One more rather wonderful thing happened this afternoon. As we did our chores, Will called me “Annie,” the way Erik does. It just came spontaneously. I guess, after hearing Erik call me that all day, maybe it just seemed to fit. Later, Brassard did, too: “Annie.” Earnest hasn’t adopted it, maybe because he already has his own personal name for me.
But Annie: I like it. “Ann” seems formal and stiff, an overly frilled English queen. “Annie” is less pretentious and more countrified and it’s also the name I’m called by family.
Chapter 40
It was mid-September, meaning there were only so many weeks until the ground froze and working in the soil would get impossibly difficult. Erik had to work fast to plant his crowns. With any other crop, there would have been no chance, given the rocks: The tillable fields Brassard and his fellow farmers had enjoyed for the past two hundred years had been hacked from this land by families willing to gouge out each stone and stump with shovels and mattocks, ropes and ox-pulled sledges, over many years.
But hops is not a ground-growing crop. It’s a climber, so the farmer builds it a vertical field—a trellis. As Erik explained, you set twenty-foot posts into holes in the ground every forty feet, string cables between them, and then put down vertical ropes for the hops vines—actually, “bines”—to snake their way up. The hops farmer can just leave the biggest rocks where the glaciers did and work among them. Erik needed to get the crowns into the ground as soon as possible, but first he had to soften the soil, erect the posts, and string the trellis cables so that in spring they’d be ready to go.
Erik’s deal with Brassard had included use of the tractors and implements at an hourly rate. But Jim’s Deere was off limits unless he drove it himself, and the big gray Harvester was not designed for this kind of work. That left the Ford and the little Bobcat, available when not needed elsewhere.
I could only observe the process in glimpses caught between chores, but there was something ceremonial about the day Erik started carving out his hop yard. At the very least, it was one man trying to build his future, to put his ragtag life on a better footing, much as I had done in buying my land. It could also be the beginning of renewal at Brassard’s farm.
He started by brush-hogging that long strip between the road and my land. I had always assumed that brush-hogging involved pigs—I don’t know, putting a bunch of them on some land and letting them root around and eat all the vegetable matter. But it doesn’t. It involves a tractor, to which you attach what is really just a bigger version of a domestic lawnmower—a broad flat platform covering two monstrously powerful spinning blades and supported by little caster wheels. You drag it up and down, and the whirling blades hack through grass, reeds, bushes, saplings—anything. It makes a terrifying noise of rending and thrashing, and sometimes a hair-raising metallic gunshot when a blade hits a rock. It’s a crude tool, but all growing things fall behind it, turned to chips and shreds fine enough to work into the soil.
Erik spent a bruising day cutting brush from those six acres, and he came back to the farm deaf, exhausted, and coughing from breathing so much diesel exhaust. He’d had to give some of the bigger rocks a wide berth, so the next day we delivered a more nuanced shave with a huge walk-behind cutter, a Gravely. Partly to show off my hardihood to Erik, I volunteered. It went like this: You grip the two-wheeled, four-hundred-pound Gravely by handles extending to the rear, controlling it with levers for clutch and blade and braking. When you engage the drive wheels and try to navigate around rocks on uneven ground, it flings around a person of my weight like a dog shaking a rabbit. After about an hour, you are exhausted. Then Earnest takes over and the bitching thing becomes docile and compliant for a couple of hours while you watch, lying torpid and dead useless against the windshield of your car, trying to gather enough energy to milk the cows.
Erik had towed the prehistoric metal-wheeled tractor out of the field earlier, but when they finished brush-hogging he repositioned it at the edge of my parking area, where my uphill trail began and where we went in and out of the scrub field. I liked the look of it there.
Erik’s most grueling challenge was opening up soil with so many rocks in it—the same dilemma every early Vermont farmer had faced. He couldn’t use any of Brassard’s implements, which were too wide and designed for broader, softer fields that had been cleared of rocks and long since leavened by a century of regular tilling.
Will and Earnest and Erik and I considered the problem as we looked out over the freshly bristle-cut field, swigging coffee from big plastic cups. The boulders humping up here and there from the mash of shredded grass and brush were not the problem. Beneath the surface, the ground was full of rocks ranging from the size of my hand to the size of a gunnysack of feed grain. Now Erik had to break that soil, soften it, aerate it, and fertilize it with fermented manure. Fortunately, he didn’t have to open up all the soil, just thin strips with fourteen feet of unbroken ground between them. Still, it was a daunting prospect: eight strips, each two hundred feet long, per acre.
Will proposed using the Ford’s backhoe attachment, a jointed arm and digger bucket that, when folded, resembled a scorpion’s stinger tail. You’d move the tractor along the trellis line, stop, dig and scrape with the toothed bucket, lift out the larger rocks and set them aside, then smooth the dirt back into place with back-of-bucket swipes.
