by Noel Perrin
The walk was organized by an undergraduate named Anthony Graham-White and by a couple of faculty members. We were to walk five miles. From Webster Hall, on the edge of the Dartmouth green, down to White River Junction, Vermont. Despite a few banners and signs, we were not an impressive sight. In those days Dartmouth had about 3,000 students and 250 faculty members, not counting the medical school, engineering school, and business school. Even though it was a beautiful mild day, a bare fifty people gathered for the walk – and some of those were neither faculty nor student, but townspeople. One was my infant daughter, in a baby carriage.
We were not the only group in front of Webster Hall. Peace walks, at least in those days, brought out war supporters, too. About twenty members of the Dartmouth chapter of Young Americans for Freedom were circling around us, waving their signs. The one that made a lasting impression on me was a big piece of yellow cardboard, with a rather good sketch of a mushroom cloud on it, and the caption “Keep America Safe.” I wondered if the student artist who drew it realized it would work as well for our side as his.
We watched the Young Americans, and they watched us; nobody else paid much attention at all. Two fraternities were having a baseball game on the green, and a couple of hundred students were watching that, with maybe one bored glance at the milling little groups in front of Webster Hall. At the time, that infuriated me. I thought, “That’s why we’ll have a nuclear war. Except for a little group of fanatics who started it, and another little group of fanatics who tried in vain to prevent it, everyone was watching baseball.”
With twenty years of perspective, I see the matter differently, see that apathy is by no means always bad. If everyone were “involved” or “concerned” all the time, the insanity rate would be up around 80 percent. There are so many causes and needs and injustices in the world that to let oneself care about even all the urgent ones would lead most of us to instant emotional bankruptcy.
All the same, averting nuclear war is a special case, since practically all other causes will cease to exist if we do have one. There may be survivors, but there certainly is not going to be much concern, the year after the war, over which party controls the Senate, or whether school instruction in New York should be bilingual, or how to raise money for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or what progress is being made in curing cerebral palsy.
For that reason I rejoice at how much more involved people at Dartmouth are now. Last year, so many students and faculty went to New York for the great anti-nuclear rally that Vermont Transit ran out of buses. (And couldn’t borrow any from other New England bus lines, because they had all run out, too.) This year there is an official part of the college, complete with office and staff support, called the Program for Education on the Threat of Nuclear War. It is the only program we have that’s devoted to a single issue, and also the only one that in its name takes a position. The other programs are all called things like Policy Studies and Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies. No one even considered calling this one Nuclear Studies, still less the Program for Education on the Threats and Blessings of Nuclear War.
Similarly, the only stand I’m aware of that the trustees have ever taken on a public matter was their statement in April, 1982, urging both the college and the country to learn more about nuclear perils.
These are encouraging signs, and they are to be found everywhere. In 1961, little Vermont towns, far from any college, considered it their business at town meeting to mind the town’s business. By 1981, some of them felt differently. Eighteen voted, along with setting a highway budget and electing someone to be selectman, to request the federal government to cease both the testing and the production of nuclear weapons. That’s only a tiny fraction of the 246 towns in the state; it was also only a tiny hint of what was to come. In 1982, another 161 towns passed the same resolution. In West Windsor it passed by unanimous voice vote – and then the whole town meeting rose and sang “America.”
But the best news is that in 1983 there is good solid organization for the kind of resistance it will take to move politicians and generals. Non-binding votes in little Vermont towns certainly aren’t going to. Or even non-binding votes in big states.
Back in 1961, I wistfully speculated on tax resistance. “It would be interesting to see what happened if two or three hundred thousand of us did refuse to pay next year,” I wrote – and of course went on to pay my 1962 income tax, telephone excise tax, gasoline tax, etc. Apart from all other considerations, it is a scary thing to start refusing to pay taxes all by oneself. There were no fellow refusers to give me courage – or if there were I didn’t know about them.
Vietnam has happened since then, and there is now a large group of Americans trained in what might be called loyal disobedience. Maybe even patriotic disobedience. Some of that training was in refusal to pay taxes. It really isn’t all that scary once you get into it. Since 1983 there has been an organization whose members have all signed a pledge to begin weapons-tax refusal as soon as the membership reaches 100,000. It’s called Conscience & Military Tax Campaign, and I belong.
The threat of nuclear war has clearly increased since 1961. But the will to resist preparations for the war has clearly increased even more. I think it is in the process of becoming a national movement. Farms and farmers may survive yet, along with symphony orchestras and medical research. That would be nice.
Last Person Rural
A Truck with Pull
IT WASN’T A big firewood truck, but it wasn’t tiny, either. Maybe you’ve seen one like it: a three-quarter or one-ton pickup that’s been converted to a flatbed, so that it can deliver two cords at a time.
This one had both its right wheels in the ditch, a muddy ditch on the side of a back dirt road in a back Vermont town. Probably the driver had moved over six inches too far, trying to let someone past the other way.
“Need some help?” I called.
The driver, a heavy, bearded man in his thirties, eyed my little blue Toyota pickup. Perhaps he also noticed my white hair. “Yeah, thanks,” he said. “Probably what I better do is go get my skidder.”
“If you like. But I think I can pull you out.”
Then I pointed to what he hadn’t noticed: the electric winch mounted on the front of my little truck. He almost smiled.
“Maybe you could,” he said. “Be nice. It’d save me ’bout eight miles.”
So I drove on past him, turned around, and came back, staying as far on the other side of the road as I dared. I stopped about thirty feet short of him, carefully aiming the nose of my truck at the nose of his. Then I got out the four chocks I keep behind the seat. By now he was in the spirit of the thing – he took them and chocked all four of my wheels. Meanwhile, I rooted around for the winch control, which also lives behind the seat (along with a six-foot logging chain, a pair of work gloves, and, effete touch, a large black umbrella.)
Leaving my engine running and the hand break set, I began to winch. It wasn’t even hard. The winch groaned some, but it pulled him and his wood right back onto the road. Total time, including conversation: about seven minutes. After his ritual offer to pay and my equally ritual refusal, we went our ways.
My present truck is the fifth one I’ve owned, the second that was four-wheel drive, and the first with a winch. I can’t imagine why I waited so long. I haven’t had so much fun since I was a small boy playing with a toy steamshovel.
My new plaything is expensive. That I freely admit. When I bought the Toyota in the summer of 1987, I paid $13,000. More than $2,000 of that was for the winch.
Has it paid for itself? Of course not. I don’t charge for my road services, and there haven’t been many of them, anyway. Just that firewood truck, and once my sister-in-law’s Bronco during an ice storm, and my daughter’s car on the same hill during that same storm, and a friend’s tractor in a boggy hayfield three years ago, and my own tractor last summer (I could hardly charge myself), and maybe two more. No profit there.
Only once has the winch
produced a cash benefit of any size. That was when I had to take down a big dead maple last year. There’s a row of old maples along the road in front of my house; back when they were planted it was a good place for a maple to be. But now they suffer from their proximity to road salt. They’ve been slowly weakening for twenty years, despite fertilizer, love, and – for a decade now – immunity from tapping. Last year one of the two biggest finally died.
It was not an easy tree to take down. If it fell back into the yard, the top would smash into my house. If it fell across the road, it would take the power lines and the phone lines. I’ve already knocked a power line down with a tree once in my life, and it’s not an experience I’m anxious to repeat.
On the other hand, if this wide-crowned old tree fell to either side, it was sure to lodge in one of its neighbor maples, and a fine mess that would be. The only way that maple could safely fall was at an angle of about forty degrees in from the road, which would put the top near but not actually on my barn.
But how to accomplish that? Dead trees are much harder to take down than live ones, because instead of gradually bending on a hinge of green wood, they tend to snap at some unguessable point when you’ve almost cut through. Then they fall any way they please.
If I hadn’t had an electric winch – and one with a hundred feet of cable, at that – I would have paid a tree company to come cut it. They, mindful of the house and the wire, would probably have cut it in sections, from the top down. It would have cost me $300, $400, maybe even $500. Instead, I just got a ladder and put a chain around the tree about twenty-five feet up. I parked the truck a hundred feet away at the forty-degree angle, and hooked on the cable. Then a neighbor ran the winch while I sawed. The tree landed within a foot of where I intended it to. Garrett, the neighbor, had brought his own chainsaw; he stayed and helped me buck the tree up. Total cost of removal: $0.00. Fair credit for winch: $400.
That still leaves $1,600 to amortize – and as I’ve already admitted, I can’t. Not in cash. Try me on pleasure, though, and I might get as high as the equivalent joy of two weeks in a good hotel in Paris. Here are some of the things that keep me busy and happy with my winch.
My farm – my sort-of-farm, I should say – has one old pasture with a lot of well-rooted brush in it. Big mean stuff, often with thorns. The barberry bushes are, of course, the worst. Even yanking them out with truck and chain did not always work. I’d get the chain wrapped, hop in the cab, put the truck in first gear, and slam forward. One time in three or four, the bush would pull out, roots intact. Then the truck and I would shake hands, so to speak. More usually, the chain would slide up over the bush, and come loose in a shower of leaves. Or else the main root would snap. With the oldest and toughest bushes, nothing would happen at all except a nasty shock to the truck frame when the chain drew tight.
The winch has changed all that. With a winch one has exquisite control. I can tighten the chain so slowly that it seldom gets a chance to slip. If I do see it start to, I’m right there, I’m not in the cab of the truck. I can reposition it in about two seconds. With the hundred-foot cable I can pull barberries and firethorns off slopes where I’d never dare take the truck itself. Slope-picking requires a crew of two, of course: one down at the truck to run the control and one up at the bush setting chain. My wife loves winching as much as I do (she once said that if it weren’t such a sexist phrase, she’d be glad to be called the winch wench), and on slope days she comes along with me. I don’t mean to sound as if there were one of these every week. There have been maybe four in all.
Another thing the winch is good at is snaking logs out of inaccessible places. My farm is a hilly one, and the wooded parts are the hilliest of all. Some of its woody slopes are below field level, rather than above. It’s quite handy to drive to the top of a bank that I have never gone down except on foot, hook on to a nice straight pine log forty feet below, and soon have that log on the pile, ready for the traveling sawmill that comes by every year or two.
But my favorite winching sport is moving entire trees. Making Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, you might say.
The same rundown pasture that has all the thorn bushes also has a lot of bull pines in it. (Bull pine: a pine tree that grew up in an open field, and that therefore has huge branches right down to the ground. Sometimes called a wolf tree.) Years ago I took most of the little easy ones out. The few big ones that had a good log in them have been sawed up and turned to lumber. What that leaves are the twisted, knotted, weevil-bent big ones. Once or twice a year I get ambitious and decide to spend a day playing matador to a few bull pines.
Pine cuts almost like butter, if you have a well-sharpened chainsaw. Felling one of those trees takes only a few minutes. And even though it may have as many as fifty big limbs, cutting it up isn’t going to take much over an hour. Well, a little more in my case, because I like to get something tangible out of the job (besides another three hundred square feet of pasture where grass will now grow). So any straight branch between about two and four inches in diameter gets converted into pieces of sugar wood: fuel for the little evaporator we use to make maple syrup. Still, even with that extra cutting and loading, two hours at the most.
But here’s the problem. What I’m left with in the pasture is something like a whale after the Pequod has got through with it. The trunk and 95 percent of the branches of this enormous pine tree lie flopped across my pasture. If I waited ten or fifteen years, the branches would melt in by themselves, and the trunk would surely go in a century.
But I’m the impatient type; I want that stuff out now. I have two choices. I can make a huge brushpile, let it dry for a year, and burn it. The trunk won’t burn, just char, but I can move that later, section by section, with the tractor. Or, right now, I can load all those branches onto my pickup, and drive a couple of hundred feet over to the fenceline. Then I can pitch them all over the stone wall into the edge of the woods. I used to do that. The branches of a big bull pine make something like eight truckloads.
But not any more I don’t. Now I just reel out my winch cable and drag the whole tree over to the fence. Then I cut it up there, stopping at intervals to pitch branches over. Macho experiences are not something I usually seek. Macho experiences remind me too much of war. But I have to admit that it gives me a delicious power feeling to see a very large pine tree reluctantly moving inch by inch away from its native stump and over to the place where I want it.
Are there then no faults at all with the winch, no limits at all to its power or my pleasure? Of course there are. All of the above. The most obvious limit is that the winch is rated at only 8,000 pounds – and even to get that you have to be pulling in perfect alignment with the direction your truck is pointed. That’s why I was so careful to aim straight at the firewood truck.
The resistance of a large bull pine may well be more than the winch can cope with, especially if a couple of branches broke when the tree fell, and the stubs are jammed into the ground. I’ve often cut a bull pine in two before winching, and I always trim stubs.
Another problem: The little blue truck is my commuter vehicle as well as what I take into the woods, and the winch is definitely not a convenience when I park in town. It sits up higher than the bumpers of most cars, and protrudes beyond mine. Were I to bump into another vehicle while parking, there would almost certainly be a crunching noise as the hook of my winch made vigorous contact with the rear of the other vehicle. This makes me an amazingly cautious parker.
Winches are dangerous, too. If that cable ever snaps, I would not care to be in its path. That’s one reason I’m glad the winch control is on a ten-foot cord, so that I can and do take it around to the far side of the truck when I pull anything heavy.
These are trifles. Mainly the winch is pure joy. It may even have made me a nicer person. I mean, how many people do you know who actively look for cars stuck on back roads, so they can offer free assistance?
[1991]
A Vermont Christmas
CHRISTM
AS IS SUPPOSED to be snowy in Vermont, maybe even snowbound. It was not that way last year. The weather clearly intended to let us down. After every December snowfall – there were only four, and they were small ones – it promptly rained. On Christmas Eve, in the little town of Barnet, we had cloudy skies and maybe an inch of slippery mush on the ground. The roads were bare and muddy.
There were five of us in the farmhouse on Crow Hill: two parents, a grown daughter, an eleven-year-old son, and a grandmother. Out in the barn were only two horses and eleven hens. We had sold our sheep and planned to get new lambs in the spring. Like nearly everyone else in Barnet, we had a great deal of getting ready for Christmas still to do.
By ten o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve we had done the regular chores and a good deal more besides. The horses were hayed and watered, the hens fed and the eggs gathered. There was a three-day supply of newly split dry stovewood on the front porch. Amy, the grown daughter, had taken Marek, the eleven-year-old, into the big town of St. Johnsbury (eight thousand people) to finish his Christmas shopping. Anne, the mother, had made and iced a giant cake. Now the true Christmas events began.
The first step was the wreath. The grandmother had had her eye for days on a big spruce tree at the edge of the woods above the house. Taking a pair of clippers (to cut small branches) and her son-in-law (to hold them for her, once cut) she sallied out. Her daughter meanwhile cut bunches of red berries from the elderberry bush in the upper pasture. Both tree and bush actually gained from the light pruning. And by eleven o’clock the grandmother had made a spruce wreath with red berries that would probably fetch twenty dollars in any city store. Mother and daughter decided jointly not to hang it on the front door. Who besides the snowplow driver would see it on the next-to-last house on the remotest road on Crow Hill? Instead they put it inside the front hall, where everybody stopping to put boots on or take them off would see it.