by Heather Ross
I shipped the blowups to New York with some simplified catalogs called line sheets—I had just found out what these were and that I would be needing them, and had had them printed at Kinkos—and followed, with my samples in my suitcase, behind them. I hired someone to help me, a smart girl named Melissa, who was supportive and sweet. A few days before we left for New York, she looked at me and said, “You have lost so much weight that you look like a different person.” I had gotten quite fat living with Mick, finding some happiness in food, but now I wasn’t cooking for him or for myself and hadn’t eaten a solid meal in weeks.
Melissa also showed me how to use spell check. The first time I turned it on, I saw the e-mail I was working on (to a potential sales rep) light up like a Christmas tree, its errors underlined in red and green lines and highlights. I had never had a job that required spelling skills. We laughed at the words that I had spelled wrong, including “apparel” and “palette.”
My booth was no-frills except for its coveted corner location. Setting it up was simple: I hung my blowups and draped my fabrics over tables and then walked back to my hotel, not knowing what the coming days would bring. I had my hair cut that night for the first time in five years. I had it colored, too, and then I went into a discount department store and bought a dress and a cardigan sweater that seemed to say “trade show.” I hadn’t ever had a job that was indoors, except for waitressing and the job that hadn’t required any clothing at all, so even though I was a clothing designer now, I was myself a mismatched mess.
The first day of the show was a blur. We had never been to a trade show before, so we didn’t know whether we were busy or not, and we didn’t know, at least at first, if our experience was unique. Someone sat down to write an order, then someone else, then suddenly, all eight chairs were filled, and then there were more customers standing in line. It wasn’t until I ran to the bathroom that I saw that nobody else had a line. There was finally a break near the end of the day, so I took a calculator and added up the numbers. I had to do it twice before I believed it. I had, on my lap, almost fifty thousand dollars in orders.
That first show yielded more than eighty thousand dollars in orders, plus many promising leads. I went home in a state of joy and shock, and began building a production process and a business around that stack of orders. I went back to my lender and borrowed more, scrambling for collateral, using my sister’s car title and a chunk of money from a friend as guarantees. The business was growing quickly; everyone loved the designs (until they didn’t), and everyone wanted to be a part of what was happening.
First came the partners. Then came the factories, then the bigger space and the new computers and the warehouse shelves and the lawyers. Then came the arguments, the damaged merchandise, the fall collection that wasn’t very good, and the late deliveries. Then our little bank was bought by an even bigger bank, which saw us as a liability. And then the factories in Los Angeles began to shut down. And then came the dot-com bust that brought the whole state to its knees. Then the partners were gone, and it was just me again, and not much else. And suddenly it had been seven years. And then, when I knew it was all coming to a close, but didn’t yet know how it would end, I found those eight markers. They were all dried out at the tips and their caps were faded, but I could still see their colors on the bands at their bases. In that mess of inventory and heartache and anger and debt, they reminded me, just for a moment, how small and earnest my beginning had been.
I had always believed that if I could be successful, my family would accept and include me, and be proud of me. Until I failed. It was surprising to me that the thing that changed the way my family, especially my father, felt about me wasn’t the level of success that I had—briefly—achieved, but rather the courage that I had displayed in trying something that was, it turned out, almost impossible. The failure that followed didn’t erase the pride or respect that I had earned; if anything, it galvanized the relationships that I had built with my father and my sister. This is the thing about failure that surprised me, that still surprises me. It is a silent, invisible thing. Failure is running out of gas on a dark dirt road and walking home in the moonlight, the walk itself not ever as bad as the worrying about it was, the watching of the little red needle as it plunged below the empty line for those last few unbearably long miles; instead, the walk is oddly peaceful, and as you wonder why you have suddenly begun to feel so calm, you realize that the fear isn’t there anymore.
And, as any successful person will tell you, it is not failure that brings you enemies and adversaries but success. Failure makes you humble. It builds you up in ways that success cannot; it shows you your strengths and teaches you and those around you what you are, who you are. And even if I didn’t know it then, I had become an artist, a designer, and an “entreprenuer.”
Damn, I still don’t know how to spell that word.
HOW TO
make sugar on snow
MAPLE SUGARING SEASON, IN case you did not grow up in the Northeast, is only a few weeks long. It occurs in that brief window of time each spring when the days are beginning to warm but the nighttime temperatures are still below freezing, before the tiny green buds begin to appear on the bare branches of trees. In the lower part of New England, this happens in February, but in northern Vermont, it can start as late as March. Sugar maples realize that it’s going to be spring soon and start producing a watery sap that they send up to their branches. If you drive a hollow metal spout into the tree, it will intercept some of this sap, enough to fill a big tin bucket in just a day when things really get going, without harming the tree. And if you boil down the sap in that big bucket on the woodstove, you will get a cup or so of thick maple syrup.
Sugarhouses, where sap is collected and boiled into syrup in big vats, are often out in the woods among the maples that produce the sap, and when you see the thin lines of woodsmoke coming off the hills and from the edges of pastures, their sources barely visible through the still-bare trees, you know that it is the end of winter. It’s necessary to enlist help in sugaring, especially when you are boiling down vast quantities of sap in an evaporator fueled with wood that must first be cut and chopped, and when you must stay up all night to keep your fire burning to boil these huge vats of sap and then syrup. Sugarhouses have no insulation and big openings in their roofs, protected by peaked little cupolas, through which the smoke can escape, but during this week of sugaring, their insides are warm and full of sweet-smelling steam and laughing men, happy to be out of their houses.
A few years after I moved to Arcata, I visited my mother and my uncle Mike just before the sugaring season began. There was still thick snow on the ground on the mountain, but the days were clear and sunny, and the air no longer felt frozen and lifeless, even though there were still no buds on the trees or mud on the ground. In town, below, the snow had even begun to melt off driveways and walkways, but on the mountain, it had not given up even a square inch. Mike was trying to get his sugaring operation going again after a few years of dormancy. I drove my completely un-snow-worthy rental car up the steep and snowy dirt road to his farm and found him on the road in front of the sugarhouse, towing an enormous and brand-new evaporator behind a borrowed ATV. When I pulled the car over and opened the door, he cut the engine, jumped off, and ran toward me. I put my arms around him. Even though he felt cold, thin, and tired—not at all what his joyful mood conveyed—I recognized in him the sure signs, the hope and the enthusiasm, that he was, at least for now, clean.
Mike’s farm had once been a thriving, wondrous thing, with a beautiful, massive house and many worked acres, all on top of a mountain. My mother and Mike had both been brought to this area, specifically to The Red House, as teenagers on summer breaks from their boarding schools. Later, they had both run back here, away from their respective colleges, inspired by the back-to-the-land movement, to ask my grandfather for pieces of the mountain, which they were eventually given. Mike was just eighteen when he claimed the Combses’ original ho
mesite and, with only books to guide him, built that beautiful timber and stone house with his own hands. His home became a haven for other young, idealistic dropouts, many of them friends from one of the many boarding schools that he had been shuffled among and expelled from, or from Virginia, where his parents were officially living at that time. It was always full of guests, drinking wine and talking—“dreaming out loud,” as one of them would say—about a revolutionary way of thinking, of living, of being. One of these young men was my father, who first had been drawn to Mike and his ambitious plans to build a house and a self-sustained way of life in northern Vermont and then had met my mother. She used to say, behind their backs, that my father had fallen in love with Mike first. They looked alike, my mother and Mike, tall and lean and strong, with thick, dark-red hair and green eyes, and honey-colored skin that tanned in the summertime in a freckled pattern that looked like the slick, dappled coat of a wild animal. They were both beautiful and had many admirers, and they both had quick, violent tempers.
I was so young when my parents divorced that the wedding pictures had been stuffed into the woodstove long before I ever thought to ask to see them. I didn’t even know how they had ended up married until I was in college, when my mother and I were making dinner and a friend of mine, Mary, came by with a bag of artisan lettuces that she had picked from her garden. “I brought mesclun,” she said, holding up the bag of greens.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” my mother said, “I haven’t done mescaline since the day I got engaged to Heather’s father.” My mother spoke openly and bitterly of the deal her parents had offered her, that if she got married she would be given a piece of the mountain, which is how she and my father came to have the dome site. My grandfather took it back when they abandoned it. My father told me once that his decision to marry my mother was due in part to the draft policies of the Vietnam War, but in the end he was drafted anyway, when my sister and I were just four days old. He managed to avoid being sent overseas by intentionally failing his medical exam, but his trick was eventually discovered. He then went to Canada, where he and other draft dodgers lived for a while in Sutton, a small town just a few miles past the border crossing, where they helped to run a Montessori school attended by their own children, brought over daily by the wives and girlfriends left in Vermont. I remember these caravans faintly—me and a pile of other small children in the backs of cars—and I remember that sometimes my father was there when we got to the school, and sometimes he was not. This was the beginning of my father’s series of long absences, and then of his legal problems (stemming from a minor drug-possession arrest), the end of the dome, the end of his marriage to my mother, and, eventually, the end of his time as a member of my mother’s family and on the mountain. He left for good on a very cold, gray day. My mother, with my sister and me in the car, drove him to the nearest highway and left him, with his backpack, on the edge of the road to hitch his way to California, where he thought he might be able to find work and then, he promised, help support us. We waved to him, my sister and I, from behind the small, oval rear window of our rusty little Saab, and he waved back, standing next to a guardrail, with no other car in sight. My father and I would reconnect again when we were both older and able to understand one another as adults. He had been just nineteen when he married my mother, and barely twenty when my sister and I were born. At that age, he could imagine that almost anything was possible, but then, I had to assume, he decided that none of it was.
By the time my father left the mountain, The Red House had begun its tenure as summerhouse to my aunts and uncles and their children, changing the culture of the mountain at least seasonally and eliminating Mike’s precious privacy for part of the year. In the summer, we would run down to his house in a small, barefoot pack and burst through the door without even knocking, and play in his barn and his pastures. In the wintertime, when my cousins were gone, my sister and I would visit him with our mother, and we would fall asleep with the big pile of dogs that lined up like logs in front of his massive stone fireplace while the adults stayed up late and drank beer and smoked cigarettes. They still talked of revolutionary ideas and lives, but now there was also something else, something less hopeful, picked from a list of things that seemed to be working against them. In the early spring, when Mike sugared, we would spend long hours playing in the snow while my mother helped him collect and boil sap, and he would tell us to bring him a snowball, and he would pour hot syrup onto it, which would freeze and become sticky, and we would eat it all, holding it with both hands, until we were chewing on our own mittens.
When we were twelve or thirteen, he married Mary, the woman who built the riding ring between the barn and the house and gave us all lessons. Her marriage to Mike was one of extremes. Together they had gardens and horses and beauty—in the evenings, after our long rides, I would sit on the porch with them and look out over that green valley, our situation higher even than the mountains on its other side, and I would think to myself, This is the life that I want, someday. But then, in the middle of the night, Mary would come to our house and sit with my mother, her head in her hands, and sometimes she would be covered with cuts and bruises.
Drugs had always been at the center of activity at Mike’s house. He grew huge amounts of pot on that land, one of his main sources of income for many years. Other sorts of drugs found their way to his home, too, bought and sold and shared among an increasingly rough crowd of dealers that thrived along the Canadian border. Mike’s drug use had always been an issue, but during these years it evolved steadily into a full-blown addiction, his lifetime divided by its cycles. When he was high, he was vacant and numb, a benign ghost in his own house and to his wife and the animals who depended on him, avoiding us unless he needed something. When the money and the drugs were all used up, he would fall into a bitter, desperate place and become cruel to everyone around him, or there would be an event—an illness, an overdose, an accident, his divorce—that would finally force him to come clean, to get enough rest and enough clarity and humility to rebuild for a time, to impress us with his strength, his beauty, his mind. And then there would be a period of hope, and there would be a new woman—always, a woman—in his house. These women loved him wholly, almost fatally. To them, he was more myth than man. The potential and the promise that he seemed to offer, of this extraordinary life with an extraordinary man, seemed to blind them. They worked tirelessly, each of them, to build lives with him in that remote place, to survive there with him, and then, too many times, to survive him. Always, they left broken and tired. But none of them, I believe, would ever stop loving him, would ever fully regain her sight. One of these women, Stacey, was the older sister of a high school friend. I remember visiting Mike during sugaring season my first year of college. He was just past forty then, but still handsome, still strong, even though we suspected that he was ill. He was alone in the sugarhouse when I found him, boiling sap for the third day without rest. I asked him to make me a sugar-on-snow, more out of habit than out of wanting one, but he ignored me.
“Stacey is pregnant,” he said. He seemed genuinely happy and went on to tell me that she was moving in with him, that this had been put off for too long, and that now he was ready. I knew that he was also telling me that he was going to be clean, that he wasn’t going to be a junkie anymore. “I’m going to have Butternut bred, get the horse thing going again. I like the idea of having a colt or a filly coming next spring, and growing up alongside of this baby, you know, Tupy? Fresh start.” But Stacey left him just a few weeks later, and while I never knew the reasons she had for leaving, it was easy enough for me to imagine why she went before having her baby, whom she named Will. I met him once, when he was very small. Stacey put him in my arms, this little cousin. She was sober now and in love with someone else, and they were happy, and safe.
A few years later, on a bitterly cold day in February, Mike’s house was badly damaged by a fire, caused by an electrical failure in a set of grow lights, under which he
insisted he had been starting tomatoes. He and his newest girlfriend, Jeannie, whom I found impossible to like or trust, had hauled a school bus up the mountain road, parked it next to the house, now blackened and under tarps, and moved into it, heating it with a woodstove, while they began trying to rebuild. I visited them there on a rainy day in the summer. They were growing and storing impressive amounts of food and keeping cows, goats, pigs, and sheep, and as long and as beautiful as summer days on this mountaintop still were, they could do nothing but dedicate almost every minute to preparing for the next nine or ten months, a frantic attempt at surviving another winter on a mountaintop in a narrow steel bus. A place that had once felt like a hidden paradise, high above the rest of the world, now seemed to me inhospitable, barely survivable, and dangerous.