The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  We took care of the pipes like babies, the animals like children, and the stoves like temperamental animals. Wood was sacred.

  We stood at the center of everything, and to survive we had to be watchman, caretaker, and protector, constantly blocking a return to chaos.

  For Zuck wood and heating were totem, taboo, and fetish at the same time. So I called him a pyromanticist, a combination of pyromaniac and romanticist.

  When I watched how he piled the kindling crossways in the big open fireplaces, laid the split logs like a grating over them, and crowned his building with a mighty log of yellow birch, when I saw how he set fire to the structure on the corners and ends and the flames shot high, I saw his work connected to secret magic formulas and charms from the primeval forest. When he put the gigantic logs into the iron stoves, when he set and arranged them, then I realized how fire was once thought to be a gift from heaven to men and must be treated reverently.

  Finally there was still the kitchen stove, which needed to be filled with coal morning and evening, and had to be shaken morning and evening with a deafening noise to make its ashes drop down into the pit, making a smell like a rusty locomotive on a local run. When Zuck threw the new coal onto the glowing fire with a swing of the black hod, he reminded me of the fireman on a ship, who had to bring the boiler to the point of exploding to escape the pursuit of enemy cruisers.

  It was only the hands of the pyromanticist that did not look like those of a fireman.

  It was part of the Drude and Alp nights that you felt of your own scratched hands again and again and rubbed your broken fingernails. You longed for calluses and thick skin as a protective covering against sensitivity, but felt that your misshapen hard hands were foreign elements on your own body.

  Even though we worked much of the time with gloves, as is customary in America—and there are gloves of all types, from heavy leather to fabric to soft rubber—our fingernails were still scarred with cuts, and calluses were beginning to make a painful appearance near our fingertips.

  For Zuck, however, working with wood and heating began to break the skin at the base of his nails. His palms and fingers were scarred and scratched by splinters that could not always be removed. Drops of blood settled into the cracks and scratches and hardened quickly to scabs when they were dried by the heat of the fire.

  The keys of his typewriter, the a, e, r, and other much-used letters, showed brownish spots, and it was sometimes simply bloody fingers that kept him from giving his penciled notes form and shape with the typewriter, even when there was suddenly and unexpectedly time to write.

  Since you get used to thinking of the things you work with as having a life of their own, Zuck’s anger was not usually directed at himself or at his existence, but at the typewriter. He beat the table with his injured hands and shouted that he wanted to take care of this machine, this . . .

  Then followed a stream of colorful, creative curses, from which we could gather that he had decided to smash the machine once and for all, to beat the stove to pieces, to stamp out the fires and scatter the ashes to the winds.

  That was the moment when something definite had to be done to counteract this clear expression of destruction. Two solutions were available with two different properties. You dipped your hands in one to wash and soften them. The other solution, reddish or deep blue in color, you brushed onto the wounded places to heal and harden them.

  For one or two days after such treatment Zuck could write again and hammer away on his typewriter, provided that there was no storm, no smoking stove, no sick animal, no leaky roof, and that no accident or misfortune occurred, things we had come to regard as normal parts of life.

  When worries about cold, heating, and hands like beds of nettles had subsided, the thought of the typewriter was the worst, a nightmare by itself. Sometimes it seemed as if I saw it as a personification of Drude, lying in wait on the desk in Zuck’s room.

  The rattling of the machine was like the motion and sound of a measuring instrument, a seismograph that indicates and records.

  Sometimes it sounded like the quick, regular hammering of a mill, at others like the rolling of great boulders in an avalanche. Sometimes it was like the slow dripping of water from a wet cliff, or like the tapping of the cane of a blind man seeking his way. Or it stopped, and it was quiet for days, weeks, and months.

  We had become accustomed with time not to speak of Zuck’s work, the way you never mention an incurable illness, or push a dangerous illness away from you by not mentioning it.

  In the first year on the farm he still had plans and illusions. The plans extended like rays in many directions, but carrying them out was interrupted, the way a radius is limited and cut off by too narrow a circumference. The themes wouldn’t fit together. The transitions didn’t succeed. The way from first inspiration to production was interrupted.

  Yes, the whole complex which had to do with free-lance work could be compared to a bush, packed for shipping with well-wrapped, balled roots, and tied branches, and set in a dark corner of the barn to be planted on a cool evening.

  As for the illusions, he shared those with many others.

  In one of the unbearable nights I tried to drive Drude away with reading. This is a rewarding undertaking when you succeed in mixing the sublime with the ordinary in the proper dosage. This time I found an article in a magazine with the title, “Farming Isn’t Fun,” an attack on farming which I read with relief and enjoyment, because it makes you happy when someone else expresses in writing what you have thought silently and angrily to yourself.

  This American fellow sufferer wrote:

  I began to farm my acres in Vermont in the free time allowed by my work as a writer. Now I have come to the point where I write in the little free time I can steal from the farm work. If it never rained, I would never get to my typewriter at all, because the corn and potatoes need my attention. My friends who are tied to their typewriters look at my farmyard, my barns, and my fields with longing. They long to dig in Mother Earth. They speak of the fresh and happy work with ax and spade. I envy them just as much. In three years I have had enough and have become tired of farm work. I am, furthermore, just terribly tired. . . . Haying certainly makes a pretty picture when you sit in a shady corner on the edge of the field and watch the happy countryman at work. Prose and verse have sung and celebrated this torment as a pleasant recreation, probably because none of those writers have ever swung a hay fork for hours in a sun-scorched field. But I have. I know how it feels when sweat drips out of all pores—my skin feels like that of an eel, and I am on the edge of total dehydration in spite of all the liquid I have thrown down my throat. It is strange that even Vermonters get romantic when the maple syrup time comes, and they celebrate the time with parties. . . . For me it means nothing but slaving with forty-pound cans of sap. My arms get stretched to ape-like length. Bushes, stones, and hidden sticks bruise my legs. Twigs whip my unprotected face, and my lungs, legs, and shoulders hurt almost as much as my arms. . . . It is supposed to be pleasant to come back to the comfortable house after a healthy day’s work in field and wood. That’s the way it is described by those who write about amateur farming, and also by those who write novels. They forget that, before he can sit down, the returning farmer has to do the dirtiest work of all, the barn work. They forget that he has to serve his animals as masseur, waiter, chamber maid, and garbage man . . .

  At this point I started to laugh. On the one hand, reading about the same anger, the same annoyance you have felt always stirs sympathetic laughter. On the other, it was unmistakable how Drude had tripped up this farm writer and now held him in her claws.

  Nothing annoys or angers Drude more than laughter. It works as if you dusted her with DDT and fed her rat poison.

  You are lucky when you can drive her away with laughter, but it is not something you can count on, just as you can’t count on any lessening of the load of work.

  Drude, Alp, Mahr, Blues—all are nothing more and nothing less than
the fear that you won’t be able to carry the load, which is made up of many components and is unchangeable.

  It seems to work like a balance. On one of the scales lie the threatening real facts, and in the other must be placed that irrational but dependable strength that keeps the balance through thick and thin.

  It is this strength that interests the blues, that they try to attack and destroy from all sides.

  There are many ways to escape them, though they are ancient, sly, and evil in nature.

  You can run away from them and become a moving target. You can withdraw to the mountain top and meditate. You can try to draw a balance by calculating debits and credits and come out in the black. You can compare your lot with that of others. In our time, we are able to visualize at any moment the fate of millions in all its hardness and cruelty, and this makes you thankful that you have come away with only a black eye.

  There are many other escape routes and weapons against Alp and Drude, but you must not underestimate the strength of these enemies, even though at first they only produce feelings like ill humor, disgust, discomfort, indifference, and discouragement.

  They sit in the background and wait for you to attribute false explanations for the circumstances that produce them, for you to try to blame others for your own mistakes. They wait for you to mix cause and effect and bring confusion and disorder into the simplest things. They poison your pleasure and feed the flames of anxiety. They want to prove to you that you are lying on a bed of nails in a state of trance like an Indian fakir, and if you are awakened you can be torn by every nail.

  They should be watched as they crouch on the threshold, for admitted they can lead to sickness, insanity, and suicide. They have been a plague in all lands, to all peoples, in all times. Procopius, a Greek historian of the time of the migrations, described them fourteen hundred years ago in an account of the land and people of the island Thule:

  On this island something very strange happens every year. For at the time of the summer solstice the sun does not set for forty days, and at the time of the winter solstice the sun does not rise for forty days, and the island is wrapped in eternal night. Melancholy attacks the people because they cannot see each other at this time. . . . But when thirty-five days of this long night have passed, a few people are sent up to a mountain peak, and as soon as they see a trace of sun they notify those waiting below, and call to them that the sun will shine in five days. Then they celebrate a great festival in the darkness. That is the great celebration of the people, and I can imagine that, even though the same thing happens year after year, the people of Thule are always attacked by the fear that the sun might stay away forever.

  The people of Thule were hunted into melancholy by the blue spirits, frightened by the constellations, and threatened by the end of the world.

  After fourteen hundred years we have progressed so far that the end of the world will perhaps be technically possible in a not too distant time.

  Doubtless there has never before been a time like our atomic age, when the concepts of maintaining or destroying life, the choice between “Energy” and “Bomb,” have been so clear and have become a part of common speech and daily life without a detour through philosophy and creed.

  We are all in one boat—the experimental animals, the goats and pigs, are there with us—and the test on Bikini affects us all.

  But there is still the “Energy,” the storehouse or reservoir of those powers which men, animals, and other creatures possess as long as they live and want to continue living.

  In the old legends there is a charm against Drude: “Drude, Drude, come tomorrow, I can wait to borrow sorrow.” This forces her to run away and to reappear the next day in the form of a person coming to borrow something.

  That means that she has become weak, a suppliant, a debtor, a poor enemy. You must treat her with kindness and caution to keep the strength you need to overcome her.

  For you will always have to live with Drude and will have to get the better of her again and again.

  THE WAY TO THE LIBRARY

  Through the Great Migrations I came to the library. I had gotten my hands on the writings of Paulus Diakonos and Procopius, who lived at the end and in the middle of that period. I could not pull myself away from that dark age thereafter, and I kept wanting to learn more about it.

  Not from historians who wrote eleven to nineteen centuries later, but through the eyewitnesses themselves, who had lived with and experienced the Great Migrations. For example, Gregory of Tours, who wrote in the wild times of the Merovingians, or Procopius, who advised and flattered the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and at the same time hated him deeply; Paulus, who lived as hostage and friend at the court of Charlemagne; Benedict, who opposed chaos with an order that extended from common sense and knowledge of men to creative wisdom; and Gregory the Great, monk, saint, poet, administrator, pope, general, Roman, diplomat, preacher, and expert on all human weaknesses. The horrors of that time are no longer able to shock us—they were far less calculated and intentional than the tortures used in our own day.

  My preoccupation with the early Middle Ages, the childhood history of the people whose dark traits are mirrored in a sick revival in our adult, conscious age, was in equal parts strange and familiar. Because of this it was not surprising that the library in which I could find all the material about it in Latin, English, and German seemed to me a place of enchanted unreality, an island, a promised land.

  It was also not to be wondered at that the way to it was long and difficult, consisted of many stages, and that I had to pay ransom, so to speak, both coming and going, to buy myself free from daily living, to earn the right to be allowed to set foot on the island. It was obvious that preparations for such a significant journey must be made as carefully as possible, and that they had to be started at least twenty-four hours in advance.

  It was not only that the library was a long way from our house.

  In summer the trip by car took exactly fifty-five minutes from the kitchen door at the farm to the entrance of the library. In the winter this simple commuting trip became an expedition, and if I closed the kitchen door behind me at seven in the morning, I rarely stood at the library entrance before noon.

  In the summer I could manage to go once a week; in the winter it depended on the weather.

  In the summer I rarely remained overnight in the university town in whose center the library stood; I was accustomed to start for home about 10:30, after the usual closing time of the library.

  In the winter I stayed one to two nights in town and had a place there with good friends.

  There are libraries everywhere in America. Each little community, each village has its own library in its own little building.

  These village libraries are mostly open twice a week in the evening. The children go there and the people of the village take out books and bring books back. These little collections often have a considerable number of works from early American history through Dickens to the most recent American literature. There are books about agriculture, about the history of the community, detective stories, and above all children’s books.

  The towns have larger libraries. Our neighboring town has, for example, a very imposing library which contains in addition to books a lovely collection of Chinese porcelain.

  The cities have impressive libraries of massive dimensions. The reading rooms of the public library in New York hold five hundred people.

  The largest library of all in America is the Library of Congress in Washington. They say that it possesses all the books of the world.

  Most of these libraries were founded by donors and are maintained by donations.

  But the university libraries are something quite unique. I had the good fortune to come upon the Dartmouth College library, an experience with the fateful quality of making me sure that I could never be happy anywhere else.

  Once I had settled in there, all other libraries, especially those in Europe, seemed like just cafeterias, ra
ilroad waiting rooms, tax offices, or museums. Their varying and uncertain hours, their many prohibitions, their attendants in gray smocks all made me feel like a petitioner, or a scholarship student who cannot afford to buy the important books and must therefore depend on charity and who has to be watched so that he doesn’t walk off with anything.

  But most of all what disturbs me in the European libraries is the dullness, the stolidness that the reading rooms exude from their dusty pores that makes you drag home like a snail with the book they have let you borrow.

  In my library you are a guest. The attendants are dressed as if for a tea party which they will hold in the rooms of the library. Your hosts pride themselves on having or being able to order the books in which you are interested.

  It is all hospitable and unforced. The building, the rooms, the way the building is divided, and the people there all contribute to an atmosphere of meaning and importance. The meaning is in the books, stored up as latent energy, and the important thing is to carry this energy over into life and make it useful to living people.

  This is my library, and it means nothing less to me than landing on another planet.

  When I step into the first section of the revolving door that leads into the entrance hall of the library, I sense that all my oppressive ghosts and evil spirits have turned into blue smoke behind me and have dispersed like mist.

  The preparations for the trip consisted in cooking ahead, telephoning, and doing and noting everything on the “frightful” lists.

  The cooking would be large quantities of things like baked beans with salt pork, an American national dish known as Boston baked beans, which is cooked in an earthen pot in the oven for twelve hours. Or it was a Szegedine goulash, or lentils with ham, or mutton with cabbage, in short, a meal that would only improve with reheating so that Zuck lived securely and comfortably for two or three days on reheated meals.