That winter there was a wolf pack living in close proximity to Kingston.13 In certain parts of the city, you could hear the wolves howling at night. One day when we were walking west along the frozen river, we found the mostly intact carcass of an adult deer a few hundred feet out from the shore. When we came back the next day, some of it had been eaten. We returned every day for a few days to gauge the progression of the feeding, but the wolves must have either been watching us or smelled us, because they soon left a sentry, a lone blackish wolf that watched us walk towards the kill and then away again, as we deciphered and heeded the message he was there to deliver.
Our triumph that winter was to walk over the ice from Kingston to Gananoque, a distance that was eighteen miles by road and, with all the bays and obstacles along the shoreline, considerably more along the river surface.
We did the walk in early March, when the days were lengthening into spring and the temperatures were warming up. The returning strength of the sun had made the surface of the ice granular, which made the walking easy because our boots didn’t slip and slow us down. We were able to stride along the frozen river as quickly as we could a city street. But the warming temperatures had also made the ice unstable in parts, and we had to deke around melted sections, and sometimes even actual holes. We tried to keep close to shore so that if we did fall through, the water wouldn’t be deep, but there were a few times when this wasn’t possible and we were forced to walk across an open bay, our footsteps filling with water the moment our boots lifted up for the next step. Periodically people waved at us from shore and we cheerfully waved back, only to find out later that they were warning us off the soft ice, and that we made the news as a cautionary item about the ice being unsafe to venture out on.
We had a kicksled with us, to carry our supplies—lunch, extra socks and a flask of tea—and we started in the early morning so that we would have the whole day for the venture. I remember that there was a mist that morning, and that the trees and shrubs were coated in a thin layer of ice and sparkled in the sun as we set off from Dog Beach.
The sun shone all day. When we sat down, on logs or rocks, to eat or have some tea, it was as warm as May because the sun reflected off the ice. We walked without gloves or hats and with our coats open, and we followed the tracks of a lone wolf or coyote as it skirted the shore. When the tracks led across a bay rather than hugging the land, we followed, trusting in the judgment of the animal. The wolf or coyote didn’t go as far as Gananoque, but almost, and it made me realize, and appreciate, the distance that predatory animals often have to travel to fill their bellies.
The walk took all day. We reached our destination by dinnertime, after over eight hours on the ice, tired but exhilarated, and then had a friend pick us up to drive us home. It had been a perfect day, and the things we had seen and learned from our winter of walking on the frozen river, and from this epic journey, made their way into stories and poems and paintings, fuelling our respective creative projects for years to come.
Shortly after that walk, Joanne wrote a poem about it and gave it to me:
I set down this account
of walking on the water
of the great river, week upon week
against a blue blaze,
laying down my text of footfalls
among notations of wolf and deer.14
Sometimes there are days, moments, that seem to fall out of the tight mesh of time and obligation, where we can live outside of our lives, slip the leash. That walk was one of those days, and because the weather and ice conditions have never been that ideal again, no one else has yet managed to duplicate our feat.
Weeks before she died, Joanne brought up our river walk. She wanted to know if I would ever try it again with someone else. I said that I wouldn’t, that I would just let our record stand. The walk over the ice had remained, for both of us, one of the exploits of which we were most proud.
“I think that’s a good idea,” she said.
I feel, from the way Frost and Thomas wrote about their walks in the summer of 1914, that they experienced a similar burst of glorious friendship, and that the symbols they took from those walks—the flavorous yellow apple, for one—were used as memorials to instantly bring back that time and place.
Robert Frost settled back into his farming life after England, for a short time in Franconia, New Hampshire, and then in Shaftsbury, Vermont. When his wife, Elinor, died in 1938, he started dividing his year, with winters spent first in Boston and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and summers spent at a newly purchased farm in Ripton, Vermont. He had orchards in both Shaftsbury and Ripton. The apple orchard at the stone farmhouse in Shaftsbury was meant to be the sustaining crop of the farm. The trees planted by Frost and his son Carol there included McIntosh, Northern Spy, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and Red Astrachan.15
Frost was becoming more famous by the 1920s, and he didn’t return to farming with his previous vigour, leaving the orchard in Shaftsbury mostly in the care of Carol. The apples cultivated by Frost and his son were popular commercial varieties for the time and place. It was a fairly standard orchard, while the one outside his writing cabin in Ripton, Vermont, is more personal. The cabin is on the property of the farm that Frost used as a summer home for the final twenty-four years of his life.
Frost had not returned to England since he left in 1915, but in May 1957, at the age of eighty-three, he went back to receive honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. While he was there, he returned to his old haunts in Gloucestershire, accompanied by his granddaughter Lesley and a photographer from Time magazine. He even went to the house where Edward Thomas had stayed, but he didn’t want to go inside. “Instead he walked to the nearby orchard where the men had spent many hours together, and after 10 minutes, walked silently back to his car.”16 There’s a photo taken of him standing in a field where he used to walk with Thomas, one hand covering his face to hide his emotion from the photographer.
At that point in his life, Robert Frost had lost almost everyone—Thomas, Elinor and four of his six children had all died before him. In one of his notebooks, he wrote, “I left myself in England and went back looking for myself.”17 And in another notebook, one he kept when he was first in England, he observed, “Curl most significant thing in nature. Things return upon themselves.”18
When Frost returned to America, he set about planting his last orchard near his writing cabin in Ripton. He began having discussions about the orchard with a local nursery the previous December, but the apple varieties weren’t finalized and grafted onto the wild trees until June 1957.
The nursery in Shelburne, Vermont, worked with the renowned heritage apple enthusiast Ira Glackens (also a painter and writer, and the son of the realist painter William Glackens) to get Frost the apples he wanted. His desired varieties included Red Astrachan, Porter, Sweet Bough, Sops of Wine, Montreal Peach, Red Van Buren, Cole’s Quince, Gravenstein, Jefferis and St. Edmund’s Russet.19 He had wanted two trees each of all those varieties, except for the Gravenstein and Jefferis, of which he wanted only one. But the varieties available at the time from Glackens were fewer in number, and the trees that Frost eventually selected for his orchard included just six varieties—Sweet Bough, Red Astrachan, Cole’s Quince, Jefferis, Lowland Raspberry and Porter.20 There was no White Winter Pearmain in the mix, but it had become a less popular apple by Frost’s time. Refrigeration had undermined the usefulness of winter apples, much as the camera made the watercolour artist redundant.
The Sweet Bough is an early nineteenth-century apple of American origin. It is medium to large in size and has pale yellow skin and white flesh. Not a good keeper, it is best eaten fresh and has a crisp honey flavour. It has been called the best-tasting early sweet apple. It ripens at the end of July or early August.
The Red Astrachan is another apple ripening in August. It is of Russian origin and was introduced into North America in the early nineteenth century. It was a very popular New England apple in Frost’s
time, although it is now hard to find. Also not a good keeper, it is best cooked and is said to make the best jelly of all the apples. It is a medium apple and yellow in colour, with streaks sometimes so numerous that it can appear to be solid red.
Cole’s Quince is a yellow ribbed apple with grainy flesh that, when fully ripe in August, has the taste of quince to it. This large apple is used primarily for cooking and does not store well. It is an old Maine variety and was discovered there in 1806.
Jefferis was a variety once popular with home orchardists because it ripened progressively, a few apples at a time, over a period of weeks beginning in mid-September. It is a fresh-eating apple and also a good keeper. A small to medium yellow apple with thick, translucent skin and a blush on one side, it has a taste of pear to it. It came from Pennsylvania in the 1840s.
The Lowland Raspberry is a medium yellow apple with light crimson marbling. It is of Russian origin and is a hardy, sweet-tasting dessert apple. It’s also known as the Liveland Raspberry and gets its name from the former Livland (or Livonia) province of Russia, which is now Lithuania. The flesh is pure white and very soft. The apple collector Lee Calhoun has described the taste of the tender flesh as “almost like eating foam.”21 It is an early ripening apple.
The final variety of apple in Frost’s Ripton orchard was the Porter. This is another New England yellow apple, medium-sized, sometimes with a blush or russet on one side. The flesh is yellow and sweet, and the midseason apple ripens in September and is good for both eating fresh and cooking. It was a favourite of the cookbook author Fanny Farmer because it holds its shape when cooked.
Frost’s Ripton orchard was a mix of early and midseason apples for both eating fresh and cooking. Most of the varieties were popular apples of the time. There weren’t many keepers, which suggests that Frost preferred to eat the apples fresh from the tree or transformed into jelly or sauce, rather than storing them through a long Vermont winter. (He wouldn’t have been there to eat them anyway, as he wintered in Cambridge.)
Frost’s apples were also all yellow.
I had thought that planting the Ripton orchard was an optimistic gesture on Frost’s part, since the trees were grafted in his eighty-third year and wouldn’t produce right away, making it unlikely he would be around to taste the fruit. “Too bad a first harvest can’t be looked for sooner,” he wrote to Fred Abbey of Gardenside Nurseries.22 But here I have to say it was a mistake for me to believe that because I understand what it is to be a writer—and to have a close and poignant friendship with another writer, and to have a feeling for apples—I understand the man. I thought it was optimistic of Frost to plant an orchard when he was an old man close to death, because I am an optimistic person and could imagine doing that myself. But Frost wrote in one of his notebooks about planting the orchard as a way to reach forward into the future, so that his life stretched back into his past but also forward into a future he would never witness. He called it “the longing for extension in both ways.”23
But of course, the apple trees were more than just the ego of the man who planted them. They were also practical because they produced food, and this can never be underestimated. And the little grove of yellow apples was perhaps also a memorial to the halcyon English walks with Edward Thomas, and to the memory of that important friendship. Robert Frost had both a practical and a romantic relationship with apples. They were there to eat and generate a living, but they were also there to dream on and to write poems about and for. In a handwritten letter to Ira Glackens when he was deciding what trees to plant, he confesses, “There’s nothing I like to think about more than apple trees.”24
My trip to visit the orchards doesn’t include the farmhouse in Derry, New Hampshire, where Frost wrote, or was inspired to write, many of his apple poems. That orchard was severed from the farm during the tenancy of one of the subsequent owners and is now inaccessible. And more importantly, it was not planted by Robert Frost, so the apples that grew there were not his choices.
I am most interested in the Ripton orchard, but I also go and visit Frost’s farm in Shaftsbury, now a museum, because there is a plan to reproduce his orchard with heritage trees in a field behind the parking lot. But again, I am less interested in this orchard because it was conceived as a commercial enterprise and the trees he chose were the standard orchard trees of the day. The first orchard already existed when he got to Derry. The second was conceived as a cash crop. But the third orchard he planted for himself, and the afterlife of those apples is in effect, as he stated in his notebooks, his own afterlife.
Ripton is a tiny Vermont village with a population of less than a thousand people. It is famous now for being the site of Robert Frost’s summer habitation, and also for the renowned Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which takes place every summer a few minutes up the road from Frost’s old farmhouse. Robert Frost was instrumental in getting the first conference running, and he was an active part of it for forty-two years. Middlebury College, which runs Bread Loaf, now owns his farmhouse and writing cabin.
Ripton is uphill from the highway, at the top of a winding road with a boulder-strewn river running beside it. On the summer day when I was there, children were swimming in the river at the bridge just below the town, darting across the road with bare feet and towels around their waists.
The Frost farmhouse is white clapboard and sits at the front of the 150-acre property; it’s flanked by fields, and a single apple tree stands near the house. When Frost bought the place in 1938, he rented it to friends of his, who acted as unofficial caretakers of the property during the summer months. The couple, Ted and Kay Morrison, were also intimately connected to Frost—he began a relationship with Kay after his wife’s death, and Ted (who remained married to Kay throughout the affair, which lasted, in some capacity, until Frost’s own death in 1963) was a poetry lecturer at Bread Loaf. The much younger Kay also became Frost’s de facto secretary and helped to manage his increasing public obligations.
Frost inhabited the writing cabin only during the summer and fall months, and frequently came down to the farmhouse in the evenings to have supper with Ted and Kay. The cabin is situated behind the farmhouse and is a short walk up a gently rising hill. It is made of logs and has a screened porch on the western side. The front of the cabin, the eastern side, looks into the woods that surround the property. The small orchard was planted forty or fifty feet from the building, in the direction of the farmhouse, and would have operated as a screen, so that if someone was looking uphill, the small wooden cabin would be obscured by the trees.
Unlike the Shaftsbury farmhouse, which has ceded to its present-day museum persona, with that narrative effectively draped on top of whatever scrap of reality still exists from Frost’s tenure, the writing cabin in Ripton and its surrounds are wholly unchanged, so that it feels very much as though the writer has just stepped out for a walk in the woods and will be back shortly.
I understand writers’ spaces, having occupied a great number myself over the course of my life. The Ripton cabin is a very good writer’s space. It is well separated from the farmhouse down the hill. The screened porch offers the outside air without the insects that inhabit it (on the July day I was there, the deerflies were numerous). The views—over the fields and to the mountains beyond on one side of the cabin, and into the woods on the other side—are spectacular and enticing. There are many writers who advocate for looking at nothing but a blank wall, to stimulate the imagination, but I have always preferred a view myself—partly because writing involves a lot of not writing and it’s nice to look at something pleasant, but also because sometimes what’s outside makes its way onto the page, and that blend of the real world and the imagined one is potent.
Of the twenty apple trees in Frost’s original Ripton orchard, seven remain. They are relatively healthy, although some have split trunks and fungus and lichen on the branches. But they all have an abundance of apples. There is also tall grass in the orchard, full of dropped tree limbs and rocks. The ro
cks are numerous and I wonder if there was once a low wall in front of the orchard. At the western edge of the cluster of trees are several soft fruit canes—blackberries and raspberries just beginning to ripen.
Near to the screened cabin porch there is a large rock that makes a perfect seat and offers a great view of the orchard, with enough distance that it doesn’t disturb the birds if you sit there. Also, the rock has a shallow depression in the top and fits naturally to a body, making it seem as though people have sat there for a very long time.
It was a sunny day in early July when I came to the Ripton farm. I sat on the rock outside Frost’s writing cabin and listened to the whir of the poplar leaves at the edge of the woods and the sweet song of a hermit thrush. The tall grasses at the base of the apple trees were rich with wildflowers—pale yellow foxgloves, clover, flax, Indian paintbrush, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies and buttercups. A robin perched in the branches of a tree above a cluster of small green apples.
It was more powerful than I had imagined, finding Frost’s last orchard still thriving, the trees with fruit on them. Everything was so alive in that little spot and I was struck by the continuum of life, by how the birds used the orchard as they probably always had, by how the apples reappeared summer after summer. It was all praise and all miracle. Edward Thomas was right about a line of apples being the same as a line of poetry in another language. And while Frost was no longer there to tend his orchard, it persisted. And because he had thought about it as it was in that moment, with fruit on the trees and the trees in full maturity, it still contained him.
The Ghost Orchard Page 7