by Ben Hewitt
The property comprised a bit more than forty acres of field and forest on the outskirts of the northern Vermont town of Cabot. It sloped to the southwest, its downward pitch interrupted by frequent rises and small plateaus, as if the land were in no hurry to get where it was going. From its height we could see across a valley to the farm one ridge top over, where Holstein and Jersey cows dotted a landscape at the midpoint of its annual metamorphosis from summer’s lush abundance to the full barrenness of winter, like a butterfly folding itself back into its cocoon.
Maybe you’ve heard of Cabot. If so, it’s probably only because it is home to the eponymous creamery, the recipient of numerous cheese-making awards since its inception in 1918. “World’s Best Cheddar!” is what the trucks say, and although I have not sampled all the cheddars of the world, I have no reason to disbelieve them. Cabot is also home to what is quite possibly the highest number of dairy farms per capita in the United States. In this town of 1,400 residents, give or take a few, there are an even dozen dairies. The smallest of these is populated by fewer than twenty milk cows; the largest, a bit more than seventy. Follow any road in this town long enough, and you’ll pass a herd of cows. Follow it farther, and you’ll pass another.
The land Penny and I walked that day sits directly between two of these dozen farms, one comprised of a bit more than a hundred acres and the other of nearly three hundred. Accessing the property meant passing through a crude gate of rusted barbed wire and weather-grayed cedar posts, before traveling across a hilltop hayfield and directly through a small herd of Holsteins that retreated from our outstretched hands. High mowing is the term farmers once used for these elevated hayfields, the ones with sweeping views, the ones that never flooded, the ones that, when standing at their apex, could make you feel as if the entire world unfurled from the very spot you’d planted your feet. Although we didn’t know it then, the two herds—the one we passed through and the one we viewed from a distance—were owned by two brothers. Rusty and Melvin are their names, and they’d once farmed together but had long since split to run their individual ridgetop operations, the valley running like a river between them.
I carry another memory from that October day nearly two decades ago. Penny and I were pushing through a patch of raspberry whips, bent and fallow in the late-autumn chill. They were wet, and so were we because it had started raining, cold enough that it verged on snow. Above the whips, the sky was turning darker and denser, impenetrable as a bank vault. At the edge of the whips, to our right, a rusted barbed wire fence hung loosely from rotted posts. The wire followed the serpentine contours of the land, or it would have if it was still taut. But now the failing strand of metal dipped and rose randomly; in places it was broken, and long sections were simply missing.
I turned to Penny, and before I could even speak, I saw the smile wrapped around her face, saw how her eyes had taken on a sheen of excitement. “I love it,” I said, a whisper so that the realtor, a dozen steps ahead of us, wouldn’t overhear. We didn’t want to show our hand just yet. We didn’t want him to see us for the hopelessly smitten suckers we were. I whispered again: “I love it.” Penny only nodded, but it was an emphatic nod, and her eyes widened even more, and I thought, “This is it.” We made an offer that afternoon.
It is only in hindsight that I can grasp how profoundly I underestimated this land and how it would influence my life in ways I could never have foreseen. But how could I have known? I had not yet strung my own fence, or cared for the animals it would contain. I had had not yet built the house and laid the floor onto which I would see my sons be born, had not yet watched them climb into the apple trees we planted the day after we took title to the land. Those trees are more than fifteen years old now, and my sons shimmy high into the branches, picking unripe fruit along the way. “Don’t you want one, Papa?” they tease, dropping a smooth, sour orb into my hands. I take a bite and make a show of spitting it out. They laugh and laugh.
Can a piece of land really shape a person in a manner that is unique to it? I believe this is true, but perhaps I do not give myself enough credit, because of course just as the land has crept up on us, we have crept up on it. We have built and planted and molded and dug. We have cut trees and stacked rocks and cleared fields and plowed furrows that from above look exactly like the open wounds they are. We have tried to treat this land with kindness and good intent, to act as partners more than overseers, but it occurs to me that we are not the best judges of our actions, and I trust that our mistakes will be forgiven.
And maybe the power this land wields over me is nothing more than whatever power I grant it. Or maybe it is not even power, a word that seems to have become associated with the hubris of military force and political influence. After all, it was Penny and I who chose the land; it was we who decided our lives would happen here, and not anywhere else. The land did not choose us. Or did it? Because who can say what truly compels us to make certain decisions. Is it always reason and logic? I know that often it is, and that often our choices come attached to a range of foreseeable outcomes, from which it is entirely possible to discern between the favorable and the unfavorable. But I wonder if sometimes our decisions are built upon something less tangible and connected to the realm of logic.
It was not as if we couldn’t imagine the particular outcomes that might evolve from choosing this piece of land. Indeed, we could, and the yearning for these specific outcomes had, at least in part, led us to this property in the first place. These were the things we talked about in the evenings, in the damp confines of the $100-per-month cabin we’d rented as part of a campaign of extreme thrift launched years prior in hopes of saving as much of our meager income as possible toward our home-to-be. Lying in the smoky half-light of a flickering candle, we spoke of gardens and chickens and views and the privacy to splay our unclothed bodies across the grass on the first warm day of summer. “A pond!” Penny exclaimed. “We must have a pond!” and I agreed, because of course we must have a pond. It was unthinkable that we wouldn’t. We talked about the house we would build, how it would be small and simple. Cool in summer, warm in winter. Welcoming. Sturdy. Ours. Were we being idealistic? Well, maybe. Yes. But then, we’d been living in a decomposing cabin. Did we not deserve a little idealism? We did. We very much did.
We spoke of all these things, and our words carried certain assumptions about the property we would buy. That there would be open land to be plowed and tilled and sown. That there would be forest to provide firewood and sanctuary to wildlife and ourselves. That it would not be flat, but instead reveal its curves, along unfurling contours defined by geologic events long before our time and far beyond our capacity to imagine. We were not yet speaking of a family, but it is fair to say that children were also assumed. But at the time, the idea of children was too massive a force to be reckoned with, not unlike the geologic events that had shaped land we did not yet own.
So did we choose this land, or did this land choose us?
To this day, I am not sure.
FITTING INTO TREES
On an early February morning, I rise early, propelled by the feeling that too many days have passed since I’ve greeted the rising sun with sweat on my brow, so I coax the fires to life, slip out the door, and step into my skis. It is still dark and an even zero degrees, but it’s been the sort of winter that makes a zero-degree morning feel like just the way things are, so I am not cold. I glide up past the barn and the still-prone cows, and I imagine them turning their shaggy heads toward me in greeting or maybe just curiosity, but it is too dark to know if they so much as glance my way.
Out on Melvin’s field, at the height of the land, I slot into the packed depression left by the big, lugged tire of his New Holland on his way to gather firewood the afternoon before. The sky is bluing ever so slightly above me, and I ski as fast as the cold snow will let me. Over by the old hollow oak I can see down to Melvin’s barn. Light shines through a window. Chore time. It is almost six A.M., so I know Melvin is probably feeding
out at that very moment. Understanding this reminds me of Thanksgiving, when we’d all been sitting around our big farmhouse table, shifting ever so slightly in our chairs to relieve the post-meal discomfort of expanded bellies pressing against waistbands. We’d had one serious cold snap already, and I said something like “I hope it’s a good, hard winter.” Melvin didn’t miss a beat: “Spoken like someone who makes his living at a desk,” he said, and he was grinning like he does when he’s heckling me but also knows he’s speaking the truth and furthermore knows that I know he’s speaking the truth. It’s a tidy arrangement, really.
That old oak. The boys used to squeeze themselves into it all the time. They’d spend hours in and around that tree, lost to their imagining. We’d read Jean Craighead George’s classic story My Side of the Mountain, about a young man who spends a winter living inside a hollow tree, and I suppose that had something to with the boys’ fascination, but I bet they would have found that tree no matter what.
Just a few days prior, Fin told me that he and Rye can’t fit into the oak anymore. Isn’t that the way it goes. I suppose it would’ve made me sort of sad if it didn’t reveal the simple fact that they still wanted to fit into it. That they’d tried. And it occurred to me that trying to fit inside a hollow tree might be as important as actually fitting into it.
The tree’s days are numbered. It’s going in Melvin’s furnace, if not this winter, then next. If not next winter, the one after that. That’s OK. My boys don’t fit in there anymore, and a furnace doesn’t run on sentiment.
By the time I return home, I’ve gotten the sweat I’d wanted. I can taste it on my upper lip. I ski past the cows again, and this time, I can see that they do look my way. Wanting hay. Wanting fresh water. I go into the house, remove my ski boots, change into my chore boots, and step back outside.
3
The View
IF I STAND AT THE HEIGHT of our land looking west, this is what I see: At my feet, the steep slope of pasture falling away from me, an expanse of grass that unrolls, carpet-like, for a few hundred yards before running into the line of trees that demarcate the forest’s edge. To my left, the pasture extends southward for a quarter mile or so; to my right, it is hemmed by our house and barn, as well as two small outbuildings that serve as a rudimentary workshop and a three-sided shed to shield the cows from the weather. A long greenhouse protrudes at a right angle from the southern wall of our home. From certain vantage points, it reminds me of a nose.
A couple of hundred feet below the greenhouse, I see a small, terraced orchard, and below that, a copse of sugar maple trees. There are perhaps twenty-five in total and, with the benefit of the giant maples that line the southeastern boundary of our property (as I stand atop that knob of pasture, these are behind me, running along a row that follows our pasture line to the south), they provide the half-dozen or so gallons of maple syrup my family consumes each year. Below the copse of maples, there is a pond, which a neighbor dug for us four years ago. It is fed by three separate springs, and even in August it is so cold that jumping from one of the rocks at its shore feels like a small feat of bravery. On those midsummer days that dawn hot and hazy and finish even hotter and hazier, I am often in the pond no fewer than four times: once before breakfast, once prior to lunch, once after evening chores, and once more as the light is leaving the sky, a cooling dunk to ease the transition from wakefulness to sleep. I shuck my sweat-damp clothes in the expanse of grass that leads to the pond’s edge, step onto my favorite jumping rock, gather my insignificant reservoir of courage, and leap. Because I do not really like to swim per se, I am generally back on shore within minutes, drying myself with my T-shirt so that it might absorb some of the frigid pond water.
There are two small rafts wedged against the shore. Fin and Rye built them, hauling small-diameter fir logs to the ponds’ edge, where they used handsaws to cut them into equal lengths, and fashioned decks of slabwood. They ride the rafts for hours, poling themselves across the pond, lost to the world beyond the water’s lapping fringe. Watching them, I remember the week in January during which I read Huckleberry Finn aloud, the three of us curled into the tattered sofa near the woodstove, chortling at Huck and Jim’s antics. And I remember the raft my father and I built when I was their age, and how I floated on the pond behind the rental house we lived in at the time, everything forgotten but the small square of slippery wood beneath my feet and the murky water it floated on.
What else can I see? I can see the ninety-something blueberry bushes we planted sixteen years ago, before we’d even broken ground on our shelter. This struck me as nothing short of insane—after all, we were at the time living in the aforementioned rental shack—but as is so often the case, Penny knew better than I. “In five years, you’ll be really glad we did this,” she said, and I can’t remember my exact reply—probably something snarky like “Yeah, in five years I’ll be really glad to have a roof that doesn’t leak”—but of course she was right. Penny is graced with the ability to envision a future I can only blindly lurch toward; she knew that bare-root blueberry whips take at least five years to produce and she knew of the Chinese proverb that says, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”
When I think of those berries, I recall how it used to be that every summer around the first of August, one of the boys would come running from the patch with a handful of half-ripe specimens in his hand. “Papa, they’re ready, they’re ready! These are for you!” he’d yell, and I’d chuckle to myself, because I knew his belly was full of the ones that really were ripe. In truth, the boys’ enthusiasm has hardly diminished; at eight and eleven, they still come running from the patch, still calling out that the berries are ready. They no longer hoard the ripest ones; at some point over the past few years, their sense of justice and generosity has evolved so that their grubby-palmed offerings are deeply blue and plump, a full expression of what a fresh blueberry can be, made all the sweeter by the eleven months that have passed since the last of the previous season’s berries were coaxed from the vine.
Just before the blueberry patch, atop one of the few relatively flat expanses on our property, there is a large garden. Actually, it is one of three gardens we tend, which in total comprise maybe a quarter acre of cultivated land. The garden near the blueberries is called the “wedding field,” so named because it is where we pitched the tent that provided shade and shelter for the friends and family who attended our wedding in 1998, the summer after we closed on the land. There is also a garden just above the pole barn where we store hay (the “upper garden”), and one immediately to the north of the house (the “lower garden”). Increasingly, the spaces between the gardens are being populated by fruit and nut trees, along with other food-bearing plants, as we transition toward a landscape that is rooted in permaculture design and theory, which models natural ecosystems to create largely self-maintaining food production.
By the time they were four, the boys had their own rows in the garden. They painted wooden signs and mounted them on stakes at the end of their rows: “Garden of Fin” read the first, installed when Rye was still an infant, not yet old enough to contribute. The second reads, “Rye and Fin Garden,” the lettering completed before the boys understood the grammatical rules of possession. In the early years, we helped them plant and tend their rows, but this is no longer necessary. Now they harvest baskets of garlic and potatoes from seed stock they planted themselves. They contribute a portion of their bounty to the family food stores; the rest they sell or trade away with friends and mentors, receiving in exchange the small tools of their passions: a flint and steel, a handful of arrows, a small-bladed hook knife for carving the hollow of a bowl or spoon.
We did not overtly teach them how to grow things; we merely incorporated them into every aspect of the process since before they could walk. Their first sandbox was perched at the corner of the upper garden. There they dug and burrowed while Penny and I weeded. By the time Fin was two, he was helping plant pot
atoes. “Night, night, ’tatoes,” he’d say as he pushed the soft soil over the sprouted quarters that would become the smooth, hard orbs we’d uncover six months later and store for the coming winter. We granted the boys unfettered access to the gardens, and I’d like to say we did so without hesitation. But the truth is, this was hard for us, and particularly so for Penny. The gardens have long been a point of pride for her, and to see Fin rearranging the stakes that identified her trial varieties, or to watch the boys trod heedlessly through a bed of just-emerged beets was an exercise in patience that sometimes felt too strenuous to maintain. But our desire for the boys to feel at home in the gardens was even stronger, so we bit our tongues, and replanted in their wake.
Depending on the season, from where I stand atop that knoll I might see seven or eight cows grazing on the pasture, and I might see a pair of pigs splayed across the ground, warming their expansive bellies in the sun. I might see the fifty or so broiler chickens we raise each year for our freezer, pecking and squawking and strutting in that frantic, head-forward way chickens strut, as if each step were a recovery from a near fall. There’s a good chance our dog, Daisy, will be lurking about; she’s a Bluetick Coonhound and prone to manic bursts of activity, punctuated by the sort of long, untroubled hours of slumber that could drive an insomniac mad with envy. Because I can almost reach out and touch it, I can definitely see the wind turbine that sits atop a sixty-five-foot tower and makes a pleasing whirring noise as its blades revolve; our array of solar photovoltaic panels is slightly farther out of reach, but it is visible, too.