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November Grass

Judy Van der Veer
Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin

208 pages (5.5 x 8.5)
Trade paper, ISBN: 1-890771-39-2, $13.95

A California Legacy book

In the light of the declining sun, amid the muffled sounds of grazing cattle, a Southern California cowgirl considers her life. The language of November Grass, concise yet evocative, transports readers to the coastal hills of San Diego County, where hawks and jays, calves and kittens, and an assortment of backcountry eccentrics bring clarity to questions of birth, death, and love.

In the new introduction, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, "Van der Veer gives us a rural landscape as deeply known and lived in as Willa Cather's Nebraska or Sara Jewett's Maine. The valley ranches of John Steinbeck's Red Pony and East of Eden are natural comparisons, but Van der Veer's picture is truer, I think, to the patient obscurity of the lives and deaths of those who live on and from this austere land.... Pain, suffering, grief are intense in her story, but not more intense than tenderness and praise."

Reviews:

"[November Grass] is more than a regional novel of truth, body, and observation: it is the record of a universe as mirrored in a personality of unusual insight, awareness, and poetic power."—New York Times Book Review

Excerpt

The girl listened to the rustling sound of her cattle breaking the dry grass. They were aware of pleasure and pain, good times and bad. The girl could share their feeling of well-being, she could suffer when they suffered. Because her life was bound up with the lives of animals depending on her, she experienced more of living than if she had just herself to consider.

She had done a lot of worrying over cows and horses, but she had had a lot of pleasure, too. In the spring she felt contented after the cows had calved, and she listened to the soft mooing of mother cows. If she went to the barn on a stormy night it was certainly a comforting thing to see animals looking soft and sleepy in the lantern light.

Now she was happy in a quiet sort of way, but she didn’t know how long it would last. Suppose the rains didn’t come, she thought, and all the dry grass was grazed off? Or if old Whitey cow became desperately sick? And now that men were hunting quail through the brush the hills might burn. There were always more fires in hunting season. The sound of shooting was enough to make her miserable, anyway. She couldn’t help thinking of wounded quail creeping under leaves to die slowly. Now if she were to find a coyote in a trap in the riverbed she would feel as tortured as the animal.

So she felt she mustn’t be smugly happy. Anything could happen to destroy her sense of peace.

The world was full of misery, yet everything wanted to be happy. Sometimes the girl felt that it might be one of the chief duties of the living to take pleasure in things the dead could no longer enjoy. To live dully might be a form of ingratitude to the long dead whose living and mating had made life possible for those who were now alive.

Each fall threatened to be a bad time. In spring when everything was exactly right, she felt that she couldn’t bear to look ahead too far. Every time after a dry fall and a cold winter she felt so relieved that it was over that she didn’t look forward with any pleasure to going through it all again. Then when she reached that time she took as much joy in colored leaves and purple mountains as she had taken in the young leaves in the spring. When she saw sycamore saplings beaded with leaf buds like drops of water she forgot how beautiful those same leaves would be when they were old and rust colored in November.

Now the cows ate the brittle November grass with as much relish as they had eaten the fresh grass of early summer. They were hungrier, so that every bite tasted good, dry and dusty as it was. She wondered if they remembered how sweet grass had tasted last spring. Did they remember when their calves were very little and the morning air was damp and warm?

It did not seem that summer was long ago. Cold nights replaced warm nights, there was a sharpness where there had been softness.
Remembering was part of the fun of living. Remembered spring made a November day more gracious. It was as if the future could be remembered before it happened: more springs would come and there would be other Novembers like this.

Now she was taking pleasure in warm sun and cool shadows, knowing that the cattle and Pete and Flaxie were finding enough to eat. They were happy.

The red cow’s calf had showed the girl that happiness is instinctive with animals.

She had gone out one morning and found Rosie cleaning a limp calf. He hadn’t tried to stand yet.

Sunshine, and the mother’s constant licking, strengthened the little red bull so that after a while he began floundering around like a fish out of water. Each time he struggled his mother stood back and roared at him. His first instinct was to get to his feet, but after every try he had to take quite a long rest. Finally he got on his knees, his back legs propped up. There he swayed back and forth. With a little help he would succeed this time. The girl steadied him and he rose from his knees and stood on earth the first time. He didn’t stand at all firmly, and it seemed he would surely go over when he tried to step.

His next instinct was to nurse his mother. His balance was threatened as soon as he began to move, but miraculously he managed to stay up while he poked his nose at the cow. By letting him suck her finger the girl guided him to a full teat, and like one famished, he began to suck. Being weak he constantly lost the teat, and the girl helped him find it again.

The more he drank the stronger he grew and when he had had enough he was not yet ready to drop down and sleep. The third instinct, that of play, was growing within him. While his mother lowed anxiously he galloped a few clumsy steps, then pranced with some grace, and tried a sharp turn, shaking his head. It was more than his legs would stand, and he went down. Again he floundered to rise, this time not for food, but for the fun of trying a few gamboling steps.

It made happiness seem important when you realized that the third thing this little red bull wanted to do was to play. It was as if he wanted to show his gladness because he was safely born, because he had risen and tasted milk, because the sunshine was dazzling after his nine months of darkness...

Author Biography:

Judy Van der Veer (1912-1982) was born in Oil City, Pennsylvania, but spent most of her life in the backcountry of San Diego, on a ranch her father bought near Ramona. Her writing reflects her love of ranch life and her deep appreciation of nature. Besides November Grass, her books include The River Pasture, A Few Happy Ones, Hold the Rein Free, Higher Than the Arrow, and two children's books, Wallace the Wandering Pig and To the Rescue.