Ralph Thurston
NO SAGE "has a unique voice and perspective, it''s written with grace and economy, and it is full of wisdom. It made a deep impression on me and it has stayed with me...(it) rewards (the reader) with a complex view of agricultural life in relation to human ecology and the farmer''s psyche. It has much to teach us."
• John Tallmadge, author of Meeting the Tree of Life
(UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS)
Ralph Thurston grows five acres of cutflowers in Southeast Idaho with his wife, watercolorist Jeriann Sabin. The area''s short growing season provides time for him to write reflective essays on the micro- and macroscopic aspects of life in a disappearing rural setting. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review and other literary magazines, as well as in the small farm-oriented newsletter, Growing For Market. No Sage: Essays From the Margin, his collection of essays on trapping, leafcutter bee raising, cutflower growing, and the ecology of self, mind, time and place was a finalist for the 2002 Idaho Book Award..
Frost sheets the autumn ground. I stride across the hayfield, marring the silver-thin veneer. In the adjacent stubbleground geese and ducks forage, their black heads bobbing above the severed golden wheat.
The birds suddenly rise, break the morning calm. One flock, then another, blackens and slashes the blue. I am threat, change, hunter, and with my approach they flee by the thousands. Some circle back, confused. Others head further upriver. High overhead, already distant, yet another band flies southward. Each flock''s course is defined by a past—its fears, its will, its uncertainty or weariness. The birds assess the rent in the sky by what has come before—be it danger, be it quietude—and move to their consequent temperament.
The squawks and honks nearly deafen, an anonymous clatter that would madden if it were not temporary. I try to ignore them—my sky will settle, as will theirs. Perhaps then we can share the soft morning.
Call it myth, call it sky, but an intangible dome covers us, sealing our world from those outside and keeping us bound to our own. Above, around, outside, the thin membrane wraps and protects, and at the same time smothers and oppresses.
We may or may not determine that sky, but by our resistance or embrace we define its effects. We can huddle in fear or turn to face the thunderhead’s terrible beauty, but with backs turned we see only earth, feel only danger.
