Home Grown

by Ben Hewitt

  So I concede the round bale makes a certain kind of logical sense. And in full fairness to Haverdink and the technology as a whole, I should note that we feed a few to our cows every winter. It’s enormously convenient to simply fire up the tractor, plop the bale in the paddock, and leave the cows to their ruminating. But doing so always leaves me feeling a little hollow and confused, like I’ve just gotten something for nothing, and I’m not quite sure if I should be grateful for all the work I didn’t have to do, or cheated because I didn’t have to do it.

  In recent years, I have come to understand that certain moments shape my life by a measure not consistent with their brevity and immediate imprint. These are not the big events, the births and deaths, the unions and separations, which for all their significance are the commonplace joys and tragedies of humanity. Rather, they are splashes in the pool of my existence, small stones tossed into the eddy of my life, like when I glance up at Martha perched on that big green tractor like a sprite riding the back of some great beast, a hundred pounds soaking wet atop twelve thousand pounds of machine, towing another ten thousand pounds or more of hay and baler and wagon, and I marvel at what it means to be human, to be of the species that for better or worse has invented all this stuff, this amazing, crazy, magical stuff. I mean, my God, to be towed through a field at the ass end of a twenty-thousand-something-pound chain of steel and rubber and grass? And to have the master of that chain be a cigarette-smoking Olympian with the bones of a bird and the work ethic of an entire anthill? It’s almost as if I can feel the small stone dropping through my surface. It’s almost as if I am not just the pool but also the shore and I can see those waves rushing toward me.

  The field we hay with Martha is at a high elevation, with 270-degree views of everything that makes Vermont the place non-Vermonters wished they lived in, if only it weren’t for the blackflies, mud season and, depending on their political leanings, Bernie Sanders. During the rare moments when bales aren’t popping out of the chute, I like to look out across those views and remind myself to stop taking so damn much of my life for granted. This works for a day, maybe two, before I retreat back into my old jaded self. But every year, a little more of it sticks, and I remain hopeful that by the time I’m Martha’s age, and maybe even sooner, gratitude will have become habitual, an ever-present backdrop from which to greet the world.

  I like to sing as I chuck bales, and there’s something about the brute physicality of the task that pushes me toward the juvenile, if not downright infantile, favorites of my youth, such as Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” or perhaps “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by the Scorpions.

  On haying days, Penny mixes thick milk shakes and we drink them on the ride home, the four of us crammed into the cab of our old Chevy. We idle down the gravel road from the hayfield; the loaded wagon pushes us, and I ride the brakes. Oncoming traffic gives us a wide berth, and wisely so. Everyone waves in that two-fingers-off-the-steering-wheel way rural Vermonters wave, as if afraid to commit to even this brief, passing relationship. I can smell the warm hay, the hot brakes, and the chopped-up sprigs of mint Penny puts into the sweet slurry of cream, egg, and maple syrup. I can smell the sweat that has risen, flowed, and is now drying on my skin. It is not sour, or at least, not yet. My teeth hurt from the cold drink, and I know that my day is nowhere near over. There is this wagon to unload, and yet another to fill. There will be more tomorrow.

  But for the seven or eight minutes it takes to get home, I am afforded the satisfaction only hard labor can provide, and I think ahead to the coming winter, when I will pull each of these bales out of our barn, one by one, extracts of summer in an iced-over world. And I will remember how it happens every year that I improbably recognize a bale or two—maybe a runt from an early pass, when we were still fiddling with the baler settings, or maybe one from the field’s edge, with an identifying stick woven in, shed from the old maples that line the northern fringe, overseers of more hay and toil than I can imagine.

  And I’ll stand in our snow-packed barnyard for a minute, holding the bale, wrenched back to the moment I hauled it off the chute and passed it to back to Penny or one of the boys as Martha guided the tractor down the long windrow, the smell of grease and diesel and drying hay riding softly on the summer air. It’s not a moment frozen in time, but rather just the opposite: A moment so fluid it can travel across weeks and even months to be with me at six o’clock on a January morning, to a point roughly equidistant from the haying season before and the haying season to come.

  Then I walk up the short hill to the paddock, release the compressed hay from the confines of its twine, throw it over the fence, and leave the cows to their breakfast.

  ONLY HUMAN

  The season’s first big snow finds me on the new shed roof by seven A.M., trying to nail down the last few sheets of tin before the storm begins in earnest. Already, the air is thick with driven flakes. When I look up from my task, I see the cows, bent to their feed, broad backs coated with white. I see the boys, sleds in hand, trudging through the accumulating snow. They are yelling. Maybe they are arguing, or maybe they are just yelling to notice how the snow hushes their voices. I yell, too, but they don’t hear or, if they do, don’t acknowledge hearing. They are getting older, learning that I can be ignored.

  It is 16 degrees Fahrenheit. The bare fingers of my nail-holding hand burn with the cold, and I have to stop every three or four nails to tuck the fingers into my armpit. Beneath my feet, the tin is extraordinarily slippery, and twice I almost slide over the roof’s edge. It is not a long drop, so I allow myself to enjoy the sensation of sliding, knowing that even if the worst should come to pass, it wouldn’t be that bad. But I stop in time.

  I have always loved winter. For years, it was for the skiing, the cut-loose feeling of falling down a mountain, of being at once in control and out of it, crossing over that invisible line so often and so frequently, I rarely knew which side I was on. I still covet this sensation, but have noticed a shift in my appreciation of the season. Maybe it is age. Maybe it is fatherhood. Or maybe it just is. Whatever the reason, I find it in the sight of those cows, uncomplaining as the snow piles atop their hides. They stand so still, as if giving the storm permission to fall upon them.

  Once, I a saw a branch break under the weight of accumulated snow. I heard the crack, and a moment later the sudden whump of it landing on the ground, and I could not help thinking about the single flake that proved to be one flake more than the branch could hold. It was like an old man’s final breath. One breath too many. If only he’d stopped breathing earlier perhaps it could have been avoided.

  Even the absurdity of laying roof on a 16-degree morning, in a snowstorm, no sure footing to be found. I should be cold—hell, I am cold—should be miserable, should probably wait for the storm to pass. It’s not my work ethic that keeps me up here, nor some misguided notion of what defines valor. Believe me, I have no surfeit of these particular traits, although it is true that a small part of myself will measure its worth against the portion of the job that remains unfinished at day’s end. It is true that I can feel myself taking strength from the sight of those cows, from the sound of the boys whooping in the cold.

  But it is also true that the settled, elemental nature of winter soothes and fortifies me in a way I can’t quite define. I do not see it as a battle with the elements; it is more like an acquiescing to them, a simple, humble acknowledgment that there is so much beyond my control. The cows know it; perhaps I have learned some of it from them. I’m pretty sure the boys know it, too, though it probably won’t be long before they forget. They are only human, after all.

  10

  The List

  ON A LATE OCTOBER MORNING, a full sixteen years after Penny and I first walked our land, Fin and Rye rose before first light. They dressed quickly, pulling frayed sweaters over holey long johns, stepping into pants stiffened by the accumulated essences of their wandering. Sleep-tousled hair was tucked into woolen hats, rubber boots fitted to growing
feet, leather gloves slid over the soft hands of youth.

  Penny and I watched from the kitchen window as they waddled down the field under the weight of their provisioned pack baskets, their progress marked by the bobbing, darting beams of their headlamps. The baskets the boys wore were themselves products of their own hands, loaded with axes and traps and lure. Wire and water. Behind us, the woodstove creaked and ticked, the small sounds of metal expanding with the rising heat, the particular, acrid odor of warming iron and wood smoke.

  The previous day, the opening day of trapping season, Fin and Rye had spent nearly a dozen hours setting traps across our land and Melvin’s. They’d set traps for muskrats and mink, raccoon and fox. They’d set traps on the banks of a stream, and at the bases of fence posts, or tucked into the cleft made by a junction of tree roots. They returned just as the last tendrils of daylight were being lost to the thick, clouded darkness of night. They ate and collapsed into bed, falling into the arms of their unconscious and whatever stories it held for them.

  That Fin and Rye would become trappers had never crossed our minds. It was almost inconceivable, like imagining they would take an interest in hairstyling or opening a fast-food franchise. Penny and I did not trap, nor did we so much as know anyone who trapped. To us, trapping seemed both crude and cruel, and our interest in fur as anything more than the outermost layer of an animal was nonexistent. Sure, we raised animals for slaughter and consumption, but this felt like something different. The deaths of the creatures under our care were immediate and painless, and the very purpose of their living was understood from the day of their conception.

  “What do we do?” Penny asked, when it became apparent that our sons’ interest in trapping would not pass of its own accord. It had been two years since it had blossomed, and rather than wane, their fascination had only intensified. We had told them of our concerns. We talked of cruelty and of dresser drawers packed with clothing made of cotton and wool; we did not need the fur or the flesh these animals would die to provide. The boys didn’t need whatever money might be gleaned by selling the furs, money that trickled down through a series of exchanges that depended on someone, somewhere wanting to wear the coat of a wild creature for no other purpose than to fulfill a manufactured emotional desire. We had told them of all this, and on more than one occasion, we had outright said no.

  But even in the face of our refusal to facilitate their desire to trap, Fin and Rye persisted. They immersed themselves in books on tools and technique, and practiced assembling the primitive traps they’d read about. They set deadfalls for mice, and figure fours for rabbits. All the while, they tried to educate us about the realities of trapping. “It’s not like the old days, when the traps had teeth,” Fin told us repeatedly. He showed us pictures of modern traps, with offset, laminated jaws that held without wounding, and the quick-killing conibear traps that delivered instant death.

  Still, for three full years we refused. And for three full years, our sons continued building traps, along with other hunting devices: bows and arrows, throwing sticks, and an elegant Native American spear-throwing device known as an atlatl. The ingenuity and sheer effort invested in their weapons was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

  It wasn’t until Fin was six that any of these devices bore fruit; his first kill was a chipmunk, which he shot off the branch of a maple tree with a homemade bow and arrow. Penny and I had never needed to explain that we would not tolerate killing for sport; our sons had always understood that any animal they took would be utilized to the greatest extent possible. Now that he had a dead rodent in hand, I half expected my son to change his tune. But he cheerfully went about dressing and skinning the small creature, and as I watched him, I could see that he’d prepared for this moment a thousand or more times in his head. Each movement, each slice and swivel of the blade was true, and within minutes he’d stretched and tacked the soft, tawny skin to a scrap of lumber for drying. He laid a fire in the fire pit and impaled the small carcass on a skewer, and soon the odor of roasting chipmunk wafted through the air.

  “Here, Papa, try some,” implored Fin when he deemed it suitably blackened. He extended a scrap of stringy meat in his greasy fingers. His lips were lustrous with chipmunk fat, and I tried not to recoil. It was my son’s first kill, after all. The least I could do was take a bite. I held the blessedly small bit of meat in my palm, before popping it into my mouth in a single, swift motion, like one takes a bitter pill. I chewed tentatively, unleashing an indeterminate meaty flavor. It was not delicious, but neither was it disgusting. It was just . . . meat. I chewed once or twice more and swallowed, relieved to have fulfilled my fatherly duty without vomiting. Following Penny’s obligatory sample, the remainder of the chipmunk was shared between Fin and Rye, and they gnawed the flesh off the bones as enthusiastically as if they were dining on joints of prime beef.

  Clearly, the boys were serious, and after that chipmunk made its journey down their alimentary canals, Penny and I could no longer deny just how serious they were. And we began to understand why trapping held such appeal. The boys desperately wanted to hunt, not merely for sport but to provide their own meat and hides. Fin’s first kill aside, bow hunting is incredibly hard. Further successes would be few and far between. They weren’t ready for firearms, or perhaps Penny and I weren’t ready for them to have firearms. But trapping was different. It was accessible, and after witnessing their commitment, it no longer felt right to deny them something they were so passionate about. Furthermore, was our sons’ desire to trap really so wrong, or could it be that Penny’s and my perceptions of trapping lacked depth? Because what, really, had informed those perceptions? Certainly not experience. Certainly not any firsthand knowledge of what it all meant or could mean.

  In hindsight, I see now that our boys had done precisely what children will do: they’d surprised us, and in full candor, we struggled for a time with not being disappointed by this surprise. Where had their passion for hunting and trapping come from? Not from Penny and me. Not from their grandparents, or the parents of friends. We knew people who hunted and trapped, but most of these people were on the periphery of our lives. They were not part of our immediate culture, and we were fine with that. From birth, we’d immersed them in nature, expecting this immersion to instill in them our particular idea of reverence for the natural world. It was a version of reverence that did not include bows and bullets and pack baskets loaded with traps.

  Yet the boys had always been drawn to the wild and to the inevitable death and consumption of living creatures that is as natural to the wild as Grande Soy Milk Cappuccinos are to the city. Fin and Rye have been fascinated by tales of wilderness adventure since they were old enough to express such preferences. One of their favorite books is Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen. Hatchet tells the story of a boy who survives the crash of a small airplane, only to find himself marooned in a vast wilderness with nothing at hand but his wits and a hatchet. How many times had Penny and I read that book aloud, our sons tucked against us, rapt at the words they’d heard so many times before. And they have always loved books about Native American skills and culture, in which deep reverence for the natural world includes the frequent taking of life.

  As soon as they were physically able, they began living out fantasies of survival. When Fin was four, Penny found him in the woods bordering our yard. He’d liberated a dead mouse from a snap trap in the basement and taken it to the forest, where he’d proceeded to skin and gut it. The “pelt” (as he called it) had been hung to dry, alongside a pair of tiny “hams.” He’d seen us slaughter and butcher a number of livestock, and therefore had an understanding of the process, but this seemed like something more than simple emulation.

  “How did he even know how to do that?” I asked.

  Penny just shrugged her shoulders. “I think it’s just in him,” she said.

  Still, none of this prepared us for the reality of our children on the land, traps and weapons in hand. None of it prepared us for the possibil
ity of examining our own feelings about such practices. Once again, our children were forcing us to learn and unlearn, to reach outside our comfort zone. Penny discussed this with the boys’ mentor, Erik, a man they held in the highest regard. We assumed he’d recoil at the notion of our sons’ trapping, at which point we could put the whole sordid affair to rest, once and for all.

  Alas, that was not exactly how it played out. “Actually, some people consider trapping more humane than hunting, because it reduces the chances of an animal being wounded and escaping,” he told her. Furthermore, he informed her, he had a friend who was an avid trapper, a man who’d learned from the Cree Indians of Northern Quebec. This man did not trap for profit. He trapped only when he had a specific use for the animal in mind, and he utilized every feasible part of the creatures he killed. He ate muskrat and made knife sheaths from beaver tails. He was in the process of sewing a beaver-pelt vest. He was gentle and thoughtful, and he believed, as the Cree do, that trapping these animals was to enter into relationship with them. He believed, in a way that was not immediately obvious to Penny and me, that trapping these animals brought him closer to them.

  And that’s how we met Nate, who, through a series of serendipitous circumstances, came to live with us. He’d needed to move out of the house where he was staying, and we had just recently constructed a small, rustic outbuilding, originally intended to serve as a “milking room,” but which stood empty. The Nate Crate is what the boys dubbed the milking-room-turned-boarding-shack, shortly after he’d arrived in June. He showed up in his pickup truck full of belongings, the majority of which he’d made with his own two hands.