Author: Ben Hewitt

The moon shining through the window wakes me earlier than usual. It’s so bright I can see the unlit numbers on the little clock I keep on the windowsill above my head: 4:27. I won’t fall back to sleep, I know, so I tiptoe downstairs and light a fire. Do the coffee thing.

Last night I skied after dark, except it wasn’t really dark, already the moon was casting ethereal light, enough to forgo a headlamp, even in the deep woods, and the trees seemed to stretch upward forever against the blue-black sky. It was cold and so, so quiet. I skied a different route than usual, straight down the driveway and through town, past the old church, plenty of snow to ski the road’s shoulder. A car drove by and honked a friendly honk, just the briefest tap to the horn. I turned into Bob’s field and started to climb.

It’s been an amazing winter, maybe not one for the record books, but still. Snow on the ground since mid-November, and only a handful of brief, inconsequential thaws. I just finished clearing a half-mile driveway that hadn’t been plowed all year, up the road another 500 or so feet in elevation, and in places the undrifted snow was an honest 5 or 6 feet deep. Even with the big bucket on the tractor it was like bailing a bathtub with a teaspoon, and it took nearly 20 hours, but now it’s done.

I have skied and skied and skied, and twice a week or so my sons and I drive 15 miles to a small basement gym where we lift weights and laugh, then drive home, loving that flush of sweet blood to our labored muscles. It is a humble little gym, none of those complicated machines, just a couple of benches and lots of iron. There are smelling salts on the window sill, and the first time we went, against my best advice, the boys thought to give them a go. They haven’t done so again.

So this has been my secret to surviving this eternal winter: glide through the moonlit forest, staring up at the endlessly reaching maple and birch, stopping where the stream still runs under the depths of snow to hear its muffled gurgle. And then, twice each week, descend the creaky stairs to that little room with my two teenage sons, put the music on loud, and lift some heavy shit.

I left the house early this morning on my skis, light just coming to the sky, the wind gusting from the south or maybe the east. It was hard to tell. I stopped to feed the cows, forking hay off a large round bale perched just outside their paddock. Round and round the bale I skied, prying loose the hay until I’d accumulated a sufficient pile, then skied it to the barbed wire fence, then pitched the hay to the cows, who’d stood watching the whole time in anticipation of their morning ration. Their flanks crusted in wind-driven snow.

Then into the woods, onto the same perimeter loop I’ve skied 25 or more times already this season, and probably 50 times the season before and also the season before that, so yes I know it well, but of course it’s always different, and today it was the consistency of the wind-blown snow that struck me, so silky and smooth, and I moved fast through the forest, the wind still whipping around me, clouds galloping through the dim lit sky.

Down the hill and across the mountain road, then through the cedar stand, then up the steep climb into our neighbors’ hilltop maple woods, now in full daylight, the tall maples creaking loudly in the wind, a chorus of sound from all directions, and in the midst of it I stopped for a minute just to listen, and it felt almost as if the sound was resonating through me, as if I were somehow a part of it. Or it a part of me.

And I guess maybe it was.

I left the house early this morning to meet my friend Tim for a ski. It was cold and dark and blustery; in the beam of my headlamp, I could see new-fallen snow being tossed and tumbled by the wind, lifted from the ground and sent swirling, only to be deposited anew as each gust subsided.

I drove slowly through the dark, the roads snow-covered and slick, our little two-wheel drive car struggling to gain traction on the steep pitch past the intersection of Route 16 and the Bend Road. At the top of the hill, I happened upon a ditch-stuck car, and slowed to offer assistance, but the driver waved me on. He’d already summoned what help he needed.

On the radio, I listened to an interview with a transgender boxer, who’d recently won his first professional bout as a male fighter. He told of how in the aftermath of his win, during an interview from the ring, there was booing and jeering from the crowd, and then they played a piece of audio from the interview, and I could hear the booing and jeering, and the boxer – Patricio Manuel is his name – say I hear some fans aren’t happy. It’s ok, I’ll be back. I’ll make you happy then. 

Then I thought back to weekend, when my older son and I had traveled to a small bar and music venue in Winooski to see a show by band Rough Francis. Rough Francis plays very, very loud music – punk, I guess you’d call it, if you had to call it anything at all – and it’s not really my cup of tea, but my son was intrigued, and because he was intrigued, I was intrigued, and so we found ourselves crammed into a crowd of Rough Francis fans carooming around the room, fully immersed in the noise and energy of the moment, bouncing and bumping and slamming off one another with seemingly little concern for trifling details like, oh, I don’t know, acute physical injury. Though to be honest, I mostly stuck to the fringes, leaning against a wall and fiddling with my earplugs in a mostly-vain attempt to temper the tsunami of sound. And so it came to be that I watched as a middle-aged man in the midst of the fray discarded first his jacket, and then the shirt beneath, his upper body now naked, and this might have been unremarkable but for the fact that he was missing an arm; there was just a briefest stub of an appendage where his arm once was (or maybe never was). But still the thing that struck me most was his absolute unself-consciousness at displaying the truth of his body. The truth of himself.

And so driving in the dark to meet my friend Tim, the words of Patricio Manuel still tumbling in my mind, I could think only of courage, and how little I know of how it must feel to be truly courageous, to follow and live a truth in the face of adversity and even outright hostility. I’m so used to people hating my very existence, Patricio said to the host, and there wasn’t even a whisper of anger or fear or malice in his voice. And the shirtless, one-armed man, spinning and tumbling around the room, not unlike this morning’s wind-swirled snow, the courage to reveal the truth that it’s not that there was no arm where an arm was supposed to be, but that there was no arm where we think an arm is supposed to be.

The skiing, it should be said, was excellent.

The cold and snow came early this year, grinding numerous projects to an inglorious halt, and leveling assumptions about what would get done before winter truly sets in. On Thanksgiving morning it was five degrees below zero, and not much – if any – warmer by day’s end. My younger son and I skied after dark, under the glow of a fat, bright moon, looping through the forest, then across the cleft of the mountain road to the apex of our neighbor’s sloping field and back down again, headlamps turned off to heighten the sensation of speed. Before we’d pushed off I’d made some inane comment about the vastness and beauty of the night sky; he’d merely grunted, and I’d felt old and foolish all over again.

We slid off the hill, then past the old church, over the bridge, and up the driveway, my lungs stinging from the cold. The next morning I turned 47, but it was still cold, still snowy, and it seemed to me as if nothing much had changed at all.

Last night I skied after dark, down past the pond, where less than three weeks ago (I remember the date: November 3) I’d taken my last swim of the season. The water painfully cold then, though surely colder now under its annual rind of ice and snow. I liked the way the beam of light from my headlamp illuminated the individual flakes as they fell. They hovered in the air, a slow descent, each so inconsequential, and yet there I was, gliding atop a foot-deep layer, an unfathomable count.  I remembered reading once that someone had calculated the total number of grains of sand in the world. I couldn’t recall what the number was (trillions? At least), deciding anyway (and on no particular basis) that surely flakes of snow out-number grains of sand.

I turned left past the pond and entered the woods. Not sweating yet, but I could feel it rising, just beneath the skin, that welcome flush before the pores open. The trees close around me, the short reach of my headlamp showing me only as much as I needed to see.

On opening day of rifle season, my son’s alarm rings at 4:00. I hear him rise, descend the stairs, crumple newspaper for the fire. A moment later, the crackle of flames. I lie a few more minutes, then follow him downstairs. He is cooking eggs and sausage on the wood stove. The cat is dozing in his preferred spot on the couch. The stove throws heat, and I stand near it, watching my son cook his breakfast. Not talking, just standing. The smell of butter and egg and sausage and still a little wood smoke from when the fire was young and the stovepipe cold and the chimney draught not fully established. I make coffee. We’re at the table, him eating, me just sitting. Sipping coffee. Still quiet. My son finishes his food, and we murmur about the day, and what it might bring, about the snow that fell in the night. He’s so different than me. It startles me sometimes.

At a little after 5:00 he heads out the door, wanting to be in his stand well before first light. After a bit, I tie on my shoes and head out into the dark, running through the snow down to the town road, which has been plowed but remains slushy. Soon my feet are wet and cold, but the rest of my body feels warm and alive, that delicious thrum of blood, the dark just now beginning to give way. I pass Danny in his truck, already heading to work in the woods on a Saturday morning, and then the road is empty and I run its center, the least-slushy part of it.

By now, my son is up in his stand, and I picture him there, sitting in a maple tree in the cold and quiet woods, thinking thoughts I’ll never know. And I am thinking about how even the people we love the most can sometimes seem so mysterious to us, and yet how we can somehow love them all the more across that mystery, across silence and time and distance, and how this must be the truest love of all, the one unbound by these constraints.

It’s nearly light now and I’m close to home, so I run a little faster.

Yesterday I drove two-and-a-half hours in a southeasterly direction, through Vermont and into New Hampshire, where the leaves have only just begun to turn, to purchase a load of floor tile from a man who lived on the banks of a river. His name was Tom, and his accent I took for Boston Irish, though I could be wrong. He was perhaps ten years my senior, and he moved in an uncomfortable way. He told me he was moving from the house he’d been building for many years. He was fixing up a school bus and he’d be living in that. I didn’t ask why, and he didn’t offer, but of all the reasons I could imagine a man in his mid-50’s moving from a nice (if unfinished) house on the banks of a river and into a school bus, none seemed absent hardship. He had two friends with him, and they helped us load boxes of tile into the bed of my truck, 60 boxes in total, each box at least 30 pounds and probably more, until the truck had settled deeply into its suspension. I drove away, pleased with my purchase, astonished to find darkness already falling, hoping to be home before too late an hour.

Closer to home, hungry and low on gas, I stopped at a convenience store to refuel truck and body, and on the way to the bathroom, passed a woman sitting at a small table. She was eating from a box of candy, and next to the box of candy was an inhaler and one of those cellophane-wrapped Danishes. She offered a wan smile as I walked by, and the sadness in her face was unmistakable. I said hello, did my business, got back in my overloaded truck, hurriedly ate a sandwich I regretted even before I’d finished it, and continued my drive, thinking about all the hardship and heartbreak in this world, the stuff we all carry, albeit in varying degrees, and some more visibly than others. Thinking about Tom and his school bus, and how as we were loading, I’d found a scrap of paper taped to one of the boxes with a diagram for how he’d planned to lay out the tile. And now it was heading north in the dark of a warm October night, in the back of a rusty, low-hanging Ford, in possession of a man with plans of his own, as if any of us can know what the future might bring.

Running fence for the cows around the last of the season’s grass, I find a single stubborn raspberry, a leftover from the long, hot days of August, when the canes bent under the weight of ripe fruit. It’s small and red and misshapen, a stunted heart. I pick it, let it fall into my open palm, tip my hand this way and that, watch it tumble over the creases and calluses. It’s raining; my boots and pant legs are soaked through. I’m cold. The cows are at the gate, watching, waiting. They’ve been eyeing this grass for days. They know how sweet it will be.

I tumble the berry again, note the missing lobes, the discoloration at its stem, wondering how it survived so far past its prime. Are the imperfections the result of its survival, or the cause? I want to believe the former, but can’t say why. For a moment, I consider not eating the berry, as if that might somehow convey respect, or the even just the small appreciation I feel for having found it. For the weight of it in my hand. For the pause in my day.

But no. Down the hatch. It’s not the best berry I’ve eaten, not by a long shot. It’s still pretty good, though.

Last night, near dark, clambering out of the pond, newly charged from heavy rains, I thought about how when I was teaching, I bought each of my students one of those little pocket-size, spiral-bound memo books, and how for every class, I asked them to bring me at least 10 observations from the day before. I placed few stipulations on this assignment, only that they carry the books with them wherever they went, that they consider all the senses, and that they write down whatever catches their attention. I told them that writing, like life, is mostly about paying attention (or as I like to call it – in consideration of my scruffy, young charges – paying f’in attention), and then engaging with that attention. Not letting it just drift by on the flotsam of life.

It was the shock of the water, colder than in recent days, the slow turn toward autumn begun in earnest the week before, and the realizing that I had no good words for what my sudden immersion felt like, or at least no words that filled the hole in my vocabulary where I thought maybe such a word should reside. And therefore, the notebook useless (not that I had one with me, anyway), the limits of language (or of my language, anyway) rearing its head yet again, and wondering how to talk about experience that just won’t fit itself into the alphabet, no matter how carefully I arrange the letters.

But still, words or no: Pay f’ing attention. Engage. I’m pretty sure it’s the best free advice you’ll ever receive.

Our older son wanted a motorcycle, and though we wished it were otherwise, we also knew that wishing would not make it so. He is almost 17, and our sphere of control is narrowing by the day. But I did make one demand: His first motorcycle must be a dirt bike, rather than one made for the street. I grew up riding dirt bikes, and know how they cultivate skills that simply can’t be learned on the road, at least not readily, and probably not without a good deal of pain. You can dump a dirt bike time and again without suffering serious injury, in the process learning the minutia of balance and traction, the razor’s line between the point of no return and the possibility of recovery. You can learn what it feels like to sling the rear wheel around a corner, and you will discover that just because you lose traction with the front wheel doesn’t mean you’re going down; it only means you’re probably going down.

Anyway, through a convoluted set of circumstances that involved a smoking deal on a little Suzuki DR250, Fin’s work schedule, and the fact that our dear friend and neighbor Tom was using our big truck to tow his trailer while his rig in the shop getting a new motor (modern diesels: my advice: steer clear), I drove alone to Middlebury, VT, two-and-a-half hours distant, in Tom’s little Tacoma. 220,000 miles on the clock, chattering clutch, hesitation under acceleration, baling twine wrapped around the sideview mirror. “I didn’t realize you were taking it that far” Tom said when I picked it up. “It’s totally fine with me, but you might want to think twice.” But it was too late for that, so I didn’t.

The owner of the bike worked at a farm machinery repair shop. A big one, with big machinery to match. Middlebury is in Addison County, and Addison County is home to some of Vermont’s largest dairy farms, which are getting bigger and bigger by the year, as smaller farms continue going under, unable to stay afloat in a era of impoverished milk prices (when I was born, in 1971, VT had more than 6,000 dairy farms. We’re now down to about 750, with approximately the same number of total cows. You can see the trajectory). And so the shop was filled with massive assemblages of metal and rubber and oil, and walking into it, I was reminded suddenly of riding with my Grandfather in his combine, harvesting corn on his Iowa farm. This would have been late 70’s, early 80’s. My Grandfather didn’t talk much, and I guess neither did I, so we just sat there, me mesmerized by endless rows of falling corn, him lost in thoughts I’d never know, the radio a constant stream of crop and weather reports.

Anyhow. The motorcycle was owned by a young man named Cale, and I liked him immediately, because when I couldn’t get bike to start by rolling it down a small hill and dumping the clutch (he’d explained before I’d come that it was electric start-only, and the battery was toast), he suggested that he tow me behind his truck. Well, yes. Exactly my kind of fellow. So we hitched a strap to the bumper of his big, heavily-stickered Ford, and then to the handlebars of the bike, and he took off across the parking lot, and once I deemed we’d achieved sufficient velocity, I dumped the clutch, the bike roared to life, and I tried really hard not to slam into Cale’s tailgate. Barely succeeding.

The bike ran great, so I handed Cale his money, loaded it into Tom’s truck, and bucked and chattered my way home, up and over the Appalachian gap, down the valley beyond, through the streets of Vermont’s small capitol city, and finally to home, where I unloaded it alone (Fin still at work), and drove it fast down our little dirt road just as the last light of day faded from the sky.