Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town Read online

  Idyll Banter

  Chris Bohjalian

  *

  Foreword

  YOUNG WRITERS ASK me frequently if I keep a writing notebook. Invariably I disappoint them when I tell them I don't. In my library in my home there are no journals with snippets of dialogue I have overheard or sketches of characters I might someday create. Occasionally I save the small (and long) sections that I have chosen to delete from a novel I'm writing, but once the book is complete I tend to recycle even those papers. (Yes, I know: The archivist at the college where my papers are preserved is going to call me the moment she reads this, and explain to me in no uncertain terms what an egregious and irresponsible mistake I am making. She may be right. But I can't help but shudder when I envision some poor soul wasting months or years of his life in a windowless room in the bowels of a brick monolith examining the passages from my books that I chose to expunge.)

  And I have never kept a personal diary.

  Last year when I explained this to a reader in Vermont, she corrected me. "Your weekly newspaper column is your diary," she said. "That's your diary and your writing journal."

  I had to ponder this for about a nanosecond before I realized she was absolutely right. My Sunday column, "Idyll Banter," has indeed been both a chronicle of my personal life and a compendium of set pieces that have shadowed--foreshadowed, actually--scenes and themes from my novels.

  I have been writing "Idyll Banter" for the Burlington Free Press since February 1992, and the column has appeared in the newspaper's living section every single Sunday but two: once when we used the entire section for a lengthy year-in-review, and once when we profiled the steamboat Ticonderoga and needed every square inch of the section's front page for a diagram of the nineteenth-century paddlewheel steamer.

  My original charge was, in the words of a paper's editor back then, "to write something that would make people who've lived their whole lives in Vermont smile. And people who've just come to the state. And, I guess, people who are visiting from out of town."

  It's instructions that precise that make a columnist smile. I had a latitude that was agreeably broad, and twenty-one column inches--or roughly 675 words--a week.

  I had lived in Vermont not quite six years at the time, a stretch that felt impressively lengthy to me then: It was, after all, about as long as I had lived anywhere else. I had two books behind me (including the single worst first novel ever published, bar none, an ill-conceived mystery about recent college graduates with the appalling pun for a title, A Killing in the Real World), and a third scheduled for publication that spring. With the hindsight of a person who has lived in one place now for close to two decades, I understand how swiftly six years pass and how little a person can know about a place in that time.

  And place has always mattered greatly in my work, both in my fiction and my nonfiction. Certainly it has influenced these columns, in large measure because they are so keenly autobiographic. As Wendell Berry said, "If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are."

  I grew up in iconically Cheeveresque suburbs around New York City, while my wife spent her childhood in Manhattan itself. We arrived in Vermont as proudly downwardly mobile New Yorkers, essentially swapping a co-op in Brooklyn for a century-old Victorian with a slate roof and fish-scale trim in the middle of a Vermont village called Lincoln.

  Lincoln is a special place. I hope it is not a unique one, however, if only because barely a thousand people live here and with the population of the earth fast approaching six billion, I would hate to think so few of us will ever have the chance to savor the sort of community I experience daily. We are a place in which the ladies' auxiliary of the volunteer fire company still holds a bake sale with cream cheese brownies at the polling station each election day, and we vote there with number-two pencils on paper ballots twice the size of diner place mats. We have a preschool that teaches the kids to sing "I Am a Pizza" in French and brings in a justice of the peace to marry the children's stuffed animals. At the general store, neighbors actually gather to discuss an ailing Latino cockatiel, and the store's owners know exactly where to find someone in a heartbeat who can milk a nursing llama mama with a baby more interested in pumpkin pine than llama manna. And every year on the Tuesday after Memorial Day, our elementary school--all 106 kids and the 14 teachers and administrators--walk en masse to the local cemetery to remember family and friends and, perhaps, find a few rusted G.A.R. stars beside the tombstones of the town's Civil War veterans.

  My sense is that Lincoln shares certain universalities with small towns in (for example) Nebraska, New Mexico, and parts of New York: a powerful feeling of kinship; a tolerance for human eccentricity that is often unappreciated; and a glorification of neighborliness for the simple reason that it is easier to be civil than ornery when on any given day you're likely to run into someone at the library, the post office, or while watching the annual outhouse races--faux outhouses on wheels, a single person inside--that precede the local parade on the Fourth of July.

  Besides, we need each other.

  In the years since my wife and I first arrived in Vermont, there have been enormous changes on our planet, as well as here in the small world of Lincoln--and, of course, in the even tinier sphere inside our yellow house on the corner of Quaker Street. Our nation has fought in Panama, Haiti, Iraq (twice), Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. The country has had four presidents, economic expansions that induced euphoria, and economic busts that produced despair.

  The Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union expired.

  The cell phone was born; the rotary phone died--except in my mother-in-law's apartment, where a pair exist like endangered animals in a zoo. Someday they will be moved to the Smithsonian.

  The number of stoplights between my home in Lincoln and downtown Burlington has climbed from six to nineteen. The number of Wal-Marts in Vermont has gone from zero to four. The dairy industry in Lincoln disappeared completely: It went extinct on an appropriately wet and gray day in December 1992 when Tom Densmore, the last dairy farmer in town, packed his herd into the trucks that would take the cows to the auction barn three hours away.

  My wife and I have had two parents and three grandparents die. We've become parents ourselves. We've owned nine cats and four hermit crabs (so far, we have yet to lose a crab to a cat), and eight separate cars (though, thank heavens, never more than two at a time), including a used 1983 Colt we bought when we first moved to Vermont for $1,100. I drove that car until the passenger doors rusted shut and I had to climb into the vehicle through the hatch in the back.

  Though I hadn't envisioned this column would become a diary, it's clear to me how it evolved into one: I was simply recording what was going on around me. Yes, I wrote about the cataclysmic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001--when my wife was younger, she worked on the 104th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers--as well as what meaning might be found in my Armenian grandparents' bewildering courtship. I shared with my readers my Manhattan sister-in-law's fanatic determination to have a vegetable garden three hundred miles to the north, regardless of how much those carrots would cost her.

  But on any given week I was more likely to chronicle my daughter's birth or my mother's death. Or the pleasure my neighbor Don Gale, an engineer by day, gets from boiling maple sap into syrup. Or the way Don's teenage daughter, Jennifer, memorialized her dead horse, Gumbo Tiger Lily C. The animal had to be put to sleep, and I will never forget what Jennifer's sobbing mother said to me after the veterinarian had euthanized the animal with a syringe the size of a thermos, and Jennifer was gently stroking the dead horse's broad but life
less neck: "It's easy for her to be strong. She doesn't have to see her daughter's heart breaking."

  I have learned so much from these people.

  Perhaps because this is a book about a town, I have divided the columns into sections that reflect some of Lincoln's notable points of interest--or, perhaps, those parts of the village that I have always found most interesting. I have not dated the pieces, but they proceed roughly chronologically within each section. That means, for example, that my daughter might be a fourth-grader in one group of columns and a toddler in the next. She does not, however, travel backward in time within any one section.

  Likewise, careful readers will note that the number of dairy farms in Vermont in one case is 2,300, while in another it is closer to 1,600. The first reference is from 1993, the second from 2001. Make no mistake: The dairy farm is beleaguered in Vermont.

  There are also occasional references to Bristol, the town next to Lincoln. It is a veritable metropolis compared to my modest hamlet, with a grocery store, a pharmacy, and a wonderful little bookstore. An eye-widening 4,000 people live there--four times the population of Lincoln.

  Finally, not all of these columns appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press. The longer pieces appeared in the Boston Globe, most in that paper's Sunday magazine but some in the travel section or the opinion pages, too.

  It would be hard to thank my neighbors for all that they have given my family and me over the years, but I hope this book--an inadvertently public diary--expresses a small measure of my profound affection.

  PART I

  THE YELLOW HOUSE ON THE

  CORNER OF QUAKER STREET

  Chapter 1.

  NOW THAT THE COWS ARE GONE

  THE SUN WOULDN'T rise for two more hours, but by 5:00 in the morning Tom Densmore was in the barn milking cows. When the trucks arrived shortly before 8:00--two the length of tractor trailers and a third perhaps half that long--he had finished milking the animals, but he hadn't begun to disassemble the feed carts or milking machines. That would have to wait until the afternoon.

  It took Densmore and the truckers three hours to march his sixty-head herd up the metal ramps into the trucks, about what the thirty-four-year-old farmer had expected. By 11:30, the trucks were beginning their slow descent on the steep road that had led them up to the Vermont hill farm, winding past miles of new-growth forest, and then through the center of town, with its immaculate white church, general store, and two dozen village houses with sharply pitched roofs.

  The animals arrived at the auction barn, about three hours away, in midafternoon. It took auctioneer Herb Gray less than ninety minutes to dispose of the herd, selling the milking cows one by one and some of the calves in small groups. Most of the cows brought Densmore $800 to $1,100 each, while the calves went for $200 to $700 apiece--not enough to pull him completely out of debt.

  Densmore's mother, sister, and one of his brothers stood by him as his cows were scattered to farms across Vermont and New Hampshire. Nita, Nola, and Nicki--alliteration that signaled the cows were from the same family--were separated, as were three of Densmore's best producers: Kim, Amy, and Fayne. Every year they gamely produced well over 16,000 pounds of milk each.

  Densmore's sixty-head herd was small even by Vermont standards, but it represented the last dairy farm in Lincoln, and the auction last December formally marked the end of an era. Lincoln, a village thirty miles southeast of Burlington, boasted forty-six active dairy farms as recently as 1945. Today there are none. There may be an occasional cluster of cows or beef cattle visible on the hillsides that roll throughout Lincoln, but there will be no more silver trucks from the Eastern Milk Producers Cooperative winding their way through town or trying to negotiate the narrow roads that link the homes in the hills.

  Like many of Vermont's small rural towns, Lincoln has changed. In 1950, there were 11,019 dairy farms in Vermont. Today there are barely 2,300. The farms that remain are bigger--an average Vermont dairy farm has seventy-three milking cows, up from fifty-five as recently as 1978--and the cows produce more milk: roughly 15,500 pounds per cow per year these days, versus 11,500 pounds fifteen years ago.

  Some of the farms disappeared simply because the farmers grew too old to milk fifty or sixty cows twice a day, and their children chose more lucrative occupations: carpentry or real estate or manufacturing jobs in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Other farmers got out when they discovered that while they may have been cash-poor, their land was valued by down-country immigrants: Selling a few acres a year might take care of the property taxes. And some farmers simply became frustrated by the economics of the industry. The price of milk today is unchanged from 1978, but the cost of producing that milk--everything from seed to the taxes on the land--has risen.

  Some of the changes in Lincoln are immediately apparent: Meadows and pastures that once were farms have become forest. New homes have appeared in the past twelve months on both sides of the white clapboard building that houses the town clerk's office. Other changes may be harder to see, but they are no less significant: The three men and women who are Lincoln's selectmen this year are from Pittsburgh, Boston, and Grinnell, Iowa. One of them has lived in Lincoln barely two years.

  What was once a largely self-contained community in which everyone worked his own land or was employed by one of the local mills that peppered the New Haven River, a community in which everyone knew how everyone else would vote at town meeting each March, has been transformed.

  And it has been transformed, at least in part, by people like me. My wife and I discovered Lincoln in 1986. At the time we were living in Brooklyn, New York, in a modest apartment with windows that boasted bulletproof glass. She was a unit trust trader, and I was an advertising executive. We had grand visions of upward mobility, something we defined as a bigger apartment in a worse neighborhood. We knew the last names of most of our neighbors in the five-story brownstone in which we lived because we saw their names on the mailboxes, but we knew few first names, and rarely could we have matched a last name to a face.

  At some point that spring, we decided to move to Vermont. I had never set foot in the state, and my wife hadn't been there since she spent a month at a summer camp near Lake Champlain. We had certainly never heard of a village called Lincoln.

  But we had a shared vision of Vermont that drew us north: an image of green hills dotted with black-and-white Holsteins, an ethic of hard work that was symbolized for us by a mythic image of a barn lit before daybreak. We imagined villages in which everyone knew everyone's name and neighbors took care of one another. We imagined a place like Lincoln.

  Lincoln sits in a valley midway up Mount Abraham, a 4,000-foot mountain, at an elevation of about 1,200 feet. Geography is destiny here. People do not stumble upon the town by accident or because they are driving between Burlington and Rutland. The center of Lincoln is located three miles off a two-lane road that continues thirty miles northwest into Burlington. The road to Lincoln coils uphill, twisting through rocky hills thick with maple and pine and ash.

  Residents take pride in the town's isolation and in the fact that its growing season is ten days shorter than Bristol's, a village only four miles away but situated at a much lower elevation. Some years, there are midsummer frosts heavy enough to kill young pumpkins the size of softballs.

  Mount Abraham, known once as Potato Hill, towers over Lincoln and is shaped more like a toppled peach than a potato. The population of the town is about 975 people, an increase of 100 residents since 1980 but still well below the 1,400 people who lived here a century ago. By the time my wife and I arrived in Lincoln, most of the dairy farms were already gone, but there were still enough cows that the place could be mistaken for a farming community by someone who didn't know better.

  There were three dairy farmers in town in 1986. There was Tom Densmore, who was renting a hundred acres from Paul Goodyear, land that Paul and his wife, Wanda, had farmed since 1945. There was Herb Parker, with fifty cows and fifty heifers, who somehow manag
ed to cut hay in fields steep enough for a ski slope. And there was Norman Strickholm, a man in his early thirties who was renting land for his cows from retired farmers Fletcher and Harriett Brown--land that, according to the Browns, Robert Frost had once offered to buy.

  The road turns to dirt as it passes Paul and Wanda Goodyear's farm. It continues upward toward the Lincoln Gap and over the mountain to Warren, but it isn't plowed in the winter and becomes impassable sometime around Halloween. In the winter, the Goodyears really do live at the end of the road.

  Paul Goodyear arrived in Lincoln in 1945, bringing with him ten cows and a pair of horses from Hancock, a town about one-third the size of Lincoln, on the other side of the mountain. He paid $1,600 for 167 acres, a farmhouse, and a barn. According to the town appraisal, his property is worth $209,000 today. For forty years Paul and Wanda ran a dairy farm in the shadow of Mount Abraham, usually with about fifty cows. Their farmhouse looks out on meadows that are already becoming overgrown with brush. "In 1945, the farms were everywhere," Paul Goodyear says. "Back then, most everybody had a few cows. People didn't go to Bristol or Burlington to work." The town had its own creamery, and there was a dairy only fifteen miles away in Starksboro.