April 30, 2010

At Cornwall, Ct.

Martha atop Mohawk Mountain, Cornwall, Ct., whittling

It was 51 degrees and windy when I arrived atop Mohawk Mountain about 9:45 yesterday morning. Sitting on a rock was an older woman, wearing warm clothes and gloves, whittling a hiking staff from a dead sapling that was something less than two inches in diameter at its thick end. We were the only people atop the mountain, elevation 1,677 feet, from which there are expansive views of the surrounding Litchfield Hills and into the Massachusetts Berkshires.

I approached, asking if in fact she was making a walking stick, and she said, pleasantly, that she was. She said she likes to take a cut or fallen sapling or branch, strip the bark with her knife and let the wood dry. Then she burns images into the stick. Perhaps images of wildflowers one day, images of leaves another. She said that she likely would decorate this stick with an image of the Berkshire peaks that spread before us on the horizon.

Her name is Martha, and she lives in Morris, a rural town not that far away. She has lots of interests that keep her busy, she said, and this was one of them. She also makes quilts. She is 82. I told her that one of the reasons she is 82 and headed for 102 is that she took the trouble, on this cool morning, to venture to the top of one of Connecticut’s higher peaks to whittle in a peaceful setting with a view. She is not passing time, I thought, she is living well.

April 7, 2010

Visiting the Hartland Historical Society in Vermont, historian Bill Hosley of Enfield, Ct., came upon a paper written in 1907 by a prominent local farmer, Byron P. Ruggles.

It was a hand-typed, 10-page manuscript with the less-than-compelling title “Modern vs. Conservative Dairying.” Hosley began reading.

One of the joys of poking around in the archives of a local historical society is that almost invariably you come upon something – letters, old photos, documents, something – that amounts to a revealing window into long-ago life. Sometimes that window gives us perspective; sometimes it helps explain how we got where we got, for better or worse.

Vermont farmer Byron P. Ruggles. Photo courtesy Hartland Historical Society, Hartland, Vermont

The Ruggles paper, Hosley discovered, was one of those windows. He photocopied it.

In it, Ruggles (1838-1917) was skeptical of the advice farmers were getting from academia, government and commerce.

Farmers were told: “We must use a seed drill, a land roller, a corn-planter, a corn-weeder, a cultivator, a corn harvester, a corn husker, a potato planter, potato hoer, potato digger, a reaper, mowing machine, hay tender, horse rake, horse pitchfork, ensilage cutter, threshing machine, drag and circular saws, and an engine to run some of the machines. We must have a silo. It would not do to think of stock or dairy farming without it.” He goes on for two pages complaining of what he was supposed to be buying, doing and not doing.

Most notably, though, Ruggles was bothered by the advice “to own and run large farms; that small farms are not profitable.” That of course became the government mantra of the 20th century, and led to the industrial farming dominant today. Industrial farming may be good at producing lots of food comparatively inexpensively, but it is fair to say, I think, that we are still sorting out the hidden and not-so-hidden environmental, nutritional and societal costs of the bigger-is-necessarily-better philosophy of farming.

Ruggles was one of those independent, civic-minded old New Englanders, the kind of guy, Hosley learned, who also founded the Hartland Nature Club and assembled its impressive natural history collections. He was an influential local leader in a small town along the Connecticut River that remains to this day a community of only 3,223 people. He also was a photographer. But first, he was a farmer. Bigger is better? After decades of farming, Ruggles figured he could shuck nonsense as easily as an ear of corn. He offered his own advice.

Megan Haney kneels in a cover crop of rye and vetch at Marble Valley Farm in Kent, Ct., where she raises vegetables and flowers on 3 acres of land beside the Housatonic River. Photo courtesy of Tom Lapham.

“Do not be a farmer unless you like the business and prefer it to another trade or occupation.”

“Do not buy a farm larger than you can do all the work on yourself.”

“Do not have a great multiplicity of farming tools. A plow, a harrow, a roller, a cultivator and a hoe are all the tools you need for working the soil.”

“Do not use any commercial fertilizers. You can raise good crops and increase the fertility of the soil without them.”

“Do not buy any meal or grain feed for your cows. Feed them with what you raise on the farm; that is what your farm is for. They must have good pasturage in summer; plenty of nutritious grasses… They must have good water to drink, such as you would drink yourself.”

“Do not keep cows in the barn all of the time in winter, nor most of the time. You cannot raise good calves from cows so kept. Let them out in the yard at least five or six hours a day except in stormy or very cold weather for sun and air and water and salt and exercise and general enjoyment.”

The Ruggles message was fundamental: respect the land, treat farm animals humanely.

It all sounds a lot like the kind of small, sustainable agriculture emerging in Connecticut and many parts of the country in recent years. I think, for example, of Megan Haney growing vegetables and flowers on three acres of land along the Housatonic River in Kent, Ct.

She starts and ends a long hot day in the field with a sunbonnet and a smile.

Oh, when she was starting out the representative of one federal agency told her that if her farm store wasn’t open every day she could fail. But her Marble Valley Farm store is open to the general public only two days a week in the growing season. After three years she has no plans to change; she is doing fine. Her Community Supported Agriculture program, in which families pay a farmer up-front for a season’s worth of vegetables provided weekly during the growing season, attracts more customers every year. Her farm store is a hit.

She uses a 60-year-old Allis Chalmers G tractor with 11- or 12-horsepower that looks, as she says, more like a Go-Kart than a serious farm tractor. It helps, for sure, but most work, all of the planting and much of the weeding is done by hand anyway. She farms organically. She does most of the work. She keeps it simple.

Her farm and her philosophy, it seems, are not unlike what Byron Ruggles was talking about all those years ago.

April 1, 2010

If it were possible to calculate an index of happiness, two numbers ought to be part of the formula – rivers explored, trails hiked.

The newly published Northern Forest Canoe Trail guidebook

I do not know exactly how many trail guides and river guides I own, but I do know they are invaluable planning tools. Glance over my shoulder and I see seven shelves of them in my study. There are guides to rivers in Alaska, rivers in New England, guides to the lakes of the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and Ontario, hiking guides for the Rockies, the Appalachians, and Great Britain. (There are field guides to birds and wildflowers, mushrooms and sea creatures, too. A friend of mine claims to be astonished that not only do I own a guide to “The Weeds of the Northeast,” I also have a guide that tells me what these weeds look like in winter. Thank you Lauren Brown for “Weeds in Winter,” Houghton Mifflin. Boston, 1977).

These river and trail guides are mostly utilitarian books, with their just-the-facts prose. I love them. They are the raw material of dreams, and the essential first tool in making those dreams memories. Perhaps they should be counted in my happiness index as well.

Map courtesy Northern Forest Canoe Trail

So I welcome to my shelves “The Northern Forest Canoe Trail,” (The Mountainers Books, $24.95) the just-published guide to the comparatively new canoe trail that nicely ties together some of the most famous and historic rivers and lakes from New York’s Adirondacks through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, 740 miles in all, including a short, friendly incursion into Quebec province. With this new text – maps of the trail already are available – we now have what we need to get our feet wet, our psyches soothed.

The idea for the Northern Forest Canoe Trail was hatched in the late 1980s by three friends, Mike Krepner, Randy Mardres and Ron Canter, who first envisioned a trail through Maine utilizing Native American canoe trails. By the early 1990s, as big forest-products companies began selling off huge tracts of land in northern New England and upstate New York – opening them to development – the fate of what came to be known as the northern forest emerged as an issue. Krepner suggested the trail be extended from the Adirondacks through Maine, as a way to demonstrate the convergence of history and geography, to help draw attention to the value of the northern forest and its priceless waterways. Much or all of the route, which extends from Old Forge, N. Y. to Fort Kent in Maine, and includes all or parts of such famous waterways as the Allagash, Connecticut, Penobscot and Saranac rivers, as well as major water bodies like Lake Champlain and Rangeley Lake, was paddled by Native Americans.

Scott Grant camped along the Penobscot River in Maine, part of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail

In 2000, Kay Henry and Rob Center, former executives of the Mad River Canoe Co., formed the Northern Forest Canoe Trail organization to make the trail a reality. The organization, with a small staff and a large network of volunteers, has worked ever since developing primitive campsites, identifying access points, and promoting the trail as an ideal resource for sustainable, nature-based recreation and tourism.

You can, as a small number of people already have done, paddle the whole Northern Forest Canoe Trail in one big adventure. I tip my Tilley to these rugged people. I’ve done just enough long-distance paddling to know how hard it can be day after day, how grueling a long portage can be, no matter how soul-satisfying the overall expedition may be. I fall in with the father of the Appalachian Trail, Benton MacKaye, who never envisioned the AT as a speed hike or even something one might do in one grand adventure. The AT was to be a restorative place, he said, a place where you recovered from the stresses experienced in the commercial canyons. It was not a place to hurry; it was a place to see, hear and feel again, to be part of natural rhythms. That is how I feel about the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. Whether you paddle the trail east to west or west to east, either involves paddling upstream at times, and involves some very difficult portages. Having spent considerable time in northern New York and New England over the past four decades, I’ve already done all or parts of many waterways that now are part of the trail. So I will paddle the rest of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail in sections, in day trips or short camping trips of 2 or 3 days. I don’t want to rush, I want to savor each sunrise and sunset at water’s edge. The Northern Forest Canoe Trail guidebook in hand, I have identified the next water body to add to my happiness index: Flagstaff Lake, Maine.