A View From the Hills

MORE THAN MONEY

SUCCESS IS A BLOOMING APPLE TREE AND A CAR THAT STARTS AT TWENTY BELOW

In 1978 Dartmouth professor and essayist Noel Perrin published the first in what would be a series of four books on country life in general, and Vermont in particular. The books, First Person Rural, Second Person Rural, Third Person Rural, and Last Person Rural, should be required reading for anyone considering a move to rural New England. Unfortunately, they are out of print and must be hunted down in used bookshops. In his first book, Perrin has an essay on the two faces of Vermont which rings as true today as it did when first published.

There are two very distinct Vermonts. Old Vermont and New Vermont.  Old and New do not mean age and youth, as anyone over fourty will tell you, youth is a state of mind. Old Vermont is a small town agrarian tradition.  New Vermont is suburban.  Old Vermont entertains itself with memberships in the local Grange. New Vermont skis in the winter and plays tennis in the summer. Old Vermont depends on its own resources and general cussedness. New Vermont is more comfortable with raising taxes to pay for higher levels of town services.

My household is firmly in the Old camp. We heat with wood we draw down from the hills, cut, and split, ourselves. We keep a flocks of chickens, and a small flock of sheep. We maintain a large garden, sweeten our coffee with maple syrup, and think entertainment is fiddling with an old truck. To keep what Noel Perrin calls our "last stand" lifestyle afloat we both work off the farm. There is a lot of satisfaction in our "last stand" lifestyle.

Which doesn't mean you find anything even vaguely attractive in cleaning out a sheep pen or planting peas during black fly season. What it means is it is quite possible that you might find yourself building your dream home next to someone very like me. Someone who spends a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon sighting in their hunting rifle with deafening bangs. Someone who may well keep a pig. Or two. And has a couple of junk cars in their side yard (in our case, three).

You just have to think that Old Vermont might have its own definition of success.

By any standard I would not describe our household as materially successful.We rarely buy new clothes, skip satellite television, and don't pay for recreation. Which means that though we live only steps away from a nordic ski resort, and ten miles away from the Stowe ski slopes... we do not ski.

We consider a year successful if nobody's died unexpectedly. If every young animal comes into this world without complications, and thrives on our thin pastures. Success is a good tomato harvest and fifty pounds of potatoes dug up in the fall and stored in the cellar. It is a good year when the deer have been kept from nibbling the apple trees and they bloom come spring. It is a great winter if the car starts every time we ask it to.

The media has seized upon lifestyles like ours and dubbed them "Simplicy." Let me be the one to break it to you: there is nothing simple about our lifestyle. It is seasonally dependant, requires advance planning, attention to detail, and has a relatively narrow margin for error. It can be dirty, cold, and involves entirely too much mud in the spring. But those are just details, against a backdrop of a green summer field, or a crackling winter fire.

No, we wouldn't change a thing.