The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  We were watched and questioned by the old ladies to see if we were also dog-lovers. Then we were permitted to choose our two dogs. They were given to us with good wishes, and we could take them home.

  They were then just two small, woolly puppies. The veterinarian advised us, for the dogs’ and our best interests, to keep them outside like huskies.

  They slept in a house built for them and fenced with a wide run so that they could get enough exercise during the day.

  Zuck dubbed them Robert and Bertram. We soon had to add a second house to avoid jealousy and strife, since they were both male dogs. Each slept in his own house.

  Later, after they were fully grown, Zuck used to go walking with them for hours in the trackless forests, and they would break through the underbrush like huge wolves that had strayed from the pack.

  They were not fierce, but they had no sense of their own strength.

  For that reason we asked guests not to open the door to the kennel carelessly or when we were not present. Many guests, however, especially the ladies who did not understand about dogs, and boys of an age to want to do naughty tricks, tried it just the same. Scarcely had they opened the catch of the kennel door when the dogs would jump against it, break out, throw the guest to the ground and frolic about him as though someone had given them a new bone to play with. At the joyous barking of the dogs and the shrieks of the guest, we had to rush to help. Picking up and brushing off guests, together with restorative doses of schnapps or cold water, was part of our job as dog owners.

  Robert and Bertram, because of their untamed wildness, were not permitted in the house and came no further than the garage, where they slept during nights of snow or ice storms.

  One time, however, they did come into the house, and that was on January 1, 1943. Thirty-six glasses stood on the kitchen table, relics of New Year’s Eve, waiting to be washed.

  I stood at the sink with my back to the kitchen door and ran steaming water into the dishpan. Suddenly the kitchen door was slammed open, and two avalanches of snow and ice rushed into the kitchen, overspreading everything.

  The crash of glasses and my shrill screams chased the dogs, who had broken into my kitchen like a natural disaster, back out through the open door. But the startling effect of the noise made them turn the kitchen floor into a lake before they left.

  In just a few seconds they had smashed all thirty-six glasses to splinters.

  When Zuck came into the kitchen a few minutes later, waded through the dogs’ puddle, and stood in front of the sea of glass splinters, I was sitting on the kitchen stool and had my soapsuds-covered hands folded peacefully on my apron.

  I was as dazed as if I had survived a hurricane.

  “I am very glad,” I said, “that the glasses hadn’t been washed yet.”

  Then we started cleaning up.

  After the dogs joined us, we had the unexpected arrival of the duck Gussy, and with her the hen Elise.

  It was in early spring, and we had been invited to lunch with friends.

  After the meal we looked around their farm.

  In one of the huge modern chicken houses was a chicken that appeared uncommonly miserable, thin, and haggard. It was not being attacked by the other hens, but as soon as it wanted to go to the feeding station they made a game of forcing it away.

  “It will die,” explained the owner. “It is a healthy chicken, but it can’t survive here.”

  “Can I buy it?” I asked. “I’d like to begin with a difficult chicken so that I can get used to having difficult animals before we get a whole flock.”

  “You don’t need to give me more than fifty cents for it,” said the owner. “It doesn’t lay eggs because it is too scared. But there is also a duck,” he continued, “that you can have for nothing. She is too tough to kill and eat, and she disturbs the entire duck pen.” Thus we got to know Gussy, the antisocial duck.

  She was sitting on a manure pile as though it was a fortress, angry, solitary, and covered with blood. If other ducks came near, she plunged down from her fortress, ready for an attack. She took on superior forces and retreated after a short time to her manure pile, beaten, pecked by sharp duck beaks and bleeding from many wounds. We took Elise and Gussy with us, packed up in two cardboard cartons.

  We built them each a stall in our empty shed, with wire mesh as protection against small predators. There they sat in two birdcages which had enough room to make a cow comfortable.

  Elise blossomed. She made up for everything which had been denied her in communal living. After three weeks we had to put her on a diet so that she wouldn’t burst.

  Later, when the regular farm hens arrived, she held the top position in the chicken house. She was, so to speak, the headmistress and assigned nests, perches, and feeding spots to the newcomers. She was not intelligent, but her mental capacity fit comfortably in the chicken community.

  Gussy’s case was quite different.

  She considered us her archenemies. She watched us suspiciously and angrily when we brought her feed, as if we might have mixed rat poison into it. But she prospered. Her bloodstained feathers grew smooth and white. Her tough flesh gained firmness and strength.

  She made innumerable escape attempts, so that we soon became expert duck catchers. We practiced skills on her that would be of great use later in handling our duck flock.

  Gussy taught us that American ducks, especially the Muscovy breed to which Gussy belonged, never in all their lives forget that they are descended from wild ducks.

  Later, when wedges of white Muscovy ducks cruised over the roof of our house and plunged into the pond, she lost any resemblance to a house pet or tame duck. On her thirty-second escape attempt Gussy succeeded in getting away from us.

  We gave her up for lost, torn to bits by a fox, chewed up by a weasel, murdered by a skunk.

  But in early summer, when we already had an impressive chicken yard and some other ducks and geese, Gussy returned.

  Where she had found a drake, and where she had laid her eggs and hatched them, we didn’t know. It could well have been in one of the fallen-down barns in the woods. But now she came waddling slowly across the meadow, and behind her waddled and chirped eleven newborn yellow ducklings.

  She wasn’t happy to see us again. She looked at us with the same expression of disgust and dislike with which she had regarded us from the start, but she seemed to have decided to conquer her mistrust to give her young a good place to get food. She did not stay long with her ducklings. She abandoned them when they had scarcely gotten their feathers, turning them over to our protection and returning to the freedom of her wild existence.

  Sometimes she came home and lived in the shed with the other ducks. At other times she stayed away for a long time. Sometimes she hatched her eggs in a nest hidden in an old stone wall and then turned her ducklings over to us. We were surprised and had to admire the way she knew how to use the duck pen only as a useful way station, without giving up any of her unlimited wild duck freedom.

  In that spring, when we had given Gussy up for lost, we bought a mother duck with two ducklings.

  It was a serious purchase. They had neither physical nor psychic defects, and we gave them no names.

  At least not at first.

  Later we named the mother duck Emma. (Seagulls, too, all look as if they were named Emma.) The daughter died before she could be named, but the son grew into a huge drake. Zuck thought his father must have been an albatross.

  The purchase of Emma and her ducklings marked the beginning of real farming. We had started to stock the farm.

  THE BEGINNING

  For twelve years we had lived in Henndorf, surrounded by farms.

  Cows grazed under our windows, hens ran across my path, geese and ducks waddled past me. I had drunk milk, eaten butter, my breakfast egg was served up every morning, and yet I had no idea how the animals whose products I ate lived, how they were milked, when they laid eggs, what they ate.

  It was not that I had no in
terest in such matters—it was simply that it had never occurred to me to be concerned about them.

  Agriculture, farming: that was a kingdom of its own, a preserve in which you did not trespass if you knew nothing about it.

  The specialists, the farmers: they knew, they understood— whether from modern research or from centuries-old heritage— how to cultivate the fields and to care for the cattle.

  Inexperienced and untrained persons had nothing to do with these matters.

  “The farmer sows. The mower mows. The carpenter builds. The baker bakes. The maid milks.”

  Those are straightforward simple sentences out of the reader we used as children, and they were connected with pictures that illustrated the activities.

  They were bright-colored, attractive pictures. They almost smelled of meadows, hay, wood, and fresh bread. But the activities, the skills themselves, remained foreign to us and incomprehensible. We accepted the sentences and pictures like fairy tales and felt no desire to make them real. And now I had arrived in a country in which there were no fairy tales in the usual sense, a country in which the land preserves are open to everyone who wants to hunt in them, a country in which the hunting areas of life are immeasurable.

  I am permitted to sow, to mow, to build, to bake, to milk—I can master everything to a certain extent.

  In many areas you will always be a bungler, in others you reach the level of dilettante. A few things you really master and never lose your skill.

  First we made an inventory of all the skills we both possessed.

  Zuck knew something of zoology, especially about butterflies, predatory animals, and the habits of wild birds—he loved animals. With few exceptions I couldn’t stand animals, but I had once studied seven semesters of medicine, including anatomy, and I declared that nothing would scare me—a very important factor in farm life, as it later developed. I knew nothing about animals, but a little about growing vegetables.

  How could we acquire our missing knowledge in the quickest way?

  We couldn’t consult our country neighbors. They lived miles from our house and had plenty of troubles of their own, since a considerable part of their help had been drafted and other farm workers had gone to the factories where they got higher pay.

  Servants or maids in the European sense don’t exist in America and particularly not in Vermont, where they avoid every kind of serving and subservience. Vermont was not a slave state, so black servants have never been common. Our farm as we planned it would have been much too small for an experienced farm worker, and his wages would have been much too large for us.

  We had to get along in the next years with hired boys, who appeared from time to time and then disappeared again. These were half-grown youngsters between twelve and sixteen to whom you had to explain every task.

  So it was clear from the start of our farming operation that we were completely on our own and had to travel a theoretical road to practical knowledge and experience.

  We had asked ourselves the following questions: What kind of animals did we want to get? Where should we buy the animals? How do you build hen houses and barns? What do you feed the animals? How large would the costs be, and how much the earnings?

  Now in America there is the blessed and indispensable Department of Agriculture in Washington, to which I am going to have to devote a whole section. This USDA—that is the abbreviation for United States Department of Agriculture—issues brochures that, in four to eighty pages, answer agricultural questions in clear and simple language.

  We learned about this institution through a letter that came in our mailbox one day.

  The sender was a congressman, the representative from the state of Vermont. His address was: Congress of the United States, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.

  For the uninitiated it should be mentioned that each of the forty-eight states, whether small or large, sends two senators to Congress in Washington. On the other hand, the number of “representatives” depends on the population, so that a state like California with 6,158,000 inhabitants has twenty representatives, Wisconsin with 3 million inhabitants ten representatives, while Vermont with 361,000 inhabitants has only one representative.

  From our single representative I received the following letter: “Dear Friend, Agriculture today is even more important than in the past. The useful brochures listed here present the results of research and experiments which the Department of Agriculture has undertaken. You can indicate on the list the brochures that you would like to have, but it should be no more than five, so that many others can take advantage of my limited supply.

  “As your representative in Congress I should like to be of service to you and other Vermonters. Write to me about everything that has to do with legislation, and also anytime you feel that I could be of help to you. Don’t forget to include your name and address. With best wishes, Yours, _____”

  So we had a representative in Washington to whom I could turn, and this I did immediately, asking whether I could have more than the usual five brochures sent to me, since I was a layman and a beginner.

  To this he answered by return mail that he had informed the USDA of my wishes. “It will probably take some time, but I understand that your order will be sent in a week to ten days,” he wrote and concluded, “With all good wishes I remain . . .”

  Meanwhile I had learned that the USDA also has branches in every state, and that our branch in Vermont gave out brochures, which applied particularly to the climate and agricultural requirements of the state of Vermont; these I could select and get for myself in the agricultural office in the next town.

  In the office one could have ten brochures free, but they gave me many more because I was a beginner and therefore needed a greater number of brochures than experts. In addition the workers in the office encouraged me to ask them the most ignorant and absurd questions without blushing for them or myself.

  My choice of brochures dealt with the following topics: The farm budget. How does one select a healthy horse? Mites and lice on poultry. Making butter on the farm. Disinfecting stalls. Caring for milk goats. Raising ducks. Raising geese. Plans for setting up a farm. Pigs. Drying medicinal herbs. Types of chickens. Protection from lightning. Selling eggs. Poultry houses and fixtures. Dairying for beginners. The farm garden. Keeping gasoline and kerosene on the farm. Choosing hens for egg production. Working clothes for women. White ladino clover. Types of potatoes on Vermont farms. How to serve maple syrup on snow. How to make a good manure pile. Animals for the small farm. Feeding chickens. Currants and gooseberries and their relationship to rust infection in white pines. Sale of farm products by mail. Making slipcovers for armchairs.

  For Zuck I got: The life of wild birds on the farm pond. Taking care of fireplaces and stoves. A dry cellar. Sharpening knives.

  There were two brochures that I had ordered only for historic-economic reasons which I didn’t receive—Vermont laws which affect home and family, and financial agreements between father and son on the farm—probably because the inquiry about them was so small that they were no longer printed.

  All winter we studied, discussed, estimated, and considered brochures.

  First we thought of getting hens, ducks, geese, pigs, cows, and horses.

  We gave up the cows and horses. Our calculations showed that cows—even if there were only two of them—would require costly remodeling of the present barns, a considerable purchase of equipment for the production of milk and butter, and that transporting the milk to a collection point on a road that was almost impassable for about six months of the year would be an unsolvable problem. For our own use the milk products made little sense—butter takes a lot of work, and the whole family except me detested milk.

  When Michi, my oldest daughter, at the ripe age of twenty-one suddenly began to drink a glass of milk every evening about six o’clock, I couldn’t understand what had caused this change of heart—until I happened to take a sip from her glass and realized that a healthy shot of whis
key had changed the milk into a cocktail. Instead of cows we decided to get goats, which were more satisfactory animals in every way and offered many advantages.

  Horses were also struck from the list, although Zuck and Winnetou are enthusiastic riders, but we could not afford riding horses. Also in “Animals for the Small Farm” I found the deciding sentence: “Even if a horse or a tractor would appear to be necessary for plowing, it is much more advantageous for the owner of a small farm to hire this kind of help than to buy a horse for it and to feed him. However, if the small farmer wants to hire himself out to his neighbors from time to time for plowing and cultivating their fields, the purchase of a horse to use this way could be justified.” Zuck and Winnetou did not want to hire themselves out to the neighbors from time to time, so they got no horse. Rather we sometimes hired neighbors, who plowed and harrowed with oxen or horses because our land was too hilly for tractors.

  When we had decided on the variety and type of animals, we went bravely ahead to build outbuildings.

  It was a good thing that we didn’t know all the problems and troubles that we would have with them.

  Early in May when the worst frost was past, we began with the construction of chicken houses and the remodeling of the old barns.

  I went to a carpenter, a careful older man. He checked the plans, evaluated them, and ordered the wood and the roofing. I was to buy the nails, the windows, and the fixtures.

  When all the materials were together, the carpenter did not appear at first, for all good things take time, and it is unacceptable to push for work and pay in Vermont.

  After a week of impatient waiting, we found a little note in our mail which said: “Could not come. Was very busy. Haven’t forgotten you. Coming Saturday.”

  He came and worked quite alone. Zuck held the heavy foundation beams for him, and sometimes I was allowed to hold nails and to look for misplaced tools.

  I had never before taken part in the day-by-day and hour-by-hour construction of a house, and since in America it is all right to ask questions, I asked my expert carpenter one after another.