A Light in Darkness

The Healing Land with Shawn and Beth Dougherty

Shawn and Beth Dougherty

Rural Constellations

Over the course of a year, the morning milking time is a lesson in contrasts. In June, the sky is light at five a.m., and you walk to the barn to the accompaniment of a hundred songbirds in joyful conversation. But by December, five o'clock is something else. We come out the back door with our buckets and milk cans into hard frost. We can't see it–there are no lights–but we can hear it under our boots as we cross to the yard gate. Beowulf, the farm dog, trots beside us as we head down to the barn.

Here in central Appalachia, only bird flight and utility companies can trace a straight line over the mountainous terrain, and all other creatures must find more circuitous ways. The path from the house to the barn is just such a trail, starting out northwest to travel south and uphill to go down. It gets there in the end. In between points, there are flower and vegetable gardens, two woodsheds, a stream to cross, a brush against the wooded hillside, and then the barnyard–a small journey.

Light in Darkness

But for the early milking, we are mostly walking it in obscurity. Our hands occupied with buckets and milk cans, we can't carry a lantern or flashlight, and our feet have to find the path without any help from our eyes. But it's a path we walk many times a day and we seldom stumble. We move through space we cannot see, our feet making the picture we perceive in our minds. Moving in darkness, we find that every small gleam or glimmer takes on a larger meaning. Even a spark captures our whole attention.

To the west, as we cross the calf pasture, we can see neighbor Barry's light come on a half-mile away as he steps out to feed the two cats–one an orange tabby and the other with a black/white tuxedo–that we know are crouching by his kitchen door. His home is as familiar to us as our own; he taught us to butcher hogs, and for twenty-some years, our families have shared in the raising of five pigs to be butchered for the neighborhood each January.

Mike and Gwen, whose farm is to the north, live beyond the reach of our vision. Still, at five in the morning, red lights blink morse from the tall chimney at the power plant, telling us exactly where these neighbors are, and we know that Gwen or one of the children is headed out the back door with a bucket to milk the Jersey/Limousin cross-cows that graze their hilltop pastures.

And to the south–but down in the next holler, from which we can see no gleam of light–son William and his wife Ashley are rising early to milk their Jersey cow Gracie before breakfast. Although we can't see any of these folks, and the night is nearly silent, we aren't really alone.

Luminous Beings

The stars in the December sky are so bright and clear, it is as though there is no longer a veil between us and Heaven, but there are other mornings–fog-bound or blanketed in lowering clouds–when darkness lies over the farm like a cupped hand. Then foxfire–bioluminescence in fungus-riddled wood–draws our eyes into the woods with its dim, green glow. Sometimes after we have been splitting firewood, the ends of the stacked splits scrawl an unreadable message across the face of the woodshed. The ground around the chopping block will be flaked with light like a summer hoarfrost. We see it so rarely that it becomes a family event, the children taking bits inside to glow on their bureaus at night.

More often, it is fireflies that light up summer nights, so many they look like Christmas decorations. By morning most of the tiny lamps have gone to rest, but a few blink lonely messages at the wood’s edge or around the pond as we trudge down the pasture to bring up the cows. From early fall right up to hard frost, little green lanterns, shining out here and there from under grass blades, line the pasture trail. We know that 'glow worms' are wingless fireflies, but they seem like another species entirely, their gleams signaling a busy nightlife at soil level.

And when the children enjoyed using headlamps to navigate at night, they discovered the myriad nocturnal predators of the insect community by the gleam of tiny eyes: thousands of spiders, their multiple pairs of eyes lit like reflective jewels by the headlamps' white brilliance. Wherever the children looked, the ground was sparked with bits of fire, astonishing in their numbers, uncanny in their fixed attention. Certainly, we are not alone.

Nighttime Noises

May mornings can be a riot of birdsong, but December is almost silent. North Creek rustles coldly in its shallow, rocky bed. Sometimes we hear coyotes in the draw behind the barn, reminding us that some folks prefer the darkness. Sometimes a train's hollow whistle passes through the village, or a tug may hoot on the river. But mostly we hear our own feet on the gravel drive. Sometimes there is the rustle of strawy bedding under the calf in its nighttime stall.

In the dairy, a single dim bulb lights a world that holds only the cows and us. We're grateful for their warm bodies that comfort our hands and shoulder pressed against their bulging sides. Finally, we finish milking and drive the cows down the still-dark lane to their next paddock of frozen grasses, where they drop their heads to graze. Then the sound of forage between the cows' grinding molars fills the darkness, ending our aloneness and declaring that, whether in sunlight or darkness, day has come.

Over on the next hill, Barry's car rumbles to life, and we hear the crunch of limestone under his tires as he sets off for Pittsburgh and his day job as an engineer. In the pasture between our farms, his three horses will be grazing, looking sometimes with mild interest over the fence at our ruminating cows. His car passes on the road. The smell of woodsmoke says that up at the house, someone has lit a fire and is making breakfast. Chain rattles against the pipe gate of the barnyard as we close things up and head to the house.

Stars are bright in the cold, dry air, prickling the sky like glitter on black velvet, drawing our eyes upward. The Big Dipper, which last night caught starlight in its upturned cup, has pivoted on the North Star and spilled what it held and now slips below the horizon. In the east, the sky is beginning to be light. Soon the night will retreat into shadows.

Farm life includes a lot of walking in darkness, one way or another: Facing full into a winter that will test the endurance of livestock and people. Putting seeds in the ground and praying, hoping, believing that rainfall and sunlight will bring them to the surface, laden with promise of the nourishment to come. Trusting that our life of service to the land is still important.

We're certain it's beautiful.