Best Person Rural Page 3

  At this point, dash back to the stove (you have been stirring while comfortably seated at the kitchen table), and put the pot over medium heat. The still-hot sugar will re-liquefy within a minute or so, still keeping its crystalline structure. In fact, at this point the crystals usually get finer and the color a still paler and more elegant tan.

  Keep the pot on the stove for another half minute after the sugar re-liquefies, stirring steadily. The sugar is now hot enough to stay pourable for several minutes, and you stroll back to the kitchen table and fill your mold. Since a pint of syrup makes almost a pound of sugar, you will have a little left in the pot as a starter for the next batch. So don’t scrape or wash the pot; put it and the spoon away as is until the next time you sugar. Then add another pint of syrup and start boiling.

  Meanwhile, you have fifteen maple-sugar hearts or twelve maple-sugar leaves, or whatever, sitting in your mold. You could even have letters spelling out the names of your children, since any supplier can get you an alphabet mold. Leave them there for ten or fifteen minutes so you won’t burn your hands when you press them out. Then put one out to eat, still warm, and the others on a plate to cool. Be sure they get consumed within roughly the next two weeks, because after that the little cakes gradually dry out and get hard. I don’t think you’ll find this a problem. My difficulty has always been to keep everything from getting eaten the first day.

  There are a good many variations I haven’t gone into. Koreans are said to have twenty-some different names for cooked rice, depending on how much water they cook it with and hence how hard it is. Vermonters have only four names for different degrees of hardness in maple candy: maple cream (which is too soft for a mold), soft tub sugar, hard tub sugar, and cakes. But in actual fact, there are infinite gradations from soft tub to cake, and each tastes just a little bit different. All taste wonderful. This is why I predict that when you’ve run through your original half gallon of syrup, you’ll be out scouring the countryside, looking for a gallon of Grade B to buy cheap.

  [1976]

  In Search of the Perfect Fence Post

  MIDWEST FARMERS – most of them, anyway – have a boring time with fence posts. When they need some more, they just open the Sears catalogue and order another five hundred metal ones. (Current price: $2.49 each.) Then they lay out one hundred or so in a straight line across the prairie, and start stringing wire.

  New England is different. Within a mile of my house – well, two miles – I can look at fences strung on eleven different kinds of posts. Bud Palmer, who runs the garage in the village, has a horse pasture fenced with pine. Ellis Paige uses mostly split oak to restrain his Angus cattle. Barbara Duncan keeps her goats behind a mixture of oak and maple saplings. George deNagy uses hemlock for Push and Pull, his team of work ponies. Warren DeMont has metal posts. Not from Sears, but salvaged from a floodplain the Government took over a few years ago. Floyd Dexter, the best fencer of us all, uses entirely sharpened cedar posts. Except when he runs out in the middle of a job, that is, and then he’s been known to use cherry, tamarack, lever wood … almost anything except popple or elm. The town uses cut granite posts, six inches square and six feet long, as a good many farmers used to. My neighbor Dr. Lucius Nye has – but let me get on to my own story.

  I’ve been fencing for sixteen years now. My serious fences surround three cow pastures totaling thirty-two acres. The posts are mostly cedar and butternut, decently soaked in oil.

  But I also have a jeu d’esprit: a little half-acre sheep pasture (for two sheep) done entirely in green hemlock. Five young apple trees fenced against deer with a variety of posts that could be called New England Miscellaneous. Plus more. Over the years I’ve probably put up two dozen fences of one sort or another. And since I started from a state of ignorance which farmers’ sons usually pass beyond between the ages of five and six, I have made every mistake but one that it’s possible to make. I’ve put up a fence without bracing the corners. Strung barbwire from the bottom strand up instead of the top strand down. Put the small end of a post in the ground instead of the large. The one thing I haven’t done is to use white or gray birch for posts. And there it was poetry that saved me, not common sense. Long before I thought of being a farmer, I had read most of Robert Frost, and could quote from “Home Burial”:

  Three foggy mornings and one rainy day

  Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.

  It’s not even much of an exaggeration.

  Sixteen years ago I blundered into fence building when I acquired a wife and an old farm the same year. She was determined to have a garden, and the deer were determined she wasn’t. I volunteered to build a fence.

  Having all that newly acquired land, most of it covered with trees, I wasn’t about to buy posts. I took my pulp saw and wandered around my new woods until I found a place where there were a lot of gray-barked young trees coming up three and four together. I know now they were sprout-growth elms and red maples. Even then I knew it was good forestry practice to take a tree coming up in three or four stems like that and cut it back to one main stem. So I sawed busily until I had twenty nice gray-barked posts, enough to fence the garden, six posts to a side. (If you think that would take twenty-four posts, you clearly haven’t done much fencing. And if you retort that it would be twenty-four after all, because a big garden needs two gates and two posts for each, you’d be right. But I hadn’t thought of that yet.)

  The next step was to get them into the ground. Someone had told me that fence posts should be set two feet deep, so I went to one corner of the garden and dug as narrow a two-foot hole as my shovel would dig. Then I put one of the four largest posts in, shoveled the dirt back, and tamped it. Then I tested my new corner post, which easily moved through a twenty-degree arc. I spent the next half hour packing around it with rocks, and then retamping with another fence post rather than with my foot. The post now wiggled only slightly.

  It was absurd to think of spending forty minutes per post, so I did what I usually do when I’m in a dilemma. I went to Dan and Whit’s (in the opinion of many, one of the world’s great general stores) to see what exotic tool they carried that would solve my problem.

  Almost immediately I found a thing called a post-hole digger, and brought it home in triumph. It worked splendidly. The holes it made were a little too big for my posts, but only a little, and I could get fairly tight posts planted in about ten minutes each. No deer got into the garden that year.

  Three years later, however, they could have shouldered their way in almost anywhere. Elm posts rot fast. Green elm posts rot faster. Green elm posts with the bark on rot fastest of all. If I were ever mad enough to use elm posts again, I would cut them in the spring when the bark is loosest, peel them, dry them for a year, and then soak them in used motor oil.

  But I never have used them again. Not counting a small grazing area for pigs (ineptly electrified, and a total failure), my next fencing project was to make a paddock for a horse we had bought. This was the year that the first eleven garden posts rotted out; and overreacting as usual, I had decided to use posts that would never rot out. In fact, I got metal posts from Sears. The date was 1965, and back then the posts were a mere $1.29 each.

  I am the sort of person who has three little helpings at dinner instead of one giant one, and this temperamental quirk carries over to buying farm equipment. Thus, though I figured the paddock would take two rolls of barbwire and seventy or eighty posts, what I actually bought was one roll and thirty posts. This was good luck, because I quickly discovered that however handy metal posts are on the Great Plains, they aren’t much use on the rollercoaster terrain of a New England farm. You ask what about Warren DeMont and his salvaged metal posts? He uses them on stock fence for his two sheep a year. Stock fence goes on relatively level ground, and they work fine. I’m talking about barbwire up and down hill. You can’t drive staples into a metal post, and it’s nearly impossible to get the wire tight.

  So I switched in mid-fence to cedar. By this
time, in my fourth year with land of my own, I knew several of the farmers in town and had walked land with them. I knew about cedar posts, and about driving mauls. I had also learned to recognize most of the common trees that grow in New England, and I knew that I personally had no cedars at all. No matter. They sell them at Agway. In fact, I might have gone to Agway even if the farm had been one big cedar swamp. The garden fence and the pig fence had been such failures that I’m not sure I would have trusted a cedar I had cut myself. I wanted something professional.

  There were two gigantic piles of posts out behind the main Agway building in White River Junction. All cedar, all sharpened at the big end to a beautiful tapering point. Posts from one pile cost $55 a hundred (Agway is getting $95 for the same posts now), and posts from the other pile cost $45 a hundred. I am sorry to report I did it again. I got posts from the $45 pile. It was my last really major mistake in fencing.

  Though any normal person enjoys saving ten dollars, it wasn’t for that that I got the cheap posts. I got them because they were smaller. They ran 3˝ to 4˝ at the butt end, while the $55 posts were 4˝ and up. I committed this idiocy out of fear. While I was vainly trying to string wire on the metal posts, a farmer friend had given me a couple of sharpened cedar posts so I could see what I was missing. One was nearly 6˝ in diameter (he said use it for a corner post), and one was quite small. Even with my new twelve-pound driving maul from Dan and Whit’s, and my wife to hold, it had taken me about forty full-strength blows to drive the big one. I had to stop in the middle and rest. The last six or eight blows pretty well splintered the top, and pretty well ruined me. By contrast, the smaller one had gone into the ground 2˝ a whack, and left me feeling like the strong man at a county fair. So I concluded that big driving posts were for real farmers, and little ones were for transplanted urbanites like me.

  This was, of course, a completely false conclusion. For which I paid the price six years later, when I had to redo the whole paddock because all my tiny posts were giving out. The true conclusion is this. You have to learn how to drive sharpened posts, and when you do, it’s easy. You don’t even need someone to hold the posts up for you (though it’s more companionable that way).

  Here is the true way to put up posts for a New England fence, learned from sixteen years of hard experience. Or, rather, here are two ways: the fast way and the best way.

  The fast way is to go buy however many posts you need. Make sure you buy large ones, 4 ˝ to 5 ˝ in diameter at the butt, and sharpened so that the taper extends at least a foot. Throughout New England, such posts are normally cedar – though if you find locust, grab them. Meanwhile buy or borrow a soft iron driving maul – not to be confused with a sledge hammer, which has a much smaller head – and a good four-foot iron bar. Lay out your first strand of wire to make a line, or else do it with string. Then you can start driving posts. Take your bar, and drive it into the ground where you want the first post to go. If you hit a small stone, you can drive it on down with the bar. If you hit a big one, or ledge, move.

  When you are down about twenty inches or so (usually about four easy whacks with the maul), stop. Then wiggle the bar around with a circular motion until you have a hole sort of like the inside of an ice cream cone, with the top about 4˝ in diameter. Then pull the bar out, pace off the distance to the next post, and stick the bar into the ground where the post is to go. (That way you won’t lose it.) Now go back and shove a post firmly in the first hole. It will easily stand, and you should be able to drive it in anywhere from six to a dozen blows, depending on what the soil is like. And it will be completely tight – no play at all.

  When you get to the big corner posts, you can do them the same way – but it won’t be any six to twelve blows. If you have a post hole digger, now is when it’s useful. It will make you a straight-sided hole about 5˝ in diameter. Dig one a foot deep. Then work your bar for another foot in the bottom. Plump the 6˝ corner post in, and drive it with ease.

  That’s all there is to the fast way. Provided, of course, you remember to brace all corner posts with braces that go right to the base of the nearest line post on either side. Little bitty braces do nothing. You can buy cedar poles for braces, or you can cut your own. Either way, they should be about a foot longer than the distance between your fence posts, and at least 3˝ in diameter at the small end. Here’s how to install them. With a shovel you make a small hole right up against a line post, and shove the butt end of the brace in. Then you lay the smaller end carefully on top of the corner post, and trim it to length with a neat diagonal cut. Then you slide it down the corner post for about a foot, which gets it good and tight, and nail it in place with a tenpenny (3˝) nail. Rich people sometimes use sixteen or even twentypenny nails.

  The best way is considerably more complicated, and also takes more equipment. But it’s cheaper, and Robinson Crusoe would like it better.

  First learn to recognize all the trees you have. If you don’t already know how to chainsaw, learn to. Then start looking for stands of young trees that need thinning. In the absence of cedar, wild cherry or tamarack is best, though both hemlock and white pine will do. Don’t bother with trees growing in the open; they taper too fast, and you’ll get only one or two posts from a tree. Three to five is what you should be getting. Since you cut the posts six feet long, that means the tree should have eighteen to thirty feet of straight trunk before it gets too small. Cut a bunch.

  Another option is to split out posts. Butternut probably works best. If you had some butternut trees nine to fifteen inches in diameter, growing straight and not too many lower limbs, you can make a lot of posts from one tree. You fell it, buck it into six-foot logs, and split each log into fourths or sixths. All it takes is two wedges, a sledge hammer, and a modicum of skill. Butternut is a notoriously weak wood, so you always make large posts. I myself wouldn’t dream of sacrificing a good butternut tree just for posts – but where I wanted to thin a fenceline anyway, or where a butternut was growing too close to sugar maples I wanted to favor, I occasionally take one. I’ve probably made a hundred posts that way. Six trees’ worth.

  If you’re smart, you will have cut all these posts where you can get pretty close to them with a pickup truck, which you now drive out there. Bring your wife (or husband, or unsuspecting houseguest) and an extra pair of ear protectors. Open the tailgate and load the first three or four posts in the back of the truck, with the butt end sticking out. The spouse or guest puts on the ear protectors and climbs in the back of the truck. While he or she holds the first post steady, you sharpen it with your chain saw. This amounts to cutting a slice off each side the full length of the chainsaw blade, getting the victim in the back of the truck to turn the post ninety degrees, and then cutting off two more slices. The whole procedure takes less than a minute. It leaves, incidentally, a pile of fluffy shavings like giant excelsior, which children find irresistible. Now do the other two or three, have the victim pile the sharpened posts on one side, and load the next batch.

  If you’re really smart, you will have done all this in the spring; and as each post is sharpened, you can also peel it. The four bark points where the sharpening cuts end will pull like Band-aids. I myself am rarely that smart and, to be honest, I think it matters only moderately.

  By lunchtime you will have posts enough for a great deal of fence; and if you want to you can start pounding that afternoon. I have. If you’re the deferred-pleasure type, though, instead bring them home and pile them under cover for a year. And the next spring, if you have the time, treat them. With a few posts, you just paint the bottom two and a half feet with creosote or whatever. But if you’ve cut a lot, that gets exceedingly boring – and besides, painting doesn’t give deep penetration. The better way is to give them a twenty-four-hour soak. I have usually done this in an old fifty-five-gallon drum, in which I put a mixture of one-third creosote and two-thirds old motor oil. Say, five gallons of creosote and ten of motor oil. Three-thirds creosote would doubtless be better, but creosote is expe
nsive. You can soak about fifteen posts at a time. I strongly advise tying the barrel to a tree, because when it’s full of six-foot posts, it is top-heavy; and few things are more annoying than having a barrel filled with used motor oil and creosote tip over on top of you, or even not on top of you. The smell, my wife informs me, does not come out of work pants until the third washing.

  Having done all this, you are ready to take your iron bar and your driving maul, and set posts. You will have a double satisfaction when you’re done. You can look at your new fence and reflect that thanks to your skill it’s going to last two and perhaps three times as long as ordinary fences. And (provided you take care not to count the purchase price of any mauls or chainsaws – which, after all, you still have, and will keep using), you can compute that your posts cost you about 10¢ each. That’s chiefly for the creosote.

  On the other hand, part of me hopes that you don’t do all this – that you go and cut some basswood in the morning, and have it in the ground that afternoon. True, it will rot out as fast as my elm fence around the garden. But after three years it may be time to move a garden, anyway. And what else are young basswoods good for? Besides, you’ll be contributing to that sense of variety which I hope New England never loses.

  There are two Yale dropouts who are caretaking / renting a house about three miles from our village. They’ve made a big vegetable garden, and they have fenced it with chickenwire mounted entirely on alders. Skinny alders driven small end into the ground. What’s more, it works. A deer could probably push that fence over with one hoof, but they don’t. Nor do they jump over. I think they’re as pleased and touched by that fence as I am, and wouldn’t hurt it for the world.

  [1977]

  The Two Faces of Vermont

  WHEN YOU CROSS the bridge from Lebanon, New Hampshire, to Hartford, Vermont, practically the first thing you see on the Vermont side is a large green and white sign. This bears two messages of almost equal prominence. The top one says, “Welcome to Vermont, Last Stand of the Yankees.” The bottom one says, “Hartford Chamber of Commerce.”