Best Person Rural Read online

  Only Vermont could have a sign like that, I think. Vermont makes a business of last stands. Consider just a few. It is the last stand of teams of horses that drag tanks of maple sap through the frosty snow. It is the last stand of farmers who plow with oxen and do the chores by lantern light. Together with New Hampshire and maybe a few places in Ohio, it is the last stand of dirt roads that people really live on, and of covered bridges that really bear traffic. It is the last stand of old-timers who lay up stone walls by hand, of weathered red barns with shingle roofs, of axmen who can cut a cord of stovewood in a morning – of, in short, a whole ancient and very appealing kind of rural life. This life is so appealing, in fact, that people will pay good money to see it being lived, which is where the trouble begins. There’s a conflict of interest here.

  On the one hand, it’s to the interest of everyone in the tourist trade to keep Vermont (their motels, ski resorts, chambers of commerce, etc., excepted) as old-fashioned as possible. After all, it’s weathered red barns with shingle roofs the tourists want to photograph, not concrete-block barns with sheet aluminum on top. Ideally, from the tourist point of view, there should be a man and two boys inside, milking by hand, not a lot of milking machinery pumping directly into a bulk tank. Out back, someone should be turning a grindstone to sharpen an ax-making a last stand, so to speak, against the chainsaw.

  On the other hand, the average farmer can hardly wait to modernize. He wants a bulk tank, a couple of arc lights, an automated silo, and a new aluminum roof. Or in a sense he wants these things. Actually, he may like last-stand farming as well as any tourist does, but he can’t make a living at it. In my town it’s often said that a generation ago a man could raise and educate three children on fifteen cows and still put a little money in the bank. Now his son can just barely keep going with forty cows. With fifteen cows, hand-milking was possible, and conceivably even economic; with forty you need all the machinery you can get. But the tourists don’t want to hear it clank.

  The result of this dilemma is that the public image of Vermont and its private reality seem to be rapidly diverging. My favorite example comes, of course, from the maple-sugar business. Suppose you buy a quart of syrup in the village store in South Strafford. It comes in a can with brightly colored pictures on it. These pictures show men carrying sap pails on yokes, sugarhouses with great stacks of logs outside, teams of horses, and all the rest. They are distinctly last-stand pictures.

  But suppose you decide to go into the sugaring business for yourself. When you write away for advice, you get a go-modern or private-reality answer. You are told not to hang pails at all, much less carry them to the sugarhouse on a yoke. Instead, install pipes. Don’t bother to cut any four-foot logs, you’re told, even though your hills are covered with trees. Texas oil gives a better-controlled heat. And finally, your instructions say, the right way to market the stuff is to put it in cans that show men carrying sap pails, sugarhouses with great stacks of logs....

  The state is full of this kind of thing. I’ve seen a storekeeper spend half an hour taking crackers out of plastic-sealed boxes and putting them in the barrel he thinks summer visitors expect him to have. I’ve driven over a fine old covered bridge, intact and complete from floor to roof, and just as busy with modern traffic as it ever was with wagons. Tourists stop constantly to get pictures. But should one of them go poking around underneath (it doesn’t happen often), he would see that it secretly rests on new steel I-beams, set in concrete. The great wooden trusses up above are just decoration now.

  Or take fairs. I’ve been at a fair where the oxen for the ox-pull were trucked in from as far as fifty miles away. The town was full of oxen. If you didn’t happen to notice them arriving in the trucks, you’d have concluded that here was a real last-stand neighborhood. Or you would have until the pulling began. Then you might have gotten suspicious. What the teams were pulling was more concrete, big slabs of it. Furthermore, when each pair of oxen had made its lunge, a distinctly modern element appeared. This was a large yellow backhoe which would rumble up, belching diesel fumes, and give the slab a quick push back to the starting point. The net effect was rather like watching the Dartmouth crew at practice, which I’ve also done. The college boys are like the imported oxen. They use muscle-power. The crew surges up the river between Vermont and New Hampshire, every man pulling his oar for dear life. The coach is like the backhoe. He skims alongside in a fast motorboat, steering casually with one hand, and shouting orders through a megaphone he holds in the other.

  Most of all, though, I see the difference between Vermont in photographs, in sentimental essays, in advertisements, and the state as it is actually getting to be. I’m thinking, for example, of roads. Even in California they know what a Vermont road is like. It’s a last-stand road. It may be dirt or it may be blacktop, but what matters is that it’s narrow and it follows the lay of the land. In most of Vermont, obviously, that means going in curves. The road will curve in so as not to spoil a field, curve out again afterwards, meander up a hill. It has, of course, a stone wall running along each side. Generally a row of big old trees marches beside each wall. Often these are maples, and when they are, the farmer who owns them taps every spring, using buckets.

  But what if some Californian gets sick of twelve-lane expressways and moves to Vermont? What if he buys a house on such a road? He hardly gets the place remodeled (exterior unchanged, interior restored to authentic 1820, cellar packed with shiny new machinery) before the town road commissioner comes to see him.

  The town’s going to resurface the road next summer, the commissioner says. While the crew are at it, they plan to make a few other changes. They’re going to take out all the sharp curves, reduce all the steep gradients, and widen the whole road by six feet. Twenty feet, if you count shoulders.

  To the Californian’s horror, it turns out that this will mean taking all the stone walls on one side, and most of the trees on both sides. It also turns out that the road will no longer follow the lay of the land. In particular, it’s going to be raised four feet where it passes his house, and the road commissioner is hoping to use his stone wall for part of the fill. Next year the photographers will have to find some other road to put on their “Unspoiled Vermont” calendar. But two cars will now be able to pass in mid-winter without one stopping and the other slowing down to ten miles an hour. And reality and image will be a little further apart.

  If the ex-Californian puts up a fight for his stones and his trees, he soon finds that the selectmen and the road commissioner are not wholly against him. They may think he shows his Los Angeles background in wanting to save a stone wall when it’s barbed wire you need for keeping cows, but they don’t really disapprove. In fact, the road commissioner freely admits to liking last-stand roads himself. He was raised on one. What’s on everybody’s mind, it turns out, is that the town is not going to get any State Aid unless it widens and straightens the road to state specifications. And, of course, a lot of people in town are tired of having to stop every winter when they see another car coming. But the money is the main thing. The commissioner rather thinks the state itself gets Federal road money on similar conditions. In other words, town and state are under the same pressure all the dairy farmers are: go modern or go broke. That’s a strong pressure.

  And yet it’s not the only one. Opposed to it is the natural cussedness of Vermonters, lots of whom don’t want to go modern. And some would say it’s not just cussedness, either. There are deep satisfactions to last-stand life. And, finally, there is all that good money the tourists pay.

  All this has amounted to almost equal pressures in the two directions, at least until very recently. Almost everyone in Vermont is at least partly on both sides. But most are more on one side than the other. By oversimplifying a little, one can draw up a sort of chart of the battle lines. In fact, I have.

  Let me start inside the fort. Manning the loopholes, and actually making the last stand of the Yankees, are a hard core of hill farmers, country storekee
pers, ox breeders, and so forth. Economically their pressure is small. Most of them earn less money every year. But they aren’t about to quit. In my part of the state, a fair number have taken full-time jobs so that they can keep farming nights and weekends. These are the kind referred to on the sign.

  Allied with them are about half the summer people. (The other half aren’t opposed; they’re neutral. In fact, they’re mostly too busy water-skiing and playing golf even to have noticed that there are farmers in Vermont.) But the first half like coming to a region of old-fashioned farms, and having farmers for neighbors. They may not want to look after cows or lay up stone walls themselves, but they like to watch other people do it. Meanwhile, the money they pay out for care-taking, barn-painting, and meadow-mowing helps to keep a good many last-stand families going.

  Also allied are nearly all the middle-class immigrants or so-called year-round summer people. Most of them were originally drawn here by last-stand life, and a certain number actually lead it. I know one couple, both with college degrees, whose first action on getting their Vermont farm was to disconnect the electricity. They do the chores by lantern light. I know another man, born and bred in Maryland, who has become as good a country plumber and as authentic a rural character as lives in New England.

  Finally, there is a scattering of people outside the state who provide economic support in one way or another. Here are the covered-bridge lovers who send money to help a Vermont town keep one. The bridge I mentioned a while back drew contributions from no less than four covered-bridge clubs last year when the town it’s in had to decide whether to repair it or to replace it with the latest thing in concrete bridges. Here also are the city people who will spend extra time and money to get locally made cheese, or barnyard eggs from hens raised organically, or hand-made wooden toys – and in doing so have put a good many country stores in the mail-order business. If you could only get that by mail, too, some of them would buy hill cider that’s capable of turning hard, rather than the tame stuff (filtered, pasteurized, and practically castrated) that’s available in supermarkets. If they only had trucks, some of the suburban ones would come up and buy half a ton of real manure for their gardens. The number of such people is small but growing.

  Turning to the other side, an equally mixed group is pushing toward modernization. In the center are what I guess to be a majority of all native Vermonters under fifty, starting with the valley farmers who already have big herds and bulk tanks. They don’t want to be the last stand of the Yankees. (After all, look where Custer was after his last stand.) They want their sons to be able to go on farming after them – even if the “farm” turns out to be a lot of hydroponic tanks inside a two-acre concrete shed, fronting on a twelve-lane expressway.

  Nearly everyone concerned with either education or state government is also on this side, at least officially. So are all of us who drive to shopping centers instead of walking to the village store, who buy lumber at Grossman’s instead of at the town sawmill. And so, with a superb irony, are many Vermonters in the tourist trade, plus the tourists themselves.

  The irony is that the tourists don’t know they are. They come here to look at last-stand life. They wouldn’t cross the road to look at a supermarket or a two-acre concrete shed. Most of them firmly believe they’re helping to support old-fashioned Vermont by coming here at all. But though they flock to see the last-stand country, and, if they’re here in the spring, to take a free taste of hot maple syrup, or in the fall to do a little free hunting – free as far as the owner of the land is concerned: the state charges a stiff fee – inevitably where they spend most of their money is in the motels, filling stations, and restaurants. Last-standers get only a little directly. They don’t get much indirectly, either. Even though the restaurant owner knows that his tourist customers have come to look at last-stand life, and even though he personally hopes it will survive, he’s still in business. He mostly buys his eggs at the battery farm, his milk at the big automated dairy, his beef from Kansas City, and so on. His chief gesture toward last-standism is to make sure the syrup cans in his gift shop have pictures of sap buckets on them.

  In the last five years the balance has perceptibly tipped in favor of modernization. Most people agree that the last stand is likely to end in about one more generation. What will happen then? Let me present an admittedly partisan view.

  Most of Vermont will look like – well, it will look like central New Jersey with hills. Where there are now fields and meadows, there’ll be scrub woods mixed with frequent tree plantations. Every now and then there’ll be an automated concrete “farm.” Around each lake will be a ranch-style summer resort. The entire state will be linked by superb highways. In the more rugged sections, these highways will take most of the valley land there is. (Right now a four-lane highway built to Federal interstate specifications consumes forty acres out of every square mile it goes through, or one-sixteenth of the whole square mile.)

  There will, to be sure, be three or four villages left in which last-stand life goes on. Two of these, I guess, will be commercial ventures, and two will be owned by the state. All four will be pure fake. If you drove into one – I’m going to call it Old Newfane Village – first you’d see a wooden barn with four live cows in it, and a man specially trained to milk them. Then you’d notice a grove of maples next to an old-fashioned sugarhouse. Probably the maples will have to be made of plastic, with electric pumps inside, since the main tourist season begins in June rather than March, and since there’s no way to keep a real maple from budding until June. But it will be genuine maple sap that the electric pumps draw up from a refrigerated tank under the sugarhouse.

  Beyond the plastic maple grove will be a large woodshed. There, for 50¢ you’ll be able to watch a man first sharpen his ax on a hand-turned grindstone and then chop up a couple of logs. Every twenty minutes he’ll reblunt his ax by smacking it into a block of granite. An expert from Colonial Williamsburg will check his technique twice a day. And public image and private reality will now be completely separate.

  There’s only one thing that makes me think this won’t happen. I told my vision to a hill farmer I know. “Shucks,” he said. “You think I could get some of those logs when the fellow’s through with them? My furnace eats wood something awful.”

  [1964]

  Second Person Rural

  Best Little Woods Tool Going

  I LEARNED A LOT of woodcraft when I was a boy. Between the Boy Scouts, my father (a fine woodsman condemned to spend most of his life at a desk in New York City), the books of Ernest Thompson Seton, and the L. L. Bean catalogues with which our house was constantly awash, I knew my way around for a suburban kid. I could make a fire on a wet day, find east by looking at the top twigs of young hemlocks, space my chopping cuts accurately on a birch log twelve inches in diameter, and so on.

  Among other things, I knew a fair amount about woods tools. This was the pre-chainsaw age (at least among Eastern sportsmen: I guess a few loggers were already staggering around with the early two-man models), but axes, hatchets, saws, and wedges were familiar objects almost from birth. By the time I was twelve, I could make a straight cut with a one-man crosscut, or pull lightly and smoothly on one end of a two-man saw – especially when my father was on the other end. I could place the splitting wedges with moderate accuracy in a knotty beech log. I had views on the weight of axheads. Give me a sharp bucksaw, and I would make you a fast pile of stovewood.

  I had never heard of peaveys.

  The peavey is an instrument worth hearing of. I won’t say they’re indispensable for the casual tree cutter – but they do make work in the woods a lot handier. The bigger the trees you fell, the handier a peavey is. Anyone who gets firewood from trees much over a foot in diameter could use one. Anyone who cuts even an occasional sawlog could use two.

  Archimedes once boasted that if he had a long enough lever, he could move the world. Archimedes would have loved peaveys. A peavey can be defined as a lever with a built-in f
ulcrum. It consists of a heavy wooden handle three to four feet long, with a steel head. Mounted on one side of the head is a steel hook that will bite into a log. In this form it has existed for a very long time – lumbermen in classical Greece may have used bronze-headed ones, for all I know – and this primitive version is called a cant hook or cant dog. Then in 1858 a Maine blacksmith named Joseph Peavey got the idea of turning the fixed hook into a swinging hook that will bite easily into a log of any size. Eureka! The peavey.

  I was around thirty when I saw my first peavey in action, and I wasn’t very impressed. What I saw was a Connecticut farmer using one in its commonest and humblest function, to roll a log over. I had an Abercrombie and Fitch reaction. Or perhaps the same reaction a cross-country skier has when he sees his first snowmobile. The damned things just weren’t sporting. I knew how to roll a log over; my father had taught me. What you do is to leave the stub of one branch when you’re limbing – say, a stub three to four feet long – and then you just roll the log over with that. Organic log handling, so to speak.

  A few years later I went out and bought a peavey. (You can get one for as little as fifteen or twenty dollars; the best big ones from Snow and Nealley, Bangor, Maine, might cost thirty dollars.) These days I own two. What happened in the interim was that I made the definite switch from crosscuts and axes to the chainsaw, and I had gradually begun to cut much larger trees than I ever did before.

  The particular large tree that led me to buy my first peavey was a white ash growing in a fence line between two fields. Two and a half feet in diameter, and probably sixty feet tall. I wanted it out of there, partly because a couple of nice ten-inch sugar maples were growing practically under it, and I wanted them to have the light. But mostly because I needed some firewood in a hurry, and ash doesn’t need much drying. (Though, as I discovered, it will burn a lot better if you do dry it.)