Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 30

Nothing in Particular (or maybe everything specifically)

A few days ago, back when it was almost cold enough to feel seasonable, back before the thin skim of snow had melted into the softening ground, I drove over to our friend Luke’s place, where I pawed through a stack of rough boards he’d pulled off his sawmill a while back. The boards were covered with a layer of dust and chicken shit, but beneath this visage I could see faint lines of spalting running through the wood, like little rivers.Luke helped me haul his planer out of the shop, and while I set to planing, he went back to welding a broken tractor loader for a neighbor.

I like going to Luke’s place; there’s always something interesting going on, something broken being put right, or something that once existed only as figment of his imagination being given form. For instance, the sawmill. He basically fabricated the whole damn thing.There’s a lot of what most people would consider junk lying around, but I know Luke well enough to know he sees something that other people don’t see in every single piece of it. “Oh, that’s a project,” he’ll say, if I ask him about something specific. He smiles when he says this, although the truth is, he’s almost always smiling. He’s one of those people who seem to be perpetually amused by nothing in particular. Or maybe everything specifically. Mirthful, I guess you’d say. He’s also a repository of delightful quips. Once, when I mentioned that our truck was running a little rough, he replied, “Have you given her a good hot supper lately?” It took me a second to realize what he was asking.

To make his living, Luke drives a dump truck, does some welding, and fixes stuff. He’s good with pretty much anything related to internal combustion, and many things that are not. He’s fixed lots of stuff for us over the years, and he never charges much. I almost wrote that he never charges enough, but I think that’s wrong: I think he does charge enough. He charges just enough to support the modest lifestyle that is satisfying to him: A small house on a small piece of land, surrounded by the tools and detritus of his trade. Because this is as much as he needs to realize material contentment, his services remain affordable to others of humble means.

I believe that Luke is a genius, although I suspect his particular brand of genius was once much more common than it is today. My friend Doug Flack likes to talk about “cultural amnesia,” a term he uses to describe all the useful things we’ve forgotten along the road to drive-through vegan lattes and Donald Trump. One of the things I appreciate most about living in a rural community is that it is inhabited by people who still remember, who haven’t succumbed to this amnesia. I think it’s more than just the skills; I think it’s also a way of being, of finding contentment in the commonplace nature of their lives and the small happenings around them.

Even Luke’s perpetual sense of amusement strikes me as an endangered quality, for who anymore can afford to be amused? There’s an awful lot of unfunny shit going down in the waning days of 2015. Why, it’s enough to keep a body up nights with the fantods. But sometimes I wonder if perhaps the best antidote to it all is to just keep finding humor everywhere we can. And there’s still a lot of humor to be found. We just gotta remember to look.

It took me a couple hours to plane enough material to trim our windows. I shut the planer down and pulled it back over to the shop, where Luke was still working on the tractor loader. I paid him what he asked and then paid a little more to cover my use of the planer. It was a better-than-fair deal, and if he’d asked for more, I would have paid that, too, and I suspect he knew this.

Luke walked out to my truck to check out the boards. “Aren’t those nice?” he said. “See that reddish one there? That’s the birch.” He ran a hand over a newly smooth board, for no particular reason, just for the feel of it. Like petting a cat. He smiled his little smile, and I got into my truck and drove away.

PS: Rye is offering a limited selection (as in the three you see here) of one-of-a-kind hand carved spoons for your ice-cream consuming pleasure. From top to bottom:

6.75″ cherry $12

8.75″ maple $15

11″ cherry $25

$5 shipping for each spoon.

You can pay via the generosity enabler in the right hand margin of the homepage; please don’t forget to specify which spoon you’d like! When they’re gone, they’re gone, although he is also taking a limited number of orders for custom spoons.

Thank you.

Sometimes We All Need A Little Break

It snowed steadily all day, and by evening chores nearly four inches covered the ground. At lunch, we put the winter tires on the truck, and the floor jack wouldn’t roll through the accumulated snow, so I lay on my back, pushing and huffing, trying to position it in place. It was not a pleasant task: The heavy jack, the slushy snow, already soaking through my pants by the second wheel and swallowing the lug nuts that dropped through my numbing fingers. And perhaps worst of all, the lurking knowledge that if only we’d done this the day before, it would’ve been half the job.

That night, just before bed, I walked down to the shed where we keep the freezers. I’d half-heartedly tried to guilt one of the boys into doing it for me, but they weren’t biting, so I donned my still-damp clothing, tucked my feet into my chore boots, and grabbed a headlamp.

It’s not a long walk – just enough to limber the legs and get the blood flowing, is all – and I turned the headlamp off, letting the luminescence of the fresh snow guide me. I passed the cows, huddled under the protective shelter of their run-in shed. I could not see them, but I could feel their presence, their sheer mass, the heat of all that flesh. I passed the newly shod truck and the rows of round bales, smelled the sweetness of the fermented hay. It was flurrying still. Just a little. Winding down.

At the freezers, I made a pouch of my jacket front, filled it with food. Meat and berries and broth. I was thinking about the book reading I’d been to a couple of nights prior, where Brett Stancui read from her new novel.

Brett is an excellent writer and a fine reader, and it was a pleasure to sit and listen for a time. She’d attracted a full house despite dodgy road conditions, and as one who has drawn plenty of half and even quarter-houses to my readings, and therefore knows the particular despair of driving three hours home from a six-person audience (but hey! Two of them bought books!), I was happy for her.

Listening to her read, it was obvious how carefully she chooses her words and equally important, I think, how well she understands rhythm. Or maybe she doesn’t understand it; maybe she just feels it, the way some people can just feel their way into music or dance.

I sliced hot bread, buttered it, and cut the pieces into triangles. Listening to his voice in the other room reading that familiar story about the old man who called children horrid things, I stared down at the bread triangles. My mother had always cut sandwiches in this way for me. I had always eaten the inner points first.

Lucien said, “What a mean old man.”

I put tea, cups, bread, on a tray and carried it into the living room.

“Tea time!” Tansy sang.

Lucien said, “Tea time?”

I handed him a mug of tea. “We’d go mad as hatters in the cold seasons, without some civility.”

He leaned over the steaming tea and breathed in deeply, his eyes closed, smiling. “Mint,” he said with contentment. He sipped the tea. “That’s good.”

His smile drew at the awfulness in me, how near to tears I was.

Tansy asked Lucien to read the book’s table of contents to her. At each story title, she said, “Ooh, I love that one. That one’s so funny.”

Lucien rubbed a hand over his skinny belly, as if he could feel the warm tea settling in.

I handed him a triangle of bread.

He took it from me.

To my thinking, rhythm is one of the most elusive, unteachable aspects of good writing (or maybe it’s just elusive to me, unteachable by me). It’s more than merely varying the length of words, sentences, paragraphs (though there’s certainly something to this); it’s the myriad ways all these units of language and sound interact. It’s the ways all the types of language and sound interact. This becomes especially clear when someone’s reading aloud. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m thoroughly convinced that the easiest way for anyone to improve their writing is to read it aloud, even if only to themselves.

Anyway, Brett’s book is very good and even if you give a fig for rhythm, I would like for you to buy it, in part because I think you’ll enjoy it and in part because I want for Brett to enjoy the success she deserves.

I walked back up the hill with my family’s sustenance. I was glad I’d let the cows into the run-in. I mean, they would’ve been fine if I hadn’t, they’re sturdy beasts. But sometimes we all need a little break.

The Best Way to Figure Things Out

What I did on my summer vacation

The evening before Thanksgiving I pulled home a load of round bales. It was 6:30 and nary a trace of daylight remained in the sky, though the moon – full or close enough to it – shone bright enough that the trees cast dim halfshadows. I could see them splayed across the graveled shoulders of the road, just beyond the swath illuminated by the truck’s headlights. Like outstretched fingers.

The bales were heavy, and the Ford downshifted on the winding climb toward home. I was glad for the hay – good first cut off a good field at a good price – and glad too for the truck’s heater on a cold night. Not as cold as it will be soon, but still. Cold enough to keep you on your toes. Cold enough to maybe keep you from taking too much for granted. Or at least not quite so much as usual.You think cold can’t do this? Then you’ve never been cold enough.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a handful of emails from readers, most seeking assurance that my long absence from this space is not indicative of calamity nor mere garden-variety crisis. Thankfully, neither is the case. Rather, we continue to be immersed in our building project, and I have been tending to a handful of magazine assignments. And I still haven’t really figured out exactly what, if anything, I want to do with this space, though it occurs to me that perhaps the infrequent vignettes I’ve posted over the preceding months are what I want to do with it. Truthfully, I’m not thinking too hard about it. Seems to me like sometimes the best way to figure things out is to stop trying to figure them out.

Main kitchen/living room, looking toward small greenhouse space

For those who’ve asked, I’ve included a few pics of our work-in-progress. I feel pretty good about how it’s turning out. I feel even better to be both on-schedule and within spitting distance of our original budget of $30-ish grand, although funds are finally running low and we fwill soon have to take a proper break. Fortunately, this should just about coincide with the place being habitable. Not finished, but definitely habitable.

In the meantime, however, we are content to call a single, insulated room in the barn “home.” Indeed, it is interesting to note how easy this transition has been for us. No one talks of wanting more space or more conveniences. We are warm and well-fed and still enjoying the work that fills our days. We have enough power in the barn for two lights, a radio, and, crucial to our elder sons’ artistic expression, a guitar amplifier. There is a wood cook stove and a stack of reasonably dry firewood just outside the front door. On the hillside behind the barn, three milk-fat pigs. On the small parcel of disused pasture to the northeast, five cows, shitting the ground back into fertility. In the new chicken coop that Penny built – the nicest coop we’ve ever had, I’ll add – a flock of layers.

The greenhouse. I like the mishmash of grille patterns on the used windows.

Oh, and we have just a couple of spots available for the December 5-6 session of our Teen Earthskills Immersion Program. The pro-rated cost for the weekend is $150; here are more details.

Anyway, for those who have sent notes, thank you. It’s a nice reminder that there are real people reading this stuff.

 

The Captivity is Now Complete

The heat of last week was almost surreal, sixty-five and clear-skied, the exposed trunks of the leafless trees warming in the sun. Basking. As if they had a choice. Amazing how quickly the leaves fell this year. They came on late, then they were gone, like guests at a dinner party they didn’t really want to attend.

For a time I felt listless and out-of-sorts, thrown off-kilter by the atypical weather. I trudged from task-to-task, shucked down to a tee shirt, thought briefly of trading pants for shorts, but was too lazy to make the change. Now it is cooling again, and I feel the urgency of the season stirring my blood. It is good.

We reside for now in a single room above five cows and 1,000 bales of hay. When the wind blows, I hear the sliding doors of the barn thumping against the side of the building. We have no Internet, no landline, and a cell phone that works only from very particular locations outside our living quarters, so I make calls while leaning against the cows’ paddock fence. I check email every other day or so, sitting in my truck, parked in the parking lot of the nearest library, listening to the radio. Since I seem to be getting less email as I age, I’m thinking I can soon transition to once every third or fourth day and no one will be the wiser. I figure by the time I’m 50, I’ll be down to once a year.

I heard on the radio (while checking email, sitting in my truck, parked in the parking lot of the nearest library) that American teens now spend an average of nine hours each day on electronic devices. Since this does not include school, the true number is certainly a good bit higher. Nine hours a day, plus school… what can possibly remain? The captivity is now complete, and all the more effective for not being recognized as such.

Early this morning I went hunting with my son. We sat for a time on a mossed rock, watching the forest lighten around us.

PS: My friend Jesse just published a book of photographs, chronicling his adventures in the out-of-doors with his daughter, Clover. You can check it out here. Oh yeah: The book includes an essay I wrote. 

Just Enough

I drove home on the cusp of evening, through a slanting snow, down the Main Street of a town so small the road might as well have been named Only Street. The snow had begun earlier in the afternoon, in the manner of almost all first-of-season snows: Tentative, soft, unserious. But now it was something else, and the wind had picked up, too, and the snow swept and swirled across the pavement in complicated circular patterns. I feared that if I looked too hard, I would somehow become lost in them, so I fixed my gaze just above the roadway, guiding the truck not so much by the road itself, but by the features that delineated its edge: Houses. Trees. Utility poles.

I passed two children standing at the forward edge of a lawn covered by the detritus of rural poverty. Cars on blocks with hoods propped like open mouths. A four-wheeler. Something that looked like a canoe cut in half longways, but this must have been a trick of mind and weather. Through a curtained window, I could see the spectral glow of a television in an-otherwise darkened room. Smoke from a stove pipe.

The children were ecstatic. They were leaping and flailing their limbs, yelling into the squall. They didn’t just hold their faces to the storm; they actually pushed into it, mouths agape, the cold flakes tickling their tongues, the tender spot at the back of the throat. I waved, but their attention was elsewhere, and in a moment I had passed beyond their small orbit, the tires of the Ford cutting dark lines through the skin of snow. I turned the heater on high and rolled down the window just enough to let in a bit of the storm.

Generally Speaking

The leaves were late to turn this year but now are in full riot. It has been warm, almost surreally so, and it feels to me as if the upcoming season is coiling itself, fattening us on sunshine and shirtsleeves, turning us soft and witless before the killing strike.

Every day lately I pass someone putting up a late cutting of hay, third cut or even fourth, the familiar whir of the mower, that sweet smell of fresh-cut grass. I dreamed I was driving our neighbors’ big New Holland tractor across our field, and then, for reasons I could not have anticipated in any rational way, the next morning I was.

Generally speaking, I believe we all know more than we think we do.

Probably

The cows gather beneath the big apple tree down at the far corner of the field. They’d eat themselves sick if I let them, so I run a short line of fence to keep them in check. The apples are amazing this year, which is supposed to mean it will be hard winter, but may just mean that the apples are amazing this year. Part of me hopes for the former; another part would be fine if it were merely the latter. Neither part has much choice in the matter.

The morning fire routine has begun, a small one in the small kitchen stove, just enough to take the chill off, boil water for coffee, cook eggs. Dark outside, hoar frost on the ground. The cows down the field under the apple tree, maybe thinking about the drops on the wrong side of the fence.

Probably thinking about nothing at all.

Go It Alone

Broom corn before the rain

The rain began in the evening hours. It was soft and uncertain at first, then gathered in the dark, and by early morning was driving through the opened window just above my head. Small slaps of water woke me from a deep slumber, and for a few minutes I just lay there, feeling the rain against my face, the cats pressed against my leg, the lyrics from Isbell’s song Go It Alone playing over and over in my sleep-softened mind.

Find me a place

With salt on the roads

I’ll do what I’m told, buy what I’m sold again.

Summer is over, the edges of the days coming closer together. The leaves are turning fast now, soon to wither and drop. The roads will be slick with them.

 

The Smell of the Late Summer Air

Every morning around 8 or 8:30 you drive past the old farmhouse that sits tight to the road. Sagging porch along the front, cushioned chair, an old chest freezer with two old chainsaws sitting atop it. Old, old, old. Across the road, to your left, a small herd of cows, Jerseys mostly, heads bent to the ground in search of food. It is late in the grazing season, the grass shorn low by all those big cow teeth. On a few of the recent unseasonably warm mornings, you’ve spotted the wife sitting in the cushioned chair, reading. What she’s reading, you’d like to know and you think of stopping to ask, but of course do not.

A few miles down the road, you pass another farm. Again, not prosperous. At this one, the front door is always open. Not usually, not often, not frequently, but always, and you wonder at what point the change of season will compel the closure of the door. There is no screen and you think of the flies. Must be something to behold. Sometimes, you can see a man sitting in a chair just inside the opening. Watching the world go by, you guess. He doesn’t return your wave.

You get an email from a friend, says all the prime farms in his area are being bought up by “the rich kids.” They’re buying into the good life and instagram’ing the shit out of it is how he puts it (he’s always had a way with words. He’s always exaggerated, too). He sends you a link to an account, and you hover over it for just a second, but you don’t take the bait. What’s the point? If you had the money, you would do nothing different. With what money you do have, you’re doing nothing different. Your friend is as jealous as he is disparaging. Maybe he is disparaging because he is jealous.

Besides, you’ve got the image of those chainsaws on that chest freezer. It’s almost too much common sense to reckon with. It’s like an antidote to everything absurd. You’ve got the image of that man in the unscreened opening of his front door, resting after morning chores. You’ve got the narrow ribbon of gravel road before you, the ping of small rocks against the underside of your truck. The smell of the late summer air.

Teen Earthskills Immersion Program

Teen Earthskills Immersion Program

It is through immersive, hands on, participatory experiences in nature that connections to the wild are made deepest. Rather than making a craft and hanging it on the wall, you use it. Rather than admiring the forest from afar, you are part of it. This is the experience we are creating with this program.

Come join us at Lazy Mill Living Arts for our one weekend-a-month teen program. At each meeting we will learn what it takes to camp out and be comfortable during that part of the year. In December this might be in a wall tent with a wood stove. Our focus will be on the nearest seasonal wild harvest, from acorns to muskrat. In addition to harvesting these foods we will learn how to preserve and cook with them. We will also make tools and crafts useful to living with the land, such as hafting a knife or carving a digging stick. Other skills and activities will include blacksmithing, archery, tracking and games.

The dates for the weekends:

Oct 3 & 4

Nov 7 & 8

Dec 5 & 6

Students arrive each Saturday at 9:30 am and stay until 3 pm Sunday

Please bring lunch for each day. Dinner and breakfast provided. As always, we strive for local and organic foods in all our meals.

Program Cost: $450 for Fall Session (Oct-Dec), $600 for Spring Session (Jan, March, April, May)

Scholarship applications are available

Located in Stannard, VT

Ideal for ages 13-17

We are flexible on age of participants if someone is really excited about taking the course

Please contact us for more information!

[contact-form]