Technical Writer

A Dietary Revision

Recently, around the time I began to take long early morning hikes through my town, I changed my dietary habits of a lifetime.  I have always liked Haagen Dazs, for instance, but I no longer eat ice cream.

I really like ice cream.  When I lived on Stone Mountain, before leaving the grocery store I would roll a newly purchased pint of ice cream in the day's entire newspaper, wrap that in plastic, and pack it all into a special bag to preserve cold foods.  I would drive the jeep home to the bottom of the mountain and hike to the house.  I would unpack my treat and sit on the porch to read the paper, and tuck into the ice cream, now the consistency of soft-serve.

I am a bit like an alcoholic.  Hello, my name is Ann, and it has been 6 weeks since I ate any food with any dairy (think of butter and yogurt), gluten-bearing grain (that means wheat and oats), and sugar.  I and my husband have increased our daily fiber intake to at least 35 grams, and we have so many vegetable and fruit leavings from meal preparation that we have to buy a compost bin because it seems a crime to throw it all down the sink disposal.

Alternatively, I could take the garbage out on my morning walks and strew banana peels and carrot tops along the way.  I won't do that, of course, because that is not a reasonable liberty a person may take and yet remain a member of an orderly society. 

Saturday Flowers May 16; Early Morning Walk

I am waiting for a little more light outside before I set off on the brisk morning walk that lately I have taken up.  I used to hike over hill and dale, but that was when I was living in rural isolation and my friends were whatever wildlife I could scare up in the woods or by the big pond on the other side of Stone mountain.  In those walks I have come upon deer, foxes, bear, moose, an otter or two, birds in size from the wren--little Druid bird, to the massive golden eagle, and once, a silent, Eastern coyote passed like a drift of smoke across the road just a few feet in front of me. I treasured every animal encounter on the mountain and felt particularly honored when its creatures allowed me to see their passage.

It is 37 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but I have the kitchen door open to the garden so I can hear the early morning birds in their second chorus.  The first occurs a good hour before dawn, and I missed it.  I have turned off the heat so the furnace doesn't clank to life on this May morning.  My husband is peacefully snoozing still, and I believe that he sleeps more soundly knowing that I am up and taking care of all matters.

I have written in months past about my life on Stone Mountain in the backwoods of New Hampshire, but I never discussed the kinship I experienced with the life of the mountain and the mountain itself.  It was on Stone Mountain that I learned to be in the woods in a non-disruptive way so that critters would not be too fearful of me upon encountering a human.

Another thing I learned while living alone for so long was how to project myself outside my body.  Let me tell you how its done.

After a period of silent meditation during which I called to myself the protection of all I honored--my fellow critters on Stone Mountain and the mountain itself, as well as the central figure of my faith, I would lie down on the floor with my arms and feet stretched out, and close my eyes. I would tell myself to feel my extremities, and then feel beyond them a few inches, then a few feet. Then I would tell myself to experience being outside the house, perhaps on the roof, or on the stone ridge near where the foxes lived, and see what I could see.  Mind you, I did this in incremental steps, over weeks, before I grew adventuresome in my travels.  The travels themselves will await another time to tell, but you can know that upon returning to my home, being my body on the floor, I always experienced a sideways jolt as if I were falling back inside myself, at an angle. It felt as if I had been upright before and suddenly found myself for that instant of reconnection inside a body that was lying on a different plane.  I got used to it.

It's time to go outside and take a walk through Frederick now.  The people I meet will be walking their dogs or running.  There is a nice camaraderie with these folks because we share the enjoyment of the fresh air and the quiet morning.

The flowers in the photo are Saturday's, and my walk is now.

Washing Clothes with the James Washer

The picture of the James Washer in the Gaiam catalog reminds me how I washed the laundry at home in my old Cape Cod house on the mountain.  The advertisements for the washer promise that you can launder as many as seven sheets at one time, but I know this assertion is a stretch.  The washer held two full-size flannel sheets, or a few days of other laundry. 

Wash day was a serious production that took hours and hours of intense work.  First, the water had to be heated.  I'd fire up the Glenwood Modern E wood-burning stove (I wrote about the stove earlier) and position the copper boiler over two burners of the stove to heat water to fill the washer. I'd fill the copper boiler with several buckets of water and transfer hot water to the washer, and then plunge the laundry into the water.

When the clothes were clean,  I opened the spigot (you can see it under the machine) and drained the washer into the bucket, and dumped the bucket into the claw-foot bath tub.  (The tub and the sink both drained into a stone-filled section of an old, barn cellar hole.) After the water was drained, I'd press the clothes through the hand-crank wringer and drop them into a big basket,  refill the washer with clean water and rinse, dump water, wring clothes, and maybe rinse the clothes a second or third time.

Drying the clothes in the summer was never a problem.  I had a line strung between two trees at the edge of the woods near the old house.  In winter, when the snow could be four or five feet deep, I'd hang the clothes in the kitchen to dry.  If I had washed sheets, I hung them from lines strung from the ceiling beams.  If you have read Beatrice Potter's Miss Tiggywinkle, you will recall an illustration of that fine little hedgehog hanging up her wash to dry from the beams in the kitchen.  That's what my drying regime looked like for sheets.  For clothes, I opened up the wooden clothes horse and hung them to dry by the stove.

I came by a clothes horse in a friendly way.  While I was working in the garden one fine summer day, a  bicyclist stopped to say hello.  Passers-by were rare, and a week might go by in the summer and I would see no one.  In the winter, weeks and weeks might pass in the same manner.  I invited the bicyclist inside for a glass of water, and the fellow told me that he had a little company in Maine that made wooden clothes horses.  A few weeks later there was a knock at the door, and the bicyclist was there again; he had strapped a new clothes horse to his bicycle and had ridden up Stone Mountain to give me the gift.  When I left the mountain, I brought the clothes horse with me.

Last year, I gave my little treasure to a neighbor, a young man,  who drys his clothes outside on a clothesline in his city back yard.  His line is strung between two trees. He used to have a clothes horse for winter drying, but it had fallen apart from use.  I retrieved the rack from my basement and gave it to him. These things are meant for use, but I have grown accustomed to soft city life. 

Nowadays I no longer have to set aside a half day exclusively for the washing.

Beech Wood and Mossy Bank

As I write about the people I knew well on Stone Mountain it occurs to me that I could be friends with them because I had the antidote to relieve my introverted self of the ills of sociability, the forest to cross to reach home. There is nothing better than the green earth itself to soothe the heart and soul burdened by other people. The forest neutralized for me my contact with people, and in examining a plant, or watching the birds over the cranberry bog or the clouds hanging low over the stone ridge, I was refreshed every time.

Thinking with gratitude of the serenity of the forest during a walk late one autumn day, I stepped into a region of the woods I had never visited before and could not find thereafter, although I searched. Stepping back from the stone wall that overlooked the ridge that fell away to the north, I turned and cut toward the stream and hemlock wood, in which thick growth provided cover in the winter for deer beneath boughs bent to the ground under weight of snow.  I missed the hemlock stand that bright fall day and came out instead into a grove of beech trees, and the leaves were still falling and had carpeted the ground in gold.  No other trees or understory grew in the presence of this quiet grove, and it was a kingdom to itself.

The mossy bank was much smaller.  The bank was by a rill that fell over itself down a rock face and away into the woods. I nearly walked right by this little homeland of bryophytes that I came upon after days of rain. There were many kinds of moss to see, some dark and others light, some with little red-capped flags raised high joyfully to announce participation in future generations of moss.  Lichens were abundant as well, and added complexity to the riot of greens. I sat in the wet by a tree at the edge, not wanting to break the solitude of this self-contained world with my Bean duck boots. Later, sodden and peaceful myself, I went home.   

Good Neighbors All

Living in a very small neighborhood magnifies personal characteristics of the people in ways that would be less pronounced in a larger group, or in a group that regularly dispersed to exercise (and exorcise) themselves in the greater world. The fact that our dwellings were separated by a few miles in all directions on Stone Mountain made living peaceful or at least tolerable for the less socially inclined or adept, and the collection of folks did constitute a community of good people (for the most part), hardy and resourceful.

The township were we lived was originally designed as a range township in the late 1700s, although there were settlers living there before that, and long before that, native Americans dwelled at the confluences of rivers. The form of town layout was different than the nucleated towns of the populous seacoast, with designated town and village centers within towns. At the time, the grid of roads helped define the town land grants farther west to settlers who would clear land and inhabit the region. Villages grew up where it was convenient, and not always where they may have been planned.  The range roads were generally straight roads measured in the old English way, one rod wide, 16 and a half feet  between parallel stone walls. Cross roads connected the range roads. 

The nearest neighbors were Jim and Grace, who married while living on Stone Mountain.  They built their post and beam house on the old cross road near the cranberry bog. They built it themselves with some neighborhood help with lumber they bought as they had money for it. They brought lumber up from the main road by hauling a few pieces at a time on their all-terrain three-wheelers. The house they built was about 13 by 20 feet, with a door in the center of the long side, and the door faced away from the road onto a dooryard.

The dooryard was always a place of activity.  There, Jim and Grace parked their three-wheelers and motorcycles, chopped their wood, and in the early spring it was there that they boiled the sap they collected from their maple trees. Boiling sap would take days and into long evenings fragrant steam would rise from the huge kettle bubbling away in the dooryard. 

Their little cabin was always neat and swept.  The cabin was open end to end, and a sink was at one end and the bedroom area at the other.  The walls had pegs from which hung all the accoutrements of daily life, from heavy cast iron frying pans to coats and hats, and firearms and other hunting gear.  In the center of the room there were a table and chairs--extra chairs in case of visitors because Jim and Grace were hospitable.

Jim and Grace were tall and slender, and they cared about their appearances.  While Jim would keep his hair trimmed himself, with her help, Grace had her short blonde hair cut in town. They liked to work out and kept themselves very fit.  I would have thought that hiking the mountain to get anywhere would have been exercise enough with the effort required to maintain life there, but they additionally went to a gym.  They always looked trim in their black leather head-to-toe motorcycle-riding outfits, and the long fringe on their jackets was especially free spirited.  I do not know what they did to earn money, but they had made some hard decisions to do without because there was gas to buy for the vehicles, and property taxes to pay instead. They decided in their early thirties to get false teeth when they could have benefitted from less drastic dentistry.  Not only did they have their offending teeth removed, but all of them pulled at once.  There was the awkward period of the weeks while gums healed, but eventually they were fitted with upper and lower sets of new teeth, and they were satisfied with the result.

After a number of years together, Jim and Grace separated and later divorced.  This had been the second marriage for each, and they had been so well suited for each other.  They had genuinely loved each other with a long-range vision that saw into the future of a life they could have together.  It was a sad parting, and it came because one or both of them could not overcome the pull of personal forces that had disabled them in previous life.  I believe that they care deeply for each other still, now years after.

My friends often took to the back roads on their all-terrain three-wheeled bikes with their friends, and they would travel out together for recreation.  There were stories of dangerous exploits on thin lake ice in winter, and stories of running out of gas and having to hike miles to a travelled roadway.  I would be overtaken on my hikes by people in caravans of three wheelers, and the people were loud and the bikes smelly and even louder than they.

I was working in the herb garden in the stone-terraced area by my house when I heard a three-wheeler roaring closer one summer day. On it in the only seat was an impossibly little boy.  I stopped him on the road, and we waited for his dad, who was not far behind.  The father told me that his son was six years old and able to handle himself on the machine. The child took off down the badly rutted road toward what would have seemed like a cliff to him when he would come upon it suddenly, a moment away, a dangerous place that even the National Guard found challenging on its annual all-terrain vehicle climbs of the mountain. The father proudly followed his child as they roared off down the road.

The impulse to permit children to test their physical limits years before the children had any ability to moderate their own dangerous behavior seemed to be a feature of mountain life.  I was sitting at the kitchen table of other neighbors, and gazing out the dirty sliding glass doors over their upper porch deck that had no rails when I saw the ever-present ladder leaning up against it swaying away from the deck. The ground below was 15 feet away. The ladder dropped back to lean against the deck and then swayed out, then back, and moved.  I stood and learned forward in horror when I saw the golden curls of the little 20-month old daughter of the house as she climbed up and teetered on the edge of the ladder.  The parents looked too, and held me back. The child made it to the deck surface and toddled inside the door her mother opened for her. 

This same little girl was only perhaps three years old when the family was out in the woods with their tractor twitching out logs for firewood. The little girl rode in the bucket of the tractor.  As her dad was working the trees and driving the machine through a narrow way, the child put her hand out of the bucket and it was crushed between bucket and tree.

The family's insurance covered emergency and subsequent care, but it took years before the child could use her hand freely.  The dad hoped that the insurance payment to him and his wife on behalf of the little girl didn't preclude additional compensation for future vocational training if his daughter needed special training to learn to type so she could become a secretary. As I recall the immediate insurance payment was for $15,000, and the family used it to immediately improve their lives with a satellite dish and TV, and I believe a new, smaller tractor.  It seemed to me that every single month one of the children in this family went to the emergency room for urgent care due to injury.

It is difficult for me to write about my neighbors because I liked them and cared about them. They struggled because they were poor.  Sometimes they just got themselves and their families into trouble because they were careless over and over again.  Sometimes they struggled simply because they were overwhelmed.  One couple built a house for an ever-growing family, and the house was not completed for many years.  Construction just stopped when the place was habitable, barely.  The toilet upstairs stood alone in the wide-open floor, and was cordoned off by blankets strung on ropes. Then construction began on the barn. 

Visiting their barn to care for their animals when they were away was always wrenching because the animals lived in filth of their making only because they had no choice.  Water troughs would be bone dry, the animals' cries were desperate when I entered the barn.  I carried innumerable five-gallon pails from the outside faucet at the house uphill to the barn to water the animals; they would drink the water basins dry and I would fill them up again until they could drink no more.  I left the basins full after the animals drank their fill, and returning for evening barn chores there would be water remaining, and I would fill the basins full again to hold the pigs and sheep until morning.  Grain barrels were not capped and rats ate freely in the barn. I would sometimes surprise them when I entered the barn and they would leap out of the grain, and then I would feed the other animals waiting for a meal.

Some of the people who were farmers had few other skills, and they barely had the capabilities necessary to make a living from a garden and some animals.  Life was hard and on the edge, and the women became depressed and their husbands moderated their own lives with a couple of six packs of beer every night.  Drunk, people took off on three-wheelers at night over Stone Mountain and drove until they ran out of gas or came to their senses, went home, and tried again another day.

Blueberry Wetland

South of my house on the mountain there was a blueberry bog that I discovered after noticing a truck parked in the same place a second year. I knew there was a wetland just off the edge, but had never been back in that underbrush. The truck belonged to a father and son who emerged from the vert at the road edge carrying five-gallon white plastic pails full of blueberries.  They had been berrying on the mountain for years, and there was no reason for them to stop; certainly my blueberry needs were small.  They took me back to show off the berrying grounds, and the area opened onto a mossy carpet underfoot, moss that was springy and wet, and rimming the edge of the wetland were tall berry bushes loaded with ripe fruit.  There was so much that entire flocks of birds could eat their fill and there were still berries for jams and pies and bowls of fresh fruit for several families each season. I imagine that the occasional bear found his way to the little hidden oasis. 

Stone Mountain has a significant cover of low-bush, ground hugging blueberries near its summit. These natural barrens were open to all, because most of the mountain, except for the few privately held lands such as my own, was state forest land.  You had to walk to the berry fields though, and you had to know where to find them. 

I always thought I was inside a John Buchan novel when I was on the summit, wind blowing and the rocky ledges bare under thin soil. I would find Queen Anne's lace and red yarrow amid the blueberry bushes, but the yarrow was rare, and some of it grew near the base of the fire tower at the summit.  Blackberries and raspberries were abundant, but those bushes grew along the side of the roads and were not hidden deep in the green woods or on the lofty rocky summit. I never put up the berries save as a few jars of jam for the winter coming, but I enjoyed picking them in season and eating them in a handful just off the bush, like the other denizens of the mountain.

My Glenwood Modern E Cook Stove

Keeping warm in the winter really began 12 months before when a neighbor twitched logs with his tractor out of the forest for keeping in the clearing near the house. The final step was lighting a wood fire in the cast iron Glenwood Modern E.  Lighting some kindling, a little paper, and small wood meant that in twenty minutes I had a fire hot enough to boil a kettle of water for a pot of tea.   

The Glenwood Modern E that I left behind in the kitchen of my house on Stone Mountain was like this one, with bright nickel trim.  The stove itself was made in Taunton, Massachusetts by the Weir Stove Company in the late 1800s.  It had recast firebox parts made for me by a foundry in Bath, Maine. Mine lacked the elegant water reservoir underneath the right-side shelf, but in every other respect, my wonderful stove was the duplicate of this that I found on a Web site devoted to antique stoves.* This one costs about $5,000 for sale 110 years after it was originally manufactured. The stove is worth every penny.

I hope the people who now own the mountain house appreciate the stove I left behind. I love this stove. Do you see the base with legs?  It is a separate foundation for the stove. In fact, all the doors come off, the oven rack behind the largest door comes out, the nickel trim pieces unhook, and the superstructure through which the stove pipe fits, all that comes off, too, if ever the stove must be moved.   

The Glenwood was designed to be useful. Notice the warming shelves above the cooking surface. You can put bread to rise near the edge, and you can put wet gloves up there to dry. Pots and kettles can boil merrily on the burners or they can be moved off onto a less hot region of the entirely flat surface. The oven holds temperature well, and you can check the temperature gauge on the oven door.

The cooking surface has six burners, and each one lifts off with a lid lifter that always lives on an unused burner.  One of the burners was fashioned in three concentric rings and to boil water the quickest, I would lift out the center sections of the burner and put my copper kettle directly over burning wood. Of course, it is best to keep the stove going all day (and nearly all night) and what occurs is that a good bed of coals develops so that you can turn the draft down and keep the coals glowing hot.  When I used the stove all the time, I would add more wood every hour or so.  There was a little Fisher Baby Bear stove in the kitchen as well, and a large wood-burning stove in the cellar that helped keep the rooms I lived in warm during the winter, but the Glenwood was the star.

The Glenwood Modern E was the hearth stove. Many a night in deep winter, after coming in from whatever chore I had finished, I would stoke the stove, throw a blanket around me and sit back in a chair so I could prop my wool stockinged feet on the stove edge for warmth by the open oven door. The stove was the center of the house.

Getting the wood to the point of loading the stove was hard, year-around work.  I had a big wood shed behind the house, but large as it was, the 7 to 9 cords I needed to heat the house in the season overflowed to the stacks I kept covered with tarps, near the back door.

First, someone had to cut the trees twitched out of the woods and laid by the side of the house into stove-length tree rounds, about 18 inches long for the Glenwood.I rolled the trunk lengths to the shed, where under the overhanging roof I hauled the wood upright on a chopping block. I used 6 and 8-pound mauls for the work of splitting the big rounds into the pieces that would fit the stoves.  Splitting wood is rhythmic work. You swing the maul back and up over yourself and use the weight of the maul head to strike the piece on the block. You strike and cleave the wood, strike and cleave, again and again, eyeing the base of the piece you are splitting as the maul pierces the top.  When a splitting wedge is needed, you embed it in the piece and strike it with the blunt edge of the maul.  Hours later, there is enough wood for a couple of days. You take the stove-length pieces from the growing heap and carefully build a stack four feet high, four feet deep, and eight feet long.  That's one cord of wood.

Air circulates around and through the stack, and wood cut and sawed to length in the winter then split and stacked in early spring can be dry enough to burn in the fall. Usually the last little preparation is taking a small axe and splitting pieces of stove wood into kindling. Few things are more satisfying to behold than the winter's wood stacked and ready to use.

(Later, I'll write about what kind of wood to use for different cooking needs. )

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http://www.goodtimestove.com/kitchen_ranges/country_cook_stove/modern_glenwood_e_sr-wkr862.html

On and Off the Subject of Chickens

For nearly 20 years on Stone Mountain I lit up the darkness with kerosene lamps. In the later years there I had a small photovoltaic system with solar panels mounted on the wood shed roof, an array large enough to charge a battery bank in the back room to power a computer and a few dim lights downstairs, and in the bedroom, a 15-watt lamp that I treasured.  That bit of light seemed magnified against horsehair plaster walls painted white in the bedroom, and electric light was wonderful to read by in bed.  To turn off the lamp, I just pulled a handy little chain and I no longer had to blow out the lamp. I continued to use the kerosene lamps, though, and I did not waste electricity on lights so I could power the computer to write. 

About twice a week I lined up all the lamps on newspaper on the kitchen table.  First I removed the globes to clean them of accumulated carbon. It is best to wipe them with a piece of scrunched up newspaper, which leaves neither streaks nor lint. Then I removed the mantels from the lamps, and filled them with K-1 kerosene, then screwed the mantels back on.  I'd trim the lamp wicks by evenly knocking off the carbon from the burned edge and perhaps trimming them up with small scissors. The entire operation could take 45 minutes to complete, and it had to be done, summer and winter, year in and year out.

Winter weather closed the long road to the house early every year, and by mid-October all supplies, including enough kerosene for eight months, had to be brought up to the house in my green CJ-5 Jeep.  The penalty for delaying laying in supplies was hauling it all up on my back, or on a sled I dragged behind me up the hill. 

Other supplies included about 300 pounds of Eukanuba dog food that I stored in 32-gallon aluminum trash cans in the cellar, all the chicken feed similarly stored for the Buff Orpintons* now safely housed in their very fine hen house, and the bales upon bales of wood chips for their bedding, which I changed every two weeks. 

The hen house was actually a hen palace, and was based on Cooperative Extension Service plans like this one from the University of Virginia.  My hen house was like this, and housed 20 chickens in cleanliness and comfort. I'd enter the hen house and check the nesting boxes for eggs every morning and they'd flap and flutter and step outside for a day in the garden looking for bugs and grubs. My Great Pyrenees dogs took charge of the chickens, and once I watched as one of the dogs led the birds in single file into the woods and in a wide circle back to the hen house.  Even in winter, the hens liked to go outside into the clearing I'd shovel for them.  A couple of times a month I'd shovel and sweep out the old bedding and dump it on the compost at the bottom of the garden and then spread fresh wood chips on their floor. 

The hens would come back by late afternoon and they would spend a few hours clucking companionably and reviewing the small beer news of the day, who found the tastiest grub and where, and if the tomatoes growing out of the compost pile were even better than last year's.  They were excellent gardeners as well as dedicated conversationalists.

During this time I gave up eating poultry, and so the hen house turned into a chicken retirement community. There was a year of some predation by the neighboring foxes, and one evening as I counted birds as they came in to roost there was one missing.  I found a little circle of feathers by the wood shed, but no hen. The neighbors later told me a unnerving story about a dog of theirs who went out one night in winter to take care of some business, and all they ever found of him was the end of his tracks in the deep snow. His tracks just stopped.

One dark night as I hiked up the road by the light of the moon through the trees, there was a swoosh low over my head and a very light colored owl with wings as broad as my outstretched arms flew low in front of me up the road and out of sight. On this mountain there was also a pair of Golden eagles.  I saw one soaring by me at tree-top level; it was the largest bird I had ever seen.  Back at the house, I studied my field guides, and called the Audubon Society.  A representative met me and I learned that in fact there was a pair, but the location was a guarded secret.

Moose strode by the house, there were deer aplenty, black bears, foxes, Eastern coyotes, otters sliding down the slope toward the marsh, beavers claiming the eastern marsh, and although I never saw it, one night while walking and now far from home on the mountain, from the high ridge came the growling cry of a Bobcat mixed with the unearthly scream of a living creature being eviscerated I was sure.   

There were other night creatures, and not all of them predictable.  I parked my Jeep at the bottom of the mountain, just off the main dirt road.  The Jeep was out of sight of passers by.  Snow began falling fast one evening as I was trudging up the hill, hurrying before the snow covered the ice slicks that otherwise I could avoid. Behind me I heard the low growl of a straining truck engine, and so I stepped off the road into the trees, and a Ford 250 passed me.  The truck crossed the little plank bridge over the creek, and headed uphill toward what I knew were impassable trenches and boulders; the truck stalled, and the driver began backing erratically down the hill toward me.  I climbed up to the safety of an embankment just as the driver stopped the truck and flung open the cab door and called out to me in a crazed voice, "I need a hundred dollars." "You and a lot of other people," I told him. He closed the truck door and continued backing out to the main road and then he was gone.

Climbing the road, again late at night, I came to the little plank bridge over the creek about two miles before the house. In the middle of the bridge someone had placed a small round ball, and shining my flashlight on it I discovered the skinned and severed head of a cat.  I pushed the poor thing into the creek where at least it was free of the burden of being a fright to other people.  The cat head has been placed on the bridge with deliberate and low intent.

I thought of all the people I knew there, and all the neighboring farms with barn cats that lived rough, but no rougher did they live than were the psyches of some people, coarsened by narrowness and poverty. Why does someone attack through the abuse and death of another creature? Such a person must feel terribly alone and vulnerable himself, and a madness to test the limits of hurt takes hold. I do not know.  Fortunately, I was rarely faced by low humanity, and felt secure on the mountain at night.

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*The image of Buff Orpingtons, a pleasant and broody breed, comes from the finest source for rare breed chickens, the Murray McMurray Hatchery.   http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/product/buff_orpingtons.html

Local Nobility

Ellen Norton is the daughter of Jonathan, who is the 12th generation of his direct line to hold land on Stone Mountain.  Ellen herself now has young grandchildren, so 15 generations live near or on land granted by the king to the first Norton who came from England long ago. Parcels of adjoining land have been bought and sold over time, but the Nortons have kept intact their original 2,000-acre king's grant of land. Local lore has it that when Jonathan drew up his will, lawyers quit the task to protest that he transferred all the original holding to his oldest son, and while making provisions for other sons, he left his daughters no bequest. 

Ellen was a close friend when I lived on Stone Mountain, and she told me that her father believed that his girls became the responsibility of their husbands, and they, not he, would provide for them. This thinking was common once, and the lack of democracy in land distribution kept land holdings intact over the years as eldest son passed the land to eldest son. The families were never small, and there was always an eldest son. The other sons could move away to make their livings; go over seas, join the army, join the clergy.

Today this family operates a dairy farm on the home place, and the sons and daughters who have stayed close by are farmers and smallholders.  I read that Stephen, my friend's oldest brother, died recently of injuries sustained in the field by a harrow. The death of this man so simply stated put in mind lines from Conrad Aiken's Morning Song of Senlin.

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise, And do the things my fathers learned to do.
...
It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness
And depart on the winds of space for I know not where;
My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket,
And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.
There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven,
And a god among the stars; and I will go
Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak
And humming a tune I know....

I did not know Stephen, but 500 people who did attended his funeral. His younger brother, a minister, spoke at the funeral. You do not win the attention of people who work the land and who have been raised in country granges, community churches, and agricultural associations of husbandry of animals and of the vert and verdure unless you have the virtues that have strengthened the hills themselves and have brought peace and plenty to the people. 

The Best Spider Ever

My pleasure in this blog is that I can write about real things to balance what I write for a living.  I write here when I need refreshment during an assignment.  What I write about professionally is certainly real, but it won't tell how to staunch a bleeding cut with a spider's new web, or that spiders deserve respect and are creators and artists. Few things can compare, for instance, with the loveliness of an upland field in the early morning as the sun rises and illuminates the webs of Black and Yellow Orb spiders covering the field and holding the morning dew. Imagine the field of sparkling clear golden crystals in the early morning light. Who would not think well of spiders after seeing that?

My favorite spider was a beautiful and industrious house spider who wove an enormous web inside a large window in the small room plumbed for water at the back of the house. All spring and summer she lived there, spinning her web and wrapping her captured prey, dining and then repairing her web upon need. Hers was the only web I allowed in the house, and over time hers became a grand home.  I thought more than once that it was for the best that people rarely came to call at the house so I didn't have to explain my theories on housekeeping. I was actually quite fastidious, as was my little friend in the bathroom window.

I call it the bathroom because there was a sink, and a bathtub.  In the earliest years of living there I hauled water in pails from a spring about 200 yards back in the woods.  Water left the house in pails sloshed into the garden.  Eventually, a fine water source was doused in front of the house by the much recommended Royal, an old man who lived in remarkable simplicity in a small house outside a town to the north. He had a bulletin board covered with letters and cards of thanks from people who praised his services. I brought him to my house early in one of the first years, and he taught me how to douse for water by starting with the selection of a good bifurcated switch from a young tree. We looked in the woods for just the right saplings, and he cut just the right switch for me.

The act of finding water that he called "sweet," and accurately judging its depth and gallons per minute is something that I left to his expert sense, but the truth is that a dowsing rod in inexperienced hands can seem to have a life of its own and will bend and twist against a handler's determination to keep it steady. He explained how the behavior of the dowsing rod could indicate if the water had too many minerals in it to make good drinking water, and he told me he could feel the depth of the water by the drag of the dowsing rod in his hands.  He refused to charge any money for his work, and he spent fully half a day working with me.  When I took him home, I left some money in his house where he would find it.

Thereafter, an ancient well-pounding rig lumbered and clanked up the road to the front of the house where Royal's marker indicated the place to drill between the house and the road.  Three days of work later, the well driller pounded a shaft down to clear, good water at exactly Royal's 75 feet at three-gallons-a-minute through granite.

The water was pulled into the house by a hand pump installed at the washboard sink, and in later years, the brilliant and inventive plumber Eddie Gagnon of East Rochester, New Hampshire devised a way to enable water storage in the house.  He rigged a jet pump inside the well pipe, and laid it to a gasoline-powered Briggs and Stratton 3.5 horse power lawn mower engine he mounted in the cellar.  He was very proud of his handiwork, and it was a marvel of ingenuity. Eddie was an independent plumber, but this is not to say that he worked without the benefit of the advice of other men in the business. 

Eddie explained that he and other small contractors often met for breakfast in town to discuss technical problems of the day ahead over ham and eggs at 6 a.m.  Eddie posed the problem of bringing water under pressure into a house with no electricity, and his collegial mates at the breakfast counter had put their heads together on this one. The result of his work was that now I could now pull a cord to start the engine, and water filled a storage tank.  With water under pressure running from a spigot, I could quickly fill the copper water boiler that fit exactly across two burners of the Glenwood Modern E cast iron cooking stove in the kitchen, and heat water for any number of uses, an improvement in home life. The bathroom was an important center of the house, and I spent much time keeping the water system working properly, under the gaze of the spider.

There came a time as the summer lengthened into autumn that I noticed the spider's web was a little tattered. The spider became pale, and she rarely stirred from her corner. I assumed that her life was ending its course. Days passed, she didn't move, and the web grew more forelorn.  All that remained of earlier prey were a few dry husks, cruel reminders of yesterday's bounty. This was a sorrowful state of affairs, but as it turned out, not a simple case of the end-of-summer, end-of life blues.

I entered the room one morning, and joy to behold there was activity in the web.  A nice fat fly had stumbled into the house and had become stuck in the web. Bad luck for the fly. The spider had been saving her strength for this moment. By the end of the day I noticed that her color was returning. By the next morning, she was the spry spider of her youth, and her web was respun. She did die eventually, and sadly I took down her web, but I'll never forget her. 

Harbingers of Spring

As soon as barred owls began to call in the woods at night in February, I knew that winter was broken and spring was inevitable, even on remote Stone Mountain where winter was always fierce. There were heavy snows yet to come, but spring was intent upon the frozen land.  Barred owls do not migrate, remaining home all year, but I heard them after an absence when they started to call to each other in February, deep in the woods on my long walks home at night.  The barred owl calls hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo...hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-waa, and then repeats herself sufficiently to make her point. Spring is slow in coming to the backwoods of New Hampshire, but the barred owl call was the first glimmer of spring. There are other harbingers of spring, but by the time the snow fleas arrive, mud season is already upon us.

Snow fleas are also year-around residents, but every early spring on the dirt road in front of the house they would appear overnight in what from the far-away distance of five feet looked like an undiluted oil streak four inches wide meandering 20 to 30 feet over the melting ice pack of the road. The oil streak wasn't going anywhere, but it followed the thawing ice on the rough road surface.

The road itself was a seasonal streambed, having been given up for maintenance by the town years ago but not yet ceded to the adjoining landowners. Over time any road work I and the those others living on the mountain wanted we accomplished by ourselves, digging drainage ditches and water bars on the downhill slopes, filling the deep trenches caused by meltwater and April rains on the soft surface. In the early stages of mud season in April, when ice was still slick on the roads, the snow fleas seemed to rejoice on sunny days and come out in untold millions in those long, black streaks on the road. Had the females already laid eggs where the snow and ice retreated from the base of trees where meltwater exposed the leaf mold? Freed from their reproductive obligation, were the little fellows in a festive, convivial mood? I always felt festive after seeing them.

The long ribbon of snow fleas would last a day, appearing in the morning.  Upon close examination, the ribbon resolved itself into hundreds of black pinhead-sized springtails in a square inch.  Springtails are called snow fleas but they are not the same creature as the parasitic fleas that plague mammels and birds, and in fact snow fleas are not insects at all, but a different representative of the arthopods, all creatures with many-jointed legs and segmented bodies. The snow fleas I observed were piled on top of each other, leaping randomly at the slightest invitation to move. It was their springtail springfest celebration with furcula in full throttle, to last just one day until another year.   

The noisiest arrival every spring was the annual return of the first fool to try to climb Stone Mountain in a four-wheel drive vehicle.  Mud season clung to the roads until mid-June, and one notable trench was large enough to swallow a Volkswagen Beetle. Someone is always first, and the first always gets sucked in over the axels.  A neighbor got his small tractor stuck in the mud while trying to free a Jeep near my house; he returned later in the day with his big tractor and nearly got it stuck, too.   

Until the end of mud season, I used to keep my Jeep parked at the foot of the hill road, on the main dirt road.  From early October until mid-June, I walked, skied and snowshoed in my trusty bear claws to and from the Jeep. The trip was two miles, which on cross-country skies heading downhill to the Jeep in fresh snow  could take 15 minutes. In the dead of winter, late at night with a small cold moon overhead and iron ice that would barely accept a crampon-shod boot, it could take three hours to get home.  I was glad for any sign that the winter was turning to spring, and each February the barred owls began calling to each other again.

Foxes and Small Whorled Pogonia Orchids

Foxes were not strangers on Stone Mountain.  Often at night I would hear their eerie shrieks on the ridge south of the mountain, or hear yipping barks on the road in front of the house.  I particularly enjoyed finding their spoor, sometimes deposited neatly on a flat yet prominent rock in the road where a passerby could not but notice that this was someone's home ground.  I rarely saw the foxes, but there was a den not far from the house by a rock outcropping on a wooded upland slope.  I found the den while looking for the Small Whorled Pogonia orchid*, which while exceedingly rare, grows in small colonies on Stone Mountain in the filtered light that reaches the leaf-carpeted forest floor. 

There were Pink Lady Slippers and Jack-in-the-Pulpit, bright orange wood lilies on the edge of the forest and purple trillium as well, but the Small Whorled Pogonia orchid was particularly delightful, in part because it is rare. I learned about the flower because a plant conservationist pointed it out as he was searching near the house in what he thought was likely habitat for the plant. The conservatory agent explained his mission to identify local sites of the rare species, and he had tied black sashes on marker trees near the tiny colonies of the flower.  We went to explore the woods together and located the tree markers and then the very small colonies of the plants. At the time, there were fewer than 150 sites in the United States for the flower, and 32 of the sites were in New Hampshire. The Small Whorled Pogonia orchid lived near the fox den.

There came an early spring when I began to notice a lean fox with a dull coat visiting the bottom of the garden.  He would appear on the stone wall near the compost pile, and then disappear.  I had golden-brown Buff Orpington chickens who liked to free range especially in the garden, where they liked to help out. Over the spring I lost a few of them to the fox.  The compensatory reward was seeing the fox growing in health as the weeks passed, and there was a memorable day when I looked at the bottom of the garden and saw the now bright fox jump over the garden wall with his mate coming along to inspect dinner prospects. The difference between the foxes was striking.  The newcomer had the shy, nervous, and lean aspect of the first fox in the early days of his visits.  Before long, health abounded in the world of foxes, and I eventually learned to keep better track of my chickens.

* The photo of the Small Whotled Pogonia orchid was taked by James Henderson, who has thrown off the life photographer-botanist for the exciting life of a beekeeper in Louisana.  Here are his sites:

http://www.goldendelighthoney.com and

http://www.localharvest.org/store/M14434

Hate Evil Knight

My mountain house was built in 1805.  It was my house until it was time to leave the woods of New Hampshire and make a new life after nearly 20 years of chopping wood and living frugally far from people on a back road that branched over Stone Mountain.  That is not its name, but to write frankly about the place and its people it is best to preserve anonymity in proper names.  The one name that I cannot change is the name of the man who built my house. His name was Hate Evil Knight and he was born on Stone Mountain.

I can imagine the tiny infant's father in 1780, opening the Bible and with closed eyes letting his God direct the pointing finger of His servant to the little baby's name. Mrs. Knight may have been too weakened by the birth to protest God's will for her child, but I believe that she lived and had more children. The family name is well established in the neighborhood today.

I know nothing about Hate Evil, as I familiarly call him, except that his adz was sharp, and he lost a fine chisel. I found that chisel not long after I moved into the old house, and was making it fit to live in. The chisel was about 18 inches long, and made entirely of forged iron. The sharp tip was about an inch and a half broad, very useful for fine work.  Hate Evil left it on top of a beam in the knee wall of the attic. The particular beam had other interesting features, including a series of irregularly shaped iron nails of different lengths. The nails were evenly spaced down the beam.  Some of the nails had bits of old twine knotted around their four-sided pounded heads, and I wonder if the twine had held herbs to dry in the attic.  The knee wall was also home to a king snake, no--the entire house was home to this fine fellow.

I met this creature when I first moved in.  As I opened the front door of the house, an adventuring snake draped himself down from the lintel overhead to see who was disturbing his rest.  The snake was splendid, and he knew it. I did not know much about snakes then, but I recognized a free thinker.  We lived in the same house and largely maintained separate lives. I learned that he liked to live in the knee wall of the attic over the kitchen stove in the winter because that's where I found him, when I was considering how to spread some insulation up there.  I was crawling on my stomach along the eves in the attic with a Coleman lantern in my upraised hand, and there he was, all five or six feet of him comfortably coiled a couple of feet in front of me. I decided I needed no insulation in the knee wall after all.  I met him outside the house as well, enjoying the early evening, and in the daylight his beautiful russet brown skin circled with milky yellow rings was a sight to behold.  There were other snakes in the neighborhood, but this one alone lived indoors. 

I wish I knew more about Hate Evil to tell you.  He is known to me through his house, and the land around it that he and his descendants shaped to their needs.  The house he built is what is commonly known as a Cape Cod house.  It is compact, and easy to heat around a central chimney that opens with a fireplace in each of the main downstairs rooms.  Enter the front door into a small hallway, and three doors lead from there.  The house has a large cellar, and the chimney foundation is a massive construction of brick and stone, and I could walk into it to store things on the shelves embedded in its rising walls. The house was built to last, and it has housed its residents in dignified surroundings for two hundred years.

Generations of people can live for decades in such a house, live full lives and be buried in the little stone-walled graveyard at the edge of the clearing by the forest, and yet be unknown to the newer arrivals.  The house is a good house, and the front door faces the rising sun.  I could sit on the front step and gaze over land that had gone from forest to field and back again to forest over the years.  There was much work involved in living there, but there was also wildlife to meet, mushrooms to hunt, and bees to raise. I left the house when it was my time to go, and now other people are discovering what it holds for them.  When I left, I returned Hate Evil's beautiful chisel to the beam where I found it. I believe he would have approved.

Trouble on Stone Mountain

Place names and the names of individuals are changed for self protection, and the rest is true.

Not so very long ago as time is reckoned in the woodsy piedmont of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I lived quietly some few miles off the main dirt road leading from the crossroads deeper into the woods. From the fire tower atop Stone Mountain a brisk 15-minute walk uphill from my old house, I could watch at night the black woods meet the dark sky with no break of twinkling lights of town or village away to the north and west. In the near distance to the east, if I stayed long enough, huddled in a blanket with a flashlight and a book of verse and the night sounds around me, the morning sunlight would suddenly illuminate the sea off the coast by Portsmouth. 

One day trouble drove up the road from the south.  I was there to see it. There appeared two sleek Lincoln Continental Mark V coupes, long and boxy, sharp edged and dark blue.  Traveling in tandem, slowly, slowly--the dirt roads were corrugated and rarely dragged--the Lincolns were driven by the new people who had bought the Hamilton place on the road, and the lands of the old farm. The new people had won 20 million in a  Massachusetts lottery. Big Bob and his wife Dotty, known now as Dorothea (a name that never appeared on her birth certificate, but which suited her now that she was rich, she mentioned once) and their son Bob Jr.

For nearly a year until disasters overwhelmed them, they lived and renovated and ran afoul of the local authorities and their neighbors. Big Bob, a genial man, had been a trash hauler in a northern Massachusetts town in the days before the big win. Bob Jr. was a large, brooding boy in his late teens. As a neighbor across the mountain, and having heard mildly alarming stories of the new arrivals, I stopped by to acquaint them with me because we shared life on the same mountain. The wife showed me the house. "And here is Bob Jr.'s room," as she pushed open the door of her son's bedroom. "He collects guns."  He was inside, sitting on his bed, caressing the barrel of an AK-47. The room was bare except for his narrow bed, a dresser, and a cabinet full of weapons.

I knew about AK-47s because some of my neighbors had them. Folks in these rural parts still live by their wits cutting timber, farming a little, and raising hogs. They make a little extra money by selling what they can--firewood put up in the spring, venison hunted and butchered in November, and Maple trees sugared in March. Where and how these entrepreneurs got AK-47s was never open for question.  Now, on the edge of his bed, Dorothea's boy sat with an AK-47 in his lap.

I returned home the three miles through the woods to my solitary house on the mountain. I walked in the woods frequently and knew the overgrown roads and now barely perceptible farm lanes through woods that little more than 150 years before had been cleared for farming, poor to be sure, and sheep grazing. The Civil War drained away the young men from the region, and many of those who survived never came home because the south returned an easier living than they had known on hardscrabble New England hill farms. The farm houses on Stone Mountain had long burned to the ground or rotted away, but the cellar holes remained, and the overgrown roadways.  Often leading only from farm to farm, the lanes led past the buried outlines of outbuilding, past old orchards and out to the travel ways that led down the mountain to the main dirt road.  On one early winter walk in the woods I found a narrow path visible only because a light dusting of snow had made the path plain to my eye.  Following the lane around the old mica mine, I came to a single, very old apple tree alone of its kind in the woods.  Snow lined the dark wet branches with long traces of white, and the tree was still bearing a full load of beautiful apples that the deer would soon eat.

Now there was something new to ponder. People had moved in and the neighborhood felt the disruption.  First it came as stories of drunken parties with bad friends at the old farmhouse when the parents were back in Massachusetts.  Then Big Bob began excavating a pond between the house and the road--without a permit from the town or Soil Conservation Service, an organization much respected in the area. Despite orders to stop his pond, he continued to dig, and the pond filled and failed.  These folks cleared some of their land and piled the refuse on the neighbors' land, and in one particularly bold move, Big Bob took down and rebuilt a section of stone wall that had defined the boundary between his property and a neighboring farm for hundreds of years. He wanted improved access to the back property through a previously constrained neck of the woods. The local constabulary became frequent visitors to the old Hamilton place.

Bob Jr.'s new friends got into trouble with the law in the nearby town; a bow and arrow shooting of a local man figured in the trouble.  Bob Jr. took to roaming the woods roads over the mountain, and I found him more than once hulking silently along the roads by a large bog, AK-47 in hand. I would call hello to him and try to engage him when he passed by me and sometimes he responded, and sometimes he did not acknowledge me.

My own house was by the side of a road, near the top of the mountain.  It was a rough road that the town had long years ago ceased to maintain, and had become a seasonal streambed, and a challenge road for dirt bikes and jeeps. Once a year just after mud season was finally over, the local National Guard would mount an expedition and a long single file of military vehicles would climb past my house.  Other than that, there were few passers by, ever. The nearest neighbor was more than a half a mile away downhill as the crow flies.

One late night, after I had blown out the lights, I heard a commotion coming my way. Engines were gunning and straining, and lights shone through the woods. I quickly dressed and with my dogs, slipped out the cellar door and into the woods just as bright lights filled the house and pierced the clearing with search lights. The dogs and I followed behind this caravan of jokers and from a safe distance listened to their drunken revelry as they slowed to a crawl past the house, but kept going.  From the safety of the forest, the dogs and I followed them off the mountain, and then returned home to bed.

A few days later I heard that Bob Jr. and his pals had shot and killed a moose, which was illegal. Someone in their drunken party talked, and likely more than one.  A couple of weeks later, the game wardens located the rotting carcass in the basement of the Hamilton house.  After that, young Bob's life became regulated by the law, and his parents moved away to the town they had come from. 

They were not seen again in the region.