He didn’t mean the heat of passion; he meant slavery on a farm. I drew a better bead on what good pal meant.
Ultimately, we got the rhizomes in more or less on schedule. Without pausing to inhale, Erik started putting in the training strings, pairs of them hanging down in a V shape from the high trellis wires. When the hops sprouted above the soil, he’d need to guide them to the strings so they would twine and climb. He would allow each crown and rhizome to send up two bines, then clip the rest.
Installing such a huge number of training strings was too much even for Erik’s long days and all the time Earnest and Will and I could spare, so again he had to hire extra hands.
They were a uniquely Vermont pair: a middle-aged gay couple with big beards, callused hands, and hard-slim, gnarly bodies. They lived in an off-the-grid log cabin, eating from their own subsistence gardens and earning some cash from a maple sugaring operation. Lunch was fun: Though they looked like hard-bitten hillbillies—“woodchucks,” in Vermont parlance—Perry had a degree in philosophy, James in English lit, and they had a marvelously idiosyncratic sense of humor, rich with scholarly allusion. They had been together for twenty years and had married the moment Vermont made it legal.
They also worked like mules. But despite the extra help, Erik was still stringing when the first shoots began popping up.
As the weather warmed, my apartment began to feel close, no longer pleasantly cozy but stuffy and airless. My land was calling me. The trees were misting with buds, just as they were when I first saw the place, and the air took on that wet tang of earth and ice. As soon as the ground got dry enough, I packed my belongings into their plastic tubs, loaded them onto the little trailer, cranked up the Ford, and dragged them up the hill. Traces of snow still hid in the north-facing shadows of tree trunks and boulders.
When I turned off the tractor and the engine clatter stopped, the forest’s subtler noises flowed around me. A few birds, just back from southern haunts, called near and far among the trees; a faint breeze told quiet secrets among the still-bare branches. Distant cows lowing, the scratchy skittering of an invisible red squirrel racing up a tree, the uneven calls of geese following the valley to their summer nesting sites farther north: From the sounds alone, I knew I had come home again.
I worried for Erik and felt guilty for not helping him at every available opportunity. But I was getting exhausted. From work in the wet soil, my hands were so chapped that no amount of Bag Balm could smooth them or heal the cracks. I was not Diz and had sworn not to become her successor, but I felt myself turning into her. So I made it clear to all—Erik, Will, Earnest, Brassard—that I would keep living on my land and I would spend time there sometimes, regardless of the fortunes of the farm or the hop yard. One of my commitments to myself had been to honor my commitments to myself.
So I had a mostly clear conscience as I swept the twigs and leaves off my little platform and set up the tent. Erik had bitten off his agenda here, and he understood my sticking to my own with the same determination he showed. Brassard had his, his family’s, fate to contend with, and though our fates were intertwined, I had by now paid an honest price in cash and labor for my acres.
On the first of May, Brassard signed the deed over to me, formally acknowledging that my indentured servitude had ended. It was the beginning of my third year there.
That didn’t mean I could stop working at the farm. It needed me, and it mattered greatly to me. If the land was the home of my soloing spirit, the farm was my home among the human family. I had learned that a family—which by then included not just Erik but also Earnest and Brassard and Will and even Lynn and Robin—is an ecosystem. It is as complex and beautiful as my forest. All its parts, all its members, are continually coevolving, each adapting to each, as every living thing must if it wishes to thrive. It is good to be part of it. My land affirmed that I was a bright and strong thread; the farm affirmed that I was woven into a sturdy and comely fabric.
But that deed—I took great satisfaction in having it tucked safely into my sea chest. These woods were now inarguably mine. It was something like a marriage. But the woods could not confuse me with my own ambivalence: I simply and without any doubt or reservation loved this forested hill. Nor could the woods disappoint or betray me, because I had no illusions about what it was I so loved. The forest was an ancient rugged wild organism, tolerating and, at least a little, accepting me.
Chapter 49
I haven’t explained a great deal about the darker aspects of dairy farming, in part because even by the end of my second year there I still didn’t know the whole story. Finally coming face-to-face with them was a wrenching experience that brought me up hard against my own hypocrisy. I came to appreciate Will more from working alongside him and for his willingness to talk with me as I wobbled through it all.
A dairy farmer carefully oversees the cycles of cows’ lives: their periods of giving milk, drying off, delivering calves, getting pregnant again. It’s a testament to Brassard’s skills that he can manage his herd to sustain steady milk production throughout the year. Of course, he also has to maintain a consistent herd size—he can’t have more cows
