It was the last day of April 1964, and Phillis and I were headed from the rolling farm country of central New York to the mountains of northeastern Vermont to interview for teaching jobs. In less than a month, Phillis would receive her degree from Syracuse University in science education. She would then be qualified to teach biology and earth science. With luck I might be awarded a degree from the liberal arts college. Though I’d majored in English and had always, from the time I was six or seven, planned to become a writer, a teller of tales like those my parents read to me by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, I was not qualified to do much of anything. Still, we planned to be married that August. We needed to earn some money, and after that, our future was open-ended. Perhaps we’d go on to graduate school. Scarcely more than a kid myself, I was naive enough to suppose that somewhere, maybe at one of the MFA creative writing programs that were becoming popular at American universities, I would find a blueprint for how to write stories that someone besides my mother might want to read.
We’d learned about two teaching vacancies in a tiny town in Vermont. Though we had no idea what or exactly where the Northeast Kingdom was, we’d found Orleans on a Vermont road map, been intrigued by the sparsely populated terrain, the mountains, the numerous lakes and streams, and decided to drive up and have a look. If nothing else, it would be a fine spring lark.
In Burlington the maple trees were beginning to leaf out. Daffodils were blooming on the quadrangle of the university. Students in shorts lounged on the newly green grass. But as we continued northeast over the Green Mountains, the maple buds were just turning red. Soon we entered an austere region of big woods, relieved here and there by rough-looking farms. Scattered through the forest were speckled patches of old snow.
Pushing on, we lost the Red Sox game on the radio. Then we lost reception altogether. We noticed that as the season retreated from spring to late winter, we seemed to be traveling into an earlier era. We passed a farmer collecting maple sap in a wooden vat on runners pulled by two black-and-white oxen, their horns tipped with gleaming brass balls. In a clearing in the woods, a shaggy horse in a working harness stood near a man stacking pulpwood. We caught the scent of wood smoke from a farmhouse attached to a barn by a ramshackle shed. A bedraggled wreath adorned the boarded-up front door. Some of the barns and sheds were decorated with rural scenes that could have been inspired by the poetry of Robert Frost. Who, we wondered, had painted them? A school bus from the ’40s, converted to a hunting camp, with a set of deer antlers over the cracked windshield, slumped in a clearing. We passed mailboxes with the names Desjardins, Thibeau, Lafleur, and Lanoue lettered on them. Had we blundered over the border into Canada?