Commune Stories

You might be interested in an article in the Saint Albans Messenger, which documents some of the nuances of living in a communal setting back in the 70s: Echoes of the Counterculture [External Link]

The ideas and metaphors which controlled and inspired our lives on the Franklin commune combined a wish to end the Vietnam War, help draft evaders get into Canada, learn to be self sufficient, raise healthy children, and save the whales, the bees, and the planet.  We said of ourselves that we were trying to live post revolutionary lives during pre-revolutionary times.  We combined a hippie Waldenesque desire to live a wholesome lifestyle, to return to the land, and to be pre-carbon fuel consumption self-sufficient farmers, maybe even Indians, with a desire to directly confront the oppressive American corporate and military power structure.  Ideals of egalitarianism, revolution, and self-sufficiency were central to us and actually informed our lives and the choices we made in many ways.

We did manage to raise one-third of our food, including a vast vegetable garden, chickens, pigs, dairy cows, beef cows, and gallons of delicious and sacred maple syrup.  We also produced most of the feed necessary to keep our animals alive, although the profit margin was slim.  A popular mocking self-image we had was that we kept a team of horses so we could take out and spread manure on the fields, so we could harrow and seed the fields, so we could harvest the hay and grain we grew to feed the horses, so we could take out the manure to spread on the fields we needed to harrow and harvest to feed the horses to spread the manure.  We were their servants as much as they were ours.  As I said, the profit margin was thin.

Periodically we slaughtered and ate one of our large animals.  Inevitably these animals had been pets with names as well as dumb beasts.  The kids had cuddled and loved them.  Some we had raised from birth.  All had contributed to our sustenance with their milk, eggs, good humor, and now flesh.  We admired, respected, and needed our animals, their tolerance, strength, and beauty.

In advance of the decision to slaughter one of the large animals, which until then we had only imagined we would eat, our group of very diverse and mostly very hard working people would sit in meeting for hours we couldn’t afford and didn’t enjoy, trying to make an intelligent collective decision consistent with our diverse images and ideologies about the killing. 

As to the slaughter of big mammals it was agreed that only one person at a time would be responsible for the actual slaughter, that he or she would select the method by which they would dispatch the animal, that children would be allowed (not compelled or discouraged) to watch, and that we would then collectively butcher, skin, smoke, freeze, cure, or whatever it was we were going to do with often hundreds of pounds of meat.

When we killed our first large boar, a fellow named Arnold, we selected Charlie, the man who loved Arnold most, the man who had spent the most time feeding Arnold, cleaning his pen, moving him around, chasing him, catching him, helping Arnold breed the sow that produced our next litter of Arnolds, as slaughterer.  Charlie used a knife to cut Arnold’s throat because local folklore emphasized the importance of bleeding a boar to death to insure good tasting flesh.  I can hear Arnold screaming in pain, terror, and betrayal to this day. We also castrated Arnold immediately upon his death out of respect for more local folklore about the impact of testicles upon the taste of boar meat. Nobody I recall particularly ate the organs of Arnold, though there was much talk of doing so and of wasting nothing. We did make organ stew, maybe some folks tasted it, but it wasn’t heartily eaten and ultimately we fed it to the dogs. The flesh that we did cure, smoke and freeze, however, was mighty tasty. I’m not sure how long it lasted. We were twenty souls and Arnold had been but one. When we dined on Arnold we often said out loud “Thank you, Arnold,” making a macabre joke out of the obvious truth that the creature we had known as Arnold was being transformed into the creatures we were.

We next slaughtered Woolly, a Scotch Highland steer.  We loved Woolly, a magnificent creature: longhaired like his keepers and long horned as well.  Standing in the field in summer Woolly was Ferdinand the bull. Covered with snow in the winter he was Perseverance and Grace. Frisky. Friendly. Our guy Wooly: never mean, but always unconsciously dangerous, sort of like we were.  We tried hard to preserve Woolly’s hide after we took his life to sustain our own and I worked diligently at salting and saving his hairy thick skin in an effort to honor Woolly and turn him into vests or moccasins, or some such utilitarian romantic image, but in the end Woolly’s hide was just a hard and unmalleably stiff piece of cow folded over a fence rail, with flies buzzing around it, never attaining the level of leather or flexible afterlife we imagined.

I was selected (I selected myself?) to make the next kill, this time of Sophie, the first animal we’d brought onto the farm besides our dogs and cats and one very old horse “gifted” us by our neighbors. Sophie was a smallish, quiet, sad looking, tired Jersey cow who had grown quite old.  Nice gentle creature Sophie was: docile, breedable, easy to move around, easy to milk, and willing to have dozens of strangers and kids squeeze her teats. Black and tan and brown Sophie. She had served us well, providing milk, butter, yogurt, and cheese, as we pulled and poked her twice daily, taught the children to milk her, helped her become inseminated, and watched the delivery of her new calves. But Sophie was now old and we were hungry.

By this time in the commune’s existence, whenever we intended to slaughter a large animal word would get out, some of the local farming folk would hear of the event, and some would inevitably come by to ogle and offer instruction in long lost arts. Slaughtering days were never ordinary days on the commune. We needed to delegate much time and energy to organizing and carrying out the many tasks associated with the slaughter, to covering the other tasks that still needed to be done, to explaining what was happening to the kids, to dealing with the kids while we actually killed, butchered and preserved hundreds of pounds of meat in an edible fashion.

I wanted Sophie’s death to be as quick and pain free as possible. I had chosen to kill her by shooting her through the forehead with a twenty-two-caliber rifle: a small gauge weapon, which would make a very small hole, with not a lot of noise or blood, and hopefully dispatch her instantly. I personally led Sophie out of the barn by her halter to the lawn between the north side of our house and the maple sugaring shack. I talked to her, explaining why this had to be, jokingly offering her a blindfold. She had no idea what was about to come next. Trust me on that one.

A triangular hoist had been erected on the lawn to raise Sophie up after death so we could gut and clean and skin her most easily. I brought her up from the barn in solemn processional fashion. I felt as if I was standing beside myself watching the man with the gun and the cow called Sophie walk her last walk. About thirty people were standing around as I dropped Sophie’s halter, moved a few feet back from her, and sighted her forehead through the rifle barrel. 

“Good bye, Sophie,” I said, as I was about to pull the trigger, but at just that moment Sophie bent down to munch some grass, changing the position of her head and the angle at which I wanted the bullet to enter her brain. So I lowered the rifle, walked over to Sophie, lifted her head up by the halter, let go of the halter, walked back three paces, and lined her forehead up again in my sights as she again lowered her head. She was after all still a cow standing in green grass and I was merely her kindly executioner. I walked patiently over and lifted her head again. I stepped back. She lowered her head. I lifted her head. She lowered her head. I lifted. She lowered. I let her go. She bent down to eat grass.  She was still a cow.

A local farmer in his late twenties walked over to be helpful with the killing. He grabbed Sophie by the halter and lifted her head up as I lined her up in my sights. He said to Sophie with tight throated humor loud enough for everyone to hear, “Come on you Christ killing Jew, stand up now, it’s your turn.”

I held Sophie in my sights. The barrel of my gun was pointed at the exact center of her forehead. The local humorist stood next to her, holding her halter with his right arm extended. I looked at him, bigoted and innocent. I looked at Sophie, equally innocent. I saw them both clearly. I considered my options. I suppressed my anger and reactivity as I have so often done in the face of mindless anti-Semitism and, not moving the rifle barrel, squeezed the trigger, transforming in an instant all of the energy that was Sophie, and all of the energy in the world.

All four of Sophie’s legs lifted from the earth at the same time.  There was literally a six to nine inch space between the ground she had been standing on alive and the air she was suspended in, legs folded at the instant of her death, a momentary holy ascension by a very old cow, before she crumbled to the earth. I remember thinking Sophie wasn’t really dead, that we could put her back together if we wanted. I believed that as we cut through her sternum. I believed that as we spilled her guts into a wheelbarrow to take to the compost heap. I believed that until I sawed her hooves off and pulled her skin off. Naked, she was meat.

We ate Sophie’s organs, her heart and liver. I don’t recall a lot of pleasure in doing so. All of Sophie’s meat in fact was gamy and tough, though far far better and longer lasting than the many frogs we killed one day that summer at the local pond and tried to eat but couldn’t, throwing dozens of dead frog bodies without legs into a bucket and dumping them into the compost heap, where they were picked at by crows and returned to the earth that mothers us all.

Harvesting hay is one of the oldest known activities required of any farmer who hopes his herd will survive the cold weather months in climates where winter grass grazing supplies for stock are inadequate to sustain them.  And if a modern farm cannot grow, harvest, and store its own hay the cost of purchasing hay can be devastatingly beyond the farmer’s economic reach.  We understood this reality, of course, but still were complete rookies in tall grass, not even knowing how to tell when the ideal time would be to harvest the hay growing on our farm in glorious meadows that were green and beautiful without our even having seeded them.

“Look here,” said the grizzled Saint George, “these seed heads are not quite ripe, which is exactly what you want to see to get your cutting time just right, with the grass leaves being about at their maximum growth, which these are.  You see it?”

Well sure we saw it.  Distinguishing it from earlier or later states of hay growth and maturity was another matter.  But George has been checking every day he’s visited the farm and a few of us had been walking out into the fields with him for daily five minute hay tutorials.  And as far as George can tell, he announces, if the rains hold off for three or four days this is the ideal day for the grass to be mowed in the field.  Now comes the hard part.

Before the advent of horse drawn or mechanical equipment all hay was cut by hand sickle or scythe.  We, of course, were centuries beyond such gleaning techniques and had already purchased for almost no money an old horse-drawn sickle mower with a seven foot long bar holding a few dozen very sharp triangular blades which moved back and forth as the mower wheels turned, sort of like a hair clipper works. Even farmers who rely on mechanized tractor drawn machinery use mowers not very different in design than the horse drawn ones.  This was an amazing and also a truly dangerous piece of equipment, the kind of mower that has been around since before the Civil War.  Ours may even have been that old, but with some sharpening and lots of oiling we were ready.
 Well, maybe ready, except for the slight matter of hitching our team of horses to the mower.  You may think that an easy task, but it is an immense commitment of time, first grooming the horses to remind them you are their friend and they are in your debt, then putting on their pulling yokes, fitting the harnesses and the reins, walking and then backing the horses into the space in front of the mower wheels, one on either side of the draw bar, hooking the draw and the pulling bars up to the harness, steadying the team, climbing onto the mower seat, walking the mower and the horses to the hay meadow, dropping the cutting bar so that it rides just inches of the ground, engaging the wheel driven gears, and then softly clucking to the horses to start moving forward without freaking out over the noise of the gears, the cutting blades, and the falling hay.  Easy. 
Except that first time I thought it was my turn – perhaps in ideological competition with tradition that holds only one person work a horse or a team no matter how steady and good the horse or the team is for consistency sake and perhaps in pursuit of my ideological credo that everyone had to share in the skilled and unskilled work … horse care and childcare, cutting hay and canning vegetables. Anyhow, horses in captivity appreciate consistency – and I was in waaay over my head – another Peter-Crow wisdom conflict in which Peter yielded, the team freaked out, literally bolted, flipped me out of the seat, and ran with a dangerously waiving seven foot long cutting bar with three inch long scissoring blades capable of cutting off a child’s foot at the ankle through the field, out the gate, and back to the barn, where they stood.  Embarrassed.  Pleased.  Panting.
So how many people should we trust to drive the team?  And why?  This was an ongoing debate.  Everyone had to do his or her share of childcare, at least ideally.  Everyone had to cook and wash dishes.  Everyone had to know how to wield a hammer, to drive a tractor, to muck out a stall, to milk a cow.  But in reality not everyone knew how to change brake pads when that was a need, and not everyone needed to learn.  And in fact Peter was the best handler of the horses.  And he liked doing it.  And it was better for the horses.  And ideology was confronted by practicality.  And on the day the team ran away from me with a seven foot long scissor slicing crazily in thin air I surrendered my hay mowing aspirations, much to the relief of the collective.

Once hay is cut it must be allowed to dry, ideally for a few days in hot sun.  Then it has to be turned and raked into long narrow linear piles known as windrows, originally done by hand with a pitchfork, but now again using a piece of horse drawn equipment.  And then, only when the hay has properly dried, is it ready for gathering in some form to be placed into the barn to protect it from moisture and rot.  Most modern farmers use a tractor driven hay baler for gathering, and when ours was working we did too.  At other times we used pitchforks to pile it loose onto a horse-drawn wagon and then off loaded into the haymow or loft.

Loose hay stored in a barn will compress down and cure. Hay stored before it is fully dry can literally produce enough heat to start a fire, due to bacterial fermentation.  Farmers have to be careful about moisture levels to avoid spontaneous combustion.  Who knew? The most familiarity any of us had with hay was seeing Monet’s haystacks.

We are moving as a group across an open meadow filled with wildflowers, red clover, timothy hay, and the sweetest smelling Vermont air, on a slightly breezy sunny summer afternoon 1971, clouds drifting in from the west.  It is a moment we are each and all aware is precious.  Perhaps some of us are stoned, or tripping.  But what would you expect of a dozen longhaired twenty and thirty year old men and women with five gorgeous children riding on a flat bed wooden hay wagon, drawn by a magnificent team of horses, hippie revolutionary communists, living on a former dairy farm less than three miles below the Canadian border and on a mission?

The day is spectacular.  Clouds rush by draw off Lake Champlain into the foothills and onto the plain that includes southern Quebec, the occupied colonial foreign country in our backyard where Vietnamese warrior negotiators sought refuge and material support from both the Quebec Liberation Front in Montreal and from the American left.

The lovingly cleaned and oiled chains and harnesses on the horses, which we’ve purchased from an old farmer who hadn’t used a piece of horse drawn equipment in over twenty years, jingle and shine in the sun.  The horses are gleaming, sweating, moving steadily and comfortably in the traces.  Peter clucks to the team, “Haw, Jim.  Haw.”  The squeak of the wagon, the crunch of the wheels on the earth, the buzz of insects and the whisper of wind fill the air. 

Beth Pratt, eight years old, riding bareback astride Jim, the older calmer heroic gelding, leading our common artistic entourage calls out, “Look!”  She is pointing toward the swamp, toward the old logging trail that leads through the woods to our neighbor’s property over two miles away on the now never used old logging trail through the woods.  Charlie, her father, rises up on one elbow, holds his rifle in his extended left arm high into the air.  His hair blows in the wind.  His skin is smooth.  He is close shaven.  There is no hair on his chest or back.  He remembers even now that a profoundly immoral war is being waged in Vietnam, a war that is in the minds of the communards every day, along with whales and other species at the edge of extinction, the impending silent spring, and huge mountains of bullshit, lies, and deceit, while the broad democracy movement, the unfulfilled promise of universal self-determination built on Indian bones and the theft of Indian land, built on the backs of slaves, and the sweat of the working masses, is still to be reborn.  “Uhuru,” Charlie shouts.  It means freedom in Swahili.

“Look,” Beth calls again, a broad smile crossing her face as the wind pulls the corners of her mouth back to the edges of her ears. It is Kisha, our three legged wonder dog, hoping and running to meet the wagon, bouncing through the meadow as best he can to join us.  The smile on Kisha’s face is as broad as the smile on Beth’s.  Can anything be more beautiful than this day, this team of horses, this wounded dog, these beautiful people?  Life is good.

We are on our way to Ken and Grace Spooners, our neighbors, each of whom is easily eighty years old.  They live on the same farm on the top of the hill that they have lived on for over fifty years.  The have a herd of maybe thirty cows that Grace still milks two times a day by herself, or sometimes with hired help, Ken having lost a leg to cancer a few years back.  They have a team of horses older than they both are, which they never use but cannot bear to part with. They have a yard filled with cats, and a sign posted on their property that says, “No Hunting.”  They mean it.

“Anyone hunts on my land,” says Grace, “is sure to be cursed.  Fellow shot a deer in that lower pasture maybe thirty years ago and danged if he didn’t poke his eye out the very next year riding around careless like on a tractor.”

We stand in awe of the Spooners.  They are the real people we seek to emulate: honest, hardworking, knowledgeable, kind, even politically savvy and liberal.  They have telephoned us late in the morning to say the weather looked ominous, that they had some recently mowed hay down in a field almost all of which has been baled, maybe five hundred bales at most, but that they would never be able to get the hay into the barn before the rains come and if they leave it out it will be ruined.  Might we be able to send over a man or two to help them get the hay in before the storm hits, they ask.

Naturally we are all tremendously eager to respond to the call and help the Spooners, and by the time we’ve discussed who might go over to help them, and how we would get there, and what impact it will have on the day we had planned, it has turned into a spontaneous little adventure that almost everyone wants to be part of.  So we hitch the team to the flatbed wagon and off we go, over the meadow and through the tremendously beautiful world we have the privilege to live in, a world we are aware of and take great pleasure in.  The Earthwork communards often said when at a loss for words to describe the choices we are making that we seek to “walk in beauty,” and that mantra guides us on our mission, where a sense of beauty and proportionality is a matter of common reverence.  We are so much the creatures of our teachings and expectations.

We emerge from the logging trail through the woods into the Spooners’ old apple orchard.  The ride to the Spooners’ would have taken us more than half an hour in a fast pickup truck on county roads.  It has taken little more than an hour riding with a ton of people on an old wagon cutting through the woods.  We ride up to the Spooner’s farmhouse through their hay meadow.

“Looks like five hundred bales easily,” says Charlie.

“Maybe five gazillion,” says Adrian, all of five years old.  “Five hundred gazillion,” says Dylan, who knows the number of stars in the sky and specializes in kitchen chemistry and animal ears.

“Whatever it is, let’s do it fast,” says Barbara pointing to the sky.

Ken and Grace are on their porch waiting for us, smiling and waving like kids.  It is delicious to see them.  We have so few contacts outside the farm.  And they are quite literally thrilled to see us, people who have given them hope for the future.  Their old tractor and hay wagon are hitched and ready to go.

“Should we use the horses and the tractor both,” asks Marcel.

“No, let’s rest the horses,” says Peter, “it’s probably just as fast loading one wagon with a full crew as loading two wagons with half crews.

“Do you folks want some milk and cookies,” Grace asks.

“Milk and cookies!” the kids scream.  We have not had cold milk or cookies in years it seems.

Grace has already put out a plate of cookies, a pitcher of milk, two jugs of lemonade, and some napkins.  We act like the starving savages we are.  There has been so few of these simple pleasures in our harsh and pristine world and the kids tear into the cookies without the slightest sense of manners or propriety.  I am embarrassed to my bourgeois core, but Grace seems oblivious and delighted.

“What nice children,” she says more than once.  “And I see they like my cookies.”

“Like your cookies?  Grace did you make these?  Where do you find the time?”  The women are particularly in awe.

“I made them last evening,” said Grace, “it was my grandmother’s recipe you know, and I make them just the way she did.  The trick is to chill the dough before you bake the cookies, never understood why, but it makes them sweeter and softer.”

“Let’s let these folks get to work, Grace,” says Ken.

“Good Lord, just take your sweet time, Mr. Ken Spooner,” says Grace.

And in a flash everyone has had a cookie, maybe two, and the lemonade and milk is completely gone, disappeared, without a crumb or a drop left, as if starving locust or scavenger ants had marched across the porch devouring everything in sight. And now the communal horde, who have hardly even had enough fresh water to brush our teeth with for over a week, are ready to work. 

          “An army marches on its stomach,” says Grace.  “Louise dear would you go into the kitchen and bring out that other plate of cookies, please?”

“Ken, we really got to get rolling,” Crow says.  “Let’s have one of the women drive the tractor.  Let’s put two men up on the wagon stacking.  And let’s have six people in the field throwing the bales up onto the flatbed.  Time’s a wasting.”

“It’s a plan,” says Charlie, “let’s move it.”

Libby gets into the tractor seat.  It is for Crow another of those moments when incredible beauty appears.  It is what he longs for, what he seeks and reveres.  Libby appears as simply the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, a Botticelli-like figure with reddish tinted golden wavy hair sparkling and blowing in the breeze.  It is breath taking.  Spiritual.  This is real, he thinks.  It is not sexual.  His gaze shifts to the sky that is backlighting Libby and creating the aura around her.  The sky is still bright and sunny in the east but heavy gray clouds are moving in from the west.  The breeze has picked up and the leaves of the trees are rustling.  Pine needles fall and tufts of milkweed drift across the surface of the earth.  It is a moment of seeing what is real, or so it feels, a moment of remembering what is real, what is important, of why we are doing what we are doing and more specifically why he is doing it.  “Walk in beauty,” he says to himself.  He looks from Libby to Charlie and Peter.  They are magnificent.  Breugels.  He loves feeling so positive, loves the love welling up from his chest, filling his head, tasting it.  A delirious energy filling him.  “We are the people,” he yells.

“Uhuru,” Charlie yells.

“Come on, brothers,” says Marcel.

Hutcher is standing in the field with a bale in his hand quietly waiting.  The reward of collectivity is productivity.

Peter and Crow climb onto the flatbed.  Barbara, Lou, Mary Pat, and Shannon stay back with Grace, Ken, and the children where they’ll find more than enough to do around the barn and the house to help out a neighbor.  They love socializing with Ken and Grace whenever they’re able anyhow.

“Can we do anything for you, Grace,” I hear Lou say over the hum of the tractor as it pulls away.

“Well there is some wood I could use brought up to the house.  And the horses haven’t been walked in over a week.  And I’ve got a load of wash downstairs that could use hanging and drying.”

“No drying today,” says Shannon pointing to the sky and everyone laughs as if it was a tremendous new joke.

It is hard to find enough folks on most Vermont farms to carry out the duties and tasks demanded of the family dairy farmer.  If you don’t have kids or a working extended family you are generally sunk.  It is part of the reason so many small Vermont dairy farms are forced out of operation.  The margin of profit is simply too small and the need for grunt level manual labor too great to support the operation of a profitable herd.  Ken and Grace survive in part because their income is supplemented by social security and Ken’s disability check.  They pay a local man to help with the milking and the mucking out of the stalls.  He appears most days.  It eats up any profit they might have made, but it sustains them in the only life they know.  They could surely give up the herd, but a purposelessness and ennui would befall them and they would wither and die.  And they know it.

Harvesting hay is crucial to any dairy farm’s operations.  It is the base feed that will sustain the herd through the long Vermont winter.  If you have to buy hay you are in trouble.  It is often simply not available, and when it is available it’s ghastly expensive.  Cutting and raking hay is a one-person job with the right equipment, as is running the hay baler.  But bringing in the bales takes at least three people to be efficient and usually four people make for the best operation: one person, the physically weakest, drives the tractor, one person stacks the bales as they are thrown up onto the wagon, and two people throw up the hay bales from both sides of the wagon.  There is a very specific pattern that bales are stacked in, maximizing the space on the wagon, stabilizing the load, and keeping the upper tiers of bales from falling as the stack grows higher and higher, usually six or seven tiers high, and totaling as many as seventy five to eighty bales of hay per wagon load.  It can take well more than an hour to stack and unload one wagon.

But these are The People, the hardworking real people, energized, super charged super efficient people, high on lemonade and cookies.  Charlie is so pumped up he’s throwing bales completely over the wagon, from one side off to the other side such that Hutcher has to quietly and stoically load back onto the wagon twice as many bales as he should.  Charlie has taken off his shirt and is wearing only boots, dungaree pants, and work gloves.  The sharp ends of the hay sheaves are puncturing his forearms and he is bleeding.  He loves the blood.

“Easy big guy,” Crow tells him, but Charlie is virtually running from one forty or fifty pound bale to the next, tossing them from as far as ten yards away up onto the flatbed.  In less than thirty minutes the wagon is piled to the absolute limit and headed back to the barn with everyone laughing and walking besides it.

When we reach the ramp into the haymow Libby has a hard time backing the load in reverse into the barn for unloading.

Ken has limped off the porch and is calling out directions.  “Cut her to the left, no hard left.”

It is very difficult to back up a wagon on a long hitch under any circumstances; and a fully loaded hay wagon makes the effort just that much harder.  Besides which, you are backing up on a ramp into the haymow that at its peak falls off ten feet to the ground below.  If the wagon wheel goes over that edge you are going to lose the whole load and risk busting up the wagon, flipping the tractor, and injuring the driver.  If there is only one person on your crew he or she better know how to get the wagon backed up into the barn.  But with eight people there is a choice.  The tongue of the wagon, usually a single piece of tapered hardwood or channel iron at least eight feet long and not more than two inches wide and two inches thick, runs from the axle that attaches to and turns the front wheels of the wagon to the tractor.  It is held onto the tractor, being pulled or pushed and swinging back and forth, on nothing more than a bolt which goes through a metal plate attached to the tip of the tongue that slides into a hole on a metal track on the back of the tractor.  A cotter pin usually holds the bolt down and keeps it from bouncing off or disconnecting from the tractor.

“Hey, let’s unhook the whole rig and just push it in,” says Barry.

Everyone thinks this is between a good and a brilliant idea except Ken, who has come down off the porch and is overseeing operations with a worried look on his face.  In his day he could have backed that wagon up into the barn single handedly … and on the first try too.

“Hey ladies,” Libby yells out like a truck driver, “get your sweet buns over here.”

Barbara and Lou walk over.  The gaggle of kids follows them.

The ramp is on an incline.  The loaded wagon weighs well over three tons, but with eight people lined up in front of it to take the pressure off the tractor Libby can back up just softly enough for Peter to lift the pin out of the hitch and not move the wheels one inch.  Once the wagon is disconnected Peter steers the wagon by swinging the tongue ever so easily first left and then slightly right while the remainder of us push the loaded wagon up the ramp and into the hayloft.  We are cheering with the miracle of our strength, a dozen sweaty men and women now throwing the bales off the wagon, laughing and cheering, drunk with the sheer physical power of our collective.  The hay is off the wagon and stacked in the hayloft in less than ten minutes.  It is nothing short of a miracle to Ken whose eyes are wide.

The wagon is walked by hand back down the ramp, reattached to the tractor, and rolling back into the field virtually without pause.  Everyone is into it now.  Shannon, Grace, all of the kids, running around shrieking in the coming wind like whirling dervishes.  It’s clearly right that we did not use the horses to gather the bales.  Good as they are, they would have been made nervous and distracted by the noisy hand waving crowd of people rushing and milling around them.  There are times when the technology is simply too efficient to argue with.

The wagon is loaded a second time in less than half an hour.  The slowest part of the operation has been just moving the tractor through the field to where the bales lie.  There are enough people so that distant bales are shuttled closer to the wagon’s path.  We are back at the haymow, unhitch the load, and push it into the barn like old experts.

“Look at them go, Ken,” says Grace, nearly dancing with delight.  “These folk are sure to have the best darn dairy farm in all Franklin County in no time at all.  Yes sir, in no time at all.”

Oh dear Grace, if you only knew.

Sugaring
One of the things that engaged us when we moved onto the farm in early 1970 was preparing for maple sap harvesting and maple syrup production. That we were able to pull it off, to actually make sugaring happen and productive, seems almost miraculous and unbelievable in hindsight.

There is no production work, no hunting and gathering, no rendering on Earth more rewarding than making maple syrup. There is also no taste more delicious than maple syrup. Trust me on this: even if making maple syrup is labor-intensive in ways you simply cannot fathom, it is an act of love for which the reward is sweet and pure ambrosia. And no matter how hard the work is, and the work is extremely hard, there is joy to be had in sugaring that is found nowhere else. Besides which, when was the last time you actually had ambrosia on your hands, and on your boots, in your nostrils, going down your throat?

Maple sugaring lore and sugaring technology go back to the Native People of the Northeast, hundreds of years before the first European settlers ever set foot on the continent. Abnaki Indians knew about sugaring and shared their wisdom and sugaring techniques with the Europeans. The idea is really deliciously simple: find a way to tap into and harvest the sap that runs up the veins of mother maple, Acer saccharum, in the spring. Then boil the sap down until enough water has evaporated off so that the juice has thickened into maple syrup. Just like bees do, take the nectar back to the hive and evaporate the excess water by flapping your wings over your harvest for a good long time, days even, turning nectar into sugar, spinning floss into gold. The larger the amount of nectar which has been collected, the faster you must beat your wings to blow air through the hive, and the faster and longer you stoke the fire to dry the nectar. And you must be careful the nectar doesn’t spoil, be careful the sugar doesn’t harden. If you’ve got a big crop and the sap is running in the maples never let the sugaring fire go out.

The means of maple sugar harvesting and production are straightforward, even simple. Just figure out how you are going to gather the sap, put the gathered sap in a cauldron or pan, apply heat, boil off about ninety five percent of the water, and watch it very carefully at the end. The short moments between producing syrup that pleases the tongue of God and producing utterly useless burnt maple molasses are brief, like a sexual climax. You build up to it slowly, intensely, steadily, but when it’s upon you it is happening urgently and unstoppably according to immutable principles of expression and release quite beyond your control.

The endeavor of making maple syrup is time consuming, regardless of whether you have been making sugar all your life or you know absolutely nothing about it, which is a fair characterization of our skills and knowledge when we began our sugaring operations less than two months after moving onto the farm. What one needs to start a serious sugar production operation is lots of time and a goodly amount of equipment, including, in order of appearance: drills, taps, about three or four thousand galvanized metal two gallon buckets, a three hundred gallon sap gathering tank, a fifteen hundred gallon holding tank, a four by fifteen foot boiling pan, a sugar shack, dozens of cords of wood, a good team of horses, harness, tack, and a dray or skidder. Yeah, that should do it.

What we had to start with was the sugar shack, the gathering tank, the holding tank and the buckets, all three or four thousand of them stuck together with congealed maple sap and sugar from the last time they were used by the overwhelmed and underachieving former owners off our farm, three thousand buckets serving as caskets or homes to sweet deprived ants, moths, mayflies, and other insects who supped and lived and died inside them. Three thousand buckets, each and every one of them needing to be pulled apart from the bucket it was stuck to, and not easily pulled apart, and then cleaned. Nor was the cleaning easy, requiring absolute fastidiousness and care, because there is nothing that ruins an entire batch of maple syrup as quickly as impurities and dirt.

Now this was a job for revolutionary communalists if ever there was one: bucket washing and the formation of brigades. It felt like the Chinese Red Guard had sent us to the countryside for rectification of our bourgeois tendencies among the peasantry. Every adult was assigned to the bucket brigade, a chore from which there could be no escape. Thirty buckets per day per pair of washers as assigned each morning, roughly an hour’s work, times five pairs of washers. If we were disciplined and started now, which we did, the job could be completed in less than a month, one more task amidst a list of tasks far more numerous and time consuming than we could ever conceivably accomplish.

In a sense it is amazing we did as well as we did that first year, because we were always critical of ourselves as being inefficient and indulgent hippie fools. We met each morning after breakfast. There was a tremendous tension between the deep desire for complete freedom that motivated so many of us and the equally honorable desire for discipline and productivity. Ideologies were routinely discussed, invented, borrowed, modified, and adapted. We had times where there was absolutely no specialization, for example, everyone had to spend one day a week doing house care and childcare, and everyone had to chop and stack wood. “Give a person a fish,” we would say “and you feed a person for one day. Teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” Only over the seasons did the demands and realities of time and the farming life make us less doctrinaire. Sometimes, for example, it just isn’t best to have twelve different people operating the same piece of machinery.

It certainly isn’t best to have many different people driving the horses. Working teams of horses thrive on consistency, dependability, and predictability. They want so much to please you, to give you precisely what you want, but they absolutely need to know as clearly and simply as possible what it is you do want in order to be able to give it to you. And Peter’s touch was different than Barbara’s touch and Barbara’s touch different than mine.

This raised an even larger question, of course, and a larger lesson was being offered here, although I’m not sure we ever fully answered or understood it, much less learned it. At our most extreme there was no ownership of anything, not of our children, our wives and husbands, not of our skills, our toothbrushes, or our underwear. Just pick up the next clean item in the pile and put it on. But if you’ve ever lived in a family of more than one person you know that specialization, personal preference, and accommodation to differences is the rule of the day. A leaderless community is not necessarily an efficient community. Initiative, which is so dearly prized and needed, is also reactively opposed.

And there we were. I don’t really know how people in town understood or knew that we wanted to resurrect the Magnant place’s sugar operations, but since nature abhors a vacuum, once they recognized that we were planning to tap our trees, advice poured in fast, principally from one George Truax, the real deal, our friend and savior and guardian angel.

George had lived in Franklin all his life. I wish now I knew more about him. He was a horse wizard, a genius, and the repository of generations’ worth of horse lore and legend. Kept a team for skidding out logs from deep in the Vermont woods and kept a barn full of ponies in a urine line. Now here was a piece of lore and education we hadn’t quite anticipated. You keep the ponies in their stalls all day long, your goal being to acquire their urine to sell to cosmetics manufacturers to use in the production of lipsticks and perfume. Don’t ask me how that part works. But you must have plastic tubing running from the horses’ penises to fifty-five gallon barrels that are collected one or twice a week from the shed outside your barn by a middleman to the cosmeticians, just another variation on the whole northeast dairy farmer’s weltanschauung: collect the liquid – the milk, the piss, the maple sap, whatever – store it briefly, transform it yourself or have others transform it, ship it off, make a small profit.

George was fifty-eight at the time, a short heavy man, with a cute rolling walk and one of those red and black checked hats on, winter and summer, and a Camel cigarette between his lips. Coughed a lot. Spat a lot. Always needed a shave, which is hard to do given there has to be at least twelve hours in any given day on which he shaved that he had to appear clean-shaven, though he never did, look clean shaven that is. Hiked up his green suspenders, a lot, reached into the belt loops on his pants and pull on them, first the right side, then the left, always had a twinkle in his eye, rain or shine, like Santa Claus.

George was in the woods one fall day he told us, more than once I must say, had to have been fifteen years ago now, trying to skid out some logs from trees he’d felled earlier, walking along side the dray with his team of horses, Chub and Tucker, through red and green and brown and yellow, when a fox ran out onto the trail right in front of them, and damn if Tucker, always a fool of a horse, didn’t start to dancing and rearing and aiming to chase that fox, while Chub, never much of an initiator, but as fine a follower as you could ever hope to meet, joined in the chase. George, having wisely or not so wisely jumped on the dray, is leaning back as hard as he possibly can, as much to keep his balance as to restrain his horses, straining and screaming at the top of his lungs, “Whoa, back! Whoa you horses,” knowing full well he was completely out of control of his stampeding team, the wind in their manes, their tails lashing like furred serpents, the leaves so thick and stirred to motion, heavier and heavier, sticking to his clothing and face, so dense it was hard to breath or see, an ocean of leaves cleaved through by these mighty steeds, pulled by invisible forces, wildly, uncontrollably, beyond his grasp and hope. “Damned if I ever knew how I got control of those critters. ‘Spect they just plumb run themselves out. And damned if it wasn’t right close to where we started, cut us a right nice new path through the forest them creatures did. Best damn team I ever owned.”

George, who knows where every piece of horse drawn farm equipment that ever lived in Franklin County is, and how much it cost new, and what it’s now worth, adopts us. I don’t know why, because we would love horses almost as much as he did and he knew it? Because he still used horses to work his farm and we proposed to do so the same, preserving a way of life he thought would be gone and didn’t much care whether it lasted or died with him one way or the other until we appeared. Maybe because he had no children of his own? Maybe because he was a bit of a rebel himself? Maybe because he worked from time to time as a hired man on the Magnant spread, and knew it well? Or maybe because he had a big heart, and loved Peter, our kids, and the women, in just that order. I don’t know, but George helped us buy our first good team, taught us everything we knew about horses, and set us up with harness and tack and sleds and equipment. Teaches us where and how to tap the marvelous maple trees, how to set up the sugarhouse, how to break the road through the snow in the sugar bush, how to boil the sap in the fifteen foot long sugaring pan without burning the sugar or the steel. It is amazing what 58 years living in one environment and developing a set of skills to flourish in that environment can be like, what pride, persistence, practicality, passion, and practice can bring out in a person. What it means to try real hard, to occasionally make big mistakes, to hurt the people you love without meaning to, and to come back and try your hardest again. We never would have made it without George. Not that we made it with him, but that’s another story.

And thus began our mission. We found a team of horses. Rather George found our team of horses. Mike and Jim. Solid citizens. Mike was shorter and older, perhaps seven years old by then and by far the more stable of the two horses. Jim was three, bigger, stronger, adolescent, with a military haircut, and not just a little bit raunchier. But they were a beautiful team of chestnut geldings who came to us with all their harness and tack for a very good price, perhaps at the time under six hundred dollars. Of course horses have to get used to their owners and owners have to get used to their horses, but from our side it was love at first sight. And they were such good strong creatures, and so good to us as well.

Freud says somewhere that the horse is the id and the rider the ego and that it is the horse who uses the rider to get where it wants to go, or some ironic transposition like that. I don’t know. I just know that these were the bravest, solidest, strongest, kindest allies anyone could have asked for, and we were very good to them, and they were very good to us.

It is not easy driving a team of horses, harnessing them correctly, hitching them to the equipment you want them to draw, and getting them to stop and go as you wish, but there was never a team of horses better suited to a person’s needs than Jim and Mike were suited to ours. Mike always went on the left. He was the leader. He set the tone. And Mike served Jim as loyally as he served us, protected Jim, steadied him down when necessary, uncomplainingly pulled more of the load when necessary. These were immense creatures, easily weighing well over a thousand pounds each. And strong, did I say that? And obedient. And eager to work, bless their souls.

We took all the buckets from the sugarhouse where they’d been careless left by the overwhelmed Bates and carted them down to the milk room, which still had all the washing equipment from the Bates’ dairy operation. We banged on the lips of the buckets with wooden mallets. We soaked them in hot water. We wiggled them and jiggled them. One pail came loose. We washed and scrubbed it and made sure all the dirt and soap were removed. We set it out to dry. There were only two thousand nine hundred and ninety nine buckets to go. Next year we’ll clean the buckets before putting them away for winter we said. It was a noble plan.

Naturally, as well, the gathering tank, the holding tank, the boiling pan and every piece of hose or pipe through which runs sap or syrup has to be washed and cleaned and freed of residue and old sugar before it can be used in any new sugaring season, which we did, for hours it seemed, filling the gathering pan with hot water, hauling it to the spot on the hill where we would later unload the sap, almost like a trial run. Off load the hot water into the gathering tank. Climb carefully onto the joists that support a tank that can hold fifteen hundred gallons of sap. Wash out the insides of the tank, run the water through the six columned boiling pan, drain that water off, send the team of horses back to the milk house with the empty gathering tank on the dray, fill the tank with fifty gallons of hot water, or whatever the capacity of your hot water boiler is, run that load back up to the sugar house, drain that hot water into the holding tank, slosh it around until all is good and clean, run it through the boiling pan again, squeegee out the boiling pan until it is clean enough that you would eat out of it, and viola, you are ready to make maple syrup.

After your buckets are cleaned and assembled, and all your equipment is washed and cleaned, you also need drills and drill bits, hammers and spouts, cans, bottles, wood, labels. The list is endless. But then on the first Monday in March you go to town meeting, and every adult who lives in Franklin is there, everyone who hasn’t set foot out of their snow caves or seen hide nor hair of their neighbors and fellow citizens since Thanksgiving, everyone, even those hippies living down to the Magnant place (now how many votes are they allowed?), ready to do battle over budgets, and road graders, and the library report. And we thought we had issues! And then you just go home with the rest of the farmers and wait for the first day when the temperature rises about freezing after the Vermont winter and then you set your taps.

You know it’s the start of sugaring season as soon as you awaken, because you hear the snow melting and dripping. And on that longed for day you hitch the horses to the dray as early as you can. And you load as many of the buckets as possible onto the dray, leaving a little room for some of the children to ride. You head out into the sugar bush. Four or five people wear carpenter’s aprons filled with dozens of taps. Four or five others carry hammers and drills. Someone watches the team, the sugar buckets, and the kids. The horses step into snow up to their withers. They step carefully, almost daintily into the snow. They do not know what lies under foot, under the blanket of snow. The step carefully to avoid rocks and buried down branches. They make the first trail of the year through the three and four foot deep snows. Some of the adults wear snowshoes. They traipse to the maple tree in teams. One person drills three, four, or five holes in the tree depending on its girth. They blow into the hole to clear out any remaining sawdust and wood chips. One person hammers the tap into the just drilled hole. At the bottom of the tap is a hook. Someone hikes over to the tree from the dray with five buckets. Each bucket has one small hole that has been drilled into it just beneath the rim. The bucket hangs on the hook at the bottom of the tap and rests against the tree trunk. Aluminum covers shaped like tent tops are slid over the bucket to keep out rainwater, bugs, and falling debris. Between drillers, tappers, and bucket hangers, six to eight sets of footprints have been made between the dray on the main trails being forged and the maple trees. A network of capillaries all branching out from the main artery is cut into the snow. The harnesses jingle. The children giggle. The first droplets of maple sap run down the spouts and strike the empty bottoms of the galvanized sugar buckets with a pinging sound, first one bucket and then another. Soon it sounds like the fall of raindrops on a tin roof in the maple forest, the sap in the trees rising into the sunlight, droplets falling into the buckets. On the way back we stop at some of the first hung buckets. We pour the teaspoons of sap that have gathered in the bottom of each bucket into a gathering pail. When we have three or four cups of fresh sap we stand around the dray, each person sips the sacred waters, each person tastes the faintly sweet delicious sap, each person marvels at the gifts of nature and the promise of spring. Three thousand taps on eight hundred trees, the droplets pinging into the buckets. If you’re quiet and stop oooing and awing long enough to listen carefully you can soon hear the empty buckets pinging again, a chorus of maple sap drum beats on the tins.

When the dray carrying the two or three hundred gallons of sap has made it back to the sugar shack we unload the gathering tank into the holding tank. This is strictly gravity at work. One end of the sugar shack opens onto the road or driveway for entry and exit into the main building for the loading and unloading of wood, equipment and syrup. The shack is invariably built beside a hill or rise so you can park the horses at the right spot on that hill, turn the galvanized rain gutter sized pipe at the bottom of the end of the gathering tank down, and direct that intense stream of sap toward the culvert size pipe that runs from this point on the hill next to the sugar shack into the shack and into the fifteen hundred gallon holding tank that sits up high on the hill side inside the shack. From the holding tank a one-inch pipe leads to the boiling pan. The boiling pan holds only about twenty or thirty gallons of liquid at one time. It is four feet wide by fifteen feet long, but only five inches deep. The boiling pan is divided by metal strips built into it into six channels, each of which is opened at the opposite end from the one next to it to form a simple maze of eight inch wide channels through which the maple sap runs, from thinnest and coldest as it enters the pan on the right hand front side, to thickest and hottest at the opposite left hand front side of the pan where the syrup, at the very moment it is formed, is drained off. The entire pan sits about four feet off the ground on a three sided brick foundation that serves as an oven, the fourth side being a door into the heart of the oven through which is fed the wooden fuel to heat and fire it.

Oh, about all that wood you need. Think about it. How much wood do you need to bring a fifteen foot long pan filled with cold maple sap to a boil, and to boil long enough to evaporate off five to ten thousand gallons of water over the course of a sugaring season, for that is what it takes, about fifty gallons of sap boils down to one gallon of syrup.

And here we had a brilliant plan. Across the Canadian border in a small town in southern Quebec was a sawmill. Sawmills generally make planks from logs by shaving off the round outer bark covered edges of the logs until the log approximates a square shape from which a number of one-inch thick (really thirteen sixteenth of an inch thoese days) planks can be sawed off and then trimmed into one by six or one by eight or even from a good log one by ten or twelve inch planks. But all those shaved off bark-covered edges are really just useless scrap to the mill owner. He might even be able to sell his sawdust, but he historically could not give away these scraps. Not until he met the hippie revolutionary sugar making horse-using farmers that is.

“Bon jour,” said Peter. We’ll take that pile of scrap lumber off your hands.”

“Take? What do you give to me for it?”

“Give to you? You should give us something for cleaning out the mess from your mill.”

“Some fellow in Hamilton say he will pay me something and haul it away for pulp.”

“Not that wet bark shit.”

“Well I must get me something for it. I cut it. I carted it. I stored it. I don’t just give it away.”

“Two dollars for a pickup truck full.” That would be about two cords of wood.

“Two dollars? I’ll keep it myself. Ten dollars per truckload is what I want. American dollars.”

“My friend, we’ll give you three dollars per truck load. We’ll stack it and clear it and take ten truckloads today and tomorrow. Here’s thirty dollars American,” Peter says as he reaches out his right hand with the thirty dollars.

“It is a deal,” says the Quebecois, taking the thirty dollars and shaking Peter’s hand.

“We need a bigger truck,” says Peter under his breath.

It will not be the first time crossing the border with a truck loaded with something – grain, wet bark, sawdust – that we have any difficulty. It will also not the last. Before sugaring season started, looking to take a rare day off, Mary Pat and I took Maia and headed up to Montreal in the pickup, perhaps our most dependable vehicle. At the time the pickup had a cab on the back end and it was our job to take a couple of weeks’ worth of non-compostable or burnable trash to the town dump. This was mostly boxes and plastic bags filled with cans, broken bottles, dirty disposable diapers, I don’t know what, but trash. We drove down the road to the dump, but it was so icy and snow bound I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get back out and just turned the truck around without ever dumping off the trash. Then we headed out to Montreal. The Canadian border guards never searched Americans and we zipped right through, as we would many times in the future with all kinds of fugitives and draft dodgers. We had a lovely day in Montreal. We visited a museum. We walked all over the city. We may even have eaten out somewhere. By the time we headed back it was well passed midnight. I had completely forgotten the truckload of garbage, but it was garbage so who could give a damn.

On the American side of the border they thought they had struck gold. We were ordered out of the truck. A matron took Mary Pat to a bathroom where here bra was searched and she was required to take off Maia’s diapers. I was taken to a bathroom and strip searched, but not cavity searched. The border guard made sure I saw his weapon. We were taken back out to the truck and asked to open the rear.

“It’s filled with garbage,” I said.

“Open the rear,” he said.

“It’s not locked. It’s really garbage,” I said.

I opened the rear. He put on rubber gloves and took the bags and boxes out one by one. Two other guards joined him. They opened the bags and poured the contents on the ground. They found bags and boxes filled with garbage. They finished their search. They started putting the contents of the bags and boxes neatly back into the bags and boxes to put neatly back into the truck.

“Look guys, I know this is silly to say, because if I were a real criminal I’d lie to you, so you can’t believe anything I say, I know, but it really is all garbage and I don’t care how it is packed, just throw the shit in the back of the truck, honest, it’s garbage, I’ll dump it all out some other time, before I ever cross the border again, honest.” I was laughing. They weren’t smiling. They finished loading the contents back into each bag and box as they had found them. They put the bags and the boxes neatly into the pickup truck. They told me, “You can return to the cab, sir.” They gave me a military salute, sort of waving me on at the chest. They did not look inside the hubcaps. Of course there was nothing there, but I’m just telling you they didn’t look.

“That was weird and scary,” I said to Mary Pat.

“Fascist pigs,” she said to me.

Oh yes, the maple sugar and the lumber. So we loaded the truck as high as we could pile it with lumber, which we tied down, and then drove across the border to the farm, where we off loaded the maybe five hundred individual slabs of wood, and then carried and stacked them in the sugar house and then went back across the border and did it nine more times. I don’t know what our gas bill was. I don’t know how many hours it took. But I do know that in the end we had enough wood to keep that stove going, sometimes twenty-four hours a day, until about eight thousand gallons of sap had been turned into one hundred and seventy two gallons of Vermont’s finest maple syrup. Here’s how we did that.

Charlie and Crow loved to make the syrup. Loved it to the point it was a passion with them. No one could explain it and no one cared to. To most of the others it was just another tedious chore, like washing buckets, but Charlie and Crow were in love with it. And they had a system. Charlie was the fireman. Crow was the cook. Peter and only Peter drove the team through the snow.

Here’s one of my favorite sugaring tales that captures the essence of the Franklin commune experience for me.

We were gathering heavily flowing maple sap on a glorious sunny day, temperatures in the high forties, using a three hundred gallon tank being drawn by our team of horses on a dray through deep snow. Dozens of people were tromping through the woods pouring sap from the tap buckets into gathering buckets and unloading those buckets joyfully and speedily into the horse drawn tank. As we drove the first fully loaded tank back toward the sugarhouse the dray hit a hidden rock and tipped over pitching the gathering tank off the dray and onto its side. Though we only lost about twenty or thirty gallons of sap, the tank was far too heavy for us to right and reset on the dray, even with all the people power we had. So we set about unloading the sap we had gathered in the tank back into the gathering pails and then retraced our steps through the snow to the trees we had just harvested where we poured the sap back into the very buckets just unloaded. It was as if someone had taken a movie of our operation and was now playing the reel in reverse. Once the dray was righted we marched back to the trees, unloaded the buckets into the gathering pails, walked the pails back to the dray, and reloaded the gathering tank and drove it to offload into the holding tank.

Once there is enough sap in the holding tank to not worry about running out of sap to keep the pan full when the fire is roaring hot you are ready to start cooking. The pan is set up in a way so that as cold sap is added to the right side of the pan it moves the sap that already sits in the pan through the channels from right to left with the thicker more concentrated sap now appearing at the left front side of the pan. The fire must be absolutely ferocious. Steam rises from the surface of the boiling pan and is released through huge open vents in the sugar shack roof. Once the fire is going there is really no sense in shutting it down, unless, of course, you do not have enough sap to sustain it. You must anticipate your future boiling pan needs. You must neither have too much sap in the buckets that you have no place to unload and store it, nor too little sap in the holding tank to support the needs of the fire and the pan. Some days you cook just for eight hours at a time, but at the very height of the season we actually cooked for eighteen hours a day for three days straight. It was glorious work. People visited us all the time to see and taste. You’d know the sap has turned to syrup when the ladle you are using to help move the sap from one side of the pan to the other comes up with an apron of syrup that drips off from it just right. And then you can drain off a quart or two quarts of syrup at a time. Pour some into that clean little bottle you have and hold it up to the light next to the standard bottles you got from the agriculture service depicting the color syrup which is acceptable from grade A to grade B. Why you can even put chicken eggs in the pan and boil them right up so that when you peel the shell from the hard-boiled egg it has a little brown hue and tastes just a little sweet.

Charlie has found a pair of chaps. He wears them to protect against the intense heat of the fire. He loves feeding the fire. There is never too much work for him to do.

“Just tell me what you need, brother. Let’s bank that fire as high as we can and sugar until the dawn.” There are brief moments when he and I rest and talk, but the sap is running hard now, the holding tank full, the gathering tank unloaded on the hill, and in the morning the buckets on the trees will have to be emptied. Lou brings us sandwiches and coffee through out the night. We are both in love with her, which was bearable, and truth be told she was in love with both of us, which was just a little harder to take.

In the end we had one hundred and seventy two gallons of syrup. We literally sold one hundred and fifty of them under the Earthworks label for seven dollars a gallon. I figure that turns out to be about ten or fifteen cents an hour as the rate of pay for our labors. But, as they say, there are just some things money can’t buy.

The dialogue went something like this:The United States is a capitalist and repressive county where wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of the few and controlled by those few. These few are variously known as the oligarchy, the ruling class, the military industrial complex, capitalist pigs, etc. Their class interests shape their values and ideology. These oppressors, quite naturally, will do whatever is necessary to retain their power. It is just a law of nature. They only share power to the extent it serves their interests. Witness the historically undeniable fact that by the deeds of the powerful invaders the Native American peoples are almost altho not quite all dead and someone else owns almost all their lands.

The rulers have enslaved and killed millions, tens of millions, literally over one hundred million human beings, to provide inexpensive disposable labor for their fiefdoms. One hundred million people stolen from Africa … over half of whom died before they got here. The rulers pay the lowest imaginable wages to the people who work for them so as to maximize their profits. And to the extent they provide any benefits, freedoms, and kindnesses to their workers and the masses it is only given in order to maintain control and avoid uprisings, defection, and revolution. Power will not be voluntarily surrendered in this worldview but must be wrested away. Since power will not be surrendered voluntarily, the only real means of wresting it is by violent confrontation. Power only understands power. Organizing is necessary because without a unified base the masses cannot succeed in their struggle to wrest power away from the rulers, but ultimately peace comes out of the barrel of a gun.

And there you have a little summary of the Marxist, Maoist, Franz Fanon type analyses that guided our thinking and occasionally our actions. Yet, if this was so, one rightfully asks, what were you doing on a farm in northern Vermont milking cows, chopping wood, and making maple syrup for untold hours each day? And, that being a good legitimate question, the following answer would be given.

Liberation and revolution will only be achieved, we would say, when there is a very broad coalition of progressive forces sharing common interests and able to act in concert led by third world people. This being so, the role of the white American left was limited to organizing white workers, serving the third world leadership, giving aid, support, and comfort to the enemies of the United States, particularly national liberation movements in Vietnam, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Cuba, and defining the terms of the cultural revolution that would accompany the political revolution. We were big on this last one. Our notion, spoken over and over again many times, was that we were “living the post revolutionary life style in pre revolutionary times.” Don’t ask me where we got this stuff, but it became an article of faith and dogma. And being back on the land as pre-technological agriculturalist was the model we affirmed and gave voice to.

When I was an anthropologist I studied a phenomenon called millenarian movements, or cargo cults. Such cults were most often seen in Micronesia, although the Arapaho Ghost dance of the American West was also probably one. The central core belief in cargo cult movements was that the ancestors would return and bring with them the abundance of goods and good times that the suffering people in culture shock longed for. These cults were actually thought to arise from culture shock, from a kind of collective cultural trauma. I wondered from time to time if our impulse to return to the old ways at Franklin was not also a manifestation of our millenarian impulses. And altho we affirmed the use of violence, we personally were not generally violent … except to the animals we slaughtered … and occasionally to one another.

In late May, 1968, literally running from the college where I’d been teaching, running from the local police, and from hosts of other unknown and unnamed demons, I fled to the Highland School for Exceptional Children in rural Paradox, NY, where I reconnected with Mary Pat, a woman I had had a deep, torrid, love relationship with in 1966, who was herself running from her mother’s suicide in Big Sur.

From Paradox we traveled together across this amazing huge country, listening to news of the police riots at the Democratic Party Presidential Nominating Convention in Chicago, concerned for those in the Black liberation struggle, excited and trepidations that revolution was becoming more real by the moment, and eager to find our place in it.  We were desperate and wildly enthusiastic about our union, the revolution, and having a child.  We lived from September 1968, to September 1969, in California, mostly in Sebastopol, in the redwoods, enjoying Mary Pat’s pregnancy, occasionally visiting San Francisco and Berkeley and the cultural/political revolutionary scene there.

I worked part of that year as a maintenance man at the University of California Marine Biology Laboratory in Bodega Bay where I met Jim and Barbara Nolfi, discussed plans for forming a commune, convinced their friends, the Jungian therapists Jane and Jo Wheelwright, to fund our venture, slept out of doors under the redwoods in the mist with our baby Maia, and then drove back across the continent to buy the old Magnum farm in Franklin, Vermont, all 330 acres of it, lock, stock, and barrel, for under $50,000.  We moved onto the farm February 1, 1970.  February Fools Day we called it.

It was an intense experience, that first year and a half, really two years if you consider sugaring seasons and summers as the year markers.  We were highly political in our orientation, but also fundamentally agrarian.  We fancied we were living a post revolutionary life style in pre-revolutionary times.  In hindsight we were a bit of a nativistic movement, desperate, idealistic, and courageously experimental.