Best Person Rural

by Noel Perrin

  Were the bolt weevils justified? To me, it seems they were. If a new power line equally dubious in origin were to come across my own farm, would I join a similar group? I don’t know. I do know that I’d be tempted. And considering how much I dislike violence, how deeply I believe in a government of laws, not to mention how afraid I am of even traffic tickets, that’s saying a lot.

  [1989]

  The Soul of New England

  RECENTLY I LEFT my farm for a week. I flew from Vermont down to Boston in a little plane and then from Boston out to California in a big plane. I was going to a conference at that exurb-of-Los-Angeles branch of the University of California called Riverside. And never having been in southern California before, I had come a day early. I wanted to see the landscape. I wanted to do it the only way worth doing: on foot.

  As it turned out, the landscape made me nervous. There were plenty of individual elements I loved, such as the double rank of bottle brush trees marching up the avenue at the main entrance to UC Riverside. But the countryside as a whole was too naked for my taste. All those bare, lion-colored hills and all that sweep of sky left me feeling exposed and vulnerable – a little bit like how a mouse would feel (I imagine) if you put it out in the middle of a basketball court. A New England mouse, anyway.

  The evening of that first day I devoted to looking at the city of Riverside itself. It’s a small city by California standards but quite a big one by the standards of New England. It has 226,000 inhabitants, which makes it more than twice as big as anything in Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine. In all New England, only Boston exceeds it.

  I was staying in a motel out by the university, and what I did was to stroll downtown just before dark. Some stroll! In the first place, downtown proved to be elusive. I’m not entirely convinced Riverside has one, at least not in the eastern sense of a thronged center where building density is much greater than elsewhere, where you can’t easily park, where things are old. In the second place I remained tense. It was the same mouse feeling I’d had out on the bare hills. Only this time the streets were the cause.

  I was walking down a broad avenue which crossed side streets at regular intervals. Every time this happened, I went into a state of mild panic – that is, I panicked once a block.

  Don’t scorn me entirely. Those were formidable side streets, like nothing I had ever seen before. Each had six traffic lanes and two parking lanes, for a total of eight. At home in Vermont not even the two interstate highways are that wide. I’m not sure the Connecticut River is.

  I had to force myself to cross. After the first couple I no longer had any fear of being squashed out in the middle by some crazy California driver. California drivers proved not to be crazy, instead quite gentle. No one shot round a corner with squealing tires or threatened me by speeding up slightly, as drivers sometimes do in Boston. And as they even do in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, for that matter, in front of the shopping malls.

  My fear – I knew it at the time – was quite irrational. Simply, I felt too far from the nearest tree. Or, rather, this being a city, too far from the nearest doorway. Even when I had made it across a street, I was still a long way from shelter. These eight-laners were not bordered by comforting buildings. They were bordered by emptiness. Every laundromat and photo shop had been set back at least a hundred feet, and the intervening space was generally paved. I couldn’t even have burrowed into the soil, had a helicopter come thumping down to catch an unwary visitor.

  That trip taught me a lot about California, but it taught me even more about New England. Opposites may or may not attract; they do clarify each other. And northern New England and southern California must be about as opposite as any two parts of the United States can get.

  They have things in common, of course, both being part of American culture. Teenagers in East Topsham, Vermont, listen to the same American Top Forty songs as teenagers in Redondo Beach, and (except all winter) they wear the same gaudy sneakers. They don’t eat the same too-rapid food as much, but that’s only because they have to go all the way into Barre to get it. Fast food is not available in Topsham. Church suppers are.

  So it goes through the whole spectrum, from theology to garbage collection. There are Hindu ashrams and Buddhist monasteries in New England as well as in Los Angeles. Compactor trucks in both places make the same unearthly whine as they swallow the same plastic garbage. Even scenically the two regions share much, from identical phone poles to interchangeable road signs to similar-looking storage buildings slapped together of cement blocks and then painted pale green. (Somehow I find them even uglier in New England than in California, probably because I have a clearer image in my mind of what a New England building ought to look like.)

  But if there are many likenesses, there are even more oppositions. As I came back on the jumbo jet to Boston and then on the little plane to Vermont (nineteen passengers, no cabin attendants), I kept thinking about them. It seemed to me that I saw the true nature of New England more clearly than ever before.

  Let me start with the landscape, then advance briefly to the people and finally I’ll say a cautious word about the soul of this region. Not all regions have souls, at least not living ones, but New England does.

  The central truth about our landscape is that it’s introverted. It’s curled and coiled and full of turns and corners. Not open, not public; private and reserved. Most of the best views are little and hidden. It was only after I started doing contract mowing of hayfields around town that I got behind people’s houses and saw vista after vista that you’d never guess from the public roads. We like secrets.

  Did I call our roads public? They mostly aren’t, other than in the legal sense. They are narrow, except for a few monsters curving around Boston and Hartford. Even when country roads are bordered by fields, there’s apt to be a line of trees and brush that effectively secludes the traveler. Or if they do offer a view, it’s small and domestic. Even a New England interstate can offer private views. In fact, the road I’d pick to be emblematic of the region would not be one of the thousands of little dirt roads curling and coiling all over the six states, including Rhode Island. They are indeed emblematic, but perhaps more of the past than of the future.

  What I would pick would be Interstate 91, the stretch beginning at mile 112 in Vermont, going north and coming over the crest of the high ridge just beyond Wells River. That section doesn’t look like an interstate at all. What you see in the valley below is a pastoral scene with what appear to be two separate two-lane roads running parallel, a hundred yards apart. What is actually a small rest area gives the impression of being a side road, curving off to the right. In short, the whole road project has been domesticated, and instead of cutting the land apart it stitches things together. And that is an emblem of how our humanmade landscape, at its best, interacts with what was originally here. I greatly prefer it to big faces on Mt. Rushmore, or the six- and eight-lane concrete strips that press down so hard on the poor suffering but still beautiful meadowlands of northern New Jersey.

  Let me take my own farm as an example of how the land is arranged. If you were to drive by it on the town road, you’d notice a fairly handsome old brick house, with a big red double barn attached to the western end. Across the road you’d see a few acres of cow pasture, fenced partly with barbed wire and partly with very handsome stone walls. (You’d better think them handsome. I built them.)

  That’s all you’d see, but it’s hardly all there is. Behind the house, completely invisible except to one set of neighbors across the valley, is my best hayfield – which is also the best kids’ sledding. I almost lost a friend who couldn’t resist observing, every time he came to visit, what a fine three-hole golf course that field would make.

  Across the road there is a great deal more. Behind the field you can see from the road, three other fields curl around a steep hill, and a steep pasture goes up it. To walk from one field to the next – this with its pine-covered knoll where the cows like to hide when they are about t
o calve, that with its oak tree older than the place, and its high cliff boundary – is like walking from one stage set to the next. Everything is so up and down, and so deeply wooded where it isn’t pasture, that my little ninety acres offers a dozen places to get lost. Even now I don’t know every inch. It was only six years ago – nineteen years after I bought the place – that I stumbled on the fort. It’s a giant rock that some glacier left: the length of a school bus, but higher and wider. Centuries ago frost split it lengthwise, and then split one of the side pieces as well, so that there is a T-shaped passage right through the great rock. A hundred-year-old yellow birch grows in that passage; dense woods surround the entire rock and conceal it.

  What caught my eye as I pushed past the last bull pine was the fortification. At some point long ago children rocked up each of the three entrances to about waist height, and at least one of those children really knew how to lay up stone. It is beautiful work. An average of one new person a year sees it. I have begun to worry that I am showing it off too much.

  That rock is not the sacred place on my farm; the huge old oak marks that. But it may yet become sacred – in fact, the whole farm seems to be in the process. Which is one reason why I have taken steps to keep it a farm.

  There are sacred places on nearly every piece of land in town, except maybe our one small commercial zone. And I would claim that the deepest truth about New England as a place is that, with the exception of some Indian reservations, it contains a higher proportion of sacred land than any other part of the United States. By “sacred” I obviously don’t mean formally consecrated to a religious purpose – though there’s a fair amount of that, too, around convents and monasteries in Massachusetts, not to mention around the lamasery thirty miles north of here. I simply mean land valued other than commercially – land for which the highest use (as tax appraisers quaintly say) is not discovered by finding what will bring the biggest cash return, but by finding what will make the land most beautiful, most productive, or most healthy, and sometimes all three together. And, yes, when I make that claim, I speak in full awareness of the million acres of the Adirondack Preserve in New York, and the Amish country in Pennsylvania, and all those Civil War battlefields in Virginia, and Yosemite, and....

  I’ll offer just one piece of evidence for my claim – but what a piece! Nine years ago, when I was first looking for ways to protect my farm from high uses, I did some investigation of private land trusts: organizations dedicated to land preservation. At that moment there were somewhat under five hundred of them scattered across the United States. Some states had one or two; some had none. Connecticut had eighty-two and Massachusetts sixty. No state outside New England came even close to these figures.

  The people of New England are a good deal harder to generalize about than the land. We are a seacoast people and a lakeshore people, as well as land-lovers. There are sacred coves, too. My wife grew up on one, and even now she wishes it were possible to hear foghorns on our farm. We may not have any seriously large cities except Boston, but we have hundreds of mill towns, some grimy, some not. We are partly French-Canadian, partly old Yankee, partly Italian, partly twenty other things. There are Mashpee Indians on Cape Cod, and there is a jai alai fronton in Hartford. There is now one county in Vermont that has an actual majority of upscale newcomers, and in that county a term like “Sunday brunch” is heard more frequently than a term like “church supper.” I believe they have hot tubs, too.

  But climate and topography do play a role in determining human character. And the example set by native Vermonters does seem to have an effect. That same county also has an enormous number of houses heated by woodstoves, and the sale of chainsaws to newcomers is brisk. Despite the vast changes of the last twenty years, I think it is still accurate to say that the basic New England characteristic is a kind of humorous stoicism. You expect it to snow just before you have to drive a hundred miles, and to be sleeting when you have a day off to ski. You are not surprised when your pipes freeze, and you probably have a wry comment to make. I love one I heard last fall, made by a woman in New Hampshire. She herself lives in a small city (about one-eighteenth the size of Riverside), but she has a daughter in the country who runs a cider press. She had filled her car with apples at that press, to take to another daughter in town, who was going to make applesauce. Before she could deliver them, a storm came up, and blew over a fifty-foot tree in her yard, on top of car and apples both. There are a good many things one might think to say at such a moment. “It sure put a cleat in my car,” she said. “I guess I’ve got a convertible now.” Sounds just like New England to me.

  What is the soul of New England? Something inward, something a little cold even, at least that’s how it’s going to strike a newcomer. But something fiercely determined, and even more fiercely protective. Almost relishing discomfort. Able to endure almost any adversity, and just get stronger. The one thing that may sicken it is too much ease and prosperity – which, indeed, I suspect is true for almost every region with a soul. Somewhat more tied to the past than any other part of America except a little bit of the South. It has a longer past to be tied to than any other part of America except a little bit of the South.

  And yet any living soul can change, and must. New ideas gather in New England with some frequency. Once it was the idea that slavery should be abolished. Then the idea that everybody should be educated. Right now two ideas are strong. And hence two changes I have seen in my own conservative Vermont over the past twenty years are first a mighty tide of environmentalism and second a very rapid alteration in the relation between the sexes.

  One of the events I missed during my week at Riverside was a barn-raising on a new organic farm on the other side of town. When I got back, an aged neighbor (still able to use a hammer) was telling me about it. He had been there, helping. “You ain’t going to believe this,” he said gleefully. “They was twenty carpenters up on that roof – and damn near half of them was wimmen!”

  There are barn-raisings still to come in New England. New Englanders of every stripe will be up there, hammering and talking, preserving the sense of community that has kept us going for the past three hundred years.

  [1989]

  My Farm Is Safe Forever

  EVERY DAY THERE ARE ninety-three fewer farms in America than there were the day before. Some get amalgamated into agribusiness holdings, and a few are simply abandoned. Most, however, get paved, built on, developed, or occasionally turned into nature preserves.

  None of these fates awaits my farm. It’s going to stay a farm long after I have moved into the village cemetery. Long after my grandchildren – and I don’t even have any yet – have done the same. In fact, forever. And if that seems too huge a claim, just wait a minute.

  I can speak with such confidence for an excellent reason. A few years ago I made a solemn and binding agreement with the small Vermont town I live in. I gave the town the development rights to my farm. For its part, the town agreed never to use them. If the town ever changes its mind – if, say a hundred years from now, whoever is running things gets tired of holding the rights – they automatically pass to a private conservation group three towns away. Should that no longer be around, the development rights go to its successor organization.

  Meanwhile, I still own the place. I still possess every right of ownership that I care about. I can continue to raise beef cattle, bale hay, make maple syrup, cut logs, make whatever rural use of my ninety acres I feel like. If that begins to bore me (it won’t), I can sell to any buyer I please. I could even sell the place to McDonald’s. It’s just that if they bought it, they couldn’t put up any golden arches. They’d have to install a farm manager, and start raising beef cattle, making maple syrup, or whatever.

  I gave up the right to develop my farm solely to protect the land, but as a kind of bonus there are some pleasant cash benefits. Getting rid of the development rights has assured lower taxes on the place, for me and for all future owners.

  The taxes will
stay exactly the same on the house and on the two acres around it – what our state government calls a homestead. But on the other eighty-eight there will be a highly pleasing difference. From now on, these eighty-eight acres – my present fields and woods – will be taxed on their value as farmland and woodlot, not on what they might be worth if they were converted into forty-four building lots, or a tennis club. (That forty-four is not random. It’s the maximum number of lots a developer could impose on my farm: we have two-acre rural zoning in this part of town. Actually, what with the roads the developer would have to put in and the steepness of a couple of my hills, I suspect he or she would have to scramble to put in more than about thirty-five new houses. That’s still thirty-five more than I want.)

  Back to the money. As I was saying, the taxes are now lower. But that’s not all. The difference between my place’s value as a farm and its value as developable land, which the town listers worked out to be $27,800, counted as a charitable deduction on my income tax. Need I say I’ve never had a deduction like that before? Since my income was nowhere near high enough to use it all in one year (still isn’t), I had a carryover deduction for the next year – and there was still some left for the year after that. Most fun I’ve ever had with the IRS, or ever expect to have.

  This was no slick private deal, either. It was not arranged or suggested by a tax lawyer. It is something almost any farmer can do. In fact, you don’t even have to be a farmer. You just have to be the owner of a fair-sized piece of open land that qualifies under “a clearly defined federal, state or local government conservation policy.” I’m quoting IRS Publication 526, entitled “Charitable Contributions,” the same lovely document that enables me to talk so grandly about permanence. The tax benefits apply, says Publication 526, only if the land is “protected forever.” Suits me. Even though I secretly know that “forever” means something like “as long as the United States exists in its present form.” That’s likely to be a while.