Best Person Rural Page 2

  The earliest farms would have looked very ugly to modern eyes. When a new farmer arrived, his first act was to chop down every tree on what was going to be his first field, cutting them about two feet from the ground. (This is a good chopping height.) He would then cut these giant oaks and hickories and maples into lengths, drag them into piles with oxen, and burn them. Then he would gather the ashes and boil them into pot ash, later called potash. Pot ash was the basic ingredient in eighteenth-century soap, and he could sell it for a high price. Or he could refine it still further into pearl ash, which people used then for baking powder. “These ashes amply pay them for the clearing of the land,” a Vermont lawyer named John Graham wrote in 1795.

  Well they might. Vermont pioneer farmers were producing about two million pounds of pot ash and pearl ash a year, and getting the then enormous price of 3¢ to 5¢ a pound. Shipped by water to New York or Philadelphia, barrels of ashes from Vermont and New Hampshire sold for a higher price per pound than tobacco, or flour, or even butter.

  The pioneer farmer now had a stretch of rich virgin soil, dotted at frequent intervals with enormous stumps. His next step was to build a house. Here is a contemporary Vermont account of how he did it. (I have added a little punctuation.)

  When any person fixes upon a settlement in this part of the Country, with the assistance of one or two others he immediately sets about felling trees proper for the purpose. These are one to two feet in diameter and forty feet or upwards in length….

  The largest four are placed in a square form, upon a solid foundation of stone. This done, the logs are rolled upon blocks, one above another, until the square becomes about twenty or twenty-five feet high. The rafters are then made for the roof, which is covered with the bark taken off the trees.... The interstices in the body of the hut are filled up with mortar, made of the wild grass, chopped up and mixed with clay....

  In this manner is an abode finished, spacious enough to accommodate twelve or fifteen persons, and which often serves for as many years, till the lands are entirely cleared, and the settlers become sufficiently opulent to erect better houses. Three men will build one of these huts in six days.

  Looking out from his windowless, chimneyless house onto a landscape of stumps, the pioneer farmer did not see desolation. Instead he saw visions of a glorious future. Here on that knoll would go the ten-room clapboard house which he would start to build as soon as the new sawmill in the village got going. There on the bottom land he would grow his hemp (for making rope, not drugs – his highs came from life), his flax, his wheat. As soon as the roots rotted, out would come all those stumps. With the oxen he would drag them into rows, and fence off some grazing land for the cattle. Meanwhile, it was time to plant an orchard, and to begin on some stone walls.

  In most of rural Vermont and New Hampshire, these dreams came true in a hurry. It was only thirty-nine years from the settling of the first towns to the beginning of the nineteenth century. But men and women, three of whom can build a log house forty feet square and two stories high in a week can create a whole landscape in twenty years; and by the year 1800 the two states looked pretty much the way they do now, in their unspoiled sections, except that the soil and the people were both richer in 1800.

  Not that life was easy. The famous rigor of our climate was the same then as now. A man who spent some time in Newfane, Vermont, in the 1790s complained, “This place is extremely cold and bleak in Winter, and not very hot in Summer.” There were wolves in the mountains in such numbers as to make the keeping of sheep almost impossible.

  But there was also abundance and prosperity – and an arcadian simplicity that in our own day seems almost incredible.

  While he was inspecting Vermont farmland, Jan Lincklaen paid a call on the biggest farmer and second most famous man in the state. This was Thomas Chittenden, Captain General and Governor of Vermont. He was then rich in years and honors, not to mention land. He had become Vermont’s first governor thirteen years earlier, in 1778, and he had governed uninterruptedly for eleven years. Then he stepped down for a year – and when the young Dutchman came to call in 1791 had just been triumphantly restored to office.

  There was no Secret Service detail, or even a state trooper. There was just an old farmer. He showed the visitors into his house “without ceremony, in the country fashion.” Lincklaen, who was used to admirals and twenty-one gun salutes, could hardly believe his eyes. “His house & way of living have nothing to distinguish them from those of any private individual, but he offers heartily a glass of Grog, potatoes, & bacon to anyone who wishes to come and see him.”

  Maybe rural Vermont is a little like that still.

  [1978]

  Grooming Bill Hill

  QUESTION: Why is Vermont more beautiful than New Hampshire? ANSWER: Because of Vermont farmers. Remove the farmers, and within ten years New Hampshire would surge ahead.

  This is a serious argument. If you just consider natural endowment, the two states are both fortunate, but New Hampshire is more fortunate. It has taller mountains, it has a seacoast, it even owns the whole northern reach of the Connecticut River, except a little strip of mud on the Vermont side.

  But New Hampshire’s farmers mostly quit one to two generations ago and started running motels or selling real estate. The result is that most of New Hampshire is now scrub woods without views. Dotted, of course, with motels and real estate offices.

  A lot of Vermont farmers, however, are holding on. Almost every farmer has cows, and almost every cow works night and day keeping the state beautiful. Valleys stay open and green, to contrast with the wooded hills behind them. Stone walls stay visible, because the cows eat right up to them. Hill pastures still have views, because the cows are up there meditatively chewing the brush, where no man with a tractor would dare to mow. (That’s the other argument for butter besides its taste. I once figured that every pound of butter or gallon of milk someone buys means that another ten square yards of pasture is safe for another year.)

  Until lately, my own contribution to the beauty of Vermont was modest. I did fence two little hayfields a few years ago, so that my neighbor Floyd Dexter could run beef cattle there after the hay was cut. Sometimes I run a couple myself. But both of these were good fields when I bought the place. My contribution was merely turning them from straight hayfield to hayfield-that-gets-grazed, so they would stop shrinking a little every year, and so that the cows would eat right up to the stone walls.

  This year, however, I think I have seriously joined the ranks of those who maintain Vermont. Or maybe not so much joined as been quietly drafted by Floyd.

  It all began because of Bill Hill. Bill Hill is a large lump of glacial debris behind the pasture across the road. I own it. Insofar as a thing as small as a human being can claim to own a thing as big as a hill.

  Sixty years ago, it was all pasture. No trees except for one white birch on top, and a row of immense old maples on the slopes behind it. But just before World War II a New York lawyer bought this farm. He naturally kept no cows on Bill Hill. When I got it, one end was completely grown up to woods, and the rest was in every possible stage from briar-choked pasture to almost-woods. The top remained open, and because I like to picnic in a place with a 360-degree view, I have painfully kept it open by dragging a little sicklebar mowing machine up there every couple of years.

  Last summer, though, I was watching Floyd’s cattle uncover yet another stone wall in the field behind the house and trim the apple trees up perfectly to a height of five feet, and it struck me that there was a better way to maintain Bill Hill than dragging little machines up it. At that time my idea was just to fence four or five acres: the face of the hill we see best from the house, and the top.

  The next day Floyd was over looking at a newborn calf, and I told him my idea. He liked it. Together we climbed Bill Hill and tentatively set the bounds. It turned out to be more like seven acres than five, because he pointed out that by using just a little more wire, I could include quite a lot m
ore of the hill.

  All winter when I had a spare afternoon I would go over and prune up bull pines and cut out poplars in the pasture-to-be, so as to encourage the grass. I got quite skillful at skiing out with a chain saw in one hand. Floyd got us a couple of hundred cedar posts at East Thetford Auction to supplement my remaining hemlock, and we bought wire at a remarkable store in Topsham called Freddy Miller’s.

  This spring, as soon as the frost was out of the ground, we began to drive posts. Also to enlarge the boundaries. The very first day we were out, Floyd led us as if by accident through a beautiful level patch of grass just beyond Bill Hill – and before I knew what happened I had agreed to fence nine acres instead of seven.

  The boundaries stayed set for about a month. (We were fencing only on weekends, and not all of them.) Then one warm May afternoon, just as we were coming over the hill with the wire, almost ready to turn and close the pasture, Floyd remarked that it was thirsty weather. “I don’t suppose there’s any water back here,” he said as we wiped our sweaty faces. I said no, not a drop.

  We drove a few more staples in silence, and then Floyd remarked almost dreamily that he had gotten his feet wet deer-hunting behind the hill last fall. Probably dry there now, he added.

  “I don’t see that,” I said. “If there was water there in November, there’s certainly going to be in May. Let’s go look.”

  Floyd was skeptical, but just to please me, he came. Sure enough, about two hundred yards beyond where I had meant to turn the fence, there was a good-sized wet place right near my boundary wall with Ed Paige, and even a tiny stream running. In thirteen years, I had never noticed it. Too grown up with briars and brush.

  “Awful good to have water where you want the cattle to graze,” Floyd said. “It’ll keep them out on the hill. Course, this probably dries up along about June.” As he spoke, he was walking steadily uphill from the wet spot to a place where someone had rocked in a spring, probably 150 years ago. People don’t do that for places that dry up in June. We dug it out a little with our hands, let the water clear, and had a drink. I had never seen the spring, either. Floyd knows my land better than I know it myself.

  Since the whole idea is to keep the cattle on the hill, I didn’t even much resist taking the pasture on back, even though I had now committed myself to fifteen acres. And it was my own idea – Floyd wasn’t even present – when I decided the next day to go back still further, to the stone wall by the maples, and turn the wire down that.

  That’s how I come to be adding eighteen acres of pasture this year. That’s how come for the next half-century, at least, there will be one green grassy hill in Thetford Center, Vermont, to contrast with the dozen or so wooded ones, and a new green meadow behind it. There will be cows against the skyline, and there will be four new stone walls visible. It will be no bad legacy to leave.

  [1977]

  Sugaring on $15 a Year

  MOST COUNTRY DWELLERS in New England sooner or later think about doing a little maple sugaring. About nine-tenths of them never actually get around to it. They don’t have enough trees, or they don’t have enough time, or they don’t have the $700 that even a small evaporator costs. Retired people with time and maples and $700 generally don’t have the stamina you need to keep slogging through the snow with full sap buckets.

  If you are such a frustrated maple sugarer, I have a solution to offer whereby you can sugar this spring with no physical effort and for a total investment of roughly $15. In your spare time. Without setting one foot in the snow.

  The trick, of course, is that I am using “sugaring” in its old and true sense – not to mean the production of maple syrup in an evaporator, but the production of maple sugar in a pot. This can be done starting with sap, of course, but it can also be done starting with existing syrup, any old syrup, which is the method I am proposing. Assuming you already have a kitchen with a stove in it, you need only three things to start sugaring: half a gallon of low-grade maple syrup ($7 or less); a rubber mold (about $8); and a touch of skill (free). With these simple ingredients you can turn out several pounds of really stunning maple candy.

  Sometimes when people make the kind of claim I have just made – that, with no training and with practically no expenditure of time or money, you can do some wonderful thing – they are secretly expecting you to provide the wonderfulness yourself. I once bought a book on building stone walls, lured by a dust jacket which promised that with just the rocks lying around my fields, I could build handsome retaining walls, set stone steps in them, design beautiful stone culverts, and so on. All this was true. I could have – if I had a natural genius for setting stones. I don’t. I can lay up serviceable stone walls, and after ten years of practice, that remains the limit of what I can do.

  But making maple sugar is different. It really takes the merest touch of skill. You can be the sort who bends nails, even the sort who breaks the yolk without meaning to when you fry an egg, and still make maple candy that elicits actual moans of pleasure from those who eat it. Maybe not with your first batch, but certainly with your third or fourth.

  Let me assume you are now convinced and dying to start. First, obviously, you’ve got to get some syrup and a mold. The mold you can pick up wherever maple sugaring supplies are sold, which means about one hardware store in three in northern New England. Or you can order one by mail from the Leader Evaporator Company in St. Albans, Vermont, or from the G.H. Grimm Company in Rutland. The most fashionable mold at the moment seems to be one that makes large and realistic maple leaves – I have one myself – but what I recommend for starting is a less complicated mold. Leader has one that makes fifteen hearts that I like pretty well, although I wish the hearts were smaller. (No child I know agrees.) It sells for $8.50.

  As to the syrup, get the cheapest you can find. There is no harm in its being this year’s Fancy Grade, but there’s no need, either. Let me tell two stories to show just how low you can stoop.

  The first involves my own introduction to making maple sugar. I got into it because of a small disaster. In the spring of 1975 I was making maple syrup as usual and managed to burn a batch of nearly two gallons just as I was about to draw it off. Since I only make about twenty-five gallons a year (I get tired, slogging through the snow with sap buckets), this meant goodbye to a sizable chunk of the year’s production. Burnt maple syrup is not usable; you can filter out the thousands of flakes of black carbon, but you can’t filter out the taste.

  Fortunately, a friend named Tom Pinder came into the sugarhouse before I got around to throwing the stuff out – in fact, while I was still jumping up and down and swearing.

  Tom can find a solution for almost anything. If he had been present at the burning of Gomorrah, he would either have figured out a way to put the fire out, or at least had the city rebuilt in no time. He took a look at my scorched pan, and then tasted the contents. “I’ve heard,” he said thoughtfully, “that you can get the burned flavor out of syrup by taking it down to sugar.” And he offered to help me try. I had never before even considered making sugar, because I thought it was too hard for someone of my limited skill.

  As I’ve already suggested, it was easy. To my amazement the burnt flavor vanished almost completely, as did the dark color. We made pie tins full of sugar and cookie pans full of sugar, and finally we bought a mold and made maple-sugar leaves; our friends and families gobbled up what we didn’t eat ourselves.

  By early summer I had used up the whole two gallons, and I began looking around for a fresh supply. I recalled that back in 1974 another friend, Alice Lacey, had made six or seven gallons of dark Grade B late in the season and had never gotten around to canning it. It was still sitting in her mud room in a ten-gallon milk can. It sported a thick layer of green mold on top. It was now fifteen months old.

  Alice was happy to trade me a gallon for a few fence posts, and when that syrup produced pale, delicious maple candy, I knew I was onto something. I promptly traded for three more gallons, and then Alice acquir
ed a mold and turned the rest into sugar herself. We have both saved end-of-the-season syrup for sugar ever since.

  The process we both use works like this. We pour about a pint (no need to measure) of syrup into a good-sized pot so that it’s no more than an inch deep. Half an inch is better. By instinct rather than for any scientific reason I know of, I use a stainless steel pot rather than aluminum. Tom, who hears a lot, has heard that you should always use a wooden spoon rather than a metal one; since I have a wooden spoon, I do that, too. But here I’m not even prompted by instinct. I just like tradition.

  You bring the syrup to a boil, and you then turn the heat well down, since even shallow syrup will boil over with extraordinary rapidity. In ten minutes or less you should have the right consistency for sugar. You can test with a candy thermometer or with a special maple-sugaring thermometer, if you like. Leader and Grimm both sell them. I find it simpler to use the hard-ball test: lift your wooden spoon and when the drops are coming off individually let one fall into a glass of cold water. If the sugar is ready, the drop will instantly form into a compact flattened ball in the bottom of the glass. If it isn’t ready, the drop will spread out in a sort of little nebula.

  You now take the pot off the stove and stir while it cools. To hasten the process, set it in cold water for thirty seconds or so, still stirring. With this shortcut, the sugar usually begins to crystallize within two or three minutes. But it is by no means cold; it is still too hot to touch.

  The crystallizing is rather dramatic. What you have been stirring is a thick, opalescent brown taffy, incredibly sticky and tooth-pulling. It now begins to lighten in color and to get rapidly thicker still. Don’t worry, just keep stirring. It will then abruptly set.