by Noel Perrin
Don’t forget there’s a fourth angel. Go on down to the next brick house, mine. Take a good look at Bill Hill, which occupies part of the ninety acres I own on both sides of the road. The Vermont Land Trust protects them all.
In fact, I suggest you go climb Bill Hill. There’s a 360-degree view from the top, which you wouldn’t expect from so small a hill, plunked down by a river. Like Mr. Hughes, I have a condition. If you do in fact walk across my cow pasture and climb Bill Hill, shut the damn gate behind you. I don’t have my little herd of grade Herefords at present, but I do have guest cows each summer and fall. They come from Dick Howard’s farm, way up in North Thetford, and they are Holstein heifers. Uncommon pretty against a green background.
The only part I don’t like about having guest cows is when they get out. The only time they get out is when someone leaves a gate open. I admit that once, a decade ago, that someone was me.
I can’t end without introducing a fifth angel. Ellis Paige, the man who mows most of the fields around Thetford Center and who could probably fix a tractor blindfolded, is one.
I suppose he won’t altogether like being called an angel, but it’s the truth. Let me show you. You’ll recall that Mr. Hughes wanted that three-acre field at the corner to be mowed in perpetuity – or at least while there was any hay to mow. There isn’t much. I’ve mowed that field a few times myself, and except for a strip along the eastern side it’s pretty sparse.
Now we come to Ellis’s letter. On April 27, 1998, he wrote to the selectmen. Here’s what he said: “I’m asking for permission to hay the field that Mr. Hughes has turned over to the town.... It will not be for profit but mostly because I would like to see it kept open and cleaned up. I will not charge the Town for the maintenance.” Permission was granted that same day. Maybe there are select-angels, too. I think so.
It surely isn’t for profit that Ellis mows that little field. You hardly get enough hay to pay for your tractor fuel. It can only be done for love.
Tucker Hill Road, though it still has some vulnerable spots, seems likely to stay a true rural road for some time to come. If we can only find enough angels, every town in the Upper Valley can keep some roads like it.
[2000]
Break & Enter
I OWN A small camp on a piece of high ground in Caledonia County, Vermont. It’s just one room. My wife and I built it together six years ago, with considerable help from a friend who’s a professional woodworker. It has a great view – and also a great attraction for people who like to break into remote cabins.
The first break-in occurred before we’d even finished building. Garrett, our woodworker friend, had just made and hung the two doors, front and back. Someone must have taken their installation as a challenge. This someone put his shoulder to the front door with such force that a whole section of the frame snapped off, taking the lock with it. The actual door, I’m glad to say, was unhurt. Garrett had made it out of local butternut and had given it to us as a cabin-warming present. We loved it.
I think the person who broke in, besides enjoying challenges, may have wanted a place to spend the night. He definitely built a fire, helping himself to our firewood, and when he left, he did not bother to shut the now freely swinging door. But he took nothing: not the fine new futon Anne had bought for the sleeping loft, not any of the tools, not even the box of granola bars I kept for midnight hunger pangs.
I was able to put the frame back together well enough so that the lock worked again, and for nearly a year no one broke in. Meanwhile, my wife got sick.
Then the front door got snapped again. This second intruder did not build a fire or spend the night. But when he left, he did take a souvenir. Even before the doors went on, we had had an eight-panel solar array installed to make electricity, and we had bought a small generator to be the backup if there should be a long stretch of bad weather. This the breaker-in now lugged away.
Fast and angrily I nailed the front door shut, tight into Garrett’s butternut boards, using big nails. I wasn’t thinking much about neat or careful repairs that fall. My beautiful wife had been diagnosed with the most dreadful of all cancers: malignant melanoma. She fought as hard as a human being can fight, and she lost.
For about a year after her death I couldn’t bear to visit the cabin. It had been our private place, where no one went but us. What I did do was write a piece for Yankee about her, and about the camp, and about how glorious a late marriage can be (“A House, a Horse, a Hill, and a Husband,” July 1995).
When I finally did return, to mow the cabin field, someone had been there before me. Someone had forced the back door open and come in, tracking lots of mud. He hadn’t taken anything, though, except a look around. (Mud even in the loft.)
The front door was already nailed shut. I couldn’t nail the back one, too, without sealing myself out. The frame was too badly shattered for me to fix. So as a temporary measure I tied the door shut with a piece of baling twine. At least that would keep it from flapping in the wind.
Somehow a month went by without my remembering or doing anything about getting the door fixed. Then, the day before he was to leave for Boston to study music, Anne’s nineteen-year-old son, Marek, drove down to the cabin with me. He needed furniture for the tiny apartment he had rented. Since I still didn’t (and don’t) care to spend nights alone in the cabin, I offered him the futon, and he gladly accepted.
I didn’t bother to bring the key. What was there to unlock? One door was tightly nailed shut, the other loosely tied.
We turned off the town road and drove the quarter mile in to the cabin. We walked around back. To my amazement, the back door had healed itself. The baling twine had vanished; the lock was working – and we were locked out. I had never heard of a door healing itself, not even one built by a master woodworker, but this one had. Marek and I sensibly decided to get the futon later, when he would be home for a weekend.
Meanwhile, I had a mystery to solve. The very next day I went back to the cabin, bringing the key. The back door opened easily. And the first thing I saw, as it swung open, was a message. Someone had taken a scrap of clean white-pine board from the scrap pile and had written me a note, using a piece of charcoal from the stove as a pencil.
This is how it read:
SOMEONE BROKE IN YOUR DOOR. I FIXED THE DOOR.
ROB MARCOTTE
And then below his name he had continued:
I LIKE TO COME HERE IN THE WINTER & SIT ON YOUR PORCH. READ THE STORY IN YANKEE & KNEW THIS WAS THE PLACE.
I’m not sure what the opposite of a break-in is. A restoration, maybe? A healing? But I know this. We have them in Vermont.
Postscript: Rob also left his phone number, written in charcoal on the board. Naturally I called that night to thank him. It turned out that he and his girlfriend like to snow-shoe in on late-winter afternoons. Then they sit on the porch and watch the sun set over the three ranges of mountains you can see. I may just give them their own key, in case they should want a fire and some hot boiled cider afterward.
[1999]
Life on Nothing a Week
THETFORD, DECEMBER 5, 1997: Today is the seventh straight day I have spent no money. I haven’t used my credit card, either. Only twice all week have I set foot in a store, and neither time did I buy anything. (What did I go in for then? You’ll hear.) At no time did anyone else buy stuff for me. It has been an interesting week.
As you might suppose, it started with a dare. I don’t often go a week without buying anything – the last time was forty-some years ago, in the trenches, in the Korean war. There was nothing to buy.
I dared myself into this buyless week because Donella Meadows was looking for people who would take a pledge not to buy anything on the day after Thanksgiving. That’s the biggest shopping day of the year, the day when we are most fully a consumer society.
“That’s not much of a challenge,” I said – boastfully, I’m afraid. “I don’t buy anything on Thanksgiving Friday anyway. Tell you what. I’ll go
a week.”
Later that day I was telling my friend Terry Osborne about the plan. “What’s to stop you from stocking up in advance?” he asked sceptically. I thought fast. “Because I won’t know when the week begins until it actually starts. I’ll get Donella to pick the starting day, but keep it secret. On the actual day she calls me. I start. If I happen to be out of eggs or beer or gas, tough.” Talking with Terry, I also made a policy on invitations. They would be OK provided there were no more than in a normal week.
Donella readily agreed to be my starter. She made the call on The Day, the Friday after Thanksgiving. She wanted me to begin the same time as everybody else, just go on six days longer.
But I wasn’t home to get the message. I was up in Barnet, Vt., where my late wife had a house and where Connie and Marek, my two grown stepchildren, were home for Thanksgiving. They were home for America’s favorite shopping day, too. We shopped. Connie and Marek and three of their cousins and I all drove into St. Johnsbury and had brunch at the Northern Lights Cafe – about $40 worth of brunch. Then we shopped like mad. Connie got a fur hat, Suzannah got a new winter jacket, Marek got a gorgeous flannel shirt, I got jeans, and so on. So much for my boast of frugality.
SATURDAY ABOUT 9:30 A.M.: I got home to Thetford. Donella’s message was waiting for me. “If you don’t get this in time to start on Friday,” she said, “then your week begins the instant you do get it.”
Ouch. Trouble already. Marek and Connie were passing through Thetford about noon, on their way to Boston. I had said I would take them to lunch at the Thai restaurant in West Lebanon. I like them, and I like to keep my promises. I was horribly tempted to pretend I didn’t listen to my messages until after lunch. But no, cheating’s no way to start a test. At 9:35 I called them and said we’d have to put off Bangkok Gardens to another time. “Don’t worry,” said Marek, “we’ll take you. We don’t do that often enough.” Kind of nice to be treated by one’s kids.
If this had been an ordinary week, I would probably have gotten gas while I was down there – my farm pickup had just over a quarter of a tank. But, of course one does not get gas without spending money. I promised myself to use my little electric car as exclusively as possible, snow or no snow.
When I got home, I cut wood for a couple of hours. Then at dark I came in, and for the first time in my life did a refrigerator-and-pantry inventory. Depending on how you look at it, I either had appallingly little or astonishingly much.
On the side of the little, I had no meat except an unopened half pound of bacon, and no green vegetables at all. I had maybe a pint of milk, not very fresh, the remnant of an aging half-gallon. No ice cream. Seven eggs. Two bottles of beer.
But on the side of much I had most of a 5-pound bag of sugar, a couple of quarts of my own maple syrup, an unopened 2-pound bag of King Arthur flour and a cup of old flour in the bottom of the flour crock. A 3-pound sack of red potatoes. Also a box of rice, an unopened bag of Goldfish, two big boxes of the Swiss cereal called Familia, plenty of coffee and about six kinds of herbal tea.
Back on the side of little: no bread except two ancient hot dog buns and three almost-as-old hamburger buns in the freezer, along with one very small round loaf of sourdough bread – a 6- or 8-ounce loaf. Also four cherry tomatoes – nice ripe ones, worth two bites apiece. As for nuts, the pantry yielded half of an ancient 12-ounce jar of chunky peanut butter. Of cheese, the tag end of a piece of Cabot cheddar. Finally, my array of canned goods: two cans of Campbell soup, one small can chunk tuna.
And back on the side of much: almost a full pound of butter, eight chocolate chip cookies from Tanyard Farm, three jars of different kinds of honey that people have given me over the last five years, three different kinds of pancake mix (Aunt Jemima buckwheat and two local ones), and countless spices, sauces, pickles and flavorings, mostly very old.
I should pause to explain why I, who like most Americans am truly devoted to ice cream, had none in the freezer, and no frozen veggies or meat, either.
It’s because of a bad mistake I made about six years ago. I replaced an aging conventional refrigerator with a much more expensive kind called a Sun Frost. Primary motive: to save on my electric bill. Secondary motive: to cut pollution. The Sun Frost, which is insulated as you have never seen, really does cut electricity usage by 70 percent, as compared to conventional appliances. But the medium-size model that I bought has only one set of controls for both the fridge part and the freezer part.
Predictable result: If the freezer stays cold enough to preserve meat, lettuce begins to freeze in the refrigerator. If the refrigerator stays at proper fridge temperature, ice cream in the freezer gets soupy, and I worry about meat spoiling. So I’ve wound up using the freezer section – which is pretty small anyway, on account of all the insulation – just for breadstuffs and bags of ground coffee. Someday I will replace the Sun Frost or get it retrofitted.
For dinner last night I had a big bowl of Familia, pouring over it about half my remaining supply of milk. (It’s obviously about to turn.) I crunched two of the eight chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
On Sunday morning I always phone my sister in Washington, D.C., at eight A.M. But first I make a cup of coffee using half caf and half decaf. Then I add a good slug of heated milk. This morning the hot milk instantly curdled when I poured it in. I dumped the coffee out, and drank boring black coffee.
My sister and I usually talk for about an hour. So at nine A.M. I began thinking about breakfast. It couldn’t be cereal, unless I was prepared to have it with water or with some of the very old powdered milk I found at the back of one cabinet. I was not. I had lots of experience with powdered milk in Korea, and it is truly vile stuff. My seven eggs I wanted to hoard a little.
But there was also an open can of powdered buttermilk that my late wife must have brought down from Barnet around 1992. I would use that, plus flour and baking soda, and I would make biscuits. So I did. Made a dozen biscuits on a teflon cookie sheet.
I have to say they weren’t very good. For one thing, most of them stuck, teflon or no teflon. For another, they barely rose. In thickness they resembled cookies, not biscuits. In texture they were a bit leathery. And there was something faintly rancid about the flavor. All the same, I had seven of them for breakfast. Plenty of butter will redeem almost anything. I also employed a little bit of homemade (not by me) strawberry jam left in a jar I bought last June. It nicely wiped out the hint of rancidness.
Naturally I couldn’t buy a Sunday paper, and if I’d been going to church I couldn’t have put anything in the plate. Couldn’t go to the movies or a concert or anything like that. I spent the morning in the woods, and when I came in around 1:30, I had the four cherry tomatoes, the five remaining biscuits, and the last of the strawberry jam. Also one chocolate chip cookie. There are now five left.
Cynthia Taylor, a friend up the road, had heard about my peculiar week, and she called in mid-afternoon to invite me to come have dinner with her and her daughter Zoe, who is my honorary goddaughter. Naturally I went. Not only did Cyn give me a splendid vegetarian stir fry, with salad to follow; we then had chocolate ice cream. Money can’t buy love, but it can buy Ben & Jerry’s.
Having failed with the biscuits, I decided on Monday morning to try a muffin mix that I picked up three or four years ago on a trip to northern Vermont and never got around to using. And mindful of the faint rancid taste of the biscuits, I decided to skip the powdered buttermilk. I would try the regular powdered milk. And, following instructions on the package, I would put in one of my seven eggs.
I made twelve small muffins. Had three for breakfast, took three more to work in a paper bag to be my lunch, ate four for dinner along with two chocolate chip cookies. Now there are three.
This was a maple-cornmeal mix, and the maple almost wiped out a faint acrid taste that I incline to pin on the long-open powdered milk, though of course it may also have been the long-ground cornmeal. But the maple didn’t get every trace. Furthermore, though the mixture
was OK, these muffins didn’t rise very well, either. Ten of them were enough. I did not save the last two for tomorrow. They went in the compost pail. At bedtime I was still hungry, and I ate both apples.
On Tuesday morning I breakfasted out. My friend Jane Bartlett, after I had taken her to pick up her newly repaired car, took me to breakfast at the new restaurant in the bus station. Eggs! Toast! Bacon! Half-and-half for the coffee! There was a bowl with half a dozen of those little plastic cups of half-and-half on our table, and I thought hard about slipping three or four in my pocket. It wouldn’t be buying, just stealing. But no, theft would be against the spirit of the week.
Back in Hanover, I had an errand downtown, and it would have been handy to park and do it. But of course I have no money to put in parking meters – I’m not even carrying a wallet this week, nor is there change in my pockets. I decide the errand can wait.
I go to my office in Steele Hall.
Today I skip lunch, which is a rare thing for me, and I go early and ravenous to Thetford. I eat the entire bag of Goldfish (it’s only 6 ounces) plus a piece of bitter chocolate I’ve been hoarding. What I’d like now is a glass of milk. Milk tastes so good after chocolate. It tastes good after a lot of things. New York City, I hear, is full of people who claim to be lactose-intolerant, but I think the Upper Valley is full of people who really are lactose-dependent. Certainly I am one.
Now I have an idea. I get one of the half-pint cans I will use in maple-sugar season, heat a little syrup on the stove, and can it. Then I hop in the electric car (the truck has about ⅛ of a tank left) and drive the 1½ miles it takes to go the quarter mile into the village, and will continue to until the bridge repairs are finished. I go into the Village Store with the still warm syrup, and explain that I am in the middle of a week where I can’t spend money. “Could I possibly swap syrup for milk?” I ask. Bev says yes. I dance off to the electric car with a half gallon of good honest whole milk, and as soon as I get home I sit down to a big bowl of Familia, drenched in milk.