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For Ned
First published in 2006 by
David R. Godine, Publisher
Post Office Box 450
Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452
www.godine.com
Anthology and Foreword copyright 2006 © by Terry Osborne
Essays copyright © by Elisabeth Perrin and Margaret Perrin Haque Joy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, 15 Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts 02108.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Perrin, Noel.
Best person rural : essays of a sometime farmer / Noel Perrin ; selected, with an introduction, by Terry S. Osborne. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56792-307-0
EBOOK ISBN 978-1-56792-574-6
1. Country life—Vermont—Anecdotes. 2. Vermont—Anecdotes. 3. Perrin, Noel. I. Title.
S521.5.V5P45 2006
974.3—dc22
2006002954
Foreword
IN HIS FOREWORD to Third Person Rural Ned Perrin proclaimed that collection would be his last. Eight years later, in his Foreword to Last Person Rural, he admitted that his life trajectory had twisted and turned in ways he had not expected. With his marriage to Anne Lindbergh he was back to farming, and suddenly there was inspiration for another book.
He made no comparable proclamation in Last Person Rural. Maybe he thought the title of the book was obvious enough; maybe he thought there was the remote chance of another rural book. Whatever the reason, he thought better of predicting the future.
Good thing, too. Not because there were any surprises in his writing; he continued producing essays, articles and book reviews. But his life kept twisting: Anne died suddenly in 1993; his granddaughter Alexandra was born in 1996; he married Sara Coburn in 2001; and that same year he was diagnosed with Shy-Drager syndrome, a debilitating Parkinsonian-like condition that led to his death in 2004.
For those of us left in the wake of this final surprise, something seemed unfinished. A silence unfilled. There was a sense that Ned’s life needed a closing, a final rural proclamation, a collection that would recognize it was indeed the last, and make its deliberate farewell.
But a “best of”? How would Ned have felt about that? Actually, that’s easy. Ned loved “best of” lists. He barely made it through a day without rating something in terms of something else. Food was his favorite: the best tomatoes, potatoes, corn, red flannel hash, waffles, syrups, pies. I’m not sure he ever wrote about them, but he had mental lists of the best Vermont country diners and church suppers. That was only the beginning, though. He rated electric cars and pickup trucks and chainsaws and fencing and fenceposts. He had his favorite breeds of cows and sheep. He rated stone walls and wallbuilding techniques. And he wrote a widely read piece on the most environmentally committed colleges in America. So, though he might have been hesitant to have his own rural pieces collected into a “best of” list, he certainly would have understood the impulse.
How does one go about choosing the best of Noel Perrin’s rural essays? I’ve been at it for months, and I’m still not sure. There are so many wonderful pieces. For a long time I kept changing my mind about which ones to include. In fact, if there weren’t a deadline for this book, I’d probably still be changing my mind. To help me, I decided to use another of Ned’s favorite tactics: I took an unscientific poll. Ned loved taking polls; for instance, in the First Person Rural essay “Market Research in the General Store,” he and his daughter Amy set up a free syrup-tasting table in the Thetford Center Village Store to learn people’s preferences on syrup grades and brands. He did this kind of thing all the time. For my poll I called and emailed people around Vermont and New Hampshire, asking them to name their favorite rural essays of Ned’s. And here are the results: no one essay received a clear majority. In fact, no single essay received more than one vote. No kidding. There was no overlap in the responses. Each person had his or her own favorite.*
That’s pretty amazing. But it corroborated what I felt in reading Ned’s essays repeatedly and making a preliminary list of favorites: for every one I chose, there were five or six similar ones I easily could have picked. And so the poll results were helpful; they eased the pressure of having to make the one “right” list. In such an embarrassment of riches, I could never include everyone’s favorite; at the same time, each one I chose would very likely be someone’s favorite. In a way it would be hard to go wrong.
Wouldn’t it?
The result is this collection, which combines essays from Ned’s four Person Rural books and a sampling of rural essays written after Last Person Rural. In selecting and arranging the essays, I’ve been guided by two goals. First, I wanted to represent as many kinds of Ned’s rural essays as possible. Ned wrote about rural life using a number of different formats, from practical how-to’s to broad philosophical commentaries. The pleasure of reading his work comes in part from this variety. It seemed important to represent that.
But it wasn’t easy to do. Even Ned had trouble. In the Forewords to three of the four Person Rural books he tried to categorize his own essays (more of his lists), but the categories changed from one collection to the next. Using as many of his ideas as possible, I tried to create categories that would fit all of the collections as well as the later, uncollected pieces.
Ultimately I settled on four large groups, each of which contained smaller subgroups: “Part-time Farming” essays (divided into the topics of food, tools and equipment, animals, and specific skills and activities); “Rural Living” essays (arranged geographically from Thetford, to Vermont as a whole, to New England, to rural life in general); “Political” essays; and “Book Reviews.” I decided to omit book reviews from this collection because two excellent collections already exist: A Reader’s Delight and A Child’s Delight. So what you will find here is a mixture of “Part-time Farming,” “Rural Living,” and “Political” essays, distributed as evenly as possible among the four Person Rural books and the later selections, and arranged so that they carry, as faithfully as possible, the trajectory of the thirty-year story they tell.
Which leads to my second goal for shaping the collection this way: to have the essays tell a story. The story of Ned. Not just of the forty years he spent at his Thetford Center farm, but of the man himself. That goal presents the biggest challenge of this project, because in his rural pieces Ned rarely discloses himself directly. In part that has to do with the purpose of the essays: though most of them contain him as their main character, few were written about him. And in part it has to do with his discomfort with what he called the “fishbowl” quality of country life, where everyone lives “perpetually in public.” As a result he preferred to portray himself in the same way he described the New England landscape in his Last Person Rural essay, “The Soul of New England”:
The central truth about our landscape is that it’s introverted. It’s curled and coiled and full of turns and corners. Not open, not public; private and reserved. Most of the best views are little and hidden.
Later in the same essay Ned applied that idea to the landscape of his own farm, saying that what you could see of the farm from the road was just a fraction of all that was there. If you went behind the farmhouse, for instance, you’d find his best hayfield and his children’s sledding hill.
These essays are my attempt to take you behind Ned’s house. Once we get there, you can enjoy the view and read these essays with the pleasure of easy conversation they’re meant to inspire. Or i
f you want, you can take your time, look more closely, and get to know Ned through what he says and does, marking the changes over time. This won’t be as easy, but hopefully it will inspire a comparable pleasure.
If you read the book with this second perspective, be prepared: what you notice may surprise you and may not make sense. From my own experience and from having spoken with other people, I know that there were a number of Neds, many of them wonderfully inconsistent. Sometimes his essays convey this. For instance, in “A Truck with Pull,” he writes, “I’m the impatient type; I want that stuff out now.” But in “My Farm is Safe Forever,” also from Last Person Rural, he writes, “Mostly it’s just the way I operate. Slowly. I’m the sort of person who can decide he needs a tractor and then spend several years thinking about it before actually going out and buying one.” Both are true; both represent the Ned I knew. So, like his beloved New England landscape, the Ned you find here will be full of turns and corners. But all of it is him.
And all of it rings with passion, with a persistent love for the life he lived. That love animated every place in his life, from his farm, to the town of Thetford, to Vermont, to New England, to the rural world in general. It influenced his feeling for farming and farmers – from Floyd Dexter, his farmer-mentor-friend, to Ed and Ellis Paige and the other farmers with whom he interacted in the region, to the “bolt weevil” Minnesota farmers who in the 1970s resisted a cross-state power line with their own brand of ecosabotage. It shaped his relationships with his family and friends and students and readers. And it resolved a question asked in “Two Letters to Los Angeles,” from Third Person Rural, a question so perplexing that Ned posed it periodically throughout all of his rural writing: “Why on earth does anyone choose to live here?”
“Love” was the answer he kept coming back to: a person lives here because he loves it here. But so fierce a love for a place, Ned well knew, came at a risk. He exposed that risk in “Vermont Silences” in Second Person Rural: “Never admit to caring too much about anything,” he wrote, giving voice to the unsettling fear hidden behind rural stoicism, “because if you do, you’ll probably lose it.” Later in the book that same fear introduces “The Rural Immigration Law,” which begins, “Each man kills the thing he loves....”
If there was a particular spot that taught Ned about these two impulses – an embracing love of place and the fear of losing it all – it was his farm; and if there was an essay that best expressed what he had learned, it was “Farewell to a Farm.” This last piece in the collection is the last he ever wrote, and is really more a love letter than an essay. (“I love every acre of it,” he wrote of the farm.) The word “love” appears in the piece eight times and would have appeared many more, I suspect, if Ned had not chosen to replace it with related expressions such as “fond of,” “dote on,” “like,” and “delight in,” in order to avoid unwanted repetition. Despite such passion the essay seems to conclude that there is no way, finally, to avoid losing the things we love most.
From this perspective the story of Ned and the trajectory of his life on his farm seem to conclude with loss, and in some sense they do. But that would only be part of a more complicated ending. No good New England story, like the landscape in which it takes place, is simple; its ending always lies a little bit hidden, sometimes coiled inside itself, sometimes tucked in corners. To find it all, you might have to look in places you hadn’t expected to. Here are two examples of those places:
His essay “My Farm is Safe Forever”: in it he describes the way he donated to the town of Thetford the development rights to his farm, thereby ensuring that it “will stay a farm long after I have moved into the village cemetery.” Against the nostalgic longing in “Farewell to a Thetford Farm,” here is some unexpected hope – notably the wise recognition that one way to ensure you won’t lose what you love is to give it away. Also implicit in the piece is the possibility – since “My Farm is Safe Forever” was written many years before “Farewell to a Thetford Farm” – that a person’s final farewell may not necessarily be his last word.
The kitchen table in Ned’s farmhouse: that’s where I sit now, writing this Foreword, warmed by woodstoves, looking out of the bay window Ned called his “farmer’s TV” at the seven-acre hayfield and sledding hill you can’t see from the road. How I ended up here, owning the farm of a man I knew for almost twenty years – who taught me about sugaring and stone wall building and chainsawing, who influenced my classroom teaching and inspired my decision to write nonfiction, and whom I loved like a father – is one of those mysterious surprises that can bend anyone’s life trajectory, in this case, my own. I can’t possibly explain it, nor should I try here, since that’s another story, and not what this book is about.
But my presence at the kitchen table is relevant to Ned’s life in this way: it’s a reminder that a person’s story rarely ends with his death; more often it deposits into, mingles with, and is carried away by, the currents of other people’s lives. In that sense we all inevitably become, in ways we can’t predict, the legacies of those who have touched us.
One of the most quoted lines of Ned’s essays is the concluding sentence of “Grooming Bill Hill” from First Person Rural. Having changed his fenceline to add eighteen acres of pasture on the top of Bill Hill (with the help of Floyd Dexter), Ned closes the essay with fatherly pride, noting, “It will be no bad legacy to leave.” As I sit here looking out the bay window at the late-winter snow dusting the sledding hill to my right, then out the front window at Bill Hill to my left, and finally at his Person Rural books on the table before me, I see clearly now that eighteen acres was just the start of what he left for us.
No, Ned. No bad legacy at all.
TERRY OSBORNE
Ned’s Farm
February 2006
* In the spirit of full disclosure, here’s a confession: just before the writing of this Foreword, and long after I’d stopped collecting data and had already chosen the current collection, a person who had responded months earlier mentioned in passing that he also loved the piece “Selling Firewood in New York,” from First Person Rural. That essay had been mentioned on another person’s list too. So unofficially, I guess, “Selling Firewood” wins the poll, with two votes. But since the polls had been closed for quite some time, I can’t in good conscience make the results official. Doing something like that would be like going back and making Al Gore President. Wait….
Contents
FIRST PERSON RURAL
Jan Lincklaen’s Vermont
Grooming Bill Hill
Sugaring on $15 a Year
In Search of the Perfect Fence Post
The Two Faces of Vermont
SECOND PERSON RURAL
Best Little Woods Tool Going
Maple Recipes for Simpletons
Vermont Silences
The Rural Immigration Law
The Year We Really Heated with Wood
THIRD PERSON RURAL
Birth in the Pasture
Two Letters to Los Angeles
How to Farm Badly (and Why You Should)
Nuclear Disobedience
LAST PERSON RURAL
A Truck with Pull
A Vermont Christmas
The Lesson of the Bolt Weevils
The Soul of New England
My Farm Is Safe Forever
UNCOLLECTED PIECES
A House, a Horse, a Hill, and a Husband
The Guardian Angels of Tucker Hill Road
Break & Enter
Life on Nothing a Week
Farewell to a Thetford Farm
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Permissions
First Person Rural
Jan Lincklaen’s Vermont
IT IS SEPTEMBER 1791. A young Dutchman named Jan Lincklaen is riding horseback up the muddy road from Rutland to Burlington, Vermont. Once an officer in the Royal Dutch Navy, Lincklaen is now in the real estate business. He is the American scout for a giant land inves
tment company back home in Amsterdam. The company already owns four million acres of land in New York State. Now it is thinking about buying 23,000 acres of maple sugar groves in Vermont. This is a pilot agricultural project. If all goes well (it’s not going to), Dutch housewives will someday sweeten their coffee and frost their cakes with Vermont maple sugar, instead of cane sugar from the West Indies. Then the investors in Amsterdam can ease their consciences. They won’t have to feel guilty about owning slaves to work the sugar plantations in Curaçao and Aruba.
The road Jan Lincklaen is riding along passes through frontier farm country. Most of it has been settled less than twenty years. Vermont is still so wild that in the very year he makes his visit, one upland farmer kills twenty-seven bears in a six-month period. It is so primitive that there is only one church bell in the entire state, way over at Newbury. There are no school bells at all, and not too many schools.
It is good farm country, though – boom country, like the Napa Valley a hundred years later. Jan Lincklaen likes what he sees. “The soil is very rich,” he reports, and adds that it is particularly good for growing wheat and Indian corn. Up near Burlington, farmers are getting forty bushels of wheat to the acre, and up to seventy of corn. They are exporting beef to Canada.
There is wonderful hay land, too. Another visitor in the 1790s was dazzled to find farmers near Rutland who were making five hundred tons of hay a year – 20,000 bales, as we would say now. All this is from the virgin soil, which in another generation will be seriously depleted. Then farmers’ sons from Vermont and New Hampshire will begin to stream out to the Middle West, to exploit a still richer soil.
But meanwhile northern New England is a place where a farmer can get rich. Nothing is commoner in those first thirty years of settlement, than to be able to buy a piece of forest for $1 an acre, clear it and get huge crops for a few years, and then sell out for ten or twenty times what you paid. Jan Lincklaen met a farmer in Dorset in 1791 who had just sold his sixty-acre farm for $19.25 an acre. In terms of present money, that would be something like $500 an acre – not too much less than land in Dorset brings right now.