Wandering Home (15 page)

We’re on our own parcel of land now, the one I bought in my mid-twenties when I left the city, 130 acres that run imperceptibly on to the vast state land. We stop for a moment at the swinging bench Sue and I got for a wedding present—I spent a week tromping around
looking for the perfect spot, eventually hanging it here between two white pines, where it offers a perfectly framed view of Crane Mountain. Our daughter’s middle name is Crane; by now this place is in us deep.

D
OWN THE SMALL
trail and out into the cleared field. Once there was a barn here, but it had caved in by the time we arrived, and so the local fire company burned it for practice, all of us in our turnout gear on a cold fall day, amazed by the heat that comes from a “fully involved” building. Now there’s just grass, and a small fire pit, where we roast marshmallows and swat no-see-ums in high summer. It’s right above the pond—the pond where the otters come a few times a year to play with the dog, the pond of a thousand hockey games. And across the pond, the house, where our daughter had her start, and our books, and our marriage. At dusk on a December night, when you take one last swooping turn around the ice, there’s no warmer sight in the world than the yellow light spilling out of the kitchen window through a scrim of icicles.

Not today, though. Today it’s hot and we’re tired, and a journey is at its end, and so of course beer is in order. A little Saranac pale ale from this side of the lake, and a little Otter Creek copper ale from Vermont—we mix them together and drink a toast to this whole territory, indivisible in my mind anyway. Tall granite, high corn, lofty pines. Big people but not too many.

T
HIS TREK BEGAN
, literally, in Robert Frost’s backyard; it ends in the domain of a different poet. Jeanne Robert Foster is hardly known at all, but her life coincided with Frost’s; she was born five years later than he, in 1879, and died seven years later, in 1970. Only one book of her poems remains in print, a posthumous collection-cum-biography called
Adirondack Portraits.
In the foreword the great literary critic Alfred Kazin writes of his amazement at coming across her work for the first time, “an astonishing duplicate of Frost’s slow-moving, artfully conversational pastorals.” But, as he also noted, she lacked his “great ego;” in the end, “she was less interested in poetry than in the world it could report.”

That world was the one I’d been walking through the last week. Born near Olmstedville, not far from where I’d emerged from the Hoffman Notch Wilderness, she lived a childhood of deep rural poverty, often “farmed out” to other families to earn her keep when there wasn’t food enough at home. And so she’d lived in Griffin, the ghost town down the Sacandaga; and in North River above the Hudson; and here, a twenty-minute walk from our house, even closer up against the side of Crane Mountain.

And then she made an almost miraculous breakout—she was a great beauty and, at seventeen, she wed a man twenty-five years her senior who had met her on
vacation and took her south to New York, to Boston, where she found herself, all of a sudden, near the center of American culture both popular and high. A drawing of her appeared on the cover of
Vanity Fair;
soon she was one of the Gibson Girls, supermodels of the day. She next worked her way into journalism, first as a newspaper reporter and then as the literary editor of the
American Review of Reviews
, the largest-circulation serious magazine in the country—she wrote eight or twelve pages of book and poetry criticism for the magazine each month, and then went to Europe to help cover World War I. Back in New York, her headquarters was Petitpas’ Restaurant, where her circle included the great portrait painter John Butler Yeats (father of William)—an unfinished drawing of Foster was on his easel when he died, and she took his body to the Chestertown, near Olmstedville, for burial. Later she worked closely with John Quinn as he assembled the greatest collection of contemporary art in America—she became friends with Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, Pound; there’s a picture in
Adirondack Portraits
of her teeing up a golf ball in a foursome that includes the sculptor Brancusi and the composer Erik Satie.

But all the time she was writing poems, poems about this small slice of the Adirondacks, and the people and the trees she had known in her youth. She published two collections around the start of World War I
—Wild Apples
, and
Neighbors of Yesterday.
Her biographer, Noel
Riedinger-Johnson, says that the books “completed a trilogy of distinguished literary portraits by American women” that also included Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett. More than that, they left the best record of what life was like in Warren County at the turn of the century, in the decades when conservation was gaining the upper hand and the state was starting to buy up huge tracts of the Adirondacks, letting them revert to wildness.

The first thing to strike a reader was how much more crowded it was—almost Vermont-like in its density. The margins of Crane Mountain, now mostly trees with a few vacation homes, then comprised farms small and large. Most of these were subsistence farms, and the subsistence was bare; the growing season up here is probably forty or fifty days shorter than in the depths of the Champlain Valley; I’ve seen frosts well past Memorial Day and well before Labor Day. One poem, “The Boiled Shirt,” describes a family farming sandy soil on the upper edge of the mountain, where “even the hens were lean from always chasing grasshoppers.” A photographer comes to take their picture, the only one they’ve ever sat for, but as he waits he hears the angry voices of the father and the two grown sons. They’re arguing, the wife explains, because

Subsistence farming did not automatically breed “community” or “neighborliness” or any of the other virtues we sometimes imagine; Foster tells of a farm wife up and leaving her husband and five children (“I’m only hands and feet for George, / Someone to put the food on the table, / Someone to have more children for him”), and of the last, abortive, tar-and-feathering in town.

And yet it was a full world, too, absolutely full. She tells about a neighbor, Cy Pritchard, who had heard about Johnny Appleseed, and who decided to do the same thing on a smaller scale—visiting his neighbors, eating their apples, saving the seeds.

She describes wax-on-snow at the height of the syrup run, and the giant elm on Landon Hill, and the old pine tree by the baseball diamond in Chestertown, its roots

A
ND IF JOHNSBURG PEOPLE
were not perfect, they did build and protect a key stop on the Underground Railroad (“and on Emancipation Day they / Set candles in the windows to proclaim / that man’s triumphant spirit rules his clay”). They had every kind of frolic—skating parties, square dances. People who’d never had security found it—Foster writes about one Irish family, refugees from the potato famine, who wouldn’t leave their land even to go to church:

No spell swept it away. Just slow time, the steady spread of an economy that made these most marginal of hill farms impossible. That filled them first with field pine and birch, and then slowly with real forest, till you need to know where to look to find a sign. (But it’s still easy to see the cellar hole on the Putnam Farm beneath Crane Mountain where Foster lived, and the wolf maple that grew outside the kitchen window.)

So—is that sad? In a sense, of course. It’s a passing, and passings are sad. If the last grassland sparrow leaves Vermont, its call will be missed. In one poem, Foster imagines the ghosts of the two Putnam brothers, come back to survey their land. Enos, frantic, sees the white house rotting, the beehives gone, the cattle and the sheep missing.

His brother Francis is calmer, though; he wants only one thing from his visit, “the scent of sweet fern in the August sun.”

I can feel both moods. There is a surpassing glory in our right habitation of a place—it’s the orderliness of the college garden, the calm of Mitchell’s pasture, the humming industry of Kirk Webster’s hives, the sweet draught of Granstrom’s wine, the endless slow bounty of David Brynn’s forests.
It’s the glory of the land and the human making sense of each other.
That conversation has almost died out in our nation, drowned by the roar of thoughtless commerce, pointless ease; that’s why it’s so fine to see places like the Champlain Valley where you can still hear it going on, indeed hear it growing a little louder.

But here on the western shore, there is another—equal—kind of glory, the glory of the human voice growing quieter and quieter till it’s only a whisper. Foster’s last poems return, relentlessly, to Crane Mountain, the mammoth, steep-sided hunk of rock, twin-summited with a big pond in the saddle between, its high flanks carpeted with berries and hence fertilized with bear scat. In one verse, two sons ask their father why he sold the family timber lot on one side of the mountain to the state for part of the forest preserve.

Some passings, in other words, are sadder than others. The conversion of a farm into a strip mall or a tract of pasteboard mansions saddens because it’s irrevocable, at least on a human time scale; it replaces the particular, the appropriate-to-this-place, with the general, the one-size-fits-anywhere. Whereas the slide of a farmstead or a woodlot into wildness—or vice versa—merely trades one appropriateness for another. It’s like the passage of a youth into an adult, a slow change and maturation that, with luck, never strikes the observer as too abrupt or ungainly. And if one is truly lucky the passage from adult to corpse will go as smoothly, seem a natural shift that leaves us sad for what is no more, but not shaken. That renews our sense of the propriety of things. A blur, not a line.