Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 16

Maybe a Pretty Good Rule

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Packed up

My family departed this morning for two weeks or more, bound for the wilderness of northern Minnesota, leaving me to tend to projects and beasts both large and small. I don’t mind the solitude as much as once I might have. This is not the same as saying I don’t get lonely, because I do, but I also appreciate the stripped-down nature of my time alone, the way it allows both mind and body to focus on the tasks and thoughts at hand. And of course the small pleasures one allows oneself in such circumstances, most of which (in my case, at least) revolve around food consumption: Drinking straight from the jar of milk, eating directly from the pan in which the meat was cooked, generally at the edge of the fire over which it was cooked, and possibly with no utensils beyond the thumb and pointer fingers, salads picked and consumed in the garden – a handful of lettuce washed down by a few green beans. Maybe a carrot, extra crunchy for the soil packed into its creases. There. A complete meal. It’s not a pretty sight, I’ll grant you that, but the sink remains free of dishes, the food tastes just fine, and I find my body feels best when unencumbered by overly much attention to detail.

Which is maybe a pretty good rule for a whole lot of other things, too.

Other People’s Stuff

First, if you’re looking for a piece of VT to call your own, you should probably buy the one our friends Hart and Michael are selling. I’ve spent a fair bit of time there, and it’s really quite spectacular and unique. Here are a couple of pictures, but they can’t begin to do the place justice, so check out this link for more.

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Second, I know I’ve mentioned my friend Brett’s blog in the past, but I’m going to do it again just to be a pain in the ass. Brett’s a great writer and I really enjoy her short, almost-daily missives. I bet you will, too.

 

Thinking All the While

Yesterday evening I drove the back roads slowly, past fields thick with fresh-spread manure, the smell of it heavy in the air and as familiar as wood smoke in winter. I topped a hill and at its crest where the tree canopy parted saw a cloud tower in the sky, tall and ominous-looking, as if the faintest breeze would send it toppling. Rain coming, I figured, or at least the threat of it. Let it come. Hay’s in. Firewood’s under tin. Streams and rivers still running high, but they can run higher. The banks have held worse. I’ve seen it myself.

Truth is, I could drive these backroads just about forever. I guess more than anything they remind me of what I love about Vermont, and not just the land, but the people who inhabit it and maybe just as much how they inhabit it. They live in old farmhouses, and new ranches, and mobile homes leveled on cinder blocks and funky cabins with rows of Tibetan peace flags hanging across the driveway. Chickens ranging in the yard. They plow driveways and clean houses and pour concrete and milk cows and go to school and get DWIs and lord knows what else.

As I drove, I remembered passing a dairy farm a few days back, not a prosperous-looking one (those are getting fewer and farther between by the year) and seeing in the middle of a nubbed-down pasture behind a sagging line of rusted wire a small hay wagon stacked with what looked to be about a cord of firewood. A nice, neat stack, spray-painted plywood sign leaning against it: “$220” No name, no phone number, nothing more than the price.

For the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about that wagon, that wood, and the farmer who thought to stack it just so. How many hours already he must have into its procurement. And who would buy it? For it was not deliverable by hay wagon, least not over any distance, and as a rule it’s pretty hard to sell firewood you can’t deliver. So what, then? Someone would see the wagon, stop in to the barn at milking time, inquire about the wood, strike a deal, back their truck into the field, throw each piece into the bed or as many as would fit, because truth is it’s pretty much impossible to fit a full loose cord into a the bed of even a full-size pickup, which I know because I’ve tried. So now on top of it all they’re having to come back for the rest. Really? Someone would do all this for a cord of wood? My head wouldn’t stop swirling with the details, and what seemed to me the futility of it. Because I really wanted someone to buy that damn wood. But I didn’t see how it’d happen.

Yet I couldn’t relinquish the image of it. Still can’t, I guess, because here I am writing about it though I never planned to, not even at the top of this page. There was something beautiful about it, something of great substance (Firewood! Heat! Survival!) and yet also a little heartwarming, which I suppose was the hope it represented, enough to be worth however long it took to fell and cut and split and stack that wood, to pull it into the pasture with the old Farmall I could see resting out behind the barn, to find the plywood, the rattle can, to paint the sign. And yet all this was tempered by that sense of futility in a way that actually felt a little achy in my gut, like I didn’t quite know which to believe: Hope or futility? Futility or hope? Perhaps that wagon of wood is not unlike the “eggs for sale” sign mentioned in the comments a while back; something that comforts in its commonplace nature and yet is just incongruous enough that we imbue it with meaning even we can’t quite understand. Which is fine. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Later that night I finally settled on what I think is going to happen to that wagonload of wood. I think the farmer’s going to leave it there until the wood is well-seasoned, and maybe even covered by snow, the sign long since tipped flat by the wind. The pasture cold and windswept, the cows huddled around a bale feeder in the barnyard. Then I think at some point this winter the farmer’s going to cast his appraising eye on the stacks in the woodshed and, realizing they’re dwindling faster than anticipated, he’s going to drive the old Farmall out to pasture and pull that cord of wood home. Thinking all the while how glad he is it didn’t sell.

Music: A new one from Isbell. 

We Are Always Arising

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Fin takes a ride on the peas train

About a year-and-a-half ago I joined the school board of this small town (pop. 220-something) for reasons that pretty much boil down to the fact that I was asked. I might have declined, but I was new to town and wanting to make a favorable impression, and maybe even figured something good might come of it, if not for the community, then at least in relation to this idea I’ve long had that some day I’ll roust myself into being of service to a cause greater than myself.

Frankly, I’m not a great school board member; I’m too easily frustrated by the layers of bureaucracy, overwhelmed by the reams of paper and endless numbers. It all seems so incredibly and needlessly complex, though it’s not like I’ve got any better ideas of how to do it. Once upon a time I might have thought I did, but the older I get the less I seem to know, which is exactly the opposite of how I thought getting older was supposed to work. Sometimes I think of all the years I’ve spent looking forward to the wisdom I thought was due me, and here I am, still looking to collect.

Because our town is so small, we don’t have a school of our own; instead, the town pays tuition at the accredited institution of choice. This has allowed our older son to attend school part-time, through a self-designed study program at a high school about 30-minutes from here. It’s been good for him, I think. He built an electric guitar with an amazing builder in Burlington who also happens to be a published author and whose father is the former Vermont Poet Laureate, which really has nothing to do with anything, but kinda strikes my fancy. He studied climate justice with an activist friend of ours. He did a bunch of other stuff, too, centered mostly around music.

I never figured one of my children would want to attend school, and this was foolish of me. Not so much in the specifics – attend school, not attend school – but in my lack of awareness of how profoundly things can change, and how quickly. As someone said to me recently, we are always arising in fields of contingencies. I like this saying, in part because I know it to be true, and in part because it acknowledges what could be seen as a difficult truth (life is unpredictable/changeable/uncertain) in a very gracious and even graceful way. I mean, one could say something like life is unpredictable/changeable/uncertain and you just have deal with it, which would also be true, but to me isn’t quite the same as saying we are always arising in fields of contingencies.

I thought about this last night as I bucked firewood, the daylight draining from the sky. The last day of July. Then, suddenly, surprisingly, it was raining, and I could see the sun behind it, that beautiful, slanting, late day sun, the raindrops illuminated like a million little light bulbs in the sky. I was soon soaked through and on the verge of being cold, so I worked harder, but the rain quickened its pace, and I could not seem to outwork it, and now I was truly cold. So I shut down the saw and put it away, shucked my rain-and-sweat-wet clothes, and ran for the pond to rinse myself clean, the pile of still-uncut firewood left for another day.

Music: Daniel Johnston. Must be seen to be fully appreciated. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Do It Again

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First light

We had six full days of dry weather, the sun summer-high and fierce in the sky, though already I see how the days are shortening; when I awaken it is darker than it was just a two weeks ago, and soon enough it’ll be even darker than it is now. I don’t mind, really. There’s something about rising in the dark that makes the time feel stolen, as if my use of it will not count against the ticking clock of my day.

We finally got our first cut off the field, late this year by a month or more, as late as we’ve ever gotten first cut. Though not as late as some, for even now as I drive the backroads I pass unmowed fields, the grasses brown at the tops, long gone to seed. There’s going to be a shortage of dry hay this year, I think.

Then yesterday it rained again, steady and soaking and almost cold. I walked in the woods looking for chanterelles, for a time with Penny, then alone, finding none. All around me, the sounds of water – pattering against the protective canopy of the outstretched trees, running in small streams and rivulets down the land, splashing when I stepped into the small hollows where it had settled. And other sensations: The thighs of my work pants soon soaked through and thus heavy and tight against my skin, the drops that fall through the leaves to my face running down my cheeks. I lick them from the corners of my mouth and they taste just slightly of salt, the remnants of my labor in the hayfield, still present after two swims in the pond. Maybe next time I’ll use soap. I feel too the whorl of hair pasted against my forehead, breathe the fecund, deep-earth smell of the wetted forest.

Almost by accident I find my favorite ridge of rock, having arrived at from an unfamiliar angle, and I walk it length wise, balancing on its slippery spine until I reach its end. Then turn back and do it again.

More Improbable By the Day

Yesterday in town I stopped at the feed store in town for chicken grain. I’d placed my order and was descending the front steps and there, coming toward me, was an old man. Not the same man I wrote about a year ago; this man was stouter, his clothes neater. Clean white tee shirt tucked into jeans. He moved in a stilted way, and slowly, as though in pain.

We exchanged the curt nods men tend to offer one another in greeting, and I continued outside to wait for my grain, standing between my car and his white Chevy pickup. The cab corners and wheel arches were consumed by rust, and the bed was empty but for the top link to a tractor’s three-point hitch. I stole a glance through the truck’s window; the bench seat was uncluttered. The truck had a manual transmission, and I imagined the man’s arthritic hand on the shift knob, guiding it through the gears.

I thought about how the year before when I saw the old man at the feed store, someone had just reminded me how I might yet have half my life to live, and how now, a year later, that possibility was lesser, and becoming more improbable by the day. Last year, I’d have had to live to 90; this year, 92. By next summer, it’ll be 94. At some point, the math stops working, though I guess it’s not really the math that stops working; it’s the body.

I considered waiting for the man to emerge from the store, if only to see what stories might be gleaned, but my grain had now arrived, and my day was full of tasks yet undone. So I got into my car and drove away.

Born to Ride

So my first street motorcycle was a 1983 Honda Interceptor 750. I was 16 when I bought it, and hanging on Martha’s Vineyard, where I lived with three friends in a one-bedroom apartment and worked on a roofing crew. The apartment below ours was occupied by a stoner named Rocket, which in all likelihood was not his given name, but I never heard anyone call him anything else. Funny. I just remembered about Rocket; hadn’t thought of him in a quarter-century or more. He must be at least 70 by now. If he’s still around.

I bought the bike for $500 out of the backyard of a middle-aged man who’d wrecked it and quickly lost interest; I would later learn far more than I wanted to know about wrecking bikes and losing interest (I believe this is called “foreshadowing”). The Honda was dinged up, but ran great, and I rode it a whole lot, and I am beyond grateful that the only time I dropped it I was in a parking lot spinning the back tire to show off for a girl I liked but who no doubt (and rightly so) had me pegged for a fool. Because really I had no business on such a powerful motorcycle. I mean, I’d had a couple of dirt bikes – a sweet old Honda Elsinore 125 among them – before the Interceptor, and I’d ridden my friends’ street bikes from time-to-time, but I was pretty green.

I rode the 750 for a while – couple of years, anyway – then bought an early 90’s Honda Hurricane 600. Smaller than the 750, but way quicker, and much more nimble. This one had been dumped, too, and I bought it cheap, too, though I don’t remember how cheap. Maybe $1000, $1200. Rode it all over the place, as much as possible. I vividly remember descending the snowed-packed dirt hill from my house, legs as outriggers, trying to keep it upright until I hit the dry pavement. Shivering to beat the band. During this period of my late teens, I also had a YZ125 (dirt bike), a XR200 (dirt bike), and a CR250 (dirt bike). No doubt there was something else in there, too, but it’s escaped my memory.

Ok. So I rode the Hurricane for a while, then sold it and bought a really nice Kawasaki GPZ750 from an older gentleman who’d babied it. First bike I owned that was in such good condition. I liked that motorcycle a lot, though like so many of those early sport bikes, it was too much engine mounted to too little suspension. Still. Fun, fun bike, and even pretty comfy.

After the GPZ – which I sold to I don’t know who – I had a KZ1000, then a KZ750 and, somewhere in there, a really cool little Honda CB350 twin. Gutless but style for miles and you know what a sucker I am for style. Seems like maybe I had a KX250 dirt bike in there, too, but I could be misremembering. I definitely remember the little XL125 I mentioned a few days back, and the Suzuki DR350 I fell off and rang my bell so hard I couldn’t remember my boys’ names. Puked a bunch, too. Truth told, that kind of put me off motorcycles. I just sort of reached a point where I realized the risk was no longer worth the thrill, and I sold the DR and that was it. With the exception of a handful of minor, low-speed dirt bike get-offs, it remains the only time I’ve dumped a bike, and I intend to keep it that way.

I just realized how few of you probably care about any of this, but it’s sorta fun for me, so thanks for humoring me.

Our Separate Ways

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Another of the old Dodge. I have no idea how this photo came to be, and that’s probably for the best. 

I camped last night at a music festival with my older boy, and waking early with hours to spare before he roused, I drove to a nearby mountain for a short hike. There I trundled upward, clad in barn boots and flannel, until the heat of my exertion saw me shrugging the shirt and now shirtless and silly-looking I walked onward until I came to a minor footpath diverging from the trail. With no conscious decision reached (and, in fact, none sought), there I turned, and soon after found myself in a forest of mature hardwood, sugar maple and ash. The light just coming on, feet clammy and hot in boots. I stood there, not thinking much of anything and not wanting to, until maybe 70 yards below me a black bear lumbered into the clearing of an old skid road. He (she?) sensed me there and turned his head my way and now we both stood, one looking at the other, until I realized some time had passed. A minute? Two? I cannot say, but we held in the morning softness and the pattering of raindrops shaking themselves loose from the foliage, falling cool against the skin of my back. Then he turned his head and ambled on, and I guess I’m not ashamed to say I felt tears welling. Not of sadness, or even joy, but of something that felt as if perhaps it lay deeper, though I can’t say what that would be. Maybe just the unsettling knowledge of how little we can predict, of how little control we have, of how even the most innocuous circumstances and choices – to wake early, to decide on a hike, to unthinkingly veer from the marked trail – can impact our lives in ways we could have never imagined.

Or maybe it’s just this: I went for a walk and saw a bear in the woods and we watched one another for a while. Then we went our separate ways.

Apropos of all the car talk, a great segment from Erica. (some folks seem to have a hard time seeing the links… so here are the analog instructions: click “from Erica”) 

Been a while since we’ve had any music. How ’bout this one from the Turnpike Troubadours?

 

 

Into the Inevitable

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The Dodge mentioned below. A loyal friend.

At the big dairy farm a few miles down the road, I pass the dying Holstein. I know she’s dying because she’s been lying in the barnyard for a week or more, bucket of water at her side, small pile of baleage at her nose. I’ve yet to see her on her feet, and a cow that’s been down for a week is a cow that’s likely never to stand again. Besides, I can see how the flesh is melting away from her spine. It protrudes more and more with each of my passings. She does not seem in distress, and I cannot help but wonder about the way of slow death in this animal, of the possibility of passing thoughts and feelings and what memories and stories might be attached. Or if it just feels like a body wasting away, legs or will too weak to stand, the good feed no temptation at all, head hanging heavier and lower by the day, as if leading the way into the inevitable.

The comments relating to my recent post on driving with my son got me reminiscing. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for cars and especially trucks (motorcycles, too, come to think of it). And truthfully, I’ve always like driving. Or liked it enough, anyway.

My first car was a 1980 VW Rabbit that had belonged to my mother. I bought it off her for the princely sum of $200. It was baby-shit tan, fuel injected, with a four-speed manual transmission. A little terror of a car, frankly. I drove it like the she-devil it was until I happened into a head-on collision with my friend Trevor (he coming to visit me, me going to visit him; I’m pretty sure I wrote about this a while back, it’s a funny story, thought it might not have been), and the damn thing never ran right again. It’d still go down the road, but was at least 50% down on power, and no one could figure out what was wrong.

A series of VW Beetles followed. The one I drove the most was a ’74 that had a bad fuel pump, so Trevor and I rigged up a gas can in the back seat with gravity feed to the Weber carb. Worked pretty good; I just had to be real thoughtful about the butts of the clove cigarettes I favored at that point in my life. The car also lacked operational floor brakes, but the cable-driven emergency brake worked just fine, so I drove with one hand on the wheel, and the other alternating between the e-brake handle and the stick shift. And the boom box in the rear seat, right next to the gas can. Got a good year out of that rig. I think that was the one Trevor and I painted with the name of our nascent carpentry/odd jobs business: Troglodyte Construction. You should have hired us. We worked hard and real cheap.

Somewhere in there mixed with the Beetles I had a ’75 Cadillac with a 501 under the hood. A real boat. Like my Mother’s old Rabbit, I bought it for $200, which was a big step up from the $75 I paid for the aforementioned Beetle. The Caddy had what I think was a blown head gasket, and a bad alternator, so for the summer I owned it I was rather limited in range. I’d wake up, install the battery that had been on the charger overnight, drive to my construction job (mysteriously, Troglodyte had failed to take off), add water, pull the battery and put it on the charger, and do the whole thing in reverse come quitting time.

Then I had a Buick LeSabre I named Putris. Fast, that car was. Had a 350, I believe, but seemed faster than that. I outran a cop in it, or dodged him, at least. I was going real quick on a main road, probably had something on me that maybe I shouldn’t have, and he was coming the other way. Turned on his siren and swung around, and I hit the next right hand onto a gravel road and just put it down. My hands shaking like crazy on the wheel, trying to not look in the rearview mirror too much; I was either going to slip him or not. Which I did. I’m not proud of this, but it’s true. I didn’t always make the best choices as a kid. Probably still don’t, come to think of it. Though these days I generally try to avoid criminality.

A bit later, I got a sweet little Mazda pick-up. Two-wheel drive. Stick shift. My first rig that cost more than $500. I think it was $3k, and my dad put $3k in an account as collateral against a bank loan. And when I paid off the loan, he let me keep the $3k. Totally unexpected. I’ll never forget that (sons, if you’re reading this, don’t get any ideas).

What else? Oh, yeah, a ’78 Subaru I bought from Trevor’s dad. A $400 rig if memory serves. Stick shift, had to pull a little lever to engage 4WD. Motor blew within a month or two, but not before Trevor and I took it jumping a time or two.

Dodge D100, circa 70-something. Three on the tree. This is what Penny and I built our first house with, and improbable as it seems, I think we might’ve paid $200 for this one, too. Bi-color. Blue and green with just a smidge of pink. Two-wheel drive. Loved that truck like all get out.

Later, a series of Subarus. Not my favorite cars, to be honest. They drive great, but parts are crazy expensive, and they eat head gaskets like nobody’s business. Oh, and wheel bearings; they’re bonkers for wheel bearings. Gas mileage is pretty marginal, too. Still. Nothing like a Subaru on a Vermont gravel road in winter.

Other rigs: Numerous Ford F250’s. Like four of them, at least. One F350 Powerstroke, the only diesel. A real nice early 90’s Chevy K3500 with a 454 and stick shift. Awesome truck, though wicked thirsty. 8 mpg on a good day. Just in the past couple years, I’ve traded trucks a couple times, and actually done ok. Had a really nice ’90-ish F250 I sold for $1000 more than I paid for it, then a newer Dodge Ram I drove for a year and recently sold for exactly what I paid for it. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course, but it’s nice when it does. Makes up for the lesser deals.

Now have a ’04 F250 with the V10 and a really nice flatbed. Tows way better than the Dodge, which is why I got it. It’s a Lariat edition with these crazy-comfy leather seats that adjust in a gazillion directions. Plus a pretty fantastic plow. The car is a Kia Soul. It’s a pathetic little rig that can barely hold 70 on the highway, but I sorta like it because it looks ridiculous, was cheap, gets amazing gas mileage, is a stick, and has been reliable as a brick.

If this weren’t getting so long, I’d write about my motorcycles, too. But it is, and there were lots of those, so that’ll have to wait for another day.

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One of my favorite motorcycles, a Honda XL125. If I crouched down real low, I could almost hit 60. I traded it for a DR350 that I subsequently rode straight into the emergency room.

Just Fine

Summer is ticking by. The rain stopped for a few days, then returned with renewed vigor in a series of hammering downpours. This morning – right now – it is clear, and I am stalling for time before morning milking, waiting until the sun is high enough to reach the fence post where I halter Pip. I need the sun. We all do.

Our older boy got his driver’s permit, and we travel the back roads, starting and stopping and swerving at my command, and I think about learning to drive myself, more than 30 years ago now. God. It’s been three decades since I was my boy’s age. It seems like such deep well of time but I know it’s not. I think about him at 45, myself at 75, and it feels impossible, like a feat we can’t achieve.

Yesterday, he stalled in the middle of the steepest hill in town, and I thought for sure I’d have to be the one to get the car going again (it’s a manual transmission), but on the second try, we were off again, and by the time we made the top of the climb, I figured everything will probably work out just fine.