Losing the Garden

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony
where everything is known and loved because it is known?

Even before we came to Barra, we agreed that Guy would keep the statistical record while I kept a narrative comment on our daily doings. I wasn’t so sure I liked my half of the deal.

“My brother found my diary when I was sixteen and went around singing ‘Laura loves Bobby,’” I said.

“Don’t write it like that,” Guy said. “Just say what we did every day.”

“Okay,” I said.“No personal stuff.”

“Well, you can put in ‘Guy loves Laura’ if you want.”

I began this journal on June 9, 1973, the day we began living on our land.

I never missed a day. This sounds ridiculously compulsive, but so is brushing one’s teeth, and for me these daily journal entries turned into that kind of habit. I could be in bed, realize I hadn’t written in my journal, and get up to do it.

The first entry read:

We left the Merritt’s in Lenox, Mass. around 6:30 a.m. and arrived at Barra at 11:05. We stopped at McLam’s to talk about our lumber order on the way, and picked up a rather large supply of mail at the post office. John and Freda Williams were working on their garden, and we chatted briefly before driving into our property. Then something happened we weren’t expecting. We didn’t get up our first hill the first time! A combination of a very wet spring and construction trucks going up and down our road. We tried again, staying to the far left side, and made it. We were consoled when we saw the shelter—still in one piece with contents intact—and the garden. Everything we’d planted in May had come up! And the peas looked superb. We decided just to unload the plants which were the worse for wear, having suffered on the drive up. We were afraid it was going to rain and needed to make a trip out for groceries, potting soil, and lime. This we did. And, though the sky blackened, it did not rain. Disturbing incident on the way out—ran into three trail bikes just before the road turns into the wood. Pleaded with them not to go up our already rutted road. We are free of subways, noise, and city rudeness—but not of mechanized and destructive toys.

Spent the rest of the afternoon planting. Peppers and cabbages and leeks. The peppers improved soon after we put them in the ground. Decided to arrange the shelter for permanent living and then started dinner. We cooked on our camp stove and made a great vegetable stew. About 6:30 John and Joan Bennett and Craig Campbell arrived. John and Joan were looking for property in Vermont and Craig owns some land near Thetford. They cooked dinner and took a walk around our property. We had the feeling that our land grew on them. We all went to bed around 9:00. Guy and I almost caused a fire by setting a candle too close to a rafter in the shelter.

Another incident happened that first evening that I didn’t record. Darkness was settling down into our clearing when, to our surprise, we heard footsteps, punctuated by occasional thrashings in the underbrush. Suddenly, a man clad in the brown uniform of United Parcel Service stumbled out of the woods. Breathing hard, he looked at us, down at the parcel in his hand, and back at us again. A desperate light shone in his eyes.

“Guy Waterman?” he gasped.“I hope!”

Guy’s record keeping was in many ways the heart and soul of Barra. That may seem like an oversentimentalized view of statistics, but in keeping records we kept in touch with an astounding number of details having to do with all aspects of our life on the land, from the weather to the birds seen and heard each day, to the wood collected and consumed, to the garden yield, to the number of nails and screws used in Twin Firs Camp versus handmade pegs, to the sap produced daily by each of our sugar maples. Keeping records like this gave a shape, an order, to our lives.

To mark our first decade at Barra we celebrated by throwing the Ten Year Anniversary Bash. We invited all our friends—the Shawangunks climbers who had helped us build our house that first summer as well as all our new North Country friends. Of course, we had a task lined up for so many willing workers: replacing our eight-foot garden fence erected to keep out jumpers like deer and diggers like woodchucks. Guy and I had already prepared the ten-foot posts from trees in our forest and carried in the rolls of galvanized fencing. At the time our garden was 70 feet wide by 160 feet long.

We were influenced in our record keeping by our friend Dan Smiley, a naturalist who kept all kinds of observations pertaining to the natural world, including the weather records at Lake Mohonk, New York, which at the time were heading into their ninetieth year. Dan had said, “You don’t know what you’re going to discover when you start.”And we found that, indeed, the usefulness of the accumulated data comes as time passes and the records build. Another reason to keep records, I soon discovered, is that close observation increases perception, and memory can’t be counted on.

“Last January I bet we’d had three twenty-belows by now,” I said to Guy, who wisely didn’t say anything but just reached for the clipboard on the wall where we kept our weather records.

“By today’s date,” he intoned, “we’d had eight straight mornings of ten degrees below, two fifteen-belows, a seventeen-below, and three nineteen-belows, but actually, no twenty-belows.” He replaced the clipboard with a smug and knowing wink.

The statistics we kept on weather were useful to us in many ways. For instance, if the garden temperature read forty-eight degrees by 7:00 p.m. on a clear night in early June, we knew we’d better cover to protect our plants from frost. If we were feeling lazy, we kept an eye on the thermometer to see how fast it was dropping. If at eight o’clock it had dropped only another degree, we might decide not to cover the plants, since clouds could develop during the night. But if the temperature had plummeted three or four degrees, the night was probably going to stay clear, and the temperature could be below freezing by morning.

We kept thermometers at three different locations—at the house, in the garden, and in the woods near the stream—and took readings at 7:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 7:00 p.m. We also read the barometer at those hours. We noted wind direction once a day and kept track of rainfall and snow accumulation. We monitored our water as it flowed through the sluice at gallons per minute. We recorded the temperature in our root cellar. In general, Guy gathered the weather statistics. But if he was away for the day, or if it was just easier for me, then I got them.

On an index card Guy kept a list of birds seen and heard on a year-round daily basis, transferring it to the master list in the evening. If we heard the indigo bunting when we were working in the garden, one of us would say, “There’s the indigo,” and we’d both look up to try to spot this lovely bird, the male an iridescent blue. Keeping records on birds made us take time to stop what we were doing and look around. In this way the birds, as they went about their daily lives, became a part of our lives too. In fact, everything we kept track of worked this way. It was as though by keeping records we had grown antennae, like insects, and these feelers kept us a little more abreast of what was going on in the world around us.

All these records drew us into a deeper connection not only with the land but with each other, since we were both tuned to gathering the data and liked talking about it.

“What were the temperatures?” I’d ask Guy every morning. Or, “Thirty-six asparagus spears, eight radishes, and fifteen rhubarb stalks,” I’d report on my return from the garden to fix supper so that Guy could make a note of the day’s garden yield on a chart kept for this purpose.

The records we kept on our sugar maples moved us into the kind of working relationship with our trees that the farmer must feel for his draft horse or the hunter for his hunting dogs. Call it reverence.A bond develops over years that can end only in death.

When we went out to collect sap, we carried with us, along with our gathering pails, a three-by-five index card with each tree’s name listed on it, a pencil for recording the number of quarts picked up, and a stick marked to measure quarts. In this way we got to know the dripping patterns of more than two hundred sugar maples. Plantagenet, for instance, gushed sap early in the season, then suddenly tapered off. Swamp Fox, dwelling deep among the hemlocks, could be counted on to produce at the end of the season, after the temperatures had moderated and his roots had warmed up. Mad Dog, our best tree, was unstoppable early or late. In the part of the forest we called the Highlands a stand of big old gnarly sugar maples kept us busy making repeated trips up the hill. Some trees were really not worth tapping but were so close to the sugar shed that there was no point in not doing it, such as Ozymandias. As with his namesake in Keats’s poem, when we removed the lid from his bucket we “looked on his works and despaired.”

The Tree of the Year race was never predictable, though Mad Dog was always a strong contender, winning Tree of the Year eight times out of twenty-five years. Our friend Doug Mayer made a sign that read: Mad Dog:Tree of the Century. We hung this in the sugar shed, along with the plaque Guy made for the award-winning trees.

At the end of collecting the day’s sap I read off the numbers of quarts gathered, and Guy recorded the amounts next to each tree’s name on the chart posted at our sugar shed; then he added up the total number of quarts produced that day. Every few days he tallied up the Top Twenty Trees to see how the race was shaping up.

We learned that the big trees were not always the biggest producers, though sometimes they could be. We learned—to our surprise—that Voltaire, who was a Tree of the Year, was not a sugar maple. We had the pleasure of introducing Voltaire to Sumner Williams of the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center. Sumner knew as much about sugar maples as anyone in the state, very likely the world. We pointed out a large area of rot and proudly announced that despite Voltaire’s health problems, he was still Tree of the Year. This astute judge of maples eyed us, a little peculiarly we thought, and said, “I thought you were going to tell me this is a red maple.” We blushed.

If I had been sugaring on my own, I never would have thought to track sap per tree per day, nor would I have named all the trees and found a way to make the hard work of collecting sap into a game of suspense. Guy said it was the Tree of the Year race that kept him going. What did he mean by that? I’ve come to see that Guy’s energy came in spurts, in sprints, in sparks, and from inspiration. He could rise up like a rocket, but when his trajectory crested he’d collapse back to earth again. This game with the maples probably served the same purpose as his baseball game keyed to the lines from Milton, or his whistling. By engaging his mind, it staved off the bad thoughts. I saw only the fun, the whimsy in the game. I didn’t see what lay behind it for Guy. But there is none of the shaman in me, or charismatic leader, or innovator, as there was in Guy. I was the worker bee —patient, tenacious, and with a dogged streak that made me determined not to let our team down.

But I have to admit that we kept some very silly statistics at Barra.

Perhaps our goofiest—all Guy’s idea—was keeping a life list of blueberries produced per bush. It made sense at the time because we wanted to get a handle on the productivity of each bush. And to give Guy the benefit of the doubt, he didn’t know where this was going to lead. For the first few years these bushes were very small—not up to producing quarts —so we counted each individual berry as we picked. Years later, after the bushes were cranking out dozens of quarts per season, we were still counting individual berries because we were often just picking enough for our morning cereal or a batch of muffins. But the truth was, we’d started this —we’d started counting individual berries, keeping a record by bush, and we couldn’t stop. Our minds automatically switched on to count when we approached a blueberry bush with a basket in hand. It was wonderfully meditative work, but we couldn’t talk and pick at the same time.Yes, counting blueberries with guests was a conversation stopper. After I was no longer living at Barra, my friend John Saltmarsh told me that when he and Peter Forbes were picking blueberries with Guy, he and Peter couldn’t help bursting into conversation. Finally, Peter said, “Oh, Guy. I have to confess, I’ve lost count.”

“Don’t worry,” Guy said, “I’ve been counting for you.”

We saved our 200,000th blueberry and set it on the front windowsill at Barra, where it slowly dried.

Our friends Sue and Bill Parmenter were along for one of our all-time marathon picking-counting sessions. We were experiencing a stratospheric yield that year and offered to Nancy Frost, who coordinated our town’s annual chicken pie supper, to fill a paper cup of blueberries to put at each person’s place. The church ladies planned on having between 200 and 250 people for the supper, and each cup held about 100 berries. So, with the help of Sue and Bill, we spent just two and a half hours picking the requisite 20,000 blueberries.

To underline the vital role that statistics played in our homesteading life, it is helpful to look at our organizational chart, drawn up by Guy and called by him “the Administrative Structure.”As can be seen, as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, I enjoyed the highest rank in the corporation. I was, in fact, Vice President of all categories or operations carried out at Barra: Food Supply, Sugar Bush, Firewood, and Cabin Services. Like all corporate personnel, I had—and rightly deserved to have—a very exalted opinion of myself. But where was Guy? If you let your eye follow down the last column to the right, to the very bottom of the chart, his name can be discerned in the small print: “Division of Research & Statistics.”

In 1990, in an effort to collect all our records and have the data available on a daily basis, Guy made the Barra Calendar. Each page captured our life for that day tracing back for all our years at Barra. It became our morning ritual for Guy to read each day’s calendar aloud before we sat down for breakfast.

On a typical page, Guy wrote at the top, under the date:“Today’s Birthdays and Historical Events.” This included birthdays of friends as well as historical figures we were fond of, like Jackie Robinson (Guy) or Maria Callas (me). “Events” came from history as well as from Barra, marking occasions we wanted to remember, such as when the Empress Pine fell in an overpowering January storm. (That occurred during our first winter, when our tree identification was a little shaky. The Empress Pine turned out to be a spruce, but it remained the Empress Pine on the calendar.)

Next, Guy noted a significant event in our lives for that date, either at Barra or elsewhere. For instance, on March 19, the day I am writing this, we climbed Pinnacle Gully in Mount Washington’s Huntington Ravine in 1972. This was my first climb of what was at the time the ice route in New England. Technically, we hadn’t yet moved to Barra, but Guy felt it was an important enough event to make our calendar anyway.

We had a space for visitors. Some winter days saw very few or even no visitors over the course of twenty-seven years, but during the sugaring season the calendar noted as many as a dozen guests on a given day. Visitors made a point of reading the Barra Calendar, often spotting their own names.

Next followed the weather data. This included the average temperature, as well as the minimum and maximum temperature with the record for that day. Guy noted precipitation: average snow depth with minimum and maximum covers, and the same data for rainfall, noting how many times precipitation had fallen on that date.

The last space on our Barra Calendar was reserved for the Quote of the Day. This quotation was drawn from the books we read aloud together after dinner.After Guy had died and I was at Barra by myself and continuing to post the calendar on a daily basis, it hit me that these quotations, all selected by Guy, often conveyed what he felt most deeply, but spoke about least. Reading them in this new light gave me fresh insight into the man I’d spent thirty years of my life with. I was stunned by my own lack of awareness. Guy had been showing me his innermost self all along through the quotations he had chosen for the Barra Calendar and read aloud each morning. I had been unable to see beneath the quotation’s surface down to its deepest resonance for Guy.Awakening to the message behind the words began to happen a few weeks after Guy walked out the door. It marked the first step of my own long journey toward understanding myself and my life with Guy.

There were, of course, many quotations that contained no hidden message and Guy’s reason for selecting them was plain. For instance, we came upon this February 25 quotation while reading Sy Montgomery’s Walking with the Great Apes; it articulated what we both tried to practice with our trail work in the White Mountains.

Everything else is less important. Career is less important. Science is less important. Fame is less important than doing the right thing when you’re dealing with the natural environment.

But here’s the quote for April 30. It’s from Shakespeare’s Richard III:

They that stand high have many blasts to shake them,
And, if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces.

And for September 25, this one from a Kipling poem:

If we fall in the race, though we win,
the hoofslide is scarred in the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin,
remaineth forever Remorse.

And this obscure line from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

Modest doubt is called

The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches
To the bottom of the worst.

Guy had been showing me his state of mind through these quotations for years. Though I was well aware of his sorrow, his pain on losing his sons, I was blind to how hungrily, how eagerly, it fed upon his deepest feelings of Blame, Guilt, Remorse, and Regret—his Demons, all tangled under a blanket of immobilizing, suffocating Shame.

For me, now, this calendar holds the threads of my life with Guy together. This morning of March 19, when I read: “1972: L & G climb Pinnacle Gully,” a young couple springs into my vision. “The world was all before them.” They are not yet married. Barra is only an idea. Someone looking up from the floor of Huntington Ravine would see a team of two, appearing very small, but moving steadily upward, the rope stretched between them.As the lead climber swings his ax, the thunk-thunk is heard far below. The leader stops, anchors himself to the ice, and soon the follower is moving up the thick green flow that fills the steep-sided overhanging rock walls of Pinnacle Gully.

I stand and gaze at the calendar page I’ve just hung on the wall. The “visitors” space is dense. Guy needed to write between the lines to fit them all in, so the years are out of order. We were well into sugaring by March 19. The average temperature was thirty-three degrees,with a minimum of minus twelve set in 1993 (too cold for sap to flow that day) and a maximum of sixty degrees in 1996 (the sap must have been gushing). The Quote of the Day is from Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders. Guy selected it in honor of sugaring:

. . . a period following the close of winter tree-cutting and preceding the barking season, when the saps are just beginning to heave with the force of hydraulic lifts inside all the trunks of the forest.