Ben Hewitt's Blog, page 53

Let Everything In

My view right now

Other than dropping trapdoor-like through the second story floor of Melvin’s barn while retrieving a round bale, only to find myself plunging directly into the milking parlor below to land amongst a row of startled yearling heifers, yesterday was relatively unremarkable.

I landed directly on my feet, and stood there in stunned silence for a moment, while Melvin and Janet and the boys stared in wide-eyed wonder, unsure of whether to burst into laughter or call an ambulance. Fortunately, for me everything was pretty much exactly the same. I was just 10-feet lower than I’d been a quarter-second prior, courtesy of the fact that like most old barns, Melvin’s features a variety of boarded-over cut-outs, the known purpose of which died with one previous owner or another. Only, this cut out was wasn’t so much boarded-over, as cardboarded-over (it wasn’t literally cardboard, but some sort flimsy, long discarded quarter-inch building board), with the intention of keeping the cold air of the unheated upper floor from sinking into the milk room. Melvin knew where the hole was. Melvin typically retrieves the bales. At one point, months ago, Melvin had even drawn my attention to the hole, saying something like “you might not want to step there.” Ergo, the covering need not bear a human’s weight.

I’ve never really liked being told what to do, so I went ahead and stepped where I damn well pleased.

Anyway. I got a great question via email last night, and although I was actually planning to take the day away from this space, this question really got me thinking. Besides, I’m so grateful to have survived last night’s adventure with nary a scratch that I’m feeling particularly delighted with life, which I’ve found is generally a good frame of mind from which to answer questions.

H ow did you go about developing your ‘voice’?  Your writing comes across as very “voice-y” (if that’s a word).  I’m guessing it comes down to lots of practice, lots of blog posts, 10,000 hours, polishing, perfecting, sweating, just writing, fewer distractions, etc. It may not be a conscious thing anyway, how that develops.

Just wanted to get a quick thought on that. Maybe though you just came out of the womb with a keyboard in hand, ready to go.

And I really loved this part of the email, which isn’t a question, but I still wanted to share:

I count storytelling as the purest form of manufacturing. Out of such simple inputs come these great big, glorious outputs, more powerful than any car, airplane, or building.

Back to the question. How does one develop voice in his or her writing? Well, here’s one thing: People often talk about writers “finding their voice,” but I’ve never really understood that. I don’t think you can “find” your voice, because the moment you go looking for your voice, you’re screwed. It’s like looking for love, or for a contact lens in a lake. I mean, it might happen, but it ain’t too friggin’ likely.

To my way of thinking, your voice finds you. And it finds you through everything you do and all the influences that surround you. The music you listen to. The friends you keep. Where you live. The people you love. What you read, of course. And on and on and on. My family is in my written voice. Melvin and his barn with the hole I fell through last night. Our cows. This house. My affection for this land. Lately, Jason Isbell. Certainly, my parents. The simple fact that I’m about to go hand milk a cow in five-degree-below-zero weather. That’s all in my voice.

But of course these influences don’t just spring forth fully formed into good or even not-so-good writing (and lord knows, I’ve produced my share of the latter). You do have to write. You have to write a lot. I think, most importantly, you have to become as close to unselfconscious as you can become, because when you get to that place, that’s when your voice will make itself truly known.

Another thing: In my experience, voice is not static. My voice is somewhat (though not entirely) different in this space than it is in my magazine articles, or books. I think that’s because it’s simply too exhausting for both the reader and myself to carry the energy and pacing of these shorter blog posts into longer work. I’ve tried, and it just doesn’t work. I sort of wish it did, because I most enjoy the voice that comes through in this space. Maybe someday I’ll learn how to bring it to the page.

And voice is always evolving. I’m sure there are some foundational aspects that will stay with me for my entire life, but I’m equally sure that my writing voice will change over the years. Maybe for the better; maybe not. I don’t know that I can control it, really. The only thing I know is that if I can remain as unselfconscious as possible and keep on talking (remembering that often it’s the fewest words that say the most), folks just might want to hear my stories.

To sum it all up. Voice: Don’t go looking. Be unafraid. Write. And let everything in.

Hope this helps.

Addendum: I was thinking about this a bit more during chores and realized two things. First, my advice to “be unafraid” is a bit flip. On some level or another, I think everybody’s afraid of revealing themselves through their writing (or otherwise). So maybe it’s more accurate to say “be less afraid.” And remember that just as fear is learned, so is fearlessness. Or increased fearlessness. 

Second, I don’t think you have to be either happy or unhappy to write well. But you sure as hell better be interested. 

Who Wants to Live Without That?

I busted out at 6 o’dark this morning to plow. We got a decent storm, enough to put the cats off their usual pre-dawn prowl. They stretched onto their hind legs and peered over the bank of snow that’d pressed itself against the front door, as if the snow itself were trying to gain access to the warmth of the house and, proving themselves yet again to be creatures of comfort, slunk back in the direction of the fire.

It’s a nice storm. Not the biggest ever, and certainly not as big as the pre-storm hype made it out to be, but still. A good storm. A worthy storm. Penny and the boys went about the animal rounds while I finished clearing the drive, and then we all came inside to thaw the wind and 5-degree cold out of our bones and cook up some sausage and sourdough pancakes atop the woodstove. There is no coziness like the coziness of a woodstove on a snowbound day, the wind tumbling across our pasture, blowing spindrifts and runnels, the sausage spitting fat and the sweet ache of blood returning to the fingers. A fellow could want for more, I suppose. But I’m not sure he could ever get much more. The Gods know greed when they see it.

The response to the addition of the generosity enabler (now tucked discreetly – but hopefully not too discreetly – into the sidebar) has overwhelmed whatever wild expectations I might have held, if ever I’d dared hold such expectations in the first place. Thank you all, and this includes those of you who of choice or circumstance have not utilized it. I did lose a handful of followers over it, or at least I assume that’s why they left; it hardly seems a coincidence that I shed a half-dozen subscribers to this blog on precisely the same day I added the button, when I’ve never shed a half-dozen subscribers in a single day before. I do not understand how the mere option to contribute could be so offensive to some, but there is much in this world I do not understand, and the older I get the clearer it becomes that not understanding is a perfectly acceptable state of affairs.

Actually, if you think about it, not understanding is where wonder comes from. And who wants to live without that?

 

Blind Man in a Closet

Tapping before the storm

So as I mentioned a couple times in passing, something went awry with the wiring that feeds the electric motor on the snow plow that in turn operates the hydraulic pump that opens and closes the cylinders that actually make the plow move. You know, from side-to-side and up-and-down, the way snow plows need to move if they’re to be of any use at all.

Basically, what happened is that anytime I toggled the plow control, sending voltage through the wires, said voltage encountered enough resistance that it actually sorta log jammed, and the truck battery overheated, sending a little curl of smoke off the positive terminal.

This actually happened a week or so ago, but back then, the forecast was only suggesting a “possible storm,” and not the 20-inch brute that’s scheduled to make its appearance any minute. So I shrugged it off. Absent a garage or other covered space, working on the truck (or anything else, really) is a whole hill of beans more enjoyable in the warmer months and I figured maybe, just maybe, we could squeak through the next month or so without any major snowfall and I could put off the repair. You know, until next November, the day before next winter’s first storm, when I’d curse myself for not tackling it back in summer, back when it was warm.

By Saturday, it was pretty clear that a major storm was bearing down, so I passed a few hours tearing apart the wiring harness to see if I could find the short. This involved ripping apart the dash, too, since the harness terminates (or begins, depending on one’s perspective, as do so many things in life) at the dash-mounted control. I found nothing. I mean, I found plenty, but nothing of consequence or direct relation to my issues.

So I took the truck down to Shon. I’ve written about Shon before, so I won’t go into any great detail about him here. He spent about three minutes fiddling with the rat’s nest of wires and whatnot, and looked up at me. “I’m a fuckin’ blind man in a fuckin’ closet,” is what he said around the stem of his Marlboro, and sorry for the language, but hey. That’s what he said. This made me feel immeasurably better about having thrown in the towel myself, because if Shon was like a f’in blind man in a f’in closet looking for the root of my problems, what was I? A goshdarn deaf man in a goshdarn coma?

Shon suggested I take the plow to Doug, one of the other mechanics in town, who happens to have some experience with plows, and a fellow I’ve used on occasion, primarily when Shon’s been overbooked, as is his habit. I like Doug, and if we weren’t so loyal to Shon, who’s bailed us out of more self-inflicted clusterforks than I can even begin to count, Doug would be our guy. But here’s the thing about rural mechanics: You must be loyal. You cannot split your affections. Splitting your loyalty between two mechanics is like keeping two lovers, not that I’d know anything about that. Doug knows we’re loyal to Shon, and he seems to be ok with that. I never feel as if he gives us short shrift because he’s not our primary guy.

Doug and Shon are pretty much polar opposites. Shon’s garage is like I grew up thinking all garages were. There are cigarette butts everywhere, and he’s forever scrambling to find the right tool in the piles of tools that are also lying around. Coffee cups. Snack cracker packages. Grease. Despite the chaos, which probably doesn’t feel like chaos to him, Shon gets it done, and gets it done well.

Doug’s garage, on the other hand, is freakin’ spotless. I mean, you could do open heart surgery in there, if only you knew how to do open heart surgery. I’m always afraid I’m tracking dirt in. That’s how clean I’m talking. I bet Doug doesn’t spend much time trying to figure out where he put his impact driver. Like Shon, Doug gets it done, and gets it done well, in his own meticulous style.

A good mechanic is absolutely central to living a prosperous rural life. I mean, essential, because there’s no way you can live the life we do and pay dealer prices to repair your car. You need a mechanic who can keep a rig on the road long past the point any dealer would’ve tried to flip you into a new rig. You need a mechanic who’ll lean over the engine compartment with you and listen while you describe your own fumbling attempts to fix the damn thing yourself, and why you believe that somehow imbues you with insight regarding what the problem actually is. You need a mechanic who’ll patch up the mess you made and then address the real issue, using parts pulled off one of the junkers sinking into the weeds on the fringes of his lot.

Anyhow. Doug called last night, around 6:30. He’d stayed late to fiddle with our plow before the storm, and lo-and-behold, he’d gotten it working, just in time for the storm.

Game on.

Not Tight

There was one comment following yesterday’s post that compels me to offer a quick clarification (by the way, you really ought check out Will’s blog. Dude can write the pink off a pig). The addition of a donation-soon-to-be-generosity-enabler button (thanks, you know who!) did not arise because things are tight. This is not an act borne of hardship. I’m not saying that your “expressions of generosity,” be they moneyed or otherwise, are not greatly appreciated, because they sure are. And they will be put to good use. Fruit trees. A rejuvenated plow truck, hopefully in time for the onset of tomorrow’s melee. Web-hosting fees. And so on.

Truth is, I wouldn’t mind putting even more time into this space. For instance, I get a lot of questions that I simply don’t have the time to answer, but would very much like to. Often, there are subjects I’d like to explore in greater detail, but shy away from because they require more commitment than I can currently offer. Problem is, the more time I put into this space, the more I take from others. Some of those other spaces are remunerative, either in spending money or in the brass tack essentials of our wellbeing on this windblown hill. Writing here, while being rewarding in its own particular regard, does not put firewood in the stove. It does not milk the cow, or run the sawmill, or write a paying magazine article, or make sausage. It seems possible, though is by no means guaranteed, that this space could at some point provide a fraction of our moneyed income, and I would therefore be able to invest even more time into it. Or maybe that won’t happen. Hard sayin’ not knowin’, as the expression goes.

I guess things are sort of tight, or nearly so, at least when measured strictly in terms of finance, although of course anyone who’s been reading this blog for any length of time knows damn well we don’t measure a whole lot strictly in terms of finance. I guess the million dollars that Eumaeus pleaded for someone to send us would be a nice thing. Last night we fantasized about it for a while, about what we’d do with that sort of scratch. The first thing I thought of was all the little things – the reading lamp in our bedroom that’s actually one of those cheap utility clip lights clamped to a 16-penny nail pounded into the topside of a piece of window trim. But really, that lamp shines just fine. Or the handles on our kitchen faucet; the originals stripped off a couple years back, probably due to overenthusiastic twisting on the part of the boys, and Penny replaced ‘em with a couple of tiny wood clamps. We could fix that faucet, I guess, but truth is, it doesn’t need fixing. We don’t have a bed – just a mattress on the floor – so maybe a bed would be nice. But what the hell. When we’re sleeping, we hardly notice one way or t’other.

There’s one big thing we’d do: We’d build ourselves a barn. But even that wouldn’t take but a fraction, ‘cause we have the sawmill and the logs to put through the sawmill. I’m sure we could drop ten or maybe twenty grand pretty quick, though – get the foundation poured, buy some windows, a roof, hire one of our friends to help for a month or two. Yeah, we’d do that. The boys might get deer rifles. Might. I’d buy some cheese. Screw it: A lot of cheese. I’d take down the generosity enabler button. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Because just as it’s not about things being tight, I don’t really think it should be about things being untight.

I guess I look at that button as a means of expression, though only one of many. For the past couple of years, my means of expression has, at least in part, been the work I’ve offered here for free. The work I will still offer here for free. I guess that button is sorta like a farmer saying “here, come eat my food. Pay me if you want. Or don’t.” Naive as this may expose me to be, I want to live in a world where the people who pay me for that food don’t do it because they see that my overalls are worn through at the knees, or because my truck lists to one side, or because my barn roof leaks. I want them to pay me because my food tastes good. Because it fills their belly and because it makes them feel contented in a way they did not feel before they ate it.

And then I want them to come help me fix that damn roof.

Generosity Activism

Yesterday the temperature never crawled out of the 20′s, but the sun was high and fierce, and despite the cold, and the storm that’s predicted for later this week, the intent of the season was clear as my shadow against the snow-white ground. Penny was giving a soil workshop around the kitchen table, so I fled the house with chainsaw in hand, bound for the copse of fir we’re clearing to make way for all manner of edible perennial plantings. The boys were off in the woods with the children of one of the workshop attendees; they’d taken along fire starting materials, bacon grease, a fry pan, and a thawed muskrat. “Come to our workshop! You’ll learn scads… and your kids can eat campfire fried muskrat!” How’s that for a marketing slogan?

Jimmy and Sara are in the midst of a rodeo of fresh cows and our current batch of piggies are fattening nicely on an endless stream of organic colostrum. This morning, as I was upending their morning ration into the trough, it occurred to me that we really ought come up with some sort of branded effort with our pork. You know, stick the word artisanal in there somewhere, along with Vermont and maybe sustainable, and then charge $7/pound hanging weight, which according to this article, is what the good folks over at Vermont Whey Fed Pigs are getting (this being the pricing option for “home cooks on a budget”). I guess that’s the new thing: Slap a fancy name on a commonplace practice – I mean hells bells, farmers have been raising hogs on waste dairy since the dawn of time – and build yourself a brand.

Here, I got a brand for ya: Ma and Pa Hewitt’s Absolutely-Not-Artisanal-But-Still-Pretty-Damn-Good-Milk-Fed-Pork. How’s that for a marketing slogan?

So I went and added a donate button to this site. Because I do not understand precisely how these things work, for a time it will appear at the bottom of my posts until I can cipher out how to get it linked in the sidebar.

I have added this link because I believe in generosity. Since we inhabit an economy that encourages stinginess and rewards accumulation, I have actually come to think of generosity as a form of activism. Maybe the most important form of activism. I believe I am generous in this space, and I ask for no compensation for the time and energy and experiences I share here.

I am still not asking for anything, but rather providing a medium for your generosity, if you so choose. If you don’t so choose, that is ok. I don’t want anyone to feel self-conscious about not contributing, and there are no additional perks for those who contribute. On the other hand, if you find value in the space, and if you have the means to express that value in moneyed terms, know that your generosity will be much appreciated.

If you so choose, but would like to send something analog, anything addressed to my name, Cabot, Vermont, 05647 will find me (you know those dark chocolate truffles with the hazelnut cream centers? Just sayin’…). For those of you who have already sent notes and gifts, thank you. They mean a lot.

Writing is my primary source of income. It is how I am able to provide my family all the things we are not able to provide for ourselves. As I have mentioned before, I am somewhat infatuated with the idea of being paid what my readers think my work is worth, rather than what my publisher thinks my work is worth. This is a very small step in that direction, not dissimilar to the by-donation soil workshop Penny led this weekend. Some people, who know far more about these sort of things than do I, have suggested I sell ads on this site. Indeed, I might now have enough traffic to attract ad dollars. But that is not what I want for this space, and therefore it will remain ad-free.

By-the-by, If I can figure it out, I’m going change the text on the button from “donate” to “generosity enabler.” How’s that for a marketing slogan?

Turn it Into a Party

Keeping Penny company while she milks

While luck is very prominent here, as there is so much of which we are unaware, this topic seems to be also about forgiveness of oneself and partner. Our society seems to ask that we study and be experts before we jump. “Think before you speak” has been taken too far and speaking/jumping has become a source of disappointment and blame. It is not a space from which one can easily recover, as forgiveness seems harder to come by than in the past. There was a time when we did not call in the experts to do the jumping for us.
I wonder, what would be the impact on our nation’s obesity epidemic if all individuals suddenly understood that they did not need the expert knowledge of dietitians and trainers. Lower expectations, relieving ourselves and thus not need to become professional athletes or professional anything elses. Suddenly, you can sing and dance, jump, and, gulp, Leave a Reply.

Ya know, I was just thinking I didn’t really have nothing worthwhile to say today and besides which I’ve got paying work aplenty wanting my attention, never mind the list of farm-related tasks Penny reeled off at breakfast whilst outside the temperature slowly dragged its sorry ass out of the double-digit below zero range. Ah, nine below! Finally, a warm spell!

I think Peter makes a great point about forgiveness of one’s self and one’s failures, and it’s not something I mentioned much in yesterday’s post. But jeezum and by gum and whatnot, this place is full of failure. It’s a teeming mess of mistakes and missteps and false starts for which Penny and I have had to forgive ourselves over and over again, lest the weight of it all crush us into submission.

I exaggerate a bit, of course, but it’s not entirely untrue. I’m reminded of it every winter, when I try – just as I did the winter before (and the winter before that) – to fully close the window I installed so drastically out-of-square. And just as I did the winter before (and the winter before that), I fail, and resolve yet again to pull the trim, cut the nails that hold the window in place, and re-shim the damn thing.

Or up by the barn, the stupid platform we built that was going to be the floor of the new milking room that never got built because right about the time we finished the floor, we realized – for reasons that are far too complex to explain here – that it was a ridiculous arrangement. And so now we’ve got this platform rotting away and one of these days I’ve gotta tear it out. I just can’t quite bring myself to do it yet; truthfully, I need to get a little more distance from the absurdity of the situation.

This whole place is full of these sort of quirks and missteps, many the result of jumping without thinking, of blithely assuming we would prevail over (or at the very least muddle through) whatever situation we faced. Maybe it’s confidence; perhaps, at times, it trips that thin line and becomes arrogance. I do wonder if maybe I should worry about failing a bit more often than I do, that perhaps I’d actually be better off spending more time thinking about jumping, than actually jumping. I’ve always been this way, and while Penny is something of a tempering influence, she’s not exactly immune to excitement and “git r’ dun-ism.”

The flip side of all this is precisely what Peter points out: That our culture has, in general, become overly dependent on so-called “experts.” Broadly speaking, we have become deskilled and unconfident to the point of near-helplessness. Because if you strip away all the 21st century socioeconomic artifice and get right down to the brass tacks of food and shelter and water and warmth, the overwhelming majority of Americans would be well and truly forked. Hell, I bet most of us can’t hardly change a flat tire, anymore.

The reasons for this helplessness are multitude, and are built into practically every demographic trend of the past century. You can’t coax folks away from the land with promises of moneyed prosperity and expect them to retain the land-based skills that are no longer economically viable. You can’t structure an economy to reward specialization and industrial production and expect people to maintain their connection to the fundamentals of their well-being. The further away from these fundamentals we get, the less confidence we have in our abilities to attain them. And I wonder if it’s not just confidence in these particular skills, but a generalized confidence that depends on us feeling as if we are, in some fundamental way, useful.

Of course as we lose confidence, we gain fear. Fear of stepping outside the prescribed boundaries. Fear of turning against the crushing tide of the very trends that are making us fearful. Fear of jumping.

There are plenty of times when I feel as if I lack confidence, when I feel as if what I do is, in one way or another, inadequate. When a real carpenter comes into our house, someone with the skills to truly craft a home, rather than just build one, I can’t quite get over the sense that he or she is quietly noting the many flaws of our humble shelter. Hah! Look at that out-of-square window. Man, Hewitt sure is a boob of a builder. Oh, my: They used spikes to pin those beams together! Philistines! I could go on. And on. But the truth is, it’s just not that helpful. It does nothing to further our pursuit of living our lives as we wish to live them. I forgave myself that out-of-square window years ago. So did Penny. And those spikes, they work just fine. Better yet, we drove ‘em ourselves. I remember it well. It made our shoulders wicked sore, but it was real fun.

Soon enough, I’ll forgive myself that stupid milking room floor and rip it down. We’ll pile up all the tore-up wood, have some friends over, and spark up one hell of a fire. We’ll laugh at our stupid mistake and our friends will laugh with (at?) us and maybe we’ll cook up some sausages or something. We might even break out some instruments and play some music. I’m still working on gaining the confidence to sing in front of others, but I’m getting there, and maybe by then I’ll be ready to belt out a tune or two.

You know, I think that might be the best thing to do with failure: Turn it into a party.

Still Jumping

Penny and me, standing in the framed dormer wall of my office. I’m looking out this window opening right now

On another note, I was wondering if you might be willing to share some of the process you and Penny went through designing and building your house? Any pictures you’ve put up that include the house look so lovely, and as my husband and I are looking for someplace outside of town building our own is definitely on the table. I’ve been looking longingly at the beams across your ceiling for a while now, and wondering how you went about it all. Even if you could just recommend a resource, that would be very appreciated. Thanks!

I’ve told this story in bits n’ pieces, so I’ll try to avoid repeating myself a whole bunch. But I also think the story is in many regards pertinent to some of the discussions relating to work and success and luck and all that happy stuff, so maybe even repeating myself wouldn’t be the worstest thing.

We bought our land in ’97. We had saved $15,000, which was quite a feat, considering I was making about $8/hr at the time, and Penny not much more than that. But we’ve always had a capacity to endure in the name of thrift, and so, through no particular cleverness on our part, we were able to save a tidy chunk of dough working low-wage jobs (me alternately fixing bicycles, banging nails, and selling the odd piece of written work, her working on an organic vegetable farm).

The enduring I speak of relates to our decision to live in a string of low-rent hovels, most of which did not feature running water, and only some of which provided the luxury of electricity. We also lived in a tent for a summer and fall, until the first significant snow chased us into something more commodious. During this period, we never paid more than $100/month for rent.

We bought this truck for $200 and hauled pretty much every piece of our house in it. I even shaved for our wedding in one of its side view mirrors

Anyway. We bought our 40-acres of land for $30,000, which was the absolute upper limits of our budget, since the bank would only grant a land loan with a 50% down payment. Shortly thereafter, we were able to borrow $10,000 from a friend, and that, coupled with the generosity of another friend who gave us two weeks of labor as a wedding present, is how we erected the humble beginnings of our house.

Elizabeth asked about designing our house. I’m sorta embarrassed to admit that there wasn’t much designing involved. I mean, sure, we made some sketches and we talked a lot and generally had a rough idea of what we wanted, but mostly, we started building. Both Penny and I had a modest amount of construction experience, enough that the idea of building our own place wasn’t totally overwhelming, but it’s also true that without the help of our friend, an experienced builder, it wouldn’t have gone nearly so smoothly.

Our place isn’t actually post and beam, at least not in the old world sense of craftsmanship and snug mortise and tenon joints. Befitting our skills, patience, and financial limitations, we banged together a lot of the posts and beams you see with huge barn spikes and sharpened bits of rebar. Indeed, our place is full of these sort of compromises, and while there’s part of me that occasionally wishes we’d taken more time and maybe spent more money, there’s another part of me that’s quite content to live in a structure that was built in accordance with our particular skill set and that mirrors, in ways both beautiful and less-than-beautiful, our characters. Yeah, we had lots of help along the way, and by gum are we grateful for that. We could never have done what we did, as cheaply as we did it, without that help. But despite all that help, in ways both tangible and intangible, there’s no getting around it: This place is ours.

Pre-addition. Note the propped-up front door. It was like that for months. We sometimes wish our home were still so small

We put an addition onto the original 16 x 32-foot cabin in 2001, which involved jacking up the cabin, removing the piers, and pouring a foundation. This time, we hired our dear friend Bob to help us for a summer of weekends. At the time, Bob was working 7 days per week, and since our funds were limited, we got him only on weekends, which worked out right nice, because Penny and I had taken most of the summer off work and could muddle our way through the weekdays, saving all the tricky bits for Bob come Saturday morning.

We worked real hard that summer because, as you see, Penny’d gone and gotten pregnant (ok, well, I had something to do with that), and it seemed only right that our child be born into a house with a roof and maybe even some windows. Which is what happened, though let me tell you, it was right down to the wire. In fact, Penny actually went into labor at the lumberyard, where she had the presence of mind to finish loading the truck and then went grocery shopping before driving home to have Fin.

Our addition was a bit more carefully designed, this time with the help of an architect friend who visited our place and drew up some basic plans in exchange for dinner. Still, it’s a very humble space, simple and perhaps even a little rough around the edges. Again, it feels like ours.

For the addition, we borrowed $50,000 from the bank, which represents the most debt we’ve ever held. Of the many things I am grateful for, the ability to buy land and build a house without assuming an overwhelming debt burden really stands out, and again I have to note that it wasn’t merely hard work that enabled us to do what we’ve done (which is inhabit a debt-free homestead well before the age of 40); it was also luck. We were lucky to have bought land at the right time, before it was priced beyond our reach. We were lucky to have obtained certain skills, and when those skills failed us, we were lucky to have friends to lean on. We were lucky to have the inflated sense of confidence that told us we could do it all in the first place. We were lucky that we worked well together; I honestly can’t remember a single argument over all the months and even years we spent building this house, though I’m sure they happened. We were lucky, we were lucky, we were lucky. Lots of friggin’ luck.

And we worked hard. No harder than lots of people we know, and perhaps even less than some, but still: Real hard. But of course, it never really felt like work. Because it was ours. Because it was what we both wanted. Because as hard as it was, it felt good. It still feels good, and thank goodness for that.

I’m sorry, Elizabeth (and anyone else who’s interested), that I don’t have any good resource recommendations, at least not off the top of my head. Our resources were primarily those of our hands and of our friends; I can’t recall reading any books (this being prior to the era of Internet immersion), though I also can’t promise that didn’t happen. We didn’t take any workshops or anything like that. We just sort of jumped in.

Truth is, sometimes it feels like we’re still jumping.

Hiding

Speaking of workshops, our friend Todd is holding a few at his organic orchard just up the road. He’s super-knowlegeable and a real nice guy, to boot. For more details, check out his website. 

The first annual Beaver Hide Tanning/Skeet Shooting/Monster Truck Rally Rodeo went off without a hitch (minus the skeet shooting and monster truck rally because, as it turned out, everyone was too tired to shoot skeet by Sunday afternoon [besides which, no one had any skeet, though we figured a lobbed tennis ball might do] and, furthermore, I was the only one in attendance who even owns a truck that might, from certain vantage points, approach monstrous status. And one truck does not a rally make, especially when it’s a nearly-two-decade old diesel that won’t start when it’s as cold as it was this weekend).

The workshop was hosted by us and led by our dear friend Nate, and I was some skeptical anyone was gonna show up to learn how to tan a beaver hide, but lo-and-behold Nate turned ‘em right out, and we had a packed house. For three full days, the entire first floor of our humble home was given over to the scraping, brain tanning, softening, and smoking (this actually happened outside, thank goodness) of beaver hides.

From my perspective, as a non-participant but frequent observer as I went about my usual routine of pretending to be doing terribly important things, it seemed like a tremendous amount of work for a finished hide that might end up being barely big enough to make a proper lap throw. I doubt anyone had anything less than 16 or 17 hours into their hide. But then, I suspect the work itself was much of the reward, as everyone seemed to have themselves a fine time of it. There was much merriment amidst the constant bustle of scraping and softening (which requires a vigorous back n’ forth rubbing against steel cables for literally hours on end). There was laughter and story telling and eating and, in the evenings, a little music playing and warbling. I even danced a little foot-shuffling hoppity jig, and lemme tell you, that’s a some-rare sight, and for damn good reason.

It was fun to have the house full of good folks, in large part because the sort of people who are interested in spending three full days tanning a two-foot diameter circle of wild animal hide are, generally speaking, not uninteresting. And it was the precisely the right time of year to wring a little extra joy out of life. I mean, any time of year is right for that, but the beginning of March, over a weekend that continued the trend of zero and even below-zero nights (12 below this morning, yikes), is particularly right. Penny and I have a small fantasy of hosting more such workshop-like gatherings in the future, although it might not be a fantasy. Our house is in many ways just right for it; large enough to accommodate a good number of folks and also messy and worn enough to feel comfortable. Around here, you ain’t gotta worry about damaging the furniture; indeed, the only real threat is that, via collapse or the poking of a malformed spring or splinter of wood, the furniture will damage you.

The other thing is, it’s real nice to every so often to surround ourselves with people who are at least as weird as we are. I don’t mean weird in pejorative sense, not at all, but rather simply to acknowledge the frequent sensation we have of being isolated from many of the socioeconomic/cultural mores of our time. We are incredibly fortunate to live amongst a community of friends and neighbors who accept and even respect our choices; the sense of isolation we sometimes feel is more on a societal level, than a personal level, and that is certainly far easier to bear. But it is still a fine thing to be amongst a larger gathering of people who, for lack of a better word, “get” what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Who dig right in to the beaver liver pate alongside us, who don’t even think to ask us if we’re worried that Fin and Rye won’t be admitted to the college of their choosing, who we can immediately fall into easy conversation with because, even if the exact particulars of our lives might be unique to us all, the overarching desire to live a humble life connected to the wild and abundant world outside our respective doorsteps is shared and tacitly understood to be shared.

That is all for now, although I did want to mention that all the great comments relating to my Winter Reading post really got me thinking. So, fair warning on that account.

Coming Real Soon

This morning I found myself stomping repeatedly on the overturned rubberized pig trough, like an oversized child throwing a tantrum, trying to dislodge the frozen remnants of last evening’s milky slop. It was hard work, lemme tell you: Over and over I jumped, stepping down every so often so I could snatch up the bowl with my hands and thwack it against the ground, and by the time I had the trough cleaned out and the new piglets were snout deep in breakfast, I was sweating good and proper. Not a bad feeling, really, to be sweating in below-zero weather. If nothing else, it’s a symptom of proper labor, and I’ve always felt that proper labor is, in-and-of-itself, a symptom of proper living. Or it is for me, anyway.

I cannot recall a winter of such consistent cold. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of below-zero mornings we’ve had over just the past three months surpasses the number of below-zero mornings over the previous three years combined, and it looks as though there are still a few more to come. “Cold enough, huh?” said Jimmy when I picked up two full buckets of waste milk this morning, and I had to agree. It’s cold enough.

With the exception of that one memorable day, I have not minded the cold. This is not to say I do not welcome the impending arrival of warmer days, only that I know my appreciation of these days does not stand on its own. It demands that I endure something, and in that sense, the enduring itself becomes part of the anticipation of that first 50-degree in March, when the sun will be high and almost harsh, and the sap in the trees will awaken, plinking drop by drop into the buckets we hung the day before. I thought about that this morning, when I was bopping up and down on that confounded pig trough. Sugaring. Hauling sap. More sweat. Proper living.

The boys, however, aren’t down with enduring. Over the past couple weeks, their enthusiasm for winter and all its charms has steadily deflated. They still go outside every day, usually on snowshoes down into the woods to track one hapless creature or another, but they return home sooner than they used to, and have taken to spending long hours indoors reading and swinging (does not everyone have a rope swing hanging in their living room? No? Well, they should. Heck, even Penny and I like to see if we can kiss the ceiling with our feet) and wrestling. This is all fine and dandy until their energy becomes too big for the house and things invariably devolve into an argument of some sort or another, often triggered by an act of treachery that from the hot center of the conflict cannot even be recalled.

Ah, well. So be it. They are children, after all. To them, the immediate is everything. They cannot understand how quickly things change, how soon it will be spring and sap will be running and the snow will be melting and we’ll be trudging across the field pulling 120-pounds of sap – enough to make maybe three pints of syrup – in a sled back from Melvin’s big maples. They can’t grasp that someday, they’ll not wish for time to accelerate, but would instead give just about anything if only it’d slow down for a bit, even if that meant another week or two of below-zero mornings. Another week or two of stomping the pig trough until sweat beaded on their brows.

They can’t fathom these changes, both those external and those internal. But they’re coming. They’re coming real soon.

Winter Reading

Fresh pig’s blood for blood sausage. Pretty, eh?

One of my favorite magazines to write for is Yankee. I love writing for Yankee because of their focus on a region (and the people of that region) that’s important to me. And I love writing for Yankee because I have a great editor who gives me almost complete autonomy over my stories. Finally, I love writing for them because there are not a whole lot of periodicals that run 5,000-word feature stories anymore (oh, sure, The New Yorker, but I have about as much chance of snagging an assignment from them as I do of getting trampled by a marauding elephant in our woodlot).

Anyhow. If you’re interested, I have a couple of stories in recent issues of Yankee. The first is about the proposed Northeast Kingdom Development Initiative, which is basically a mammoth economic development project in Vermont’s least financially prosperous county, funding largely by foreign investors who, through a program known as EB-5, can essentially “buy” a green card. I find rural economic development stories fascinating and nuanced, and this one was no different.

The second, which is not yet online, but is probably at your local newsstand, is about our friends and neighbors, Jimmy and Sara Ackermann and their efforts to make a life for themselves and their new baby daughter Allie Rae on the same dairy farm Jimmy’s grandparents farmed. Jimmy and Sara milk about 50 cows, have a 2500-tap sugaring operation, plow driveways, sell about 50-cords of firewood each year, and hire out for various logging and landscaping tasks. I love this story because it’s about people I care about, but also because it’s about people who, outside their immediate community, work in almost total anonymity (or who did work in almost total anonymity, until I wrote about them). Since it’s not online, I figured I’d give you a short teaser, in hopes you’ll all rush out to your nearest newsstand and pick up a copy or 10.

When James “Jimmy” Ackermann was 19, in the fall after he graduated from Cabot High School, in Cabot, Vermont, he drove forty-five minutes due west from the town in which he’d grown up. His destination was Johnson State College, where it was assumed that Jimmy would lead the Johnson State Badgers basketball team to glory on the court. It wasn’t a flawed assumption: In high school, Jimmy had been one of the Cabot Huskies’ star players, racking up more than 1,000-points, once scoring 35 points in a single game. He wasn’t tall, but he was tough and strong, and despite his muscular frame, exceptionally nimble. Obviously, he could score. Yeah, he was good. 

 “I wanted to play ball something bad,” he told me. We were driving in his big GMC pickup, floating down a rural Vermont road on a halcyon September morning. The truck’s radio was tuned to Froggy 100.9; a male singer was drawlin’ about fast trucks and slow women. Or maybe it was slow trucks and fast women. Jimmy was dressed in a grey tee shirt tucked into shorts of a heavy canvas weave. He wore a pair of tattered work boots on his feet. His dirty blonde hair protruded from his head in an unruly fashion that looked as though perhaps he’d stuck his head out the open window of a moving vehicle.

But Jimmy didn’t play much ball in college because, as it turned out, Jimmy didn’t much like college. Oh, sure, he’d drunk his first beer at JSC, and that was kind of fun. And there were pretty girls everywhere, and that was pretty cool. But when it came right down to it, Jimmy had to admit that college was, well, a little too slow for him. “The thing I didn’t like about college was it wasn’t busy enough,” he told me. “I’d wake up at six and I didn’t have class until ten, and everyone’s walking around in sweatpants hanging off their ass. I mean, what the hell was I supposed to do?” He offered a little sideways grin, as if to acknowledge the absurdity of the whole situation.

So what he decided to do, after two of the most physically lazy and interminable weeks of his young life, weeks which he largely spent gazing jealously through classroom windows at the men mowing the college’s expansive grounds atop shiny John Deere machinery, was leave school to the ass-hanging sweatpants-wearers.  And get to work. 

and

But it wasn’t so much the sheer volume of work that intrigued me as the simple fact that, beyond a small circle of customers, family, and friends, they toil in anonymity. Although they produce food (milk and maple syrup), they have not ridden the wave of recognition bestowed by the local/artisanal/sustainable food movements upon many of the region’s producers. They do not sell their products at farmer’s markets; they do not tweet or blog about their farm and its offerings; you cannot “Like” the Ackermann Farm on Facebook, because the Ackermann Farm is not on Facebook.  In fact, the scope of their marketing efforts can be summed up in that “Pure Vermont Maple Syrup” sign flapping in the breeze at the edge of the barnyard.

In a sense, Jimmy and Sara Ackermann are throwbacks. I do not mean this in a derogatory sense, but rather with the understanding that their lives exemplify a deeply historical New England work ethic that seems to be evolving inexorably away from the land to align itself with our nation’s cultural embrace of digitized technology. It is not that Jimmy and Sara are dismissive of technology, and they own both a computer and cell phones. But if these items were to suddenly disappear from their lives, very little would change for them, and their work would be essentially unaffected. I’m struck by how rare this is.

It may be obvious by now, but in Jimmy and Sara I see something both humbling and hopeful. I am humbled by the sheer scope of their commitment to their work and the good-naturedness with which they go about it and I am I hopeful because I cannot help but wonder how many other young New Englanders are leading lives of similarly quiet, purposeful intent. There are times it seems to me as if it cannot be many, but then I remember that the very nature of Jimmy and Sara’s relative anonymity suggests there could be an awful lot.

And yet, it must be said there are times when I see in them a certain naïveté. It’s not merely their youth (although that might be part of it), and I suppose it is best explained by their assumption that if only they work diligently and conduct themselves with integrity, they will be afforded the life they dream of. In short, that hard work is all it takes. Can this be true? I want it to be so, not just for Jimmy and Sara, but also for myself and for my children, if only because I wish for my sons to inhabit a world in which the honest integrity of hard work is justly rewarded. In this sense, the story of Jimmy and Sara Ackermann is not merely the story of a young couple eking a living from the land. In this sense, it is the story of us all.