Best Person Rural Page 5

  In my old crosscut days, dealing with that tree would have been a half-a-week project. An ash that size has two cords of wood in it, and weighs three tons. In fact, I might have just looked at it respectfully, and found something smaller. But by now I was fairly competent with a chainsaw. I strolled out and started cutting.

  In a couple of hours I had the tree down and the whole top converted into firewood. Then it was time to attack the trunk. Since there were no limbs for the first thirty feet, I didn’t have much limbing to do. In ten minutes I had the trunk bare (except, of course, for the turning stub I had left), and in another twenty I had all my cuts made partway through the trunk. Now to turn.

  I gave the stub a firm push. Nothing at all happened. After a while I got my wife, and we both pushed. We couldn’t even rock it much.

  I have a standard procedure I use in such contretemps. It may lack macho prestige, but it works. I have three friends in town – two native, one not – who are clever at solving problems, and what I do is I call one of them. This particular day I called Tom Pinder, because I happened to know he was home putting a new roof on his house. (I did have the grace to wait until I knew he’d be in the house having lunch.) He came right over, bearing his peavey. He set the hook confidently, just about halfway up the trunk, and pushed. It was a big tree, and he did have to strain a bit, but it rolled obediently over. The next day I owned a peavey myself.

  Loggers, as I understand, routinely use their peaveys to do everything but pick their teeth. Or at least they used to. There was even supposed to be one cook on the old Penobscot drives who stirred the big kettle of baked beans with a peavey. For the first few months I used mine only to roll logs. Then one day I made a mistake cutting a fifteen-inch red maple and got it hung up in a neighboring oak. I’ve lodged a good many trees, one time and another, and I am very familiar with the dangerous and humiliating business of cutting short sections off the bottom of the lodged tree and then hopping aside as the now unsupported top thumps down a few feet. I’ve even pushed a few very small lodged trees over by brute force.

  But this one was far too big for me to push over, and it was still so nearly vertical that the idea of cutting a piece off the butt made me nervous. I’ve seen a man on whom a tree fell.

  Once in a while I get an idea of my own. I got one now. Holding my peavey horizontally, I set the hook into the leaning tree about three feet up, and rotated it. The maple majestically spun like a giant top, came clear of the oak, and crashed on down right where I meant to have it in the first place. Thousands of loggers, I now know, have been doing the same for the last 122 years – but for me it was a true eureka moment.

  There’s a third thing I have learned to do with peaveys that is even more gratifying than the first two. This is to use them in low-technology log loading.

  Maybe once a year I get an urge to cut a few white pines or wild black-cherry trees and have them sawed into lumber. Since Gary Ulman’s sawmill is only two miles away, it’s an urge I can gratify. But no one with a logging truck is going to come pick up my miserable four or five logs – or, at least, if someone did, it would cost so much that my boards would wind up more expensive than first-quality four-sides-planed stuff at the most expensive lumberyard in the Boston suburbs. Instead I take them over in my pickup.

  But how do you get twelve-foot sawlogs off the ground and into the back of a pickup? There are various ways. Enough helium balloons will do it, or a forklift truck, or any of the larger-model helicopters. On one memorable occasion, I had six Dartmouth freshmen out for a picnic and got their help. Seven people can lift quite a heavy log, hard though it is for human arms to get a grip. A much simpler method, though, is to get one friend and equip him or her with your spare peavey. Then you back the pickup up to the smaller end of the log. One of you stands on either side of the log, and you hook on with your peaveys. You can get a splendid grip with the peavey, and the two of you can load it with ease. You have to expect a few grins, of course, when you trundle in to a sawmill with four small logs on a pickup – but I have known a real logger who was there with his monster truck and fifty big logs and cherry picker to get so involved helping me unload that he almost walked off with my spare peavey. I think he was having a fit of nostalgia.

  Not that that’s the only way to load logs with a peavey. That’s just the way you do it when you’ve got a pickup and have to slide them in through the tailgate. With a more versatile truck, namely one that has removable sides, you can roll them on.

  I did my first roll-on loading just about a year ago. I had gotten carried away and dropped a couple of white pines that even an Oregon logger wouldn’t have sneered at. I don’t say he’d have been impressed, but he wouldn’t have called them Vermont toothpicks, either. They were nice tall pines, each with three sawlogs. The butt log of the bigger one was just about twenty inches in diameter. There’s no way two people are going to pick up one end of a log like that and hoost [sic] it into the back of a pickup.

  Fortunately, my neighbor George deNagy has an old one-ton farm truck, the kind that looks much bigger than it is because the bed sits up over the wheels. Except that it gets five miles to the gallon and won’t start in cold weather, it’s a lovely vehicle. And, of course, you can take the sides off.

  George loves challenges. He was glad to come rumbling into my woodlot (that’s no cliché – farm trucks invariably rumble; it’s because of those detachable sides) and pull up next to my modest log pile. We then cut three ten-foot hemlock saplings. Two are all you really need; the third is just a little piece of insurance in case you’ve cut the saplings too small and one of them happens to break just as you’re rolling a log up.

  We laid the saplings against the side of the truck so as to form a ramp. One went at each end of the truck bed, and the insurance sapling rested in the middle. Then we hooked on to the first and biggest log with our peaveys and began to roll. It worked beautifully. The bark on a green sapling makes a nice corrugated surface, and the log never even threatened to slip. (I’m told that people who use sawed timbers for the ramp sometimes find the log skidding right back down onto their feet.) In twenty minutes we had loaded all six logs and were on our way to Gary’s mill. Two weeks later I had as handsome a pile of clear pine lumber as a man could ask for. Score another victory for the peavey.

  I have probably now reached my personal limit of peavey skills. After all, I started late. But there is one other of their many uses that I hope to witness sometime in my life. Peaveys are the tool of choice in river drives. I once heard a lumberjack’s song about breaking a logjam. The boss wanted to dynamite it – which of course would have damaged some of the logs, besides being crude and noisy – and the lumberjacks said no, they could pick it apart. Guess with what. As the song put it:

  But before you try the powder,

  Or to break her with the juice,

  Hand some peaveys to the river rats and jacks.

  They will roll her and they’ll crowd her

  And they’ll break the timber loose;

  Yes, they’ll break her, or half a hundred backs.

  As poetry that’s on the weak side, but as a vision it’s something else. Fifty men out on a river with peaveys, swarming over a million board feet of tangled pine logs would be a sight worth seeing. If gasoline goes enough higher, I might even get to.

  [1979]

  Maple Recipes for Simpletons

  THERE ARE A lot of maple recipes in existence. Someone once gave me a book that contains at least three hundred – in fact, that’s all the book does contain. There are recipes for Maple-Cheese Spoon Dessert, and for Modern Maple-Pumpkin Pie. For baked squash covered with crushed pineapple and doused with maple syrup. For peanut-butter cookies. Even directions for a truly revolting salad dressing. (You mix cream and lemon juice, and then add a big slug of maple syrup. Oil and vinegar with a discreet touch of garlic is more my idea of a salad dressing.)

  I yield to no one in my admiration for maple syrup. I’ve been making it for fifte
en years; and even with my little rig, total production now comes to many hundred gallons. I have gradually learned to make not only syrup, but tub sugar, maple candy and finally, just in the last few years, the highest art of all: granulated maple sugar that pours as readily as the white stuff you get in a five-pound bag at the store. These products taste, if anything, even better as the years go by.

  But all the same, I view most maple recipes with dark suspicion. Too many of them put a noble product to unworthy, not to say peculiar, uses. Many also ignore the fact that maple syrup currently costs about eighteen dollars a gallon, and is thus a pretty expensive sweetening agent.

  Take those peanut-butter cookies. To make one batch requires half a pint of maple syrup, and all you wind up with is something that tastes like sweet peanut butter. Ten cents’ worth of cane sugar could handle that job – and it’s just the sort of humble task cane sugar was born for. As for mixing syrup with crushed pineapple and plastering it on hunks of squash, I’d as soon mix twelve-year-old Scotch with diet Pepsi.

  I certainly don’t claim all maple recipes are like that. A good maple cake, maybe with some butternuts in the frosting, is one of the joys of life. And I’ve had a maple charlotte I would walk several miles to have again. These are splendid uses of syrup; the maple flavor comes out, if anything, enhanced. My only problem is that I am not personally competent to make either a cake or a charlotte.

  However, there are some recipes that I can handle and that are maple-enhancing. I propose to share three of them. Two are my own discoveries, the third is a standard rural treat. All three are notably easy to prepare. In fact, they are so simple that any cook is going to regard the word recipe as absurdly out of place. So perhaps I should instead say, here are three good uses for maple syrup.

  The first recipe is for Vermont baklava. Greek baklava (which came first by about five hundred years) is a many-layered pastry soaked in and fairly oozing honey. Vermont baklava is less complex. The ingredients are a loaf of good-quality white bread (homemade, Pepperidge Farm, Arnold, etc.) and a can of maple syrup. To prepare it, you take two slices of bread from the loaf and place them in your toaster. Set the toaster on medium. When the toast pops up, remove and place on a plate. Then cover each piece generously with maple syrup. Wait two to three minutes for it to soak in. The baklava is now ready for consumption.

  Two important tips: On no account heat the syrup, and on no account butter the toast. It is essential that the only ingredients be white bread and room-temperature syrup.

  I stumbled on the recipe for Vermont baklava about ten years ago, when I first became a commercial-syrup producer. People began to stop by my farm to buy syrup. I would ask them what grade they wanted; and naturally enough a fair number didn’t even know there were grades. My usual impulse was to give them a sample of each grade. But straight syrup from a spoon is a little overwhelming, and I certainly wasn’t going to fire up the stove and make a batch of pancakes for every visitor. One day it occurred to me to try toast. I omitted butter simply because we happened to be out. And I then discovered that toasted white bread is one of the great vehicles for maple syrup. One gets the full brilliance of the flavor – if you’ll forgive the arty term – and one gets something else that I have never experienced elsewhere except in tasting partly finished syrup in an evaporator. Poured at room temperature over toast, maple syrup by itself seems to have the qualities of butter, along with its own characteristics. The dish thus recommends itself especially to those who love butter but avoid it on account of their fear of polysaturated fats.

  May be made with Fancy, A, or B. Not suggested with Grade C.

  The second recipe will be of interest only to those who like to eat sliced bananas and milk. And even within that already limited group, only to those who feel that sliced bananas and milk go much better with brown sugar than with white sugar.

  I have felt thus since roughly the age of six. In those early years I was likely to have a base of cornflakes under the bananas and brown sugar; since about sophomore year of college I have omitted the cornflakes. They only get soggy, anyway.

  The ingredients called for in the second recipe are one or more ripe bananas, a supply of whole milk, and some dark maple syrup. Slice the bananas in the usual way, add the normal quantity of milk, and then pour in a couple of tablespoons of maple syrup. (Right in the milk? You feel it might be like adding syrup to crushed pineapples and squash? I assure you it is not.)

  The recipe is again one I stumbled on. One night a couple of years ago I happened to be fixing dinner alone. My wife and daughters had gone to a fair, and wouldn’t be back until late. I usually figure on a maximum preparation time of ten minutes when I’m fixing dinner alone, so as to waste as little time as possible indoors. The menu this particular evening was a hamburger, to be followed by sliced bananas, milk, and brown sugar. Then I couldn’t find the brown sugar. Not only no real brown sugar, but not even any of that light-tan stuff that will do in a pinch.

  I already had the bananas sliced. Some kind of sweetening was necessary for the milk. We happened to have an open jar of Grade C in the pantry. I went and got it. At first bite I realized that for over forty years I had been having second-class bananas and milk. With brown sugar it’s good. With dark maple syrup it’s better.

  May be made with Grade C or Grade B. Not recommended with Fancy or A.

  The third recipe is the New England equivalent of sweet-and-sour pork in a Chinese restaurant, and it is a traditional spring dish. Warning: Anyone on a diet – in fact anyone who is not something of a glutton – should not even read about this dish.

  Ingredients: a dozen plain raised doughnuts (two dozen, if more than four people will be present), a large jar of dill pickles, a quart or more of maple syrup.

  First you boil the syrup down by about one-third, so that it has the consistency of a sugar glaze. Meanwhile, quarter the dill pickles and put them in a dish in the middle of the table, right next to the unsweetened raised doughnuts. Then, while it is still warm, you put some syrup in the bottom of a soup dish for each person.

  Everybody then takes a doughnut, dips it in his or her bowl of syrup, and begins to gorge. After every two or three bites – or at a minimum twice per doughnut – you stop and eat a bite of pickle. With this constant resharpening of the palate, it is possible to eat an astonishingly large number of doughnuts. Stop just before you are comatose, and conclude with a cup of brewed coffee. Then retire to bed.

  Should be prepared with Fancy or A. B will do, though not as well. C is not recommended.

  This by no means exhausts the list of simple maple recipes – a small quantity of B or C does wonders in a pot of baked beans, a little A on popcorn beats Cracker Jack hollow. But it’s enough to use as much spare syrup as most people are going to have in the course of a year.

  [1980]

  Vermont Silences

  THERE IS AN OLD story about two Vermont farmers who lived a mile apart – one west of the village, and the other east of it. Since rural free delivery didn’t exist yet, each had to come into town to get his mail. Every weekday for twenty years Eben would finish morning milking and come striding into the village from the west, while Alfred did the same thing from the east. Since both were punctual men, they invariably met in front of the post office at nine A.M., just as the last letters were being put up. They’d say good morning, go in and get their mail, and stride off home – one west and one east.

  One morning during the twenty-first year, however, Eben came stumping out of the post office and, ignoring his usual route, started briskly south, down the state highway. Alfred stared after him for a second, and then called, “Eben, where on earth ye going?”

  Eben whirled around. “None of your goddamned business,” he snapped. Then he added, visibly softening, “And I wouldn’t tell ye that much if ye wan’t an old friend.”

  This story conforms perfectly to the stereotype of conversational habits in the country. City people talk a lot, the belief goes, but rubes are clo
sed-mouthed. They think they’ve had a big conversation if one person says he hears Harley’s brown cow is going to calve, and the other answers, “Ayuh.”

  For the first year or two that I lived in the country, I believed firmly in the stereotype. (Even now I wouldn’t call it wholly false. There is less badinage in the average milking parlor than in the average cocktail lounge.) But I have since come to realize that words can fly as fast in the country as in town. It’s just that rural conversation operates under a rather peculiar set of rules. And the rules do impose certain silences.

  The first rule is that only the person who’s supposed to be talking does. The others keep quiet. For example, say a fellow who might be going to mow your hay comes by on a Saturday afternoon to discuss the terms. His wife and her brother are in the car; they’re on their way to go shopping.

  In the suburbs where I grew up, there would be some kind of general introduction. “This is my wife, Alice, and my brother-in-law, Fred.” “Pleased to meet you, Alice. Hello, Fred.”

  There is none of that here. The wife and the brother-in-law sit out in the car, not saying a word. You never even learn their names. Weird, silent, unsocial country people, you think. But it’s not that at all. It’s just that this is not their deal. If it were, they’d have plenty to say.

  I first realized that when I lived for a couple of years in a house that belonged to a rural utility company. This hick utility owned two small reservoirs, and provided water for a New Hampshire town of about seven thousand. The house was right by the lower dam, and normally it was occupied by one of the three employees of the company.