Northern Borders Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The Farm in Lost Nation

  Hannibal Rex

  The Snow Owl

  The Green Mountain Whale

  Down the Coat

  Upland Game

  Lost Nation Calendar

  Family Reunion

  The Season of the Cluster Flies

  Northern Borders

  About the Author

  First Mariner Books Edition 2002

  Copyright © 1994 by Howard Frank Mosher

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-618-24009-8

  eISBN 978-0-547-52654-6

  v1.0714

  To Phillis

  We have advanced by leaps to the Pacific, and left many a lesser Oregon and California unexplored behind us.

  —The Maine Woods,

  Henry David Thoreau

  Introduction

  A LESSER OREGON

  Even today Kingdom County is an out-of-the-way and little-known fragment of a much earlier rural America. Forty years ago, when I was a boy growing up there on my grandparents’ farm, it was still something of a true frontier. Sequestered from the rest of New England by the Green Mountains to the west and the White Mountains to the east, and further isolated by its notorious seven-month winters and poor dirt roads, the Kingdom during the late 1940s and well on into the 1950s was just the sort of remote, unspoiled enclave Thoreau must have had in mind one hundred years before, when he characterized interior northern Maine and other tracts of overlooked territory east of the Rockies as lesser Oregons.

  From my grandparents’ place at the end of Lost Nation Hollow, you could strike out ten miles and more through big woods in three directions without crossing a single road, other than a few disused old logging traces. Their farmhouse was situated less than a mile south of the Line, as everyone in the Kingdom called the international boundary between Vermont and Canada. Unguarded and for the most part unvisited, the Line north of our place passed through some of the last authentically wild and undeveloped terrain in the state. And with its two-hundred-year history as the site of countless skirmishes between the Abenaki, French, and English, its tradition of whiskey smuggling and legends of huge yellow panthers and savage gray wolves, and its vast stands of tall timber made nearly inaccessible by still vaster cedar bogs, the border imparted an additional frontier atmosphere to Kingdom County.

  Yet it was not just the wild and mountainous terrain or the Canadian Line or the myths of marauding catamounts that defined the Kingdom of my boyhood as a frontier. It was also the terrifically independent-minded people who still lived there, enjoying, as they did, the essential elbowroom not only from outsiders but from each other as well, to develop unique styles of thinking and living.

  Moreover, although the Great Depression had officially ended several years before I was born, few Kingdom natives seemed to realize it, any more than the Kingdom had ever acknowledged the Depression when it arrived. The fact of the matter is that Kingdom County had always been poor. During the Depression and its long, lingering aftermath throughout rural northern New England, my grandparents and their neighbor had, perhaps, somewhat less ready cash than usual—which is to say, next to none at all.

  Still, with the passing of my boyhood, the era that had distinguished the Kingdom as a lesser Oregon was rapidly coming to a close, along with the lives of the generation, my grandparents’ generation, that sustained that era into the middle of the twentieth century. In fact, much of the drama and conflict inherent in the lives of the last traditional hill farmers derived from the sheer impossibility of preserving their special way of life in the face of inexorable progress and changes, such as Vermont’s bulk tank law prohibiting the shipping of milk in cans, the arrival of electricity, improved roads and cars and easier accessibility both to and from the outside world in general.

  Fortunately for me, the world of my grandparents remained intact a little longer in the Kingdom than elsewhere. Long enough, at least, for me to live through its final years, as recorded in the following remembrances. All date from my boyhood with my Kittredge grandparents, from 1948, when I turned six, to 1960, when I was eighteen and my grandfather astounded me and the rest of the family by doing something so totally marvelous and unpredictable, even for him, that in a very real sense you could say that he put an end to the era of which I am writing himself. For the most part, I have selected recollections designed to record that world that no longer exists and I have arranged them more or less chronologically. Some describe single events during the twelve years I spent with my grandparents; others are more general; still others concentrate on one or more family members since this is, first and foremost, a family memoir.

  These are the events and people that have stayed with me, undiminished in clarity, over the past four decades. They are as vivid in my mind and imagination today as the old family photographs in the albums in my grandparents’ attic, which as a boy I pored over for hours on end, and which I still keep on the shelves of my study. Often at night, just before falling asleep, they appear unbidden, image after image, photographs never taken, of my great and little aunts, my Uncle Rob, my cousins, and mutual ancestors whom I never knew but seemed to live with, through family stories, like near neighbors. Yet always my thoughts return to my grandparents themselves, whose fierce pride and diligence, not to mention sheer Kittredge cussedness, seemed to embody the spirit of Lost Nation Hollow and the Kingdom.

  For twelve years, they were at the center of everything for me. They remain now, forty years later, at the center of that vanished world, that lesser Oregon, whose like will not be seen again, in Kingdom County or elsewhere.

  Austen Kittredge III

  Lost Nation Hollow, 1994

  1

  The Farm in Lost Nation

  When I was a boy living on my grandparents’ Kingdom County farm, I sometimes amused myself by looking through an ancient family Bible in the farmhouse attic. This ponderous tome was a gloomy-looking affair if one ever existed. It weighed a good fifteen pounds, and it was bound tightly shut by a tarnished metal clasp which snapped open with the report of a pistol and never failed to startle me, alone in the remote, dim attic of my grandparents’ vast old house.

  Once this formidable mechanism had been breached, the Bible’s contents were intriguing. Besides the Old and New Testaments, it contained a Kittredge family birth register illuminated in gilt; a death register edged in sable; a table of standard weights and measures from which I gleaned the invaluable information—it must have been invaluable because I still remember it today, some four decades later—that one country furlong is the equivalent of forty rods; a dozen or so remarkably well-preserved wildflowers collected by a distant aunt said to have died at eighteen of a broken heart; and several pages of genealogical charts inscribed with the biblical-sounding names of more ancestors than I’d ever dreamed one boy could lay claim to, beginning with my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather: the first Kittredge to venture up into the trackless mountain fastness that would become Kingdom County.

  His name, aptly enough, was Sojourner Kittredge, and he was a Loyalist schoolteacher and part-time log sawyer who fled Connecticut and the American Revolution for Canada in the summer of 1775 with a lone red ox and a high-sided cart containing all his worldly possessions. Two arduous months later,
my ancestor stopped for good on the headwaters of a small, fast, icy river, which he promptly named the Kingdom, in honor of his beloved mother empire. Unfortunately, there was one small difficulty with Sojourner’s choice of a homestead. As my grandfather, who disliked all schoolteachers in general and those in our own family in particular, loved to tell me nearly two centuries later, the old Tory had put down stakes here as the result of a minute but fateful miscalculation. Since the Kingdom River drains north, toward the St. Lawrence, though by a circuitous and at times even contradictory route, he erroneously assumed that he had already reached Canada and sanctuary when in fact he’d fetched up instead in northern Vermont.

  Not, you understand, that such a trifling technicality as a line on a map mattered a whit to the old expeditionary once he’d made up his mind to stay put. By the time Sojourner finally figured out where he actually was, the Revolution had been over for several years. He’d already established the first grammar school and sawmill in Lost Nation, as he wryly named our township. And by then he did not have the slightest intention of lighting out again for Canada or anyplace else, though for three generations afterward his descendants marched in the Independence Day parades in Kingdom Common wearing bright scarlet coats and carrying the Union Jack.

  This is nearly all I know about my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather—except that in 1790 he astonished his neighbors and outraged his heirs by ceding the title to a ten-thousand-acre tract of woodland just south of the Canadian border to the state whose authority to govern any other part of the Kingdom he refused to acknowledge to his dying day. Sojourner’s intention was for Vermont to use the donated property as the site of a college to educate the youth of its white settlers and native Abenakis alike. In exchange, he neither demanded nor received a single shilling. He requested only a written guarantee that every qualified graduate of the Lost Nation Atheneum, as he rather grandiosely called his one-room country school, be entitled to attend the proposed state college free of charge, for as long as the grammar school and college should both exist.

  Of course the University of Vermont never did take advantage of my ancestor’s offer. Instead it situated itself one hundred miles across the Green Mountains to the southwest, on the considerably more clement and accessible shores of Lake Champlain. Yet even after the university sold off its Kingdom real estate holdings to pay debts incurred during the Civil War, it continued to honor the agreement between Sojourner Kittredge and the state that he otherwise declined to recognize. All duly prepared graduates of Lost Nation Atheneum were entitled to attend the university at no expense to themselves; and it was partly as a result of this ancient pact that a Kittredge family decision was reached that I would receive the first eight years of my education at the tiny country schoolhouse established one hundred and seventy years ago by my forward-looking ancestor, and live during those years with my Kittredge grandparents on their farm in Lost Nation Hollow, spending some of my school vacations with my father in White River Junction, eighty miles to the south.

  Other considerations influenced my father’s decision to send me north to Kingdom County, however. No doubt the first, and most weighty, was that my mother had been dead for nearly a year at the time, and my father had concerns about raising me entirely on his own. As a child and teenager, my mother had waged a protracted and costly battle with tuberculosis, and throughout her brief adult life she continued to have periodic relapses. Several times since marrying my father and having me she had been forced to return to the famous Trudeau Institute at Saranac Lake, where she’d spent much of her youth; and for several months when I was two, she convalesced at a sanatorium in Tucson, Arizona, while my Grandmother Kittredge kept house for my father and took care of me in White River. I don’t remember that my mother ever said much about her illness to me. I’m sure she made every effort not to. But from my grandmother and my two little aunts, Dad’s sisters, I received at a very early age the alarming impression that Mom was much more sickly than she ever revealed. “Your mother is a poor frail soul if one ever existed,” my grandmother told me frequently; and although it was terribly difficult for me to lose her when I was just five years old, I must say that even at that tender age, it came as more of a surprise than an outright shock.

  From those early years, I vividly recall two things about my mother. Unlike most of the Kittredges, including my father and both of my grandparents, she laughed easily and frequently. And she loved to read to me, so that one of my very earliest and strongest childhood recollections is of sitting beside her on a rather battered green living room couch and looking at the pictures in the storybooks we went through together by the dozens, especially the marvelous old tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, whose brilliantly-colored illustrations of the most hideous scenes and creatures imaginable I found deeply fascinating.

  Because of my mother’s huge medical bills, the opportunity to send me to college free someday must have been unusually appealing to my father. And a further factor in his decision to send me up to my grandparents’ farm in Lost Nation was that as headmaster of the White River Academy, my father, wisely enough, did not want me to be stigmatized, possibly for the next twelve years, as the principal’s son. Also I believe that Dad may have had a secret motivation in sending me north—one he did not mention to anyone.

  For many years my grandfather and my father had not, as my little aunts put it, seen eye to eye with each other. Dad had left home at eighteen for the state university and returned only for brief visits. The division had deepened when, to my grandfather’s utter disgust, my father had chosen to become a schoolteacher. But time and distance have a way of softening even the most acrimonious of family feuds; and although I have no real evidence that this was the case, I strongly suspect that I was sent to Kingdom County partly as a peace offering from my father to my grandfather.

  What I know for certain is my father decided that to become acclimated to the Farm, as we called my grandparents’ place, and to my grandparents themselves, who to this day remain two of the most unusual people I have ever met, it would be helpful for me to spend the summer before I entered the first grade with them in Lost Nation. We would try a one-month stint at first and see how it went. Dad would then visit me in Lost Nation, and if all was going well, I would stay on at least for the rest of the summer.

  And this is how, one sunny June afternoon a few days after my sixth birthday, I came to be waving good-bye to my father from the grimy window of a Boston to Montreal passenger car carrying me north toward the wild border country of Kingdom County and, though I had no way to know it, some of the most memorable years of my life.

  What do I remember from that long-ago train trip up the Connecticut River to the little-known territory that might well become my new home for the next eight years or more? Fleeting impressions, mainly. Backward-rushing glimpses of the river, with cows and barns spread out at intervals along it. Small villages with tall white church steeples. A few bridges. For some reason I also recall that the seat material was of a fuzzy, worn felt, which set my teeth on edge when I ran my fingernails over it, and made me shiver. What a solemn, daydreaming, standoffish little fellow I must have been, with an entire seat to myself and my suitcases, which to the annoyance of the conductor I had insisted on carrying aboard with me. In one were my clothes. The other contained my favorite storybooks.

  Of course I was sad to be leaving home, and somewhat apprehensive about my first solo train ride. But there have been few times in my life when I have not been able to achieve a degree of serenity by immersing myself in a book—in part, no doubt, because my books provided me with a certain tangible connection with my mother even after her death. Shortly after leaving White River I dug a copy of Heidi out of my suitcase-library, and soon I was far off in the Swiss Alps, though whether I was absorbed mainly by the book’s gorgeous color plates of the mountains, or my recollections of the tale as read to me by my mother, or the actual words themselves, I don’t know. I do remember bein
g especially interested in Heidi’s old hermit-grandfather, since not long before her death my mother had confided to me that he had always reminded her of my own grandfather, who could be “rather gruff” himself at times. To which my father had bluntly replied, “Gruff! Good God, the man’s a bona fide misanthrope.” I didn’t know what a misanthrope was, bona fide or otherwise. But it sounded forbidding and I must say that I looked forward to meeting my grandfather for the first time with some trepidation.

  As we rolled north on the local passenger train, or Buntliner, as it was called—the entire train consisted of a silver-and-blue engine that looked more like a passenger car than a locomotive, and four silver-and-blue coaches—the hills became steeper and shaggier. The farms began to look shabbier. The spanking white houses and fire-engine red barns gave way to unpainted houses connected by swaybacked sheds and ells to listing barns. In the farm dooryards, lilacs were just coming into blossom though back in White River the lilacs had gone by two weeks ago.

  At one riverside town a fearsome-looking old man with long gray hair and black whiskers and a greasy slouch hat got on my coach and sat down in the seat opposite me. When the Buntliner pulled out of the station, he produced a flat, amber-colored glass flask from his lumber jacket pocket and took two or three swigs of a very vile-looking dark liquid. As he wiped off his mouth with the back of the hand holding the flask, he darted a severe look out from under his drooping hat brim straight at me. I looked away fast. But when I glanced back at him a moment later he was still staring at me. And in a single, bonechilling moment, it became irrefutably clear to me that this bewhiskered apparition was in fact my grandfather.