Best Person Rural Page 6
But the guy who’d been living there had just bought a trailer, and the other two weren’t interested, so the company rented it to me. It was a terrific deal. I paid a hundred dollars a month rent – this was 1961 – and meanwhile the company paid me twenty-five a month to keep people from swimming or fishing in the reservoir. Naturally I interpreted “people” to mean the general public, but not me, my family, or a few close friends. So for seventy-five dollars a month I had a nice little house plus a private ten-acre lake. Good clean water to swim in, and really great bass fishing.
Every morning the foreman, a man named Asa, would come by to check the dam and the chlorination unit. He always came in a pickup truck, and he always had his second-in-command with him. (It took two people to deal with the dam gates.) If I happened to be outside when they came, Asa and I would usually have a little chat. I’d tell him how many trespassers I’d driven away; he’d tell me stories about New Hampshire years ago, or funny things that happened while they were fixing pipes in town. The second-in-command never spoke. I didn’t even know his name. One of those weird, silent country people.
Then after about six months, Asa was sick one day. But the truck came as usual. The second-in-command was driving, and he had the third employee of the company with him. I was outside when he arrived. As he drove into the barnyard, he stuck his head out the truck window and called cheerily, “Nice mornin’, ain’t it? Looks like we’ll get spring, after all.” Ten minutes later I knew quite a lot about Denny. We’d swapped a couple of jokes, traded views on baled versus loose hay. He wound up inviting me to come take a look at his farm sometime.
As for the third-in-command, a kid about twenty, he hadn’t said a word. I didn’t even know his name.
Another rule is connected with rural stoicism. This rule says never admit to caring too much about anything, because if you do, you’ll probably lose it. Hence you simply never encounter the phenomenon I used to in the suburbs, where sometimes at a party one of the guests would suddenly look up and say, “Isn’t this fun! Aren’t we all having a marvelous time!” Except once from a summer person, I have never heard such a remark at a church supper, or at the square dance we have at the end of Old Home Day each summer, or at any Vermont festivity whatsoever. I have seen a good many shining eyes, but heard no gush.
The working of this rule is perhaps clearest among country children. If you invite a city kid to go to the circus, that kid may perfectly well whoop with joy, ask if he can bring a friend, turn cartwheels, if young enough even kiss you. If you invite a country kid, at lease in Vermont, the answer is much lower key. “I don’t care,” he or she says.
What that means is “Yes, please, I’d love to go, and you’re wonderful to ask me,” but he’s not going to spill all that out. You have to get the message from his eyes. You have to look pretty carefully, too, because if he didn’t want to go, he might well say the same thing. Only then it would mean something like “I’m getting a little old for the circus, but if you’re determined to take me, I guess I can stand it.”
This trick of speech makes it easy to sort native from non-native children. Just invite all the kids in town to a soda fountain, and ask who wants an ice-cream cone. All the ones who shout “Me” or “I want choc’late!” or who groan and say it’s too soon after lunch are the children of immigrants from New Jersey. All the ones who say “I don’t care” are natives.
I still haven’t mentioned the most important rule. This is the one that’s descended from the work ethic. It says that conversation should never be sought for itself, but should just sort of happen. Deliberately to plan some occasion when you do nothing but talk (e.g., a cocktail party) is certainly foolish and probably immoral.
The best way to let it happen is to share a job with someone. That you can plan – a quilting bee or a barn raising is just fine – but officially you’re there to work on the quilt, or nail rafters; and if there happens to be a steady stream of conversation while you stitch or pound, well, you’re just as surprised as everybody else. You came to work.
Hence all my conversations with Asa were just before or just after he checked the dam. When I talk with Rodney Palmer, it’s at his garage, and he generally has a wrench in hand. The best conversation I ever had with Wesley LaBombard was while we were planting trees. It lasted seven hours, and ranged from the existence of God to how to raise chickens. Meanwhile, we planted four hundred red pines.
The most remarkable example I know, though, of work freeing a countryman to talk concerns a master mason whom I shall not name. He’s a man in his sixties, taciturn even by the standards of rural Vermont. For forty years he has been a silent attender of church suppers (when he goes at all), a silent presence in some summer person’s yard, rebuilding a stone wall.
But a couple of years ago a friend of mine who’s pretty handy himself got this man to teach him how to build chimneys. In effect, he apprenticed himself. Well! The first couple of days they worked mostly in silence, except for businesslike remarks about hearth laying and lapped courses. Somewhere on the third day they began to trade views about coon hunting. By the end of the week they were into politics.
It was the middle of the second week that the old mason really opened up – never, of course, ceasing to work. At the time he began, they were cutting tiles with a masonry saw, and you are to imagine a noise somewhere between a dentist’s drill and a jet takeoff in the background.
It turned out the old man had worked for a couple of years in Boston when he was just out of high school. He had proved very attractive to Boston girls, but in his stiff country way he had repelled their advances. (This, of course, had made him even more attractive to certain ones, who liked challenges.) For forty years he had been wondering whether he had done the right thing to repel those girls, or whether he had been a young idiot. He could remember some of the evenings more or less minute by minute, and he reported every detail. Still, of course, using the masonry saw.
My friend says he talked a blue streak. He would describe a date with one of the Boston girls – it was like hearing a documentary, my friend says – but at the crucial moments he was fairly often sawing a tile. So that what my friend heard went something like this:
“It was about midnight and her folks was all asleep. We were standin’ in the hall. I was just going to tell her goodnight, and she says to me” – here he started cutting a tile, and Tom didn’t catch another word until the tile fell apart. “Well I didn’t quite know what to make of that, so I says t’ her, ‘Mary, I don’t see as you have any reason to’” – neeeeeeyowhh – neeeeeeyowhh – “and b’gosh if she wasn’t trying to drag me” – neeeeeeyowhh – “so, Tom, what would you ’a done if you’d been me?”
Doesn’t that sound almost as lively as the average conversation in a bar? Maybe even livelier than some? You know it does. If you want real talk, forget the city. Move to the country, and get yourself a job on the road crew (you’ll make about $3.25 an hour) or helping some old-timer sharpen axes. During the intervals, when you can hear, you’ll learn what country conversation is really like.
[1979]
The Rural Immigration Law
EACH MAN KILLS the thing he loves, Oscar Wilde wrote in a poem that later became a popular song. As a general statement, this won’t do. Lincoln didn’t kill the Union; lots of men don’t kill their wives; so far from killing the ERA, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett have worked hard to keep it alive.
But practically all tourists and most people who move to the country do kill the thing they love. They don’t mean to – they may not even realize they have done it – but they still kill it.
The tourist does it simply by being a tourist. What he loves is foreignness, difference, the exotic. So he goes in search of it – and, of course, brings himself along. The next thing you know there’s a Holiday Inn in Munich.
The case with people who move to the country is more complicated. What they bring along is a series of unconscious assumptions. It might be better for rural Ameri
ca if they brought a few sticks of dynamite, or a can of arsenic.
Take a typical example. Mr. and Mrs. Nice are Bostonians. They live a couple of miles off Route 128 in a four-bedroom house. He’s a partner in an ad agency; she has considerable talent as an artist. For some years they’ve had a second home in northern New Hampshire. The kids love it up there in Grafton County.
For some years, too, both Nices have been feeling they’d like to simplify their lives. They look with increasing envy on their New Hampshire neighbors, who never face a morning traffic jam, or an evening one, either; who don’t have a long drive to the country on Friday night and a long drive back on Sunday; who aren’t cramped into a suburban lot; who live in harmony with the natural rhythm of the year; who think the rat race is probably some kind of minor event at a county fair.
One Thursday evening Don Nice says to Sue that he’s been talking to the other partners, and they’ve agreed there’s no reason he can’t do some of his work at home. If he’s in the office Wednesday and Thursday every week, why the rest of the time he can stay in touch by telephone. Sue, who has been trapped all year as a Brownie Scout leader and who has recently had the aerial snapped off her car in Boston, is delighted. She reflects happily that in their little mountain village you don’t even need to lock your house, and there is no Brownie troop. “You’re wonderful,” she tells Don.
So the move occurs. In most ways Don and Sue are very happy. They raise practically all their own vegetables the first year; Sue takes up cross-country skiing; Don personally splits some of the wood they burn in their new wood stove.
But there are some problems. The first one Sue is conscious of is the school. It’s just not very good. It’s clear to Sue almost immediately that the town desperately needs a new school building – and also modern playground equipment, new school buses, more and better art instruction at the high school, a different principal. Don is as upset as Sue when they discover that only about 40 percent of the kids who graduate from that high school go on to any form of college. The rest do native things, like becoming farmers and mechanics, and joining the Air Force. An appalling number of the girls marry within twelve months after graduation. How are Jeanie and Don, Jr., going to get into good colleges from this school?
Pretty soon Sue and Don join an informal group of newcomers in town who are working to upgrade education. All they want for starters is the new building (2.8 million dollars) and a majority of their kind on the school board.
As for Don, though he really enjoys splitting the wood – in fact, next year he’s planning to get a chainsaw and start cutting a few trees of his own – he also does like to play golf. There’s no course within twenty miles. Some of the nice people he’s met in the education lobby feel just as he does. They begin to discuss the possibility of a nine-hole course. The old native who owns the land they have in mind seems to be keeping only four or five cows on it, anyway. Besides, taxes are going up and the old fellow is going to have to sell, sooner or later. (Which is too bad, of course. Don and Sue both admire the local farmers, and they’re sincerely sorry whenever one has to quit.)
Over the next several years, Don and Sue get more and more adjusted to rural living – and they also gradually discover more things that need changing. For example, the area needs a good French restaurant. And it needs a much better airport. At present there are only two flights a day to Boston, and because of the lack of sophisticated equipment, even they are quite often canceled. If Don wants to be really sure of getting down for an important meeting, he has to drive. Sue would be glad of more organized activities for the kids. There’s even talk of starting a Brownie troop.
In short, if enough upper-middle-class people move to a rural town, they are naturally going to turn it into a suburb of the nearest city. For one generation it will be a very nice and a very rustic suburb, with real farms dotted around it and real natives speaking their minds at town meeting. Then as the local people are gradually taxed out of existence (or at least out of town), one more piece of rural America has died.
This is happening to large parts of New England at the moment. The solution, as I see it is a good, tough immigration law. It wouldn’t actually keep Don and Sue out, it would just require them to learn rural values before they were allowed to stay. When they moved to the country, they would be issued visas good for one year. At the end of that year, they would have to appear before a local board composed entirely of native farmers, loggers, and road-crew men. They would then present evidence of having acclimated. For example, they could show proof of having taken complete care of two farm animals of at least pig size, or of one cow, for at least nine months. Complete care would be rigorously interpreted. Even one weekend of paying someone to feed the pigs or milk the cow would disqualify them. (An occasional trade, on the other hand, would be acceptable. Don and Sue could take care of a neighbor’s stock one weekend, and thus earn the right to be away the next, while he looked after theirs.)
Such a rule might work a hardship on elderly people moving to the country – say, if Sue’s parents decided to come up from Baltimore. For them there would be an appropriate modification. The old couple wouldn’t have to learn how to handle cattle at sixty-eight and sixty-three. They wouldn’t even have to get up on the roof of their house, like natives, and shovel snow or replace missing shingles. But they would have to do undelegated work. For example, if they both worked in the kitchen at all church suppers during the first year, personally cooking beans and making the red-flannel hash, that might earn them a visa renewal. A cash donation would get them nowhere.
What if the board didn’t pass you? I’m kindhearted. I wouldn’t say you had to clear out immediately. It’s just that your taxes would automatically double. They’d stay double until you passed your preliminary test.
And if you did pass? Why then you’d get a five-year visa under the same conditions. By then a seasoned pig raiser, woodlot manager, or church-supper worker, you would appear before the board a second time. If the board approved, you would then be an Accepted Resident – and, incidentally, perfectly free to spend all your time playing golf, trying to turn rural schools into suburban schools, etc., etc. But I’m guessing that very few immigrants would. It’s so much more interesting to keep pigs.
What about all the second-home owners who aren’t residents anyway? That’s easy. Double all their taxes right now.
[1980]
The Year We Really Heated with Wood
TO BOAST IN 1978 that you have a wood stove is about like telling people proudly that you own a TV set, or that your kitchen has a sink. By the latest estimates, more than half of all rural New Englanders run a wood stove these days. In places such as northern Michigan the proportion may be even higher.
But to have a wood stove and to depend on wood for your principal heat are two very different things, as my family and I discovered last winter.
We are old hands with wood stoves. For the last fifteen years we’ve been living on a Vermont farm. The house had an oil furnace when we bought it – and the farm had a big woodlot. No oil wells, however. So fourteen and a half years ago we set up a couple of stoves: one in the kitchen and one in the living room. We’ve used them, too. Saved a significant fraction of our heating bill, and all that. Never had any problems. A few years ago we even added a third stove – a nice little Jøtul in the guest room upstairs, which has always been cold. But we ran it only when we had guests.
Then came the well-known rise in the price of fuel oil. By the spring of 1977 the stuff was selling around here for fifty-one cents a gallon, which at the time seemed high. What had been half a game for fourteen years suddenly became serious business.
By then I was an experienced woodcutter. Experienced enough to know that my woodlot could yield ten times what I had been cutting, and actually benefit from the process. Why not step up production? So in the spring of 1977 we decided to switch from System A, an oil furnace supplemented by wood stoves, to System B, wood stoves supplemented by an oil fu
rnace. This is the story of what happened. Or part of the story, anyway. I haven’t been able to get in everything, like my wife’s learning to play the piano twenty minutes at a time, and then dashing into the kitchen to wash a few dishes, because none of our stoves really gets to the room where she keeps her piano. But the main elements are here.
March 7, 1977. Today we paid 526 dollars for a new stove. If we’re really going to heat with wood, we need a really powerful stove. It’s got to handle four rooms downstairs and four more upstairs – everything, in fact, but the kitchen and the guest bedroom. So we’ve taken out our hundred-year-old cast-iron parlor stove and replaced it with a brand-new Defiant. As a fringe benefit, we will gain some space. One of the Defiant’s advantages is that you can mount a heat shield behind it, and then put it practically up against a wall.
March 8. I took the day off from work and spent it entirely on the stove. If it’s to go where my wife wants it, we need a new stove hole on the left side of the chimney. Our neighbor Lee Ilsley came and cut a perfect round seven-inch hole through the chimney bricks with hammer and chisel. Then I helped him install the thimble. The rest of the day I devoted to buying stovepipe, setting it up, building a new and larger woodbox, and so on. Tonight it all looks worth it. The Defiant is tucked away beside the chimney, looking very handsome. The back is only five inches from the brick house wall.
The old stove used up about a third of the room.
April 8. Maple-sugaring ended two days ago. Starting today, I am spending my free time cutting next winter’s wood. I already have about four cords I cut last fall – but with System B I figure I will need at least twice that much. It is already late to be cutting wood that will be dry enough.
April 9. Today is Saturday, and I spent the whole day in the woods. It would make sense to cut all the trees I’m going to, right now, so they could start drying. But psychologically that doesn’t work for me. It’s too much like an assembly line. I prefer to take one tree at a time, fell it, buck it up, and do all the splitting, before I move on to another. Today I did about a tree and a half. Both were red maples eighteen inches in diameter. A tree this size yields something over two-thirds of a cord.