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Car rides are insulating. Controlled temperatures and cushioned chairs, music that can be made soft or loud. Conversation by another occupant that can be tuned out.
Too much direct sunlight makes the interior warm. The trees are turning, their leaves forced into brilliant color by the cold, and the surface of the rivers are shingled with whitecaps, but you don't comprehend it until you're out of the safe, enclosed environment.
The driveway is long, gravel, and filled with ruts. There is an unspoken rule that all rural roads leading to farms and ranches should be thus. There is a speed limit posted on the front gate. To go over ten miles an hour is to invite a broken windshield and also threatens the resident dogs that often come loping out to investigate an incoming car, and the loose gravel at the initial turn off is treacherous. The cars here don't slow down, and would rather risk illegal passing than accommodate the time it takes to properly take the turn onto the gravel driveway.
A line of tall green pines obscures the large arena building and the other smaller buildings and farm equipment to the right of the driveway. The road takes you between two fields, partially fenced, one decorated with jumping obstacles, thick downed logs or plastic poles, and a blue barrel. To the far right, the former outdoor arena retains its white fence, but the sand inside has been allowed to turn to grass. This arena used to hold barrels and poles for gaming, or jumping obstacles, and at the far end is an open shelter and several small paddock areas that had held calves and cattle for team-penning, roping, and herding. Now the arena is a pasture with only one occupant, the resident stud stallion, who lifts his head behind the fence to watch the movement of the car. He is large, buckskin, and amiable. The approach of a vehicle is nothing to him, when the edge of his pasture/paddock lies only meters from the highway, and he soon returns to grazing.
The parking area would be the grass in front of the main barn, but it's an area that often floods and has become mostly hard-packed, pebble strewn sand when it is not sucking mud. Greenery gains a foothold there, is flooded out, and slowly creeps back. In the winter, this sandy area becomes layer upon layer of sheet ice as the snowdrifts nearer the barn melt, flow a little distance, and then re-freeze during the night as flat, thick panes of ice.
The barn is metal, and no longer new. There are gardens around it, lined by thick square cut timbers. A faded green plastic picnic table is moved around in the grass before the barn, sometimes used for seating people and holding beers during conversation, sometimes used to pile tractor parts on, sometimes used as a mounting block. An old washing machine stands next to the front door, white slowly giving way to rust, filled full with flowers in the spring and summer. Now its plants are wilting and pumpkins have been arranged in front of it, along with brown and yellow corn. The "end" of the barn is now an apartment and there are red-pink cobblestones laid before the front door. A dog bed lined with old blankets sits there, along with buckets, water dishes for cats and dogs, mudscraper rugs, a large chunk of brain coral. Another small garden area forms a perimeter around this corner of the barn, with wooden latticework for tomatoes to climb.
The first thing noticed upon stepping out of the car, of course, is the shock of the air. The chill is a slap in the face after all that warm insulation, and the first breath sucks all of the previous warmth out of you as your lungs fill with cold air. It's an unapologetic cold, and some part of the human hindbrain recognizes that "it is this cold now and it will only get colder." It's a permanent sort of feeling, as it ought to be, heralding winter and the frosts. Fall is the best time of year in this country for the sunshine and the cool air, but this is not a lazy fall day. This is a day that feels like winter already, when the wind blows, even though it's not cold enough for breath to steam yet. The sky is cloudless and blue and the sunshine feels very thin. The air seems thin, as though you were standing in the mountains and that much closer to the sky, and the sliver of crescent moon over the row of pine trees looks reachable. Without any hint of cloud, one can imagine there is no atmosphere between the cold ground and cold space.
The second thing to impress itself on the senses is scent. I'm sure most people don't stop to notice whether the particular patch of earth they're standing on has a scent, unless perhaps they're standing in a garden, but there is a particular scent about forests that, presumably, could tell a person what region of the country he or she had found themselves in, from the smell of the trees there. It's a dry smell, anyway, and must be what harvested fields and cold, plowed sand smell like, because that is what it is. The woods are far back enough to have another scent once you're inside them. Poplar leaves have a distinct scent and they cover the ground under the trees.
Patches of the thin, mowed grass are already brown and crackling underfoot. The nearby gardens, much larger than the decorative perimeter ones and containing sunflowers, corn rows, pumpkin, squash, beans and many other of vegetables, are brown or wilting, and much of their harvest has already been picked. Loose dirt marks where plants have been uprooted. The sunflower stalks are brown and the flowers droop. A woodpecker clings determinedly to the face of a large flower, hanging upside down and picking out seeds with his beak. A few pale yellow butterflies, the kind that swarm the warm roads in summer, still flutter across the grass and chase each other in the weak sunlight. It seems too late in the year for them to be mating. Perhaps butterflies chase each other for amusement, just like dogs and children.
Part of the garden extends nearly to the sandy, trampled pasture, fenced in by metal, wood, and the newly re-activated electric fence. Only stubborn weeds grow close to the gate due to the high volume of traffic of humans, vehicles, and horses. There are a few rotten vegetables thrown out to the sand for the horses to trample or nibble if they choose, squash, a few green tomatoes, a small smashed pumpkin, bits and pieces of brittle corn stalk.
Most of all, it's very quiet. Even with the highway nearby and a small housing development across it, the most prominent sound is wind in the trees and rattling the dry plants. Footsteps crunch loudly in sand and brown grass. The herd of horses is miniature in the distance, silhouetted against another line of huge pine trees. If you called them, they might come running, or they might not. Their heads are bent to whatever grass is left and the thin layer of hay strewn on the ground, scattered from nineteen horses tearing apart a round bale and carrying sheafs of hay away from the original bale as they jockeyed for position. They don't look up for the non-novelty of a person standing far away by one of the gates. At this distance, the crunching of their hooves can't be heard.
The harvested garden and the trees and quiet and the movements of herd animals in the distance seem striking. These are the plants the first people here ate. These are the woods they hunted in. This is the grass that crackled under their feet.
The first people probably didn't plant neat rows of corn. But perhaps the colonists did. And certainly the farmers who settled in this region to breed their dairy cows and plant their cornfields would have stood in front of gutted autumn gardens, pulling pumpkins, twisting corn ears from their stalks, debating what could be left or not left to risk the inevitable frost.
Or perhaps the traditional autumn vegetables, pumpkins and corn, only put someone in mind of Thanksgiving and the pictures they saw in elementary school of smiling, button-eyed Native Americans and settlers with funny hats. Maybe there's not that much history in the garden or out in the fields.
In the barn, though, history is a weight. This is a barn full of barn things, discarded equipment, buckets, hoses, brushes, pieces of fencing, hay bales, medicines for the horses, tack covered in dust so thick you know that particular saddle hasn't been ridden or even touched for a decade. Old wood. Old metal. Everything seems very old inside barns, even when they aren't the ancient wooden structures full of rusting farm equipment.
The barn is silent without a single horse inside it. Birds dart among the rafters, but fewer now than during nesting seasons, when they try to build nests between the roof and the thick plastic stapled to it. There are carved owls on some of the stall posts to keep these birds out.
The sand covering the ground is fine and soft, and rises as thick dust when one trudges through it. You'll be sneezing dirt for the rest of the day and feel the dust in your throat when you breathe deeply. There are small depressions and miniature dunes from the traffic of hooves and boots and paws and wheels. In the end stall, amidst the hay and sawdust, the big tabby cat Walter looks up with a mouthful of gray and white feathers. He'll come to you later to be petted and coddled, mewing energetically for attention, when he is finished being a prehistoric, apex predator. For now he wants to eat his bird in the corner of the stall.
Entering the barn is a routine. If there are horses in the fenced, interior paddock area, the first action is to go to that fence and greet them. If any come to you, you stroke their noses or necks carefully over or through the metal rails, and withdraw your hand if another crowds too close, because they will bite at a horse that seems to be getting unwarranted attention and might be receiving treats.
From there you check the sandy ground of the paddock for piles of manure. Then the stalls. The red wheelbarrow is always in a stall, with its plastic scooper fork. Sometimes the only one available is the one with the broken tine. The first thing one does upon entering the barn (at least, if you are courteous), is to clean, because the stable owners muck this barn out every day, several times a day, 365 days a year, and the only times they don't have to are when someone else volunteers to do it for them.
When the ground is clear of horse apples, the next thing to do is go into the small tack room at the end of the barn. Saddles and blankets and bridles are organized (or not organized) on the walls, on racks, dangling from hooks. Tack boxes go near certain saddles. Every boarder has a section of space. Lead ropes in every color of the rainbow hang on the walls. You would be looking for the dark blue tack box that was in a former life the large cosmetic carrier for a little girl's dance career, and two of the dark blue lead ropes. One has a dark blue halter attached to it with a green, clover shaped charm on it that says "Fox." The other halter is red and has no charm, but belongs to Lancelot.
There is a third halter, blue with leather patches sewn to it. It's a large halter, a size up from the other two. The horse that wore it was a Thoroughbred mare named Brandy, who is buried in the pasture close by, under her favorite wallowing spot in the sand. You can see this spot from the door of the tack room.