by Ben Hewitt
Penny and I have not made the choices we have—around education, money, ambition, and so on—because we think we are going to heal the world. We are not that foolish, nor that virtuous. But while these choices may not immediately influence the trajectory of global affairs, they are ultimately a reflection of the world we wish to inhabit, and in that sense, they become the world we wish to inhabit. It is a world in which children feel trusted, useful, and respected, where generosity is stronger than greed, and where all people are liberated to live in a manner that affords them the freedom to be generous and trusting. It is a world in which it is commonly understood that all the seemingly overwhelming forces of humankind, many of which cause hardship and despair, depend on us to feel dependent on them. They depend on us not realizing that with every choice we make, with every action we take, we are shaping the world. Our world.
THEN I WALKED HOME
Summer comes as summer does, fast and undeniable, bringing with it the means to fill each of its days, from their gauzy five A.M. beginnings to the exhausted, body-sore collapse into sleep. There is firewood to be cut, split, and stacked; a woodshed to be built for the firewood to be stacked into; a stand of mature fir to be thinned, skidded, and sawn. Then there are the boards, redolent of the earthy sweetness of fresh-cut lumber, to be stickered and covered. Fence posts to be set; the raspberries to be thinned and trellised; dozens of vegetable beds to be broadforked, weeded, and seeded. The sheep and pigs and cows to be turned out to pasture. Hay to be baled; bales to be loaded, thrown, stacked. And then the cows freshen and there is suddenly milk everywhere and even better, cream: To turn to butter, to cut the bitterness of strong coffee, to whip, to slurp by the cupful straight from a quart jar while standing before the open fridge in chainsaw chaps and a sweat-damp T-shirt. Fishing trips with the boys, walking downhill through the woods to the neighbor’s stream, where the brookies hide in the shadows of a tumbledown stone bridge, half or more fallen in, uncrossed for decades and perhaps even generations.
One morning I awoke particularly early, for Rye’s cat, Winslow, had squeezed his way through the gate through which he is not supposed to squeeze and pranced his way upstairs, where he settled into a spot directly to the right of my slumbering head and commenced to purr maliciously. It was 4:45 A.M., or thereabouts, so I shuffled downstairs to make a cup of coffee, and then, just as soon as I thought perhaps I could make out the shaggy forms of the sheep in the murky half-light of predawn beyond the kitchen window, I strolled outside.
It was eerie warm, the air soup-thick and rank with the smell of the skunks the boys had trapped the day prior for our friend Todd. Not for the first time (and certainly not for the last), I cursed my sons’ odd desires and also Penny’s and my willingness to accommodate them. I mean, really: Who in their right mind would let their children trap skunks and skin them in the front yard? Who in their right mind would let their children build a trapping shed at the junction of lawn and driveway, in plain smell of the house? I want to support my boys and all, but sometimes it just seems like it’d be a hell of a lot easier if they were into Xbox and Little League. Sometimes, it just seems like it’d be a hell of a lot easier if we just said no a little more often.
I spent the remainder of the early morning moving from animal to animal as the sky went about its business of exchanging dark for light. Pigs, chickens, and the new batch of piglets, down in the nascent nut grove, rutting out the wild raspberries and spreading their rich manure. I strolled down to the cows at the far end of the pasture, and stood under the big apple tree along Melvin’s boundary and ours, just watching. I’d had the idea I might gather some wind-dropped fruit for the pigs, but I’d brought no bucket and hadn’t even worn a shirt from which to fashion a carrier, and I realized how foolish I’d been.
A minute passed, maybe two. It was not raining, but it felt as if might start, and I remembered the ending lines of Hayden Carruth’s poem “The Cows at Night”:
But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how
in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then
very gently it began to rain.
Then I walked home.
6
Big Sticks
ON JANUARY 14, 2002, in the chaotic, dust-thick midst of a house that had no kitchen sink, finished floors, exterior siding, or drywall, Penny went into labor with our first child. She was grocery shopping when the unmistakable grip of contractions began, and she continued filling her basket as our Finlay made his imminence known. Befitting my wife’s pragmatic nature, she crossed each and every item off her list and then, having coolly calculated the pace of contractions to achieve a rough estimation of her allotted time before things got down to business, continued on to the lumberyard, where she loaded a dozen boxes of slate shower tiles into the trunk of our car before embarking on the twenty-five-mile drive home. Upon arrival, Penny settled into our bedroom (which is to say, there was a bare, unfinished room with a mattress on the floor, so we called it a “bedroom”) and I called the midwife, Judy, before embarking on a frenzied quest to transform our construction zone into something more amenable to the birth of a child.
This was to be our midwife’s first visit to our home; from our prenatal appointments, I had gotten the impression that she did not hold me in high regard. There was something disdainful in her manner whenever she addressed or responded to me, a haughtiness that suggested distaste for my company. I could only guess at the reasons for this distaste, which had uncharacteristically given me a desire to impress upon her that I was, in fact, a fine and upstanding young man, providing for my wife and child-to-be in a manner that spoke of responsibility, compassion, and general competence. Did the piles of debris and strewn-about, sharp-bladed tools with which we shared our living space evoke these qualities? I thought not, and so as Penny endured her deepening contractions in our little flophouse of a bedroom at the top of the stairs (which is to say, there was an ascending set of creaky rough plank treads, so we called them “stairs”), I busied myself humping the jagged-toothed cutting implements to the basement and consolidating the various piles of construction detritus.
Thirty minutes later, Judy swept into our home, casting her gaze around our rudimentary living quarters, which to my eyes had never looked more splendid. I’d even relocated the table saw to the basement, a process that normally required two able-bodied humans. The impending arrival of both our midwife and our child seemed to have imbued me with superhuman strength and catlike agility. “Well, you sure have a long way to go,” Judy huffed as she swept into the house on a cloud of frigid air. She tromped up the wobbly stairs and settled into a rocking chair perched directly in the center of the bedroom doorway. There, she fell into a deep and restful slumber. In fairness, I am compelled to point out that Judy was an exceptionally experienced and highly regarded midwife, and we’d chosen her to help bring our first child into the world specifically because of these qualities. Still, for Rye’s birth, we retained the services of a midwife whose competence was accompanied by kindness toward both me and our home.
This may sound sort of obvious, but there is something amazing about having your children born at home, into the protective shell of a house you have assembled from piles of bare lumber. How many boards had I nailed together over the prior year? How many trees had lost their lives to the home that was slowly taking shape around us, and into which my sons would emerge from their small, private oceans? I remember, with striking clarity, placing my hands under each of their warm, wet heads and feeling, with just that brief whisper of first contact, the sweet and infinite vulnerability of parenthood wash over me.
It’s not that you can’t experience these things at a hospital birth, of course, but every day I walk past the precise spots on the living room floor where my sons came into this world, the precise spots where I crouched atop those foot-worn boards to
receive their tiny bodies, and hold them for a greedy second longer than absolutely necessary before placing them against Penny’s chest.
Having children was, of course, a life-altering event, but unlike our land, which has imprinted itself upon us slowly and in a manner that occasionally leaves me second-guessing whether or not its influence is as absolute as I imagine, the force of children is both immediate and irrefutable. The impact is at once acute and emotionally fluid: Joy. Fear. Pride. Confusion. Worry. Joy again. More pride, more worry. Behind it all, the omnipresent sense that your life has ceased being yours and yours alone, because there is suddenly a person whose well-being matters more than your own, more than anything else in the world. You might never have thought such a thing possible, but even if you did, you find yourself nearly stricken by the sheer force and certainty of this truth.
Lacking as it may have been in many of the twenty-first century’s assumed comforts, the house into which Fin and Rye were born was a distinct improvement over the humble cabin we’d begun assembling immediately after taking title to our land. The plans for this cabin had been sketched onto the back of an envelope by the small light of a candle and were open to a broad sweep of interpretation. Still, some things were known. For instance, we knew the cabin would measure sixteen feet by thirty-two feet, with a sleeping loft tucked under its roof. We knew the roof would be steeply angled so snow would slide off of its own accord, and we knew it would be metal so that we might fall asleep to the sound of rain on tin. And we knew the frame of the cabin would be built of large timbers procured from a local sawmill. “Mr. Hewitt, them are some big sticks,” the mill’s proprietor told me when I placed the order. For no particularly good reason, this pleased me. Them are some big sticks. Damn straight, fella.
We worked hastily, almost frantically, driven by our desire to extricate ourselves from the damp, moldy, cigarette-smoke-stained hovel we’d rented for the previous year and a half. One hundred bucks per month the place cost us, but of course that wasn’t the full toll, because, put bluntly, the place was a turd, a dark and dispiriting burrow into which congeniality and general happiness could disappear, never to be seen again. It wasn’t that we had to haul drinking water from our respective work places; it wasn’t that the roof leaked, or that the bathroom consisted of a dilapidated and poorly vented outhouse. It wasn’t that it was tucked into a forest so close and dense that leafed branches rubbed the windows. It wasn’t any of these things, because any and all of these deficits might have been overcome by a single iota of cheer or vitality. There was just something unspeakably desperate about the place. It was like a three-legged dog, or an aging rock star playing the local dive bar.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I told Penny late one night, shortly after we’d flopped our exhausted bodies on the mattress tucked beneath the eaves. We’d spent the day framing the floor system of our soon-to-be (but clearly, not soon enough) home, staggering under the weight of brutish two-by-twelve-inch-by-sixteen-foot joists of hemlock. Each weighed approximately as much as a small planet.
It wasn’t the first time one of us had expressed that sentiment. It probably wasn’t the fiftieth. “I know, I know,” she said in a placating tone.
“No, you don’t understand!” I was a little panicked, now; I was rising off my pillow, my voice shrill and keening. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
There was something else driving us, too: We simply yearned to be on our land. The yearning was a viral, magnetic force in our bodies and spirits. It could not be resisted, and the only cure was to make the transition as soon as possible, to step through the threshold we now stood upon, to immerse ourselves in the life we had imagined for so long, the one that had kept us awake so many nights, our words barely able to keep pace with our fevered imaginations.
There was a minor problem, which is that we were broke. Every dollar we’d saved had been absorbed by the initial land deal, which had set us back thirty thousand dollars. Half we’d borrowed from a bank; the other half represented the entirety of our life savings, cobbled together one meager eight-dollars-per-hour paycheck at a time. Our shortfall was solved by our friend Jerry, a fast-talking New Yorker who’d cashed in a couple of inherited NYC taxi medallions and was perhaps the only person we knew who possessed both the means and, crucially, the inclination to extend us a loan. Still, the interest rate on Jerry’s ten-thousand-dollar loan was 10 percent, which is to say, Jerry might have been a buddy, but he wasn’t an altruist.
To raise more cash, we sold our car—a sad little Volkswagen that fetched six hundred dollars—and replaced it with a Dodge pickup of early seventies vintage. The truck was tricolor, the factory green supplemented by swaths of blue and pink. It was ugly, sure, but for two hundred bucks, we sure as heck weren’t complaining. There is a certain type of person who sells a six-hundred-dollar car because they are willing to drive something cheaper, and we were that type of person. With Jerry’s money, the profit from our vehicle trade, and the help of our friend Rick, a carpenter with biceps so firm and pronounced they might as well have been hewn of wood, we erected the exterior shell of a modest shelter, installing the last of the windows just as the season’s first snowstorm rolled up through New England. Rick had gifted us two weeks of his labor as an early wedding present.
To keep expenses low, we’d eschewed a traditional frost wall or basement foundation and instead perched the cabin atop two long rows of concrete piers; each pier was set, eight feet away from its neighbor, into a four-foot-deep hole dug by a splinter-handled spade. By the time all the holes were dug, our palms were pocked moonscapes of blisters. Some nascent and rising, some ripe and juicy, still others turning to hard knobs of callus. I suspect that some of the calluses I have on my hands now were initiated during that digging.
Owing to the slope of the ground, the rearward piers stuck four feet out of the soil, exactly double the recommended maximum height of above-ground exposure. This may have been the cause of the swaying motion that visited our cabin whenever the wind blew, which, owing to the cabin’s exposed location, was approximately always. One way to describe the motion is to say that it was sort of like being in a cradle. Another way to describe the motion is to say that it was sort of like being in a cabin that feels as if it’s about to tip over.
We lived in the cabin for three years, gradually improving upon it until it featured running water (both cold and, to our rapt amazement, hot), insulation, and a pair of borrowed solar panels that enabled us to run three lights, a radio, and my laptop, although not all at the same time, and, unless the sun was high and bright, not for more than two consecutive hours. We slept atop a futon mattress laid across the rough-board floor of a loft accessed via an aluminum ladder. After the ladder slipped out from underneath a housesitting friend as he was descending, leaving him clinging to the loft edge by his fingertips until he found the courage to jump, we installed a cleat at its base.
For all these shortcomings and many more, we loved that little cabin. Our wedding invitation, mailed just after we’d moved in but before we’d installed insulation or running water, depicted a drawing of our new home’s front gable end, with our tandem bicycle leaning rakishly against it, and from just that simple black-and-white sketch, you could sense a particular rightness about the scale and form of the structure, as if it knew its place in the world. As if it knew what it was and what it wasn’t and had made peace with this knowledge. In a strange way, I could not help but want to emulate it.
Of course, I recognize my bias in all this. It’s hard to avoid caring about a structure you’ve built with your own hands, a place where you can literally point out the faded bloodstains from where you nicked a finger while shaving the edge of a floorboard with a utility knife. The smallness of our home, accompanied by the limited resources with which it was built, ensured a high level of engagement on our part. There was not a single part of the process that did not in some manner or another bear our mark. This is not because we were terrifically skilled. Sure, we
had rudimentary construction experience, gleaned primarily from the hodgepodge of jobsites we’d both worked on, but neither Penny nor I had ever advanced beyond the semi-skilled-laborer stage.
Years later, I see how the building of our home is in many ways analogous to the manner in which we educate Fin and Rye. Neither of us had formal instruction in the craft of homebuilding; rather, we relied on our innate curiosity and capacity to learn on the fly. We knew we’d make mistakes (although maybe we underestimated the sheer number of mistakes), but we understood this to be inevitable and therefore not something that could be avoided. When we reached the limit of our skills and resources, we sought out friends and professionals who could facilitate the process. In short, we granted ourselves the confidence that we could actually do such a thing, and while such confidence may seem misplaced and even indicative of an inflated sense of self-worth, I believe it to be nothing more than the confidence all humans are born with but which slowly erodes as they come to perceive learning as existing in isolation from living.
In 2001, we began construction on an addition that more than doubled the square footage of our living space. Again, we comprised the principal labor force in the process, working under the oversight of yet another builder friend, who moonlighted with us on weekends. This time around, we’d secured a construction loan from a local bank, which enabled us to lift the cabin off its piers, excavate and pour a full basement, and commit the summer, fall, and fledgling weeks of winter to expanding our home. It was a span of time that almost perfectly mirrored the gestation of our first child.
