by Ben Hewitt
Everywhere I look, I see evidence of friends and family. I remember raising the windmill with our friend Jim, and I remember how one of the guylines failed, how we heard the horrible hiss of the rope unfurling and we yelled and dove as the tower crashed to the ground.
And I remember how Penny’s brother and his wife helped lay the plastic over the greenhouse. It was windy that day and the wind got under the plastic, threatening to send it sailing into the trees and perhaps us with it, but we managed to wrestle it down just as dark came in full. There’s the apple tree my mother planted back when Penny and I were still working on the shell of the house. There’s the retaining wall made of huge slabs of fieldstone Melvin helped us gather and place with his big tractor. It took a full afternoon, and he wouldn’t take any money. I think of our friend Bob and how he came every weekend for nearly a year. Could we have built this house without Bob’s help? Maybe. Probably. But it surely wouldn’t have been as much fun.
Our home is a traditional farmhouse style, with a steeply peaked roof, and already in spots the roofing tin is rusting. I suppose it will not be very many years before I will be compelled to replace the sheets of metal I so vividly remember installing. Below the roof, there are rough wooden clapboards and divided-light windows painted dark blue. Because the clapboards are unpainted and have therefore weathered over the years to a dull gray, our house probably looks older than it is. More than fifteen years after we broke ground, there remain certain unfinished aspects to the house—a missing piece of baseboard here, an unpainted surface there—that may or may not reach completion in our lifetime. The way I’ve come to look at it, these quirks add character to our home (and I’m fortunate that on most accounts, Penny agrees). They are evidence not merely of our home’s imperfection but of ours as well, and in this regard, I view these flaws as an expression of our personalities.
What can’t I see? I can’t see very far into our woodlot, from which we harvest the five or six cords of firewood that heat our house every winter. Ash, maple, beech, yellow birch. I seek out the dead and dying, the weakest specimens among our woodlot’s citizenry, and cleave them from the latticework of roots that runs beneath the soil. I drag the logs home behind the tractor and pile them for bucking and splitting on one of the Sunday mornings we reserve for processing firewood. Some families attend church; we split firewood, and again I see the imprint of the land on my sons in their progression as contributors to our family’s heat source, from throwers of the smallest sticks to wielding the maul against the easy-splitting rounds of ash and birch. They have learned to pilot our old Ford pickup up the farm road, its rear springs sagging under the load, whichever boy is driving sitting straight and his chin tilted up so that he might see above the curve of the steering wheel.
I also can’t see behind me, where Melvin’s hayfield disappears over the eastern horizon. It’s a wonderful thing, that field. In the spring, it is redolent with the manure he spreads, an odor that would be considered offensive only by those who do not understand the vibrancy it brings to a crop of hay. In the summer, Melvin’s field is thick and green and lush and then, when he hays, nubby and shorn and less green. In the fall, after he has taken the second cutting of hay, he turns his milk cows out to graze on it, and the field is dotted with their great, lumbering forms, either standing with heads bent to the grass or lounging in the shade of a fence-line maple. At least a few mornings every fall, I’ll see him just across our shared boundary, driving the cows down to his barn for morning milking as I tend to one chore or another, the foggy half-light of almost-dawn rendering him more as vague movement than any specific shape. But that stride: I’d know it anywhere. “Morning, Melvin,” I’ll say, no louder than necessary, the hour deserving the small respect of my restraint. “Morning,” he answers back, as the fog swallows him.
In the winter, Melvin’s field is covered with snow and we ski across it almost daily, faces tucked behind our collars to protect our cheeks from the prevailing wind. There is a soft rise that runs across the center of the field, and depending on where one stands, anything atop that rise is etched against the sky and there is nothing to suggest that stepping off the other side would be any different from stepping off the edge of the earth.
I also can’t see our driveway, which parallels Melvin’s field from the main road for a quarter mile. It is narrow, lined mostly by pine and balsam fir, and it is riddled with potholes, like earthen Swiss cheese. Every year, I fill in a few of the holes with crushed stone, and every year, more holes appear, like a geologic game of Whac-A-Mole. On both ends of our drive, there are short, steep hills that contribute to my miring the plow truck on a regular basis. This is an event I not so secretly covet, as it involves our tractor and a chain and a particular sort of crude, rural ingenuity (“From which angle shall I pull?” “Do I go forward or backward?” “Full gas or idle?” and so on) in which I like to think I specialize. The boys love to plow with me, and when I become stuck, they love to race back down the driveway, shouting my predicament into the thin winter air: “Papa’s stuck! Mama, Papa’s stuck!” This duty fulfilled, they spin around and run back to witness my antics and offer unsolicited advice.
I can’t see the old sugarhouse foundation, a hundred years old or more, nestled into a stand of balsam down past the power line that traverses our property. I like that foundation. Like the failing perimeter fences that define our boundaries, it is a comforting reminder to me that nothing I am doing on this land is new. Nothing I am doing is out of the ordinary.
I often wonder about this land’s imprint on my sons, and I consider how their immersion in nature—which this place enables to an extent that many would not—has become one of the nurtured parts of them, an environmental factor that will determine so much of how and what their lives will be. What parts of them are them—their innate nature, the cells and synapses, thoughts and emotions that cannot be influenced by place—and what parts of them are that same integration of land, spirit, thought, and emotion and even body that I know to be so strong a factor in my own life? How different might they be, in ways both subtle and profound, if they lived elsewhere? Would Rye still be so self-possessed? Still so drawn to labor, at seven years old already wearing holes in the palms of his leather work gloves? Would Fin still be so keen on the hunt, so primal in his curiosities? (He tells me what he’s learned about how best to prepare field mice for eating. “You singe the fur right off them,” he tells me. “They get sort of crispy.”)
You might call our place a farm, or you might call it a homestead, or you might call it some combination of the two; there are no precise definitions for these terms, and that is fine by me. People often ask me to describe our property, and I just as often struggle with my reply, because it seems to me as if it defies easy categorization. We do not garner much income from our land. At most, a few thousand dollars per year. But then, we do not have to buy much food, either, and in this regard, we do realize a certain type of profit from our land and our efforts. And of course it has come to inform almost every aspect of our lives, from how Penny and I spend our days to how and even what Fin and Rye learn, hour by hour, day by day.
I would be remiss if I didn’t briefly mention the land that surrounds our property, because it too has become a defining factor in our lives. It is our good fortune to live in a community that does not place much stock in No Trespassing signs, and we roam freely (permission having been granted, of course) across our neighbors’ properties, seeking morel and chanterelle mushrooms, casting lines in prolific brook-trout streams, and exploring on our skis come winter. I know how rare this freedom has become, and how fortunate my sons are to have access to more than five hundred acres of field and forest, all of which unfolds literally from our doorstep. Over the years, their boundaries have steadily expanded, responsibility granted as it has been earned, and now it is common for them to wander miles at a time.
So. This is our place, to the extent that a place can ever be “ours”; I’m sometimes more inclined to thin
k of our sense of ownership as being nothing more than an affectation. After all, we can only claim this land because somewhere far down the chain of ownership someone drove the native populations from it. Certainly we’ll soon enough pass on from here, and until someone convinces me that an afterlife is an ironclad guarantee, I’m assuming we’ll have no idea what or who will come to “own” this land next. Fin and Rye, presumably, but what they do with it will be entirely up to them and far beyond our capacity to influence, anyway.
In the meantime, our land and infrastructure are constantly evolving, either as a result of our intervention (over just the past four years, we’ve dug a pond, planted three small orchards, partially converted two acres of forest to pasture, and erected a pair of outbuildings), or the inevitable continuum of nature’s process. This land, like all land, is in a constant state of change. There are the changes we have wrought, and there are the cyclical, generally predictable shifts inherent in each season, although these seasonal changes seem to be getting less and less predictable with each passing year.
And of course there are changes tied to events, like the storm one summer that brought down the old elm tree along the fence line we share with Melvin. “I’m sorry to see that elm go,” I told Melvin the afternoon after the storm. We were standing in his barnyard, in our usual spot just outside the door of the milk room, both of us facing the town road at the other end of the yard. Melvin is shorter than me by nearly a foot, and wears a frayed baseball cap perpetually. Indeed, I’d known him for years before discovering he was mostly bald. “Me, too,” he said, looking at me. “Me, too.” Elm is not great firewood—full of moisture, prone to rot, hard to split—but I bucked the fallen tree into stove lengths anyway, half for Melvin and half for us. It burned begrudgingly, spitting water and sputtering. But it burned.
Less obviously, there is the unhurried, almost imperceptible change that must be measured in years, if not decades. An abandoned sugarhouse decays, leaving only a rusting arch, slowly returning to the soil, and around it, a rough rectangle of foundation stone, punctuated by towering trees. A hummock erodes, losing height at the rate of millimeters per annum, the same way a person begins to fold in on himself as age and gravity conspire. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could see our land long after I’ve died, to know what changes will come in my wake. But I know it’s a silly wish and I do not hold on to it.
I am forty-two now, which is old enough to begin to understand how little I truly know. Sometimes, it seems as if I know less every day. But there is at least one thing I’m certain of, one thing that cannot be refuted, if only because I am presented with its evidence everywhere I turn. This place and I have shaped each other, one incorporated into the substance of the other, and both the opportunity to incorporate and the opportunity to be incorporated have defined me in ways I may never fully understand. Both are emblematic of a particular type of freedom, one that is becoming increasingly rare, as the very notion of place is usurped by transience. Transience holds its own sort of freedom, to be sure, a freedom of movement and change, but one that is so often mandated by forces that feel achingly beyond our control, as is so often the case when paying work is sought or other life circumstances intervene.
Have our decisions to live where and how we do and to educate the boys the way we do merely accentuated their inborn natures or have they come perilously close to defining them? An absolute answer cannot be known, and of course the question could apply to any child, reared in any environment. But there can be no denying that just as this place has shaped me, it is shaping my sons. The fact that Fin and Rye feel the pull of this land is as undeniable as the very fact of their existence.
Someday, of course, that pull may wane, or the pull of another place may prove stronger. That is OK. That is the natural order of things. But what the shaping this land has done will not be easily eroded. Whatever else my boys forget, they will remember where they came from. There is no doubting that.
CHOOSING FOR OURSELVES
My children have enormous freedom to do as they please. This is by design; we have engineered it into our lives, the way most people make room for a career, or strategize their retirement. Most mornings after chores and breakfast, the boys set out on some adventure or another, into the woods or down the field. Usually they do this together, although it is not infrequent that one returns before the other, complaining of a grave injustice: Rye didn’t want to pretend they were carrying a .30-30, and everyone knows you can’t hunt deer with a .22. Rye put wet wood on the fire and it went out. Fin made Rye carry the heavy backpack. Like I said, grave, grave injustices. But they often disappear for hours, returning only when they become hungry or when whatever force that motivated their journey has waned.
“Where’d you guys go?” I’ll ask, and the reply is often long and by necessity detailed: Down the snowmobile trail to Celley’s stream, but the fish weren’t biting, so up the banks of the stream onto the Ackermanns’ land, then doubling back through the hayfield and Keith’s sugarwoods, before returning to camp. “We saw moose tracks,” Fin tells me. “Yeah,” says Rye, “and the scat was fresh. Last night, probably. We found these, too.” He reaches a grubby hand into a pocket, and for a moment, I’m almost afraid of what he’ll extract—Moose poop? Something dead?—but it’s only a handful of wild onions, small white bulbs we’ll slice so thin they become translucent before frying them in butter.
From a parenting perspective, there is a downside to the tremendous degree of freedom they have been afforded: The boys have become rather discerning regarding how they spend their time. In short, when the occasion calls for them to do something they’d rather not do, they are not always accommodating. Part of this, of course, is simply a child’s inability to grapple with time: What is happening right now is everything to a child. There is little awareness that it will pass, that something else will take its place. There is little capacity to understand that an unpleasant task is temporary, that its unpleasantness is a fleeting thing and, furthermore, only as unpleasant as it is believed to be.
Penny and I talk about this a lot. “Are we giving them too much freedom?” I ask, standing in the kitchen in the aftermath of a conflagration with one of my sons or the other, often over a requested task deemed unworthy of their efforts. “I don’t know,” she says, and it’s not a non-answer, because she doesn’t know. Nor do I.
Depending on our mood, and the degree to which the boys have managed to invoke our ire, our perspective on their entitlement spans a broad chasm of possible outcomes. The worst of these, we figure, is that we’ve failed them completely and they will never amount to much of anything, being unwilling to do anything but what suits them in the moment. The best is that we are teaching them to be particular about how they pass their time, that time is a finite resource, and that this will serve them well as they go out into a world that does not encourage such discernment.
I suspect the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, if only because experience has taught me that this is where truth most often lurks. They will, of course, need to learn how to accept that life will not always meet their expectations. They will benefit greatly if they learn that some of what will be required of them will not be pleasant. They will need to learn that what is not pleasant will be only as unpleasant as they allow it to be.
Still, I can’t help but think of how my own sense of discernment over my time has shaped my life, and generally for the better. I did not like school, so I walked away from it. I did not like working for others, so I chose not to. I do not like to spend a lot of time indoors, so I don’t. The truth is, I want to live the way I want to live, conventions be damned, and I can only hope for my sons to know they can be so free.
4
Drive
JUST BEFORE I TURNED SIXTEEN, in November 1987, my mother sold me her car. It was a ten-year-old Volkswagen Rabbit, the exact same yellow-tan hue as a newborn’s soiled diaper. It had four forward gears, hand-crank windows, and an AM/FM radio, which emitted a buzzy
squawk through its in-dash speakers. I paid my mother two hundred dollars for the car, a price my parents settled on because it fooled them into believing I’d actually earned the thing rather than had it dropped into my ungrateful adolescent lap.
Back in the day, those little Rabbits were prized by miscreant teens. They weighed hardly anything, particularly once a few Vermont winters’ worth of rust had eaten away at their flimsy tin shells, and some of them—mine included—were equipped with 1.6-liter fuel-injected engines that could be revved to a racecar-like 7,000 rotations per minute. Most crucially, the Rabbits’ emergency-brake handle activated the rear wheels rather than the front, a feature that enables the high-velocity, 180-degree turnaround skids that are a mainstay stunt of any newly licensed scoundrel.
I drove my new car heedlessly, with a juvenile’s inflated confidence and arrogant disregard for law or safety, which probably does not surprise you. Mostly, I traveled the latticework of dirt roads around my childhood home, my friends and I shrieking along to the angst-ridden music of the era, which played through the buzzy speakers of an old boom box I’d appropriated for the task: Metallica, Suicidal Tendencies, Bad Brains, Slayer. At the time, my favorite song was a Bad Brains number called “The Regulator.” I played it over and over again, nodding my head to the heavy beat as the band’s lead singer, H.R. (for Human Rights, naturally), railed against the despotic forces regulating and oppressing his existence.
One month after I took possession of my mother’s car, with the ink barely dry on my driver’s license, I dropped out of high school.
Did I hate school? Well, yes, I suppose so, but only in aggregate. There were elements of it I liked very much. For instance, I liked hanging out in the parking lot with my friends. That was a lot of fun, or at least, it fit my version of fun at the time. I liked Creative Writing, one of the few classes I rarely cut. I liked my physics class, not because I liked Physics (I flunked it, along with Algebra, Calculus, History, and French) but because Tom, my teacher, was something of an oddball. He smelled horrific, wearing the accumulation of his fetid perspiration like a badge of honor. But despite the odor, and despite my flailing half attempts to succeed in his class, there were compensations, such as the time he encouraged my friend Django and me to paint an old steel barrel with the international warning symbol for nuclear waste and leave it in a conspicuous place on school grounds. In no way could I discern how this had anything to do with physics.