A Trap, and How I Got Out of It; or, The Treacherous Shortcut

Snow came on November 22^nd, in the middle of the night. I had gone down to Massachusetts to my mother’s to pick her up to take her up here for Thanksgiving, though she did not come. That is another story. Perhaps because I didn’t experience the snow falling, I didn’t take it seriously.

“I think I’ll take us back via Christian Hill Road,” I say unnecessarily to my passenger Saturday, a UNH sophomore and Thanksgiving weekend guest named Ugo, who can’t care less which route we take home from our errand, it being his first visit to Vermont. He’s from urban Michigan. I want to show him more of the beauty of the landscape and so swing left out of Bethel and proceed merrily up onto Christian Hill. The slope is gradual, and smooth for a dirt road, and we spin along through lovely views. We pass a bare apple tree decked with gorgeous round red apples that glow in the dim November light, and Ugo begs out of the car to go grab some. I take some pictures so his mother can see how wholesome her son can be.

The miles pass as we go, enjoying fields, the few quaint houses, and the gorgeous distant view of the valley far below to our east.

Far below-- that is the key phrase: I forgot that we had to make that drop to get home to that valley floor, using a road ominously called, at this end, the Oxbow.

Up ahead, the road becomes inexplicably snowier. Wondering, I continue. Next thing I know, the front of the car is distinctly lower than it was a minute ago: a drastic steepness has begun. How could I have forgotten this end of the road!? Instantly it is too late to back up: my wheels’ grip is tenuous on slick, moist packed snow. Turning around is violently prohibited by a ditch at least two feet deep on my right, scoured to jagged new depths by Hurricane Irene. Ahead of me, a ninety-degree corner looms on a thirty-degree slope. My heart begins to pound. My wheels are not gripping well though it’s a four-wheel drive car. The slightest forward momentum of this car and it’s out of my control.

Inch by inch we creep gently forward. (No need to worry about another car, not there, not then.) Ugo is in awe—he’s never been in anything like this situation. He looks at me trustingly and in wonder. “Wow,” I say to him through gritted teeth, “Wow.” After what seems like a long time but is just one-quarter mile, we reach the corner, sliding gently and not quite in position to actually turn the corner. We get out and look down the road. My heart sinks to my shoes. The road slopes down, down, with the nasty ditch on the right and a big drop-off to the left with a slight mud bank to prevent all cars from sliding off regularly--to another corner bearing left far below. I will have to make it down that straightaway and not keep going into the ditch on the right. The distance and the slope combine with the necessity to avoid momentum to make success look impossible to achieve.

“Back up, “ suggests Ugo, puncturing the reverie of terror that grips me, and I agree, “Yeah, it’ll probably move back a little, and then we’ll be in position to turn the corner.” I put it in reverse and nudge the car back a few inches. And again. But it slithers a bit from side to side. I ask Ugo to help me, as I get out of the car and go to the mud bank. We pull clods of cold dirt out of the bank with our bare hands—Ugo does not even have his jacket—and make a trail for the tires to grip to back the car into position to turn the corner. Thank God for emergency brakes! After too many scrabbles of cold mud for Ugo’s non-Vermont hands, the car is in position. I do not mention my fears and say, “Maybe we should walk down to the valley and get some shovels for more dirt.” Because the only way I can imagine getting down that long threatening expanse is by making a dirt trail all the way down for the wheels to grip. It’s a very big job to do with just hands. Ugo says, “It’ll be dark soon,” and he is right.

Just then, I hear voices and, coming down around the corner steps a cheerful couple. “Are you stuck?” asks the young woman. “I completely forgot how this road ends!” I tell her ruefully. The four of us stand and strategize. “How about if you put it in neutral and sort of coast down?” asks the young man, a non-Vermonter. “No, no,” I declare, trying to be tactful about the fact that he is suggesting exactly what I think will get us killed. “I’ll call my father,” says the young woman, Casey, “he lives just at the bottom of the hill. Maybe he’ll have shovels and sand… Oh, but he wouldn’t be able to get them up here. Only a tractor could get up here.” We stand and stare at the straightaway.

I persuade them to join us in pulling mud. They set to work with a will, Casey declaring herself a native, though living in Cambridge and just up for Thanksgiving with Mike, her boyfriend from Cambridge. Just then Mike has a great idea. “How about if you get your left wheels onto this untouched snow next to the bank? Then you’ll have a little traction…” because packing mud by hand for a good half-mile as dark is coming on is daunting to say the least. My heart lifts a bit. It looks feasible. We make a mud path for the car toward the untrodden snow. I hop into the car and the three others stand by to guide the thing if it slithers. I begin, so tentatively. It moves, then slips too far and almost hits the mud bank. Gently, I pull on the emergency brake. We strategize. Casey hops to the left front and says, “Go! I’ll keep it away,” and she applies her shoulder to the left front as I try again. The car goes straight for a few feet, then slips right, toward the ditch. On went the emergency brake. Mike and Ugo go to the right wheel and Mike says, “Okay, we’ll apply pressure on this side so it won’t veer right.” With the small amount of traction from the fresh snow and the guidance on both sides, I creep that car down the hill, my breath coming a little deeper with each car-length forward.

The corner ahead turns out to be on a somewhat more level spot and, getting Ugo back in the car, we take that corner like a piece of cake.

“Hop in! Would you like to come back to my house for some brandy?” I cry to Casey and Mike, but they cheerfully decline both offers, wanting to continue their walk. “How can I repay you?” I ask them, and Mike says, “Do you have any friends in Cambridge, Mass.? I am running for Congress and would love people to spread the word about me.” “What’s your platform?” I ask. “No money,” he says, and explains, “I want to run just by going door to door, explaining the idea of the No Money candidate. My views are in line with Occupy Wall Street. I’ll be announcing my candidacy soon on Facebook.com/nomoneycongress.”

I promise him I will spread the word. Then, slowly, almost gracefully, due to the kindness of those strangers we ease down into the tiny village of East Bethel . We cheer, wildly. We drive the few miles home and step into the kitchen and knock back a shot of brandy each, throwing ourselves luxuriously into soft chairs. And I say, live and learn!

Make Hay While the Sun Shines--we did it

The farming endeavor. As October wore on, I began to wear out.

Every day, hours of physical work—just what I asked for! Still harvesting all month, crops still grew, carrots, kale, collards, broccoli—even tomatoes and peppers until October 20^th at least, because we arduously covered them for the first frost in September. (We’ve got to invent a spiffier way, a thoroughly pre-thought-out way, of covering plants. Old sheets and crumbling wire contraptions just won’t do.) Digging potatoes, garlic, onions—a treat to dig all the successful root crops (something hideous got the carrots and deformed them in scary ways). The potatoes taste incredibly good. Drying winter squash on a tarp on the lawn. Drying garlic and onions: I put them on screens on sawhorses upstairs in the shed where it’s dry and warm (though I had to sneak around very jealous and nasty hornets up there); the old-wood warmth of that obscure shed space is old-Vermont evocative and I felt the abundance as hops replace the dried onions and garlic which got sent to the root cella with the bushels of potatoes.

I realized that scads of mulch would have made my year a lot easier. So we prepared for a satisfying quantity of mulch for next year. And with the time that will be freed up next year, there will be just more and better farming to do...still so much to learn.

Onion sets need loads of hay as soon as they’re planted in early May. The hops need it now—they’re perennial. Winter squashes need it, strawberries, all the things we put out there in the crop field and leave to grow on their own. But also the in-garden tenderer things, carrots and garlic, broccoli and such need it. (And the sea-roses I got from an old Swiss woman who also makes a nutritious green powder from the edible weeds that grow in her yard: plantain, lamb’s quarters, dandelion, pigweed, maybe some others I’ve forgotten. She got us eating these things last June, but then our garden came in and we turned up our noses at them. It’s a spring thing, wild greens, like cowslips, also known as marsh marigolds, you know? Mark’s mother grew up eating cowslips, and she would serve them to her kids in early spring, the practice a holdover from the days when you could not get green things in early spring and you got what you found. Oh, are they bitter! Yecch! A huge patch of them grows in the wet spot I see from my library window beyond the little field by the big apple tree. We will not be eating them again. At least I hope not! We will keep loving their brilliant gold flowers in the April bog, though. Although that’s where Mark is planning on putting the pond—I’ll move them if the pond goes in.)

So in early October, we made hay to use for next year’s mulch. Beautiful days in a string fostered our work. Mark mowed a half-acre of one of our little fields and next day we set out with our rakes and optimism. The way hay was made before machines came along is to rake the long grass you’ve scythed into rows called windrows. Then you move along the windrow with a pitchfork and a wagon and pitch it in. Then you drive the wagon below the hay window up in the barn loft and someone operates the big hook pulley and lowers the two big hooks like pincers into the wagon and grabs up a big hunk of hay. Up it goes, into the window. Someone pulls the hooks in, and the pulley man keeps pulling, making them ride along a rail over the loft floor until they reach the end, where they drop the hay. Hunk by hunk that loft fills up until it becomes that legendary place of strewn, comfortable hay where children leap and teenagers lose their virginity.

About sixty or seventy years ago, they invented bailers. Our neighbors have and still use a bailer, and they did it here for us in ’09. It looks like a large blue metal box which your tractor drags over the windrows (that you had raked into place with your tractor-pulled rake). It sucks up the hay and spits out bales which fly out a chute into the air and fall into the yellow hay-wagon at the end of the little train: tractor, bailer, wagon, red, yellow, blue. It’s great to watch it. Of course now, bigger machines make wider windrows that are rolled into huge balls and encased in white plastic and placed at the edge of the field: the giant marshmallows of modern farms. This is indeed better, you need no huge storage space. You do need bigger equipment and a fork-lift to move the marshmallows. That white plastic technique has also taken over the silage, as you probably have seen. The enormous white worms you might have seen, lying in the back of barns, are filled with silage. The cornfields that border us to north and south were harvested by a big combine in mid-October to make the stuff that goes into the worm. The huge machine looks like it’s two stories tall though it’s probably not; it grinds its way into the fields and mows the corn down, chewing up stalks, corn and all and spewing out the bits into a very large wagon. That’ll be your silage. I don’t know exactly how they blow it into the worm—maybe the worm is like a long balloon. Perhaps you know that the sweetness of the corn cobs ferments it. It gets moist and molasses-y, but as it goes in, it looks as dry and unappetizing as wood chips. Cows love it. I don’t know, though, if pure hay is ultimately better for them. I haven’t learned much about cows yet, though we owe the beauty of Vermont to the cows. We owe them, so I will be learning more about them. Right now, the Armstrong brothers have put some of their herd on their November grazing land, right out our north windows. Pastoral beauty, green fields against fall skies, with cows.

Mark’s and my hay? We found our rakes could not move through the cut grass very well, so we mowed again. “We,” because this was the day I finally learned to use the tractor. Fun! Really fun; no wonder Mark’s on it every chance he gets. It’s easy, too. It made the hay much easier to rake. We let it dry another day, then we went again to the field with optimism. After about six hours, (phew) we had raked our half-acre into five windrows. (Think of them having to scythe it first in the old days,…we are soft!) Next day, we did indeed get pitchforks and toss it into the wagon which we moved around with the tractor. Amazingly thirsty work, haying. And then—we left it in the wagon. That simple. It’s just mulch hay, it doesn’t need protection. And we had a hay ride for some friends, which felt like a big triumph somehow. We’ll dump it when Mark figures out how to use that dump trailer we bought last spring—its new identity is “the wagon.” The word changed naturally. Wagons are for farms.

Love, Josie