A Piece of String

Confession... I wrote this a six years ago, and you'll quickly see that--since it references October--my timing is a little off in recycling it now... but because I'm reliving this experience (I'm digging holes again for another set of solar panels), maybe the timing is okay after all...

It’s a Saturday in late October, and I’m standing just inside the big double doors of my ramshackle shed. The shed is not more than forty years old, but like a man who has spent most of his days working in the wind and sun, and a fair number of his evenings fortifying himself with spirits, it looks older than its age. The concrete floor is cracked and uneven, the tin roof is rusted, and the red paint faded. Through the door, I look south, down toward Blaisdell Brook, across the valley to a well-tended hayfield, and then to the hills beyond. I know I need a house, a place with warmth and food, but it’s these hills that always feel like home to me. I never get tired of looking at them. The sun is low in the west, and I pause to notice the slanting light in the sugarbush over toward Messier’s farm. Each tree is not just red or gold; it is glowing with these colors.
The weather has been gentling all day—warm enough to see a few bugs flying, plenty of sunshine and scudding clouds—but now, with the sun sinking into Mary Pugh’s woodlot, the hill is cooling down. I’ve been working since breakfast, raking leaves, stacking firewood, harvesting the last carrots and broccoli from the garden, planting garlic, replacing the valve cover gaskets on my John Deere lawn tractor, and doing a half dozen other chores that have kept me just where I want to be—out-of-doors.
Now, I’m picking up the tools and the hodge podge of other stuff I’ve been using for a project involving solar panels. Tools and lumber have been scattered around the yard and tossed helter skelter in the shed for a week now, but finally I have poured the last of the concrete around the eight inch, vertical iron pipe that will hold the rack of panels, and I’ve filled in the ditch that will bring power to the house, and I can put things away.
I’ve just hung up a shovel and stacked a small pile of the two-by-fours I used to brace the pipe when the concrete was poured, and now I’m puttering with odds and ends, feeling good about the day’s work. As I pick up a fallen piece of string and hang it from a nail, I suddenly see my grandfather, gone these many years, but making his way ahead of me in my imagination as we clomp down the stairs into the gloom of the old cellar at 3 Golf Avenue, Woodstock. I see dim but familiar shapes again as if, with the string, I have pulled back a curtain and uncovered the past.

In the entryway to the cellar, the spaces between the wall studs are packed with containers, the old fashioned canning jars that sealed with rubber rings, emptied cottage cheese tubs, a discarded cookie tin, rusty Prince Albert tobacco cans, and so on. These containers are filled with bent nails, nuts and bolts, fence staples, coil springs, no-longer-fashionable cupboard door knobs, hinges, hasps, screws, fish hooks, and the like. Hanging from nails Gramp has hammered in everywhere, formerly bent nails, I might add, I see tools that are still useful (a hoe, a rake, a shovel, etc.) along with ones that are relics of a bygone time (a scythe, a pair of ice tongs, an adze, a hay knife, to name a few).
In a way, what interests me most is the hoard of salvaged raw materials, the stuff —sorry, Gramp—most people would definitely call junk. Why in God’s name did you save baling twine, one gallon plastic milk jugs (rinsed out), a galvanized pail with holes in the bottom, and, of course, odd lengths of wire and string? I see all the detritus of my grandfather’s cellar and ponder its meaning all in the same moment that my piece of string drops over the nail, and I realize in that instant how like my grandfather I’ve become. I’m a saver of string.
That brings a smile, a half chuckle. I pull up a stump and sit down in the dwindling light to think a little more about my grandfather and the old days. Vermont has changed a lot—a heck of a lot—since he was born in 1904. During a life that spanned the twentieth century, he saw all the great inventions come: the skidder, the hay baler, the barn cleaner, and the tractor, to say nothing of the television, the telephone, the radio, the trans-Atlantic jet, the touring car, and the computer. No doubt that’s why his parents gave him the middle name Edison. Inventions and inventors were more admired in Gramp’s day then perhaps they are now.
Yes, Vermont has changed a lot, but I think some of the old Vermont still survives. If nowhere else, it survives in my dilapidated shed. I turn slightly—I’m getting so I can’t turn that well—and glance over my shoulder. It’s almost a mirror image of his cellar—tools and “useless” junk everywhere. Some of it, in fact, was his. I don’t have his old bridge jack, but I still have his block and tackle with the one-inch diameter manila rope and the wooden pulleys. A couple of his logging chains are hanging next to a dust-streaked window. A mattock, a crowbar, and a spade lean against the opposite wall. I used all these tools in the last couple weeks to dig a hole seven feet deep and install a sixteen foot long steel pipe in concrete. That’s the same pipe I mentioned earlier, the one for the solar panels. The steel company that sold it to me said the pipe weighed over four hundred pounds. It felt like all of that when Lee Franz and I hooked onto it with Gramp’s block and tackle and swung it into the hole.
More than one guy I talked to about the solar project looked at me like I was a tad crazy when I said I was going to dig a seven foot hole by hand. I’ll admit that there are places in Vermont where digging a seven foot hole by hand is not an especially bright idea. There are places in Vermont where stones were made fruitful in the great beginning, and then they multiplied. In fact, such places are probably the rule rather than the exception in this place we like to call God’s Country. Nevertheless, I was unphased. I hadn’t encountered any big rocks tilling my garden over the years, and I figured digging the hole myself wouldn’t be all that hard. Besides, like any Vermonter worth his salt, I wanted to save money.
This may sound odd, since, if you know anything about solar panels, you’ll know that saving money doesn’t feature in such a scheme. I’d just spent about $9,000 dollars on the panels and the gizmo that turns DC current into usable AC house current. Obviously, short-term gain was not a driving force in the story of deciding to install solar panels. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to hire a backhoe to dig that hole, and I can only account for this by saying my Vermont “stubbornness” kicked in. A voice I couldn’t quite identify (though I suspect it was Gramp’s) called from one of the cluttered corners of my mind and asked why I would hire a backhoe if I could do the job myself? My back, of course, spoke up on that subject long before I reached the seven-foot mark in the hole, but stubborn to the last, I ignored it and kept digging.
At four feet, I finally encountered a stone I couldn’t dislodge easily. I worked it and worked it, and worried it and worried it, and finally pried it out with Gramp’s pick axe. Now, it’s a stepping stone between the driveway and the kitchen door back up at the house. About the time I reached six feet, my wife decided to come out on the porch and check on me. No longer seeing my head, she thought perhaps I had keeled over from a stroke or a heart attack and was lying in the bottom of the hole in need of help. Just then, another shovelful of dirt flew out of the hole, and she returned to the kitchen, relieved that I was alive. Still, she insisted at supper that the hole was too much like a grave, and I should consider that fact if I began to get short of breath or feel inordinately tired. In this way one’s sixth decade makes it stealthy appearance.

All this, the return to Gramp’s cellar and the cogitations on my solar project, have come to me while sitting on that stump. There’s a time to work, and there’s a time to ponder. Before I know it, the outline of the hills is fading, and the only light in the sky is the afterglow of sunset. I feel good. I’ve been outside all day, surrounded by fresh air and fire-colored maples, working steadily but at the pace I wanted. A day spent puttering and remembering oldtimers like my grandfather leaves me at peace.
But all spells must be broken. Denise steps out of the kitchen and tells me supper will be ready in five minutes, and being hungry I’m glad. I padlock the shed, because, God knows, the priceless treasures inside need protection, and then I turn toward the house. “I’m a saver of string,” I think again. “Well, it could be worse.” As Gramp said whenever anyone asked him why he was saving a seemingly worthless piece of junk, “You never know when you might need that.” As I walk to the house, I take a last look at the sky. The stars are coming out one by one as the western horizon finally darkens. A steady breeze touches my neck. “Yes,” I think, “it could be worse. And I could live in a worse place too.”