Author: Ben Hewitt

Spring. I awake to the distant sound of water rushing in the small creek that skirts the southern boundary of our land, and above that, the intermittent call of songbirds. I feel like I should know which ones, but I don’t. Daylight coming on, but the sky is low and sinking lower, I can feel it even if I can’t quite see it yet. It will rain soon. The floor creaks beneath my feet. After coffee and chores I pedal my bike up the long, steep climb to Cole’s Pond, the thawing road soft beneath my tires, beads of sweat amassing along my brow, lining up to drop one after the other. I ride under a strand of wire strung from the outstretched branches of maples on either side of the road; a hot line to a fence containing a herd of Angus that watch my passing with that particular bovine breed of curiosity: Interested, but not too interested. Like really if they had anything better to do, they’d be doing it. There’s no grass for them yet, but it won’t be long. Two, three weeks. Another few minutes of climbing and there’s the charred remains of the house that burned last month, it’s stunning to see the fire’s rude work, everything black and twisted into gross approximations of its original form. I don’t know the family, but I heard they made it out ok. So that’s good at least.

A young woman shows up to my writing group, and when I ask if her name is spelled Bee or Bea, she says it’s just B, and then proceeds to crank out one incredible spoken word piece after another, full of these complex rhymes that never quite seem to fall where I’m expecting, and I can tell immediately that this is a person who’s done some living. I mean, who hasn’t, but you know: There’s living, and there’s living, and maybe like most of us I sometimes feel like I’m dwelling too much in the former and not enough in the latter. But really who’s to say. Each will take their pound of flesh. Each will eat you alive eventually. I bet B would agree.

By the time I’ve made the top of the climb and ridden back down past the burned house and under the hot wire, the farmer who strung it is out fixing fence. Lines in his face like a treasure map. He waves, I wave. Morning. Mornin’. I look for the cows again but they’re nowhere to be seen and I guess they went and found something better to do after all.

The hours bleed into days, the days into weeks, weeks into months. The snow recedes, the ground thaws, and navigating the backroads become a test: Of courage (or is it stupidity?), of skill (or is luck?), of sheer determination (or is it simple necessity?). Everyone says it’s the worst mud season in years, if not decades, and maybe they’re right. My memory for such things is scant, so I just nod along: Yeah, it’s bad. Mud and war. That’s all we talk about anymore. Well, that and the price of gas. So: Mud and war and gas. Hell, a fellow could get nostalgic for the days when covid was all we had to worry about.

In the morning I ride my bike while the road surface is still solid from the nighttime freeze. Just over the crest of the mountain, there’s a moose standing in the road, all leg and nose. I slow to a stop and watch, and I can see that it’s not healthy: It’s thin and its coat is rough. It holds its head at an odd angle. The moose looks my way, then slowly turns and begins to trot downhill, straight down the middle of the road, and since that’s the way I’m headed, too, I follow at a distance until I see it stumble and then I stop and turn back. I don’t want to watch the moose anymore. I just want it to turn into the woods and find a quiet place to rest and maybe even die if that’s what needs to happen. But when I look back over my shoulder, I can see that it’s still headed down the road’s corridor with its head at that weird angle, its gait unsteady, like a child just learning to walk.

The road pitches steeper. I stand to drive to pedals, and pretty soon I’m back up and over the top. And even though it’s cold and starting to spit rain and the road is rough and the sky is even lower than it was just a few minutes ago, I know that from here to home, all I really have to do is hold on for the ride. So that’s exactly what I do.

Six days a week my son’s alarm goes off at 4:30. He’s working a big sugaring operation an hour-plus drive from here; they start at first light and end at last, and some nights even later than that. They’ve got maybe 5 weeks to make it or break it, and those 5 weeks start about now. Last year, they broke it, and so did pretty much everyone else making syrup. It won’t be good if that happens again, though I hear prices are up, and some are speculating that all the cold nights we’ve had are setting us up for a good season. Then again, someone’s always speculating about something, are they not?

Over the weekend, I ski with an old friend, someone I haven’t seen for nearly two years. I take him on my favorite loop, the one that climbs up through a shallow saddle, then veers up and to the right to the knife’s edge of a ridge that drops in a series of cliff bands to the east. We trace the ridge northward along the edge of the cliffs, then cross to the next ridge over, and follow it back to our starting point. The new snow – six inches or more – is so, so smooth and light, there’s hardly any moisture to it at all, it’s like cold dust, like smoke, like something that appears in a dream from which you awaken unable discern fact from fiction. And maybe even unsure if such discernment is necessary.

The news unfolds in slow-moving tragedy; one hardly knows how to respond. Renounce the Russian vodka, I suppose. Pay what it costs to fill the damn truck and be grateful you’re not huddled in some damp basement waiting for the strike you know is coming, just not when. Hope for the things that seem the least possible, while not closing an eye to those that seem the most.

Then just do what needs to be done. Get up in the dark with your son. Light the fire. Make the coffee. And for God’s sake, don’t you dare forget to give him a hug as he walks out that door.

It snows, then thaws, then freezes hard again, creating a crust that I quickly punch through when I try to walk on it. Later in the day, driving, I pass an older mobile home far down the other side of the mountain, where two young girls and a dog are running across the yard. The crust is strong enough to bear their modest weight, and it’s true that I’m a little jealous, but it’s also true that maybe that’s exactly the way it should be, that part of the magic of childhood is being able to do at least a few things the big people can’t: Scamper atop the crusted snow, nap whenever fancy strikes, squeeze into small places. Watching the girls and the dog, I remember riding my BMX bike atop the frozen snow around my parents house, that incredible sense of freedom to go anywhere I pleased, up and over and around the natural hummocks of the forest floor, the whole world (or at least what seemed like the whole world to a 10 year old boy from Vermont) transformed into something that defied the laws of physics as I’d previously understood them.

Pedal and swoop, pedal and swoop. Four decades ago but damned if I can’t feel it now, exactly as it was. Exactly as if all those intervening years only prove the simple truth that time is an illusion. But attention is definitely not.

Deep cold has lingered for weeks, though the January sun is strong and already there’s a spring-like quality to the afternoon light, the way it slants across the landscape, across my upturned face, forces me to squint my eyes or simply close them altogether. We’re still a bit lean on snow – the blizzard tilted eastward and left us in its shadow – but the skiing in the woods and fields is excellent and by now I’m well enough acclimated to the weather that even this morning, at an even dozen degrees below, I soon found myself hatless and sweating as I climbed an old skid road deep in the woods just over the crest of the mountain. It was the first time I’d come this way, but already I knew I’d be back, I liked the openness of the trees – sugar maple, mostly, with a scattering of birch – and the contours of the land, rising steep on my left to rock abutments before topping out at what appeared to be a sort of plateau and dropping on my right into a snowed-in drainage where I suspected I could still find fluid water under the snow if I were inclined to go looking. Which I was not. The air was stone still and when I stopped to linger I could hear nothing but the muted noises of my body’s mysterious inner workings: A vaguely electrical hum that’s more sensation than sound, a steady whump, the occasional gurgle. Then back to it, leaning forward to get my weight positioned just right so that my skis would find traction against the slope.

An hour later I emerged from the woods into the full force of the sun and started gliding back toward the road along the edge of a large, south-facing logging cut, mindful of the stubble lurking just under the surface of the shallow snow. Yet the slope kept pitching downward, and the temptation to let ’em run got the best of me, and so I now I leaned back in hopes that doing so would allow the tips of my skis to ride up and over any unseen hazards until I was legitimately going pretty fucking fast with no real plan other than to keep riding it out and trying to gently steer between the more-obvious perils.

Soon I’d reached the bottom (with no ensuing calamity!) and then turned to ski atop the snowbank at the side of the mountain road, now in-and-out of the sun according to the placement of trees, the sensation of cold settling back into my body but even as I thought to reach for my hat, I could see the nose of the truck up around the bend and instead I just skied a little faster.

And that was the last morning of January.

There’s barely any snow. It’s been below zero once that I’ve noticed, and maybe twice more that I haven’t. In the mornings I fry eggs for the boys on the wood stove; it’s dark outside and they sleepily dress for work while I tend to their breakfast. The fire whooshes and the eggs are done so I slide them onto chipped plates. Two yolks intact, one broken, one leaking just a little. Not really broken, not really intact. No one cares one way or another, it’s just a game I play, trying to keep those yolks whole. I’m not too good at it.

They eat and leave. I ski on the scratchy snow, do chores, then drive over the mountain. It snowed a little the night before, it’s still snowing now, in fact, but so lightly you could almost miss it. Maybe an inch total, and yet the old man who lives in the trailer on the other side of the mountain is shovelling his driveway. He’s cleared the neatest of paths down one side of his drive and seems to be working his way back up the other side. The edges of his path are so crisp I want to stop and take a photo. The trailer is old, but clean. It looks freshly painted. The old man looks spry and happy and I watch him in the rearview mirror for as long as I can.

On Tuesday I drive to P&R Lumber to pick up a few sticks of lumber, along my way passing through the small town of Hardwick, which on this stone-grey day is even quieter than usual. I’ve been going to P&R since I was a teen, back when my friend Trevor and I had an odd jobs business we called Troglodyte Construction, which we operated out of whatever decrepit rig was most road worthy at any given moment. There was a ’71 VW Bug, a similar vintage VW van, a ’79 Cadillac, a mid-70’s Buick LeSabre I called Putris, and a handful of others that escape memory. Trevor was a good builder, particularly for a 16-year-old; I mostly rode on his coattails and tried not to screw up anything too awful bad. We listened to a lot of Van Halen on cassette tapes (Panama! Hot For Teacher! Ain’t Talking ‘Bout Love!) and thought we were cool. Maybe we were.

(I feel like I must’ve written about all this before… but, anyway…)

I like going to P&R. It’s a sawmill and a lumberyard, so there’s always noise and motion – the constant whine of the mill, and the back-and-forth of the front loader moving logs and lumber. The smell is amazing – fresh cut hemlock and spruce, the diesel exhaust of the loader – and I like driving past the towering piles of logs to the towering piles of lumber, where I’ll load what I need and write it down on a scrap of paper with the old stub of pencil I keep in the truck for precisely this purpose, and then pay in the little office where pretty much no one wears a mask nor has since this whole shitshow started. Not saying that’s good or bad; it just is. The office walls are covered with old logging photos and postcards of thanks people have sent and sayings like the one that reads “we shoot every third salesman. And the second one just left.” There’s another about taxes, but I can’t remember quite what it says, though I’m fairly certain it’s not pro-taxation, if you know what I mean.

When I go to pay with my little scrap of paper in hand, there’s a scrawled note on the counter that says “out in the mill,” but just as I’m about to head out to the mill, Aaron comes through the door and takes my money. At least I think his name’s Aaron; I don’t know him the way I know Ben, who’s run the place since his father and uncle passed on, and who’s about my age and who’s now been selling me lumber for 30 years or more. I’m a little bummed not to see him today; we always catch up a bit, ask after one another’s families and so on. And to tell you the truth, if there’s anything I’m needing right now, it’s catching up a bit with someone I’ve known for as long as I’ve been legal to drive, if only the way I know Ben, at just enough of a distance to have a sense of his character and mannerisms, but not a whole lot more. Which is actually a pretty good way to know someone, come to think of it.

With Aaron it’s just “thanks” and “have a good day,” and I’m back on my way, back past those 1500 guns and the dump truck and trailer (hood still up, no sign of the man I saw before), back through the under-populated heart of town, and to home, where I stoke the wood stove to make coffee and where, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, my favorite Van Halen song is but a few clicks away.

Later in the day, when I drive in the opposite direction on yet another errand, I find that someone has carefully situated a fully intact gingerbread house at the apex of a roadside snowbank, and though I don’t claim it – don’t even snag a Hersey’s Kiss or three – I’m delighted simply by its presence and am already planning to come this way again tomorrow. You know, just to see if it’s still there.

Holy smokes, this blog has somehow survived another year. Thank you all so much for reading and commenting. It means a lot.

The shortest day comes and goes. There is scant snow; I’ve plowed the drive only twice. The temp rises and falls and rises again. The New Year is barely a week away and it feels as if winter has yet to begin. In the mornings I draw water for the cows and then ski through Bob’s hayfield, climbing to the height of the land where the sugar maples begin. Along the way I pass the bench that Bob has situated at the top of the field. I sat on it once. It’s a real nice view. This morning, though I didn’t sit, I pause and glance back down the long slope of the field and across the road to the church and beyond that to our barn on the hill which from this vantage point looks small and quaint and not nearly as messy as I know it to be.

Every year I await the passage of the Solstice with a certain anticipation, but this year everything seems so frayed and tenuous that I can’t quite muster my usual enthusiasm for the transition. At least there is snow, I think. At least there is the familiar routine of my morning ski. At least there is this view stretched out before me: A church, a barn, and, if I looked carefully enough, the distant specks of the cows gathered at their morning hay.

More snow, this time upwards of seven inches, enough to shovel and plow and ski. The lattermost I do the morning after the storm, before the former two (priorities, ya know?), guided by the thin tunnel of my headlamp for the first 20 minutes or so, until enough light has come to the sky that I can flick off the headlamp and stash it in my jacket pocket.

On my way home through town, past the old church that sits across the road from the town hall, I see Kyle, who comprises the entirety of our road crew. This means he runs the grader and the plow and the backhoe and the dump truck and pretty much anything else that needs running in the service of the 16 or so miles of gravel roads that fall within town lines. He’s stepping out of his tall F250, on his way to drop his time sheet for the previous week.

Right next door to the town hall, I happen upon Peter, who’s out shovelling his driveway with one of those big, blue push scoops. Peter lives alone, has an old Massey tractor he uses to pull an old wooden wagon he uses to gather firewood to heat his old farmhouse. I’m guessing he’s 60 or so. In May, when we had our covid-friendly, outdoor town meeting, we had to talk loud over the clatter of Peter’s tractor, but no one seemed to mind.

I stop. Peter asks how the skiing is; I tell him it’s good. He comments that the weather doesn’t look too bad; I agree. We both have something to say about what we’ve heard from someone who knows someone else who supposedly said that the Farmer’s Almanac is predicting an up-and-down sort of winter, so I know it must be true. I ski on.

It’s hard to believe it’s already December. It’s hard to fathom another winter of this virus, though I notice how many people seem to have stopped trying so hard not to catch it. It’s difficult to imagine exactly what awaits on the other side of this winter, or the one after that. I keep hearing the phrase “new normal” as if there was an old normal, as if we’ve somehow forgotten that this is what life does – give and take and ebb and flow and bend and straighten over and over again. Always the newly graded road needing grading again. Always the snow falling in the wake of the plow, blowing and swirling into drifts that disorient the landscape. Always the fire burning down to ashes that by dawn have gone cold.

The weekend brings the first snow of consequence, enough to smooth the rough edges, cover the bootprints pressed into the half-frozen mud, stifle the cats’ usual pre-dawn pacing: They’re not so eager to get outside now. Later in the day I’ll drive north on Route 16, where the road is lined with tamaracks turned a deep gold. The afternoon light will be draining from the sky, and those golden trees will seem almost to illuminate my path. Where the tamarack corridor breaks I’ll see into the dusky forest, devoid of foliage but for the occasional beech, which hold their leaves through winter. Marcescence is the word for it. The leaves are known as marcescent leaves. Try saying it aloud. It’s a great word.

The boy gets up early each morning to chase deer. He’s not seen much yet. I get up early each morning to light the fire, watch the sky change, drink coffee, check email, read news I’d be better off not knowing. The snow-averse cats doze alongside the wood stove. Later, I go out to the barn to lift weights. I watch the cows through the opening of the big sliding door while I do deadlifts. One of the cows – the heifer – is licking the others’ neck, right along the collar line. The one being licked – Pip – has extended her neck for better access. It must feel so good.

I lift the weights up and set them down again and again. I love the solid sound of the clanking iron. I love the last, labored repetition of each set, the moment between thinking I might not make it and knowing I will. I love walking out of the barn 40 minutes later, my entire body flush with blood. It’s like a hum in my bones.

The day has arrived in full. The cows are at their hay. Someone has chased the cats outside and now they sit on the wide cherrywood sill of the door, paws tucked under, watching my approach through the falling snow.

Here’s a great version of a great song.

Here’s a great conversation with a great songwriter.