Ben Hewitt's Blog

In the morning the temperature is a single degree above zero. Snow is falling, but the flakes are small, as if stunted by the cold. The cats lie immobilized by the wood stove, their long, heat-hungry bodies splayed across the hearth. I drive up the mountain at the break of day, the road striated at regular intervals by shallow drifts of windblown snow that make barely audible whumping noises as I pass through them. There are few houses along this stretch, and I do not see any other travelers, and their absence, combined with the cold and the wind and the uncertain light of this in-between hour allow me to imagine that I am careening into a desolate land, where safe passage is hardly guaranteed. And perhaps, in a way, I am.

At the road’s crest, I bind myself to my skis and angle toward the forest, where the wind is most forgiving. Even still, I am compelled to stop at regular intervals to swing my arms in exaggerated half circles, forcing hot blood into the tips of my numbing fingers. I know my body well enough to know that I’ll need to do this four or five or maybe six times before I’ve crossed the unprotected expanse of Dead Moose Pond and the trail pitches upward and my heart picks up its pace.

If I hurry, I’ll have just enough time to make the top of the mountain, which is the namesake of the small town situated along its western flank, the very one I live in. Yet there is no marked trail to its summit, and no real way to determine exactly when you’ve arrived there, unless you know to look for the little jar that hangs from the little beech tree that someone – I don’t know who, I don’t know when – decided would be the place. There are scraps of paper in the jar, and a dull pencil, and sometimes I sign my name and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes, I open the jar and just leaf through the paper scraps, curious to see who else knows this place or has found it by happenstance. There are some, though not very many at all, and I guess that’s ok with me.

By the time I return to the car, the temperature has risen to 3, and even along the open corridor of the mountain road, the wind has quieted. It’s still snowing, and if anything, the flakes seem even smaller. So small it’s hard to even be certain they exist.

In the evening after dinner I walk up Silver Road, under a moon so bright it cast shadows at my feet. It’s unseasonably warm, and when the breeze blows, there’s the sound of rain pattering. Yet the sky is cloudless, and I puzzle over this for a moment until I realize that I’m hearing the small, dry rattle of falling leaves landing atop those that have fallen before. It’s hard to believe it’s almost November. It’s hard to believe winter will ever come at all.

Dean* passes me in his big, white truck, trailing – as he always does – the unmistakable odor of marijuana smoke. Dean’s a logger, and he’s built like one, short and stout and strong, and he tells me his doctor says he’s in real good shape for a man his age, which if I had to guess, is probably a year or two on either side of 60. He used to have a dog that looked just like him (or maybe he looked just like his dog, it’s hard to say, really), but that dog got hit by a car and died and now he has another one that doesn’t look much like him at all, though I suppose it could still happen. Sometimes these things take a little time.

I turn back where the road dead ends. When it’s daylight, I can see all the way to Caspian Lake from here, where the summer people host late afternoon cocktail parties with fancy cheeses and imported olives arrayed across beautiful lacquered cutting boards. Or at least, that’s what I imagine they do. Up here, the landscape is more open, the trees are set far back from the road, and I can no longer hear the falling leaves. A dog barks; another answers. Now the moon is behind me, and my own shadow lies long across the road. It’s just the vaguest likeness, though I’ll be damned if I don’t recognize the particular slant of my shoulders, the way they always seem bent a little forward, as if they’re in some sort of hurry to see what happens next.

*Some names in this story have been changed

Really digging this song by Ritch Henderson. Maybe you’ll like it, too.

A year to the day since the great flood of ’23, and the rain sweeps in again, hammering down for hours in the night, and when my phone rings at 4:00 a.m., rousing me from a dream in which I’m riding in the bed of a pickup piloted by an unknown woman who steers with a single, heavily bejeweled hand, I know it has to be bad.

It is bad: The bridge above the Rich’s is gone, the bridge at the bottom of the Mountain Road is gone, the Mountain Road from just past the Giles’ old place and upward is gone, Silver Road is reduced to a single lane, the lower section of Gonyaw is unpassable. And those are just the worst parts.

I drive the dangerous, diminished roads of my town in the dark, a pile of Road Closed signs in the back of my car, windshield wipers slapping, window open to the thick air, rain slanting through the opening onto my arm, into my lap, and I don’t even try to stop it. There seems no point to it. I’m already wet. The damage is already done. At 5, I find Kyle at the end of Norway Road and we travel the remaining roads together, stopping every so often to chat with whomever we meet coming the other way, all men, all in trucks, all wearing baseball caps, all greeting us with a smile and a rueful shake of the head, because while there’s nothing funny about any of it, there is a certain dark comedy at play. I mean, seriously, a year to the day of the previous flood, our little town still hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from that storm, with the long-promised FEMA relief still dangling like a carrot at the end of the longest damn stick you’ve ever seen? Are you fucking kidding me?

Indeed, you are not.

And I don’t know what gets me thinking about this, maybe it’s just the vulnerability of the moment, the sense of being at the mercy of forces beyond my control – natural forces, bureaucratic forces, forces I cannot name and perhaps are not even nameable in any language I know – but all I can think about is the moment exactly one week prior when I’d left Rye standing in the middle of the vast Montanan valley where he now lives, on the vast Montanan ranch where he now works, after a too-short visit that had seemed shorter still, and for the entire three-hour drive to the airport where I’d soon fly 2500 miles in a direction pointing away from my son, I’d felt as if I might literally not survive. As if my love for him could break me into pieces too small, too numerous, too complicated and messy to ever be put back together into anything resembling their original whole.

Even though I thought this might actually come to pass – indeed, I was nearly convinced of it – and even though many times I thought to turn back, I also knew that I wouldn’t, that his life and mine have diverged in the ways they were always meant to. Which is not to say that we are not still connected, or that our lives won’t intersect again, because surely they will. But it is to acknowledge that he himself has become like the weather: A force beyond my control.

So instead of turning back, I kept driving under that ceaseless sky, putting mile after mile after mile between us. Waiting to see if maybe I’d survive.

In the morning I ride up and over the mountain just as the mist from the previous night’s rain is beginning to burn off under a rising sun. I pedal up and over the mountain at least one morning each week; it’s one of my three preferred morning routes, and generally the one I choose when time is tightest because I like how it compresses two mountain sides worth of climbing and descending into less than an hour. And I like how the road twists its way through the forest, which is predominantly hardwood – maples, mostly, but also the occasional birch and beech, with an ash or two thrown in for good measure – and how each of those curves has its own particular character, the sharp ones, the shallow ones, especially the ones that force me to the height of the road’s crown on the descent so that my speed doesn’t carry me into the ditch. I’ve seen what happens to people who end up in that ditch. It’s not pretty.

I love riding bicycles. I love riding anything with two wheels, really, and I have for as long as I can remember. I currently own four bicycles and two motorcycles, which is three bicycles and two motorcycles more than I need, especially given that it’s only one bicycle I ride 95% of the time, anyhow, and most of my motorcycle time involves me cruising back and forth along the dirt roads of my town, not really going anywhere. Then again, not really looking to go anywhere, either.

I bought that one bicycle off Craigslist a bunch of years back; Rye and I picked it up on our way to a Drive-By-Trucker’s show in Burlington. It’s a nice bike but it’s old and was missing a few parts, so I got it cheap and I suspect part of the reason I like it so much is that I feel a bit subversive when I ride it. Which I think is partly because I got it cheap, but also because that’s just the way bicycles make me feel. Like I’m getting away with something.

One of my favorite things about riding my bike are the random social interactions it confers. Not so long ago I was humping up the hill to Flagg Pond, and suddenly there was Kyle’s father, Ricky, emerging from the woods at the side of the road, carrying his chainsaw, not yet 7 in the morning and probably already a solid 90 minutes into his working day. So I stopped and we chatted about basically nothing, and then I rode on, and I hadn’t gone a quarter mile when suddenly there was Michael, pushing an empty baby stroller down the hill, preceded by his two huge Newfoundland dogs. So I stopped and we chatted about basically nothing – not even the fact that he was pushing an empty baby stroller, which took some restraint on my part, let me tell you – and I rode on, as happy as if I’d just had tea with the queen. Happier, probably. And thinking about how much can be said when you chat about basically nothing with someone who loves a place as much as you do. That’s the key, I think: The love for a particular place, because that’s what you’re actually talking about when you’re talking about basically nothing. It’s the subtext for everything, the point of connection that can endure any difference. Or any difference I’ve come across, anyway.

I don’t have any fancy bike clothing with the exception of a pair of shoes that attach to my pedals. Usually, I ride in an old pair of jeans, because usually I ride in the morning when it’s still cool. I don’t have anything against fancy bike clothes, I just don’t own any, and I’m probably not going to buy any anytime soon. Sometimes I wear a helmet, and sometimes I don’t, and I don’t have any particular method for deciding when to wear one and when to go without. It’s just a mood thing.

This morning when I got back from my ride the cats were waiting for me, each perched atop one of the big stone steps that leads to my front door, basking in the early sun. I leaned my bike against a tree and walked up the steps past the cats, who looked to me with lidded eyes and then turned straight back to the matter at hand.

A year since my last post, and again I find myself driving the tractor to Smith’s for diesel, though this time it’s not as warm, and I haven’t worn quite enough clothing but I also haven’t realized this until the calculation of whether to turn back and grab a jacket or just keep thrusting forward in a shiver tilts toward thrust and shiver. So that’s what I do, and at Smith’s I fill the tank fast as the pump will let me, and then turn back, no ice cream this time, none of that Ah, Spring, isn’t it glorious? bullshit, just a bone deep chill I know will take me at least 20 minutes to shake.

And then just before Johanna’s place a dog rushes into the road to greet me, and for a moment my heart races, I think he’s not going to turn in time, that I’m going to be knocking on someone’s door with sad and terrible news, but he does turn, and then I lose sight of him. I roll on, slower now, looking around for the dog but I can’t find him anywhere until I glance to my right and I see the shadows cast by the late day sun: Me, high on the tractor, and just behind, the dog, loping along, maybe five paces back. I watch our shadows for maybe the next 30 seconds, it’s like we’re painted on the land, and yet the land keeps moving beneath us, and for a few moments I lose all sense of my place in the world beyond the shadow puppets of tractor, self, dog. Then the dog turns back, having chased me off his territory, and that breaks the spell and now I’m just cold again. And eager for home.

The reason I haven’t written here in so long is that last June, my marriage came apart and I haven’t really wanted to talk about it. Or known how. And still don’t really want to. And still don’t really know how. It’s humbling to me, both the coming apart, and the lack of knowing, so I practice just sitting with it. Just being humbled.

Some days I’m good, somedays I’m not so good, but mostly, I’m ok. So much is different, and so much is the same. I live in the same town, on the same road, on a piece of land that was once part of the original whole. My sons are out west, lapping up big space and big skies and possibility like hungry cats. In the evenings, I work on clearing a little patch of forest to plant an orchard, and even though it still looks so rough – the raw, sap-oozing stumps, the newly revealed ground, the jumbled branches – in my mind’s eye I can already see it coming to life, taking a shape I can’t quite bring into focus, but which I allow myself to believe will be even more beautiful than I can possibly imagine.

I think I’m not really up for comments on this post, so I’ve turned them off for now. Thank you all for reading, it means so much.

It’s warm enough to drive the tractor three miles to Smith’s to fill it with diesel while wearing only a tee shirt (well: pants, too, for sure I’m wearing pants), and so that’s what I do, my spindly, winter-pale arms soaking up the late afternoon sun as I rumble down the mountain road in high gear, then swerve right over the bridge onto Norway, where I see another tractor coming toward me beneath the canopy of budding maples. The driver of the approaching tractor is also wearing only a tee shirt (and pants, too, presumably, though it’s hard to tell for sure from my vantage point); he waves and smiles as we pass, and so do I, and I imagine that he’s thinking the exact same thing I am: Ah, spring. The season of tractors passing on a road just wide enough to do so without complications. The season of sunburn and a frantic last dash to finish cutting firewood for the winter to come. The season of turned-over earth, of the sweet dank scent of last fall’s decomposing foliage, of lying in bed at first light listening to the distant rush of the mountain stream, still swollen in its banks from the very last of the snowmelt and last week’s rain.

Down at Smith’s, I fill the tractor and buy an ice cream (two fat scoops, hell yeah) and head back up the road, licking at my cone, shifting gears, smelling all the smells: the drips of diesel fast evaporating from the tractor’s hood, the rich exhaust, the dirt of the road, the sweet ice cream, even the sweat dried on my skin. And then, back on Norway, my cone now down to the nub ends in my sticky fingers, here comes the other tractor again! It’s the same one, same guy, same wave, though now the smile’s more of a chuckle, both of us just a bit delighted at the little ways the world compensates.

And really, isn’t that the best way to be?

On Friday comes the biggest storm of the season thus far, the snow beginning in the evening hours and continuing unabated throughout the night. In the morning there’s a solid 10 inches on the ground and snow still falls. Historically speaking, there’s nothing unusual about a storm like this in early March, but this winter has been so consistently warm and weak that it somehow feels like a breach of contract, the promise of an easy glide into spring rudely revoked.

It takes me nearly three hours to clear our drive, plus the two others I tend. By the time I’m done, the sky has stopped spitting and is breaking into intricate patterns. I park the tractor, haul water to the cows, then stand for a moment under that fracturing sky, watching it separate into more shades of grey than I would have thought possible. So many colors within the one; so many different ways of seeing something I thought I knew exactly how to see.

Later, after the storm is long passed and all those shades of grey have faded from the sky, I ski into the woods to a spot where the yellow birch grow so big they don’t even look like yellow birch anymore, the bark turned brown and roughened by age, the trunks thick and branches twisted in improbable ways. I think the birches are like very old people: Hard to fathom but also strangely captivating, as if they’ve done something miraculous other than simply endure. As all of us must. As most of us do.

When I tire of breaking trail through the new snow, I turn back, now gliding easy in my own tracks, back past the yellow/brown birches and through a long sweep of young-ish maples. Dark coming on, but later than I’ve grown accustomed to, almost six o’clock and still plenty of light to see by.

Spring is close at hand. I can smell it on the air.

Halfway through a half-assed winter, and the sun makes a glorious return, rising high and almost-hot, and suddenly it feels like the middle of March when it’s barely the second week in February. When we’ve barely had any winter at all. Standing in line to buy a pound of coffee and a tub of yogurt, I overhear someone talking about their climate grief, and then at the lumberyard I hear someone talking about how they started tapping two weeks earlier than usual and damned if they didn’t wish they’d made it three. The narrow gravel road we live on transitions between ice and mud and ice again, and Kyle tells me we’re going to need to increase the town’s budget for material; he’s been waging an ongoing war against the ruts and potholes opened by the constant freeze/thaw/freeze cycle and the big piles down at the town garage are disappearing fast. We’ve had two mud seasons already this winter, and it seem we might be on the cusp of a third. I vacillate between bemoaning the weather and wielding my own peculiar brand of stoic philosophy, which basically involves making up pithy affirmation sayings and then sharing them as broadly (and frequently) as possible, a past time which has not entirely endeared me to my family . “Comfort is where growth goes to die” is my favorite so far, though I acknowledge it’s not the most obvious response to a weak winter. But still: Comfort is where growth goes to die.

You gotta admit, it’s pretty damn good.

Music: Really digging this tune by Pony Bradshaw

Words: Really loved this book by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Winter passes as winter does, in fits and starts of snow and cold, in the pages of one book after another, the cat dozing on my chest while I read in the evenings before bed, in early morning forays into the high-elevation hardwoods at the top of the mountain road. There I watch the sun rise through the leafless crowns of the maples and yellow birch and eventually over the snowed boughs of the spruce and fir, glad for the silence and the solitude and sometimes wondering how different my circumstances might be if it weren’t for snow and skis and cold and this big swath of land where I soon find myself beyond the range of human sound. Or of any human sign at all. It’s good to wonder these things, I think, at least from time-to-time, just as perhaps it’s good to wonder how to be of use in a world that spirals further and further out-of-control with every passing day. Though it’s true the answers don’t come easy; it’s true I envy those who have any sort of answer at all. Or who seem not to wonder in the first place.

In the evening, I read again. The cat dozes, and I doze with him, drifting in-and-out of my family’s murmured conversation, stars visible in the sky through the window above my head. In the morning, the boy and I rise before dawn; he leaves for work and I sit by the fire until I’ve sat by the fire long enough and then I head back to the woods where it’s always clear I know nothing more than the last time I came here, or the time before that. But also where knowing doesn’t seem to offer any kind of answer at all.

The big storm hits with pounding rain and swirling winds, but the power stays on and the roof doesn’t leak, and in the night, toward the end of the maelstrom, the rain turns to an abundant snowfall – perhaps 5″ in total – so that by the next morning, the landscape is returned to its former winter glory. It is suddenly cold again, and at first light I ski to Dead Moose Pond, which is arguably one of my three favorite places on earth that I can think of at the moment. The early light is eerie and spectral, the conifer-green wedge of the surrounding forest like the filling of a sandwich between the grey bread of sky and ground. Despite the cold – it’s 5, maybe 6 degrees above 0 – the pond ice is rain-rotten beneath the new snow, and within a few strides I know I won’t be crossing, so I turn back and retrace my tracks to the road, then push north toward the summit of Wheelock Mountain, which is also arguably one of my three favorite places on earth that I can think of at the moment. And so it is that an hour later I find myself at it’s little-heralded-and-even-less-visited peak, which isn’t really a peak so much as a wooded plateau where the boys and I used to joke that every broken and bent over tree was evidence of a resident Sasquatch marking her territory. It’s been a some years since one of the boys has ventured up here with me; I try to remember the last time, the particulars of it, but I can’t, all I can recall are the Sasquatch jokes, all I know is that it happened, and that I surely failed to appreciate the possibility that it wouldn’t happen again. Or at least not for a very long time. But that is the way of it, I suppose, the appreciation so often coming too late for memory to salvage the specifics.

In the evening I fall asleep early, but not before I’ve opened the window above my head just an inch or two so that when I awake in the night I can feel the air drift across my face, just for a moment or two, like the tiniest, gentlest waves of the clearest, coldest pond you’ve ever jumped in.

Another year. I’m grateful to you all for reading and commenting. Happy New Year.

Also, here’s a nice one from Zach to close out 2022.