When the 19th century filled New Hampshire with farms, 70 percent of the state was open land. Dairy farms of 40 or 60 acres lined the dirt roads, pastures for cattle behind them. When I am driven in the backcountry now, past dense forests of hardwood or soft, I see remnant stone walls that kept sheep and cattle to their allotted pastures. I see no horses, whose manure used to surface the roads. The farmers’ sons and daughters deserted granite and sandy soil to work in the mills or go west, where the earth was better for farming. New England has become the most forested part of the United States, 80 percent covered by trees.
In summers when I hayed with my grandfather, 1938–1945, fewer than half a million people lived in New Hampshire. Every quarter mile or so on Route 4 (paved 1928), a small farm—a few Holsteins with hayfields, sheep, chickens, one horse to pull or carry—struggled to survive through the labor of a farmer like my grandfather. Much land and no cash. Old backcountry farms had already begun their return to forest. When my grandfather and I walked in the hills, to call the cows or pick blueberries, we were wary to avoid cellar holes and abandoned wells. Sometimes we knew that a cellar hole was near because the dead farmwife’s hollyhocks gave us warning. At 12 I hayed for the first time on two acres of widow hay down the road. (The farmer had died; his widow wanted grass in her fields, not brush.) When my late wife, Jane Kenyon, and I returned to live in central New Hampshire in 1975, the widow’s hayfield looked like virgin forest to city sorts, softwood rising high and dense. In the southern part of the state, tract houses cover the earth of old farms, and New Hampshire has more than a million people now—mainly suburbanites who live an hour or less from Boston, refugees from Taxachusetts to a state without income tax.Dylan Thomas wrote a villanelle addressed to his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The rhyming line was “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” When I met Dylan, I was 23. I told him I loved that poem, and he told me he didn’t; he said he stole it from Yeats. (Yeats in old age liked to use the word “rage.”) Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about the poem. It showed affection and care for his father, but it asked him to do what he could not do. In real life, a student of mine at Michigan cherished her ferocious father. He was difficult, but she had always adored his explosiveness. When he softened in age, she couldn’t bear it. She spoke in something like anger, as if his weakness were willful.
When Jane and I moved here, we loved a great-aunt of mine—82, younger than I am now—whose temperament was cheerful and affectionate. She and Jane spent mornings together digging bitter dandelions to boil for dinner. My aunt tottered when she walked, and with difficulty climbed six concrete steps, without a railing, to reach her front door. She asked her grandson, a 30-year-old carpenter, to put up something she could hold onto. I heard him grumble, “She could climb them stairs if she was a mind to.”
Everyone who practices an art should love and live with another art. One learns about one’s own work by exposing oneself to a different passion. Mentioning a second art does not imply competence in practicing it. In eighth grade I flunked Art, which was lamentable because I sat beside Mary Beth Burgess in class, and I was sweet on her. Music is totally beyond me. My most notable musical moment took place on Ken Burns’s Baseball. He interviewed me about the game, about loving baseball, not about playing it. I had hung around Major League players, writing books and essays about them, and for Ken I came up with 20 anecdotes. Then he asked me to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” telling me that all his interviewees would sing it. Ken Burns’s charm could persuade a monkey to breed with a daffodil. At his urging I tried singing “Take me out …” and heard my pitch waver capriciously up and down. Tuneless, ashamed, I forgot the lyrics in my disgrace. The highlight of Ken’s Baseball series, I swear, is the image of my mouth hanging open wide and silent. It looked like brain damage. In editing, Ken paid special attention to this image by holding it for two or three beats. (...)
Old houses are full of holes. Creatures sneak into the living room. A summer ago, a garter snake entered and slithered across my living room. I stepped on its head and threw it outside. The same year, I discovered a visitor who became my favorite for persistence. A chipmunk took up residence and remained on the first floor for two or three months. Every day I would hear chirping, at first sounding like an electronic signal. Then the chipmunk came into sight, pausing with its paws tucked or folded before it, I suppose sustained by my cat’s kibble and water. As for my cat, she stared at it intently, fascinated. My housekeeper, Carole, bought a tiny Havahart trap and baited it with whatever we imagined was a chipmunk treat. Every morning the bait was gone, but so was the chipmunk. One morning the creature skittered from the kitchen into the toolshed, where the door showed a wide space at its bottom, and never appeared again. I felt abandoned. When autumn descended into winter, I walked into the cluttered dining room, never used in old age, and smelled something rotten in a box of unsorted snapshots. Under a layer of pictures I found the small body of our chipmunk. It had not escaped after all. With a paper towel I picked it up, rigid and almost weightless, and threw it from the door as far as I could. Next morning when I opened the door to pick up the newspaper, half of his small mummified corpse lay beside the door.
At this New Hampshire house, woodchucks are annoying and commonplace. Sixty years ago, my cousin Freeman grew vegetables by his shack up on New Canada Road, and his shotgun took care of many such thieves. Each summer he ate one. “If they eat my peas, I’ll eat them! ” Freeman would dress the woodchuck and carry it downhill to my grandmother’s wood stove. Kate held her nose as she baked it, and Freeman in his hut ate woodchuck.
Across the road from the house, my grandparents raised their year’s bounty of beans, peas, onions, potatoes, and corn. The farthest part of the garden was sweet corn, which phantom raccoons ate every night. Nearer the house were the peas and beans, and it was maddening to find pole beans devoured by woodchucks. When I was a boy, I’d sit on a concrete watering trough with my .22 Mossberg and wait for an hour to assassinate a predator. When Jane and I returned, we grew another garden. I was too impatient, nearly 50, to sit so long with my gun. I bought a Havahart trap. From the porch I could see when the trap was sprung. I walked across Route 4 with the same Mossberg and killed the woodchuck trembling in my Havahart. Once every summer I thought of what Freeman did. In the kitchen I picked up the Joy of Cooking, where Irma Rombauer gives a recipe for woodchuck. When I got to the part about looking for mites when you skinned it, I closed the book and buried the corpse.
My Havahart came from an Agway, which sold farm equipment after most farmers had left. Traps were not the only solution for woodchucks. If you found a likely hole you could try poison, but nothing worked for me except a long rifle slug from my .22. An Agway clerk told me of a customer who was especially enraged. He bought sticks of dynamite, fed them down a woodchuck hole, and blew up his whole garden. (...)
Gray squirrels dig in the driveway. Red squirrels are sneaky and rip into insulation on the second floor, poking pink fuzzy fragments through the cracks in the toolshed’s ceiling. Always there have been multitudes of mice, though not so many as when my grandfather kept a shed full of grain. Back then, a mother cat had three litters a year, and the kittens who ate mice followed my grandfather as he milked. In the tie-up he swirled a teat and sprayed Holstein milk into gaping mouths. Eventually each kitten strayed away to take a look at Route 4, and it was my chore to bury them deep enough so that something would not dig up a snack. Meanwhile the old mother dragged her teats on the barn floor and never approached the road. If mice in the house became a nuisance, my grandmother invited a cat inside for a predatory visit. Otherwise no mouse-catching cats or beloved cow-herding dogs were allowed inside. People lived in houses.
In 1975 Jane and I brought three cats with us from Michigan. In Ann Arbor, a town of a hundred thousand, Catto and Mia and Arabella roamed outside. New Hampshire’s Route 4 turned them into housecats. They didn’t seem to mind, maybe because the mouse supply was exemplary. Jane went barefoot most of the year as she walked around the house and wrote poems. She screamed a special small scream whenever her bare foot squished the ripped body of a mouse, placed in her way by a cat showing off.
by Donald Hall, The American Scholar | Read more:
Image: Ronald Wittek Picture Press Getty Images via[ed. See also: Donald Hall’s Life Work]
