---
Euclid Farnham's wife is
trying to shove a head of cabbage into the refrigerator.
“This is not working,”
she calls from the kitchen, her head buried in the depths of the
appliance.
“This is not working,”
Euclid repeats to himself, rising from the rocking chair by the
woodstove
where he's been discussing, among other things, how history
and conservation are two sides of the same coin. He shuffles into the
narrow kitchen. Seventy-nine years old, he's lived in this house his
entire life. His family inherited it “down to the kettle” in the
throes of the Great Depression.
“And the squash is
getting gooey,” Priscilla Farnham mutters from within the fridge.
“The squash is getting
gooey,” Euclid repeats. “What do you need me to do?”
“Take this.” Priscilla
shoves an armload of fall produce at her husband. “There's no room
in the crisper. We should never have bought those grapes.”
“Our problem is we have
the world's smallest refrigerator,” Euclid explains en route to the
pantry. “Look around this room. We have seven doors and two
windows. Where do you put anything?”
“Oh,
hell,” Priscilla says from the kitchen. There's a loud thump. Just
then the phone rings – an old-fashioned, actual-bell ringer. It's a
library group asking to book a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Claus at their
Christmas party, roles that Euclid and Priscilla have been playing
for decades despite the fact the Euclid – lean, with a gray
mustache and thinning hair – needs a good deal of padding to fit
the part. He takes the call and makes a note on the calender.
“It's a real ordeal,
getting involved in all this stuff,” he says wryly, sitting back
down. Not only is he the only Santa anyone can remember, he's also
served as town moderator and president of the Tunbridge Historical
Society for more than 30 years, and recently retired as cemetery
commissioner and president of the Tunbridge World's Fair, an annual
agricultural event. He's been a justice of the peace, the town
lister, the trustee of public funds, a dairy farmer, a maple syrup
producer, a soldier, a Republican, a Democrat and an author. The one
thing he has not been is a father.
“I'm the end of the
Farnham line,” he says. “That concerns me, it really does.”
Farnhams have been in
Tunbridge, Vermont for eight generations – since before statehood
in 1791. Euclid's ancestors walked north from Connecticut alongside
Ethan Allen's family after the Revolutionary War, hauling their
belongings on horseback through the forest until they reached the
present site of Tunbridge. They've survived a Mohawk raid, fought
against a dam that would have flooded the town, and lived through
natural disasters that nearly did flood it. Euclid describes events
from the early 1800s as though talking about yesterday's Red Sox
game.
“My family's been here so
long, I grew up with all this history,” he says. “If I don't
write this down, a lot of it's going to be lost. It's the roots of
the community.”
***
In
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, the
western writer Wallace
Stegner writes about the “deficiency of community” and lack of
“deeply lived-in places” that can result from the transient,
mobile culture of the American West. Coming from a nation built by
pilgrims and pioneers, Americans have long searched for identity and
opportunity by taking to the roads, trails and highways. Leaving is
in our blood.
Staying
is less romantic. Staying means grappling with sustainability. It
means preserving resources. But when you stay, your history sinks
like taproots beneath the land until you become part of a place. You
remember, for instance, what the forest looked like before the
American chestnuts and elms all died. You know there used to be
salmon and eels in the First Branch of the White River, because your
mother told you how she sat on the banks and fished for them. When
you know these things and you care about a place, you have the power
to protect it.
For
decades, though, the Farnhams were the exception, not the rule, even
in blue-blooded New England. Throughout the 20th
century, droves of families and young people left Vermont in search
of richer soil and better opportunities, and the population of
Tunbridge dwindled from 2,000 to less than 790 by the 1960s.
Even
Euclid's grandfather left for a while. In 1880, Grandfather
Farnham was swept up with the great migration west, joining millions
of others who left their homelands and sought new opportunities and
better futures by pushing ever further into the new frontier.
Grandfather Farnham found himself drawn to the the fertile,
boulder-less expanses of Kansas, but
his own father, a Civil War veteran, wouldn't let his son out of
Vermont so easily.
“In
a last desperate attempt, he took a train as far west as he could go
to convince him to come back,” Euclid recounts, his gray eyes
flashing. “He was successful, thank heaven. I've been in Kansas,
and it's long and flat and boring. I'm glad I'm not in Kansas.”
Euclid
is glad he's not anywhere else but on Whitney Hill Road in Tunbridge,
Vermont. In the 1950s, he spent three years in the army traveling
through Europe, and in the early 1980s he spent a month exploring
National Parks west of the Mississippi.
“It's
great out there,” he says. “But I just – I just missed the
hills of Vermont. I missed the hardwoods. It's a silly thing, but
growing up with the maples and the beeches, when I got east to
Minnesota I felt like I was home again.”
***
Today, the hardwood forests
that Euclid loves are changing, along with nearly everything else.
The state has turned from staunchly Republican to staunchly Democrat
(a move Euclid applauds), many of the old family farms have been
hacked into smaller and smaller plots, and much of the old
pastureland has reverted to forest.
“It seems like everything is
happening to our forests,” he says, ticking off the diseases that
have swept New England trees in his lifetime. “We lost our
chestnuts. The elm trees are gone. The butternut trees are well on
their way. The beech trees – well, the reason I'm burning beech
this winter is I'm told to burn them for wood or they'll die anyway.
It seems like one species after another is going.”
Seasons have changed drastically since
he was growing up. Winters are warmer and natural disasters are more
common. Sugar bushes and apple orchards are suffering. There are
fewer fish in the rivers and the rivers themselves are less stable
due to decades of human intervention.
But
today, a second wave of back-to-the-land revivalists buying land in
Vermont, and they're doing it with the radical intent of staying. The
local stigma against “flatlanders” is lifting, and demographics
are slowly shifting. Euclid's neighbors on Whitney Hill Road now
include a young law student who put his career on hold to build a
cabin, a Jamaican farmer (the only black man in town) and his artist
wife, and a publishing agent who's no longer chained to New York City
thanks to broadband internet. None of them have roots in Tunbridge.
But they all want to stay.
***
The
recorded history of Tunbridge, Vermont currently resides in its
entirety in a cramped office in Euclid Farnham's house, but within
the year a new fireproof room will be completed at the local library
and the collection will be moved. Euclid and Priscilla are deciding
what to do with their house – a piece of living history itself –
when the time comes. Meanwhile, Euclid is working on his third book
about Tunbridge history, preparing to leave eight generations' worth
of research, observations and anecdotal knowledge to his new
neighbors. He hopes it's enough.
“If
we lose our roots,” he says, “then future generations have lost a
lot.”
No comments:
Post a Comment