by Noel Perrin
I suppose you think that means I skipped supper? Not likely. Having this nice fresh milk, and having decided to commit half of the little dribble of canola oil at the bottom of an almost empty bottle, I make another batch of biscuits. I double the amount of baking soda Ms. Rombauer calls for (God knows how long the baking soda has been open), and I use a muffin tin, not that miserable teflon-coated baking sheet. Using my right forefinger, I quickly rub a little butter in each muffin hollow. Then I drop the batter in carefully, filling each hollow just so.
I turn out to have enough batter for nearly ten muffo-bisks. They are excellent. I eat six of them for a late supper, the last one swimming in maple syrup. I wash it down with a glass of milk. God bless the Village Store! I wonder how my proposal would have fared at Grand Union, or Wal-Mart.
The next day is Wednesday, and I don’t have to be in Hanover until 4:30 P.M., when I am one of several people doing a signing at the Dartmouth Bookstore. (That will be my second and last time in a store this week.)
I eat the other four of my high-quality biscuits for breakfast, and I feel so confident I even soft-boil an egg. There is hot milk for coffee.
You may be getting bored with reading about biscuits, but I was not yet bored with making them. Around noon on Wednesday I used the last of my flour to make twelve large muffo-bisks. Delicious, my best yet. At lunch I employed the three biggest as vehicles for a taste test: I wanted to compare the three jars of honey that have been kicking around my pantry for so long. One is a jar of Langnese honey from Europe, so old it’s totally crystallized, even granulated. One is raspberry honey from Oregon, and one is fire-weed honey made by my brother-in-law in Washington state. All are so good that I can’t possibly rank them. The granulated Langnese can be eaten with a spoon – it has a lovely texture. The other two, the liquid honeys, make a good biscuit great.
My one conclusion: standard clover honey is boring compared to any of the three.
That afternoon I parked at a meter while I was signing at the bookstore, and didn’t get caught. Dinner I had at Jane’s, and tasted meat. But Thursday I was back to muffo-bisks. I work in the environmental studies program at the college, and we have a brown-bag lunch every Thursday during terms. My brown bag contained four muffo-bisks, the jar of Langnese (much tidier than the two liquid honeys) and a spoon.
I will admit that I was now ready for a change. That evening I dined on rice, plentifully seasoned with teriyaki sauce from a bottle that probably dates from the late 1980s.
And so it went until the week ended at 9:30 on Saturday morning, December sixth. No serious problems. Oh, there were a couple of inconveniences. For example, I have a recurrent fungus-on-the-feet infection that I picked up in Korea. It chose this week to recur. It would have been handy to swing by the Thetford Pharmacy and get some ointment. But a few days really doesn’t matter. No toes will drop off.
Not only were there no serious problems, I ended the week with surpluses. The electric car did so well on snow and ice that my four-wheel-drive pickup still had a sixteenth of a tank left, maybe more. I still had one chocolate chip left, and three eggs. But that’s nothing. I also had the untouched bag of potatoes and more rice. If need be, I could probably barter syrup for more flour. I could easily do another week, maybe even a month. Sometime in the summer, when green vegetables come from gardens, I may just try it.
What is the point of this week? Well, there are two points. One is the pleasurable challenge of being thrown on one’s own resources. Of being independent, self-sustaining. It is extremely handy going to Dan & Whit’s and Wing’s and the Co-op and the Village Store, and I would not wish to give any of them up. But occasionally it seems too easy: just picking up frozen everything or a lot of prepared foods. And then it’s time to make a few muffo-bisks.
The other reason, of course, is to practice consuming less. Not necessarily less food (I’ve probably gained a pound or two this almost saladless week). Less energy, fewer jackets, fur hats, extra jeans, exercise machines, kitchen gadgets, disposable cameras, plastic spoons. Of most kinds of possessions we Americans have more than we know how to use. Which is one reason we consume a quarter of the energy and produce a quarter of the pollution in the world.
It won’t be easy to change our ways. High consumption is one of our oldest and most powerful traditions. It is by no means an entirely bad tradition, either, being closely entwined with the whole concept of generosity, of knowing that it is blessed to give, and if not damned at least very unattractive to be a tight-wad and a scrimper.
But clearly as a society we have carried consumption too far. Long ago we turned shopping into the most expensive – and, yes, deadly – of all sports. Hunting in the woods got replaced by hunting in the store. One of the funniest and most historic examples occurs in a novella Henry James wrote in the 1870s. It’s called An International Episode, and it takes place in Newport, Rhode Island.
Two visiting Englishmen, Mr. Percy Beaumont and young Lord Lambeth, are staying with the wealthy Westgate family. Its principal members present in Newport are the beautiful Mrs. Westgate, age thirty, and equally attractive younger sister Bessie Alden, age twenty.
Both Englishmen are soon put to work assisting these two in their shopping expeditions. When Percy Beaumont mildly protests, Mrs. Westgate explains that such expeditions are not optional.
“An American woman who respects herself,” says Mrs. Westgate, fixing her beautiful eyes on him, “must buy something every day of her life.” Pretty Bessie then demonstrates a remarkably high level of self-respect. Taking Lord Lambeth along to mind the parcels, Bessie cruises seventeen shops in one morning. They weren’t using the term “mall” yet (not in its present sense, anyway), but clearly Bessie was doing a mall crawl.
That was in 1874. Now, a century and a quarter later, Bessie’s descendants, male and female, need a new way to achieve self-respect. For starters, they might try a low-consumption, do-it-yourself week now and then.
[1997]
Farewell to a Thetford Farm
ABOUT THREE MONTHS AGO my wife and I made a major decision. We decided to sell our farm. We did this knowing it would be painful for both of us. I have sometimes thought it was a little extra painful for me, just because I have known the eighty-five acres of our farm so long and so well.
I’ve been living on the farm for the last forty-one years. I love every acre. I also love the brick farmhouse, which I believe to be about 190 years old, and which I know for sure was built of local Thetford bricks. I have plenty of love left for the two barns, one early nineteenth century and one late nineteenth century.
The handsome old brick farmhouse is where I have lived almost my entire adult life, and I have no wish to move. It’s also where my younger daughter, Amy, came into the world thirty-some years ago; she has no wish for me to get rid of the house where she was born.
What about Sara, my tall, beautiful, book-addicted wife? She has lived at the farm only the three years since we got married, which is about one-fourteenth as long as I have. But she has crowded an amazing amount of rural know-how into those three years. For now, I’ll just mention that she not only runs a chain saw, she is so good at starting a reluctant Jonsered or Stihl that I don’t even try anymore. I pass my saw over to Sara. She starts it, lets it run for half a minute, cuts the engine, and hands it back. Those big steel teeth are perfectly motionless.
Or consider tractors. We have a medium-sized one, a John Deere 1050. It took Sara about twenty minutes to get the hang of mowing our field with it. We are both so fond of mowing that we have had to make almost a formal rule: mowing is to be shared 50-50. And, oh yes, the quantity of land devoted to perennials has shot up in the past three years.
But I’m getting ahead of my story. I haven’t introduced the farm yet. I will do so now. And I’ll start with the location.
There are two covered bridges in the town of Thetford. There used to be five, but that was before Union Village Dam got built. One of the survivors is on Tucker Hill Road,
just outside the village of Thetford Center. Coming almost up to the bridge is a fenced pasture for cows, though there are no cows in it now. Just outside the pasture and even closer to the bridge there’s a small sugarhouse with a freshly painted red door and two cracked windows. It was last used to make syrup in April of 2004.
With a great deal of help, I built that little sugarhouse way back in 1969. It pleased me greatly that I was able to put recycled siding on, using hundred-year-old boards that I had bought – at a very modest price – from a man who was taking down an old barn, I think, in Sharon. Don’t worry about my putting clear pine board to so humble a use. They were – still are – humble boards. Lots of big nail holes. And the man in Sharon must have worked fast. Almost every board had scars. I think they were being given a second chance when he sold them to me.
Wooden bridge with great curving timbers, old-fashioned sap buckets on the nearby maples (March and April only), well-fenced pasture – this part of the farm has an enormous quaintness quotient. And people often do stop and take pictures. I have nothing against quaintness. In fact I rather like it, as long as it’s unself-conscious. But it’s not what I love the place for. I love the place we sometimes call Two of Everything farm for about twenty reasons, maybe twenty-five. For example, I dote on the old brick farmhouse – and it’s a three-way dote. First, I love the look and the feel of the old bricks. They’re softer than new bricks, and have a better color. Second, I like it that they are a local product, made in Thetford some time around 1810. Most of all I like it that the house has style. It’s a rural adaptation of the urban architecture known as Federal, and it’s a delight. My heart does a little skip every time I come in.
Two more reasons. I love the view from the kitchen window. It’s a rolling pasture with trees behind. Other than the barbwire fence, which is inconspicuous, there is no trace of the works of man. And of course I delight in the grander view (360 degrees) to be had if one climbs Bill Hill, the Farm’s in-house mini-mountain. From the top you can see about five miles.
So. Now we have identified five of the reasons why the little farm is so appealing. They have either been small ones, or at most medium-sized. Are you ready for a biggie? Good. The thing that delights me most is that the farm really is a farm … about 10 percent of the time. It does produce a little food every year, and most years a little fuel as well.
I’ll skip over some early attempts to market produce, and go straight down to that little sugarhouse near the covered bridge. I first made maple syrup there in 1970, and I made a paltry four gallons. A few years later, there came a March and April of perfect sugaring weather, and I happened to be sugaring with an energetic partner that year. We made fifty-seven gallons. That’s a quarter ton of syrup.
At one time I thought I might turn most of my share into maple sugar, which could then be used as a general sweetening agent. The point would have been to supply a local organic product to serve as an alternative to cane sugar. But it would never have worked. Apart from sugar made from fancy grade syrup, there is just too much flavor.
As to fuel, in our best year we cut and split a little over twenty cords of firewood, double what we did any other year. That meant five cords for the wood stoves in the old brick farmhouse, and fifteen cords to sell. Our best customers were nearly all Dartmouth professors.
Another thing I love about the farm is that there’s always something to do. I’ll even say something that needs doing. For about thirty years my favorite something has been the care and repair of stone walls, plus the very occasional construction of a new piece of wall.
Repair is something you can do alone – though it’s less fun that way – but a from-scratch piece of new wall really calls for a two-person crew. In my case, the other person was nearly always a local physician who practiced medicine part-time, precisely so that he would have time for things like wall work. His name is Andy.
In those early years I believed that to make a decent wall from scratch you needed to excavate a trench where you intended the wall to go. Then (so I thought) you had to put a lot of your good rocks in the trench, as a foundation for the wall-to-be.
The good news is that you don’t have to do any such thing. For a mortared wall, yes. But for a regular stone wall, optional. You can lay the first course right on the ground if you like. Though I do recommend taking a few minutes to make sure that the first course is level. It just isn’t hiding in a trench, where no one will ever see it.
For about ten years, mostly in the ’90s, Andy and I traded stone work on Wednesdays. Mornings only, and just every other week. We each had a wall maybe one hundred yards long and badly in need of repair. Besides the replacement of whatever big stuff had fallen off the wall during the last hundred years, we inserted many chinkers. They are small flat rocks, seldom weighing as much as a pound, and they are wonderful stabilizers.
We finished Andy’s wall two years ago. There’s still plenty left to do on mine – it’s a big as well as a long wall – but it’s doubtful that we’ll get to much of it.
I have developed a remarkably unpleasant version of Parkinson’s disease. One of the unpleasant things it does – one of the minor ones – is make it impossible for me to lift heavy rocks. Heavy anythings, actually. Thank God for chinkers.
There are many other things to do at Two of Everything Farm. Cider-making, for example. For about a century it has been possible to buy a one-bushel cider press. Then, when you climb up Bill Hill with a picnic lunch and maybe a pair of binoculars, you can also bring a jug of fresh-pressed cider. If any children are present, you can be pretty sure they will have ground the apples, done the pressing, and now are glad to carry “their” cider up the steep side of Bill Hill.
Then there are cows. There have been cows at Two of Everything Farm for about thirty of the forty-one years that I was privileged to live there myself. Mostly they were guest cows; they came in June and stayed until October or maybe early November and day by day trimmed up whichever pasture they were in. For a few years I had a tiny herd of beef cattle, and that was the period when I felt most at home on the farm. I love cows – for their warm sweet breath, their sweet dispositions (I could write a whole piece about the week when I had to give two shots a day to a sick heifer) and their insatiable curiosity. Once when my sister Bee was visiting, and we were making cider (kids at school), the six guest heifers we had that year were lined up like the audience at a play. They stayed neatly in a row along the wire fence, and did all but clap. I rewarded them with all the pomace from three one-bushel pressings.
As I move into exile – and that is how I see leaving the farm, the maple trees, the cattle, the wild turkeys – I am very clear that assisted living comes at a price.
[2004]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Passport Secretly Green. New York: St. Martin’s, 1961.
Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1969.
Amateur Sugar Maker. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1972.
Vermont in All Weathers. New York: Penguin Group (USA), Ltd, 1973. (or Viking?)
The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob: Loyal American Refugee, Written by Himself. (Editor.) Boston: David R. Godine, 1976.
Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879. Boston: David R. Godine, 1978.
First Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer. (Illustrated by Stephen Harvard.) Boston: David R. Godine, 1978.
Second Person Rural: More Essays of a Sometime Farmer. (Illustrated by F. Allyn Massey.) Boston: David R. Godine, 1980.
Third Person Rural: Further Essays of a Sometime Farmer. (Woodcuts by Robin Brickman.) Boston: David R. Godine, 1983.
Mills and Factories of New England. (Co-author with Kenneth Breisch. Photographs by Serge Hambourg. Captions by Kenneth Breisch.) New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988.
A Reader’s Delight. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988.
Last Person Rural: Essays by Noel Perrin.
(Illustrated by Michael McCurdy.) Boston: David R. Godine, 1991.
A Noel Perrin Sampler. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991.
Solo: Life with an Electric Car. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1992.
A Child’s Delight. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book – especially a collection like this, which has pulled material together from a number of different sources – can exist without the help of many people. I want to acknowledge those people here and express my deep gratitude.
The book would never have happened without David Godine. His idea inspired the project. He proposed the idea to Nardi Campion, and Nardi graciously passed the proposal on to me. Since then, David’s suggestions have helped to shape the collection, and his sharp editorial eye has smoothed out the rough spots in my prose.
Thanks also to everyone at David R. Godine, Publisher, who helped with the preparation and publication of the book.
Sara Coburn assisted me throughout the project, answering my questions as they arose, providing materials when I needed them. I’ve been honored by her patient support.
The same is true for Elisabeth Perrin and Amy Perrin Haque Joy. I hope this collection honors their dad the way he deserves to be honored.
Nat Tripp provided manuscripts and photographs. Jon Gilbert Fox, Medora Hebert, Annemarie Hoffmeister, Nancy Hunnicutt, Reeve Lindbergh, and Laurel Stavis all contributed or located or tried to locate photographs.