CRAFTING NATIVENESS

By Jeff Bickart

I know some native Vermonters, all residents here for quite some time, all with a deep understanding of this place, all able to make their lives here perfectly, without excess and without waste, from the materials and resources they find around them, using only the tools given to them by birth. You know them too: sugar maples, black spruces, and Green Mountain maidenhair ferns; moose, deer, and fisher; the common whitetail dragonfly and the eastern tiger swallowtail; boreal chickadees, ravens, and Bicknell's thrushes; spring peepers and painted turtles. And a few hundred others. There are even more I haven't met yet. All these native Vermonters have likely been here for tens of thousands of generations, notwithstanding some long stays in the south when their home ground was buried in thick ice or still warming up after a few millennia of arctic weather. I don't know any Vermont people who are native like this.

I don't expect us, of course, to live up to the same high standards set by saw-whet owls and yellow birches. For us, being native to a place is a much more difficult task. It is, in fact, a becoming, a development of nativeness over generations—but not just generations of simply being born in a place. That may be only accident or happenstance. For people, complete nativeness is earned: being, or becoming, a native Vermonter must be a conscious act. And it must be renewed, revitalized, and strengthened with every generation.

There can be no doubt that knowledge of and personal connection to the human history of a place is part of being native. Growing up on the farm that has been in one's family for decades, a century, or more, could be nothing but deeply meaningful. Newcomers like me will never have that blood connection. We are not going to know, for example, what it means to get up at 3:30 every morning, in every sort of weather, to go out to milk in the same barn that one's grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather went out to; we will not ourselves know what it means to look out over fields once hayed with scythes by the sweat of one's own family, and still kept productive by ferociously hard work. We can only hope that our children will choose to come back and settle here after the wanderings and explorings of young adulthood, and carry on with making a family history.

Two miles down the road from our place, Robert Linck has come back to Craftsbury after college in New York and a bachelor's degree in anthropology. His mother's family has been here since the 1830s. During summers in college and after graduating, Robert worked for Pete Johnson, a local organic vegetable grower. Now he's moved an old trailer onto the family land, has planted 500 black currant bushes, and has additional plans. His sister has also moved back, with a passion for sheep and organic dairying, after college and a stint teaching high school in Massachusetts.
Family history and continuity are important, but are only one part of being native. I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in Syracuse, New York. I've lived in Maine and Vermont all but two of the past eighteen years, since 1998 in Craftsbury. The biomes of the northern deciduous forest and the boreal forest are where my heart is, and where I have chosen to make my home. In a slim volume titled The Rediscovery of North America, author Barry Lopez writes of the Spanish word querencia, “a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one's strength of character is drawn . . . a place in which we know exactly who we are . . . from which we speak our deepest beliefs.” The northern forest, and the farm country that has been made from some of that forest, are my querencia. To here I always come back, here I gather strength, to this land I have pledged my life and my fidelity.

Americans have almost always been happy to move on to the next chance, the beckoning frontier, the unsettled country. We are mobile. And our willingness to imagine, to head down a fresh trail, to throw everything we've got into something new, to take risks, has shaped us deeply. But we have often left wreckage behind—worn-out farms, cutover forests, cities with severe problems. Some people, however, have always stayed behind, for whatever reasons, in difficult places, on difficult land. Some have used these places poorly, but also some well, with great care, with love, with slowly growing knowledge and understanding.

We need an expanded nativeness, a flourishing of people committed to place in the deepest possible ways. Indeed, I believe that our survival depends on this: we can no longer keep moving on. We must decide, at last, to settle, to become as much at home as the black-capped chickadee and the red squirrel; to make the best of what is at hand. The first standard of our success must be the health of the land. No true native, by his actions, leaves the land in worse condition at the end of his life than at the beginning, for all lives, whether in the city or in the country, ultimately derive their good health from the good health of the land. (And no true native, loving deeply her own home, willingly or happily makes choices that harm the homes of others.) We will not achieve this in one generation, or several; it is a project of centuries, but we must get started.

Vermont, with relatively few people, with small cities and much of the population living in rural areas, with a strong attachment to small-scale agriculture, with abundant resources for self-reliance, is a good place to begin to craft this new nativeness. It will be difficult, because people everywhere have become very nearly locked into an economic system that (thanks to inexpensive petroleum) supplies local needs with stuff brought in from around the globe. But there are numerous examples around this state of Vermonters figuring out how to do things differently. Vermonters getting local fresh vegetables onto the tables of our citizens. Vermonters learning how to milk sheep and make exquisite cheeses. Vermonters turning wood from our forests, and wool from our pastures, and wind from our ridgelines into what we need to thrive. It is continuously inspiring and energizing. What I see in Vermont is a drive everywhere toward a renewed, invigorated nativeness that respects and draws on the good knowledge, traditions, and connectedness of the people whose family names are on the headstones, combining that with the energies of those who are just now establishing homes here.

My wife and I bought our place, 87 acres on the Wild Branch River, in 1999, just a few days after our first child was born in Burlington. Slowly we are coming to know it. We have planted more than 300 fruit trees, bushes, vines, and canes, learning the nature of our soil by digging holes for them each spring. We ate our first own apples last year. More of them are flowering this spring. We expect the grapes to bear this summer. The currants, gooseberries, blueberries, and raspberries are fruitful. We are learning which varieties do well here, which don't. A great help in our work, through his books, has been Lewis Hill of Greensboro. His experiences over decades of fruit growing and propagating in the cold Northeast Kingdom inform what we do in trying to establish our own orchard.

Our vegetable gardens are well established and fertile, enriched by the manure given back to us by the neighboring dairy farmer who hays our fields. We save our vegetable seeds for the next season, and replant our garlic and potatoes from year to year. The asparagus and rhubarb are flourishing. We cut some of our own firewood. The rest we buy from our neighbor, Andy Moffat.
His family has lived on this road since the 1930s. There are now four houses, three for family and one with renters. The business is Christmas trees, with a side of firewood and sometimes of syrup. Working to unload several cords of wood at our woodshed from Andy's truck, we've learned the unrecorded history of our area. When the road was paved. The house on the corner of Denton Hill Road that used to be the one-room schoolhouse that Andy went to. What the river looked like before the floods (not long before we arrived) that transformed it. Andy has filled out our scanty knowledge of our own place. The first barn burned when he was a child, and he was at the fire. I'd figured out that there was a substantial sugarbush on our land at least sixty years ago, but he was able to tell us what happened to it.

Food is always on people's minds, and in Vermont the activity aimed at growing our own seems almost hyperactive. The event calendars sent out by the UVM Center for Sustainable Agriculture and NOFA-Vermont are stuffed: grazing seminars, dairy goat nutrition, cheesemaking, on-farm composting, soil ecology, northern Vermont slaughterhouse feasibility, direct marketing of farm-raised meats, organic vegetable seed production, and on and on.
In Westfield, Butterworks Farm, owned by the Lazor family, produces from its dairy herd its incomparable yogurt, sold around the state, as well as grains, dry beans, sunflower oil, and other products, in a nearly closed system with almost no purchased inputs, while building the health of the soil; they, and many other farmers looking for new possibilities, are showing that we can supply more of our own food than we have thought we could.

To the degree that we depend on resources or finished products brought in from outside our region, we are not native. Can one truly be a native Vermonter (Coloradan, Michigander, North Dakotan) if most everything one needs—food, clothing, building materials, tools, energy and fuels, and so on—comes in from somewhere else? If being native to a place means anything, it must include making one's life from the resources of that place—and doing so in a way that does not degrade that place, that does not make it impossible for our children and grandchildren also to make native lives. But we have moved so far from local and regional self-reliance that this is a very difficult business.
For the past sixteen months, as part of developing a new course for Sterling College, where I teach, I've been slowly making clothes. Garments straight from the soil of Vermont, from this ground that I love—from pastures, forests, roadsides, overgrown fields. I have washed, carded, spun, knitted, woven, and felted wool from Craftsbury sheep. I'm working with local llama fiber, alpaca, and mohair. I've gathered milkweed, dogbane, and nettle to experiment with the beautiful and strong fibers found in the stalks of those plants, and have grown flax. I have tanned the hides of deer and stillborn calves to make buckskin clothing and leather for shoes. We could do much more here to supply one of the most basic human needs—clothing—from local resources. This has become very nearly a thing of the past: our clothes are made of cotton, wool, silk, leather, nylon, polyester, acrylic, whatever, grown/raised/extracted, and processed and assembled we know not where or by whom, with unaccountable environmental and social costs. Could we change this just a little bit? Could Vermonters produce locally more of what they wear? Would it make some sense? At one time New England mills turned out lots of clothing and employed thousands of people. Now those mills are mostly silent, those people moved on to some other work, many of them somewhere else. Why? Can we not do for ourselves? What would it take? Would there be rewards that we must now re-imagine?

In summer 2004, several visionary entrepreneurs opened the doors of Vermont Premium Fiber Company in an old mill building in Johnson. With custom-made, small-scale, but state-of-the-art equipment, they offer complete processing for the small farmer and the fiber artisan. They can turn the fleeces of sheep, goats, alpacas, and llamas into roving, batts, yarn, or felt, working with amounts as little as a couple of pounds or as much as hundreds. They have been flooded with business, and they are showing that we don't have to send all this work to China or India or Vietnam. We can do it here.

My friend Jody Stoddard grew up in Pennsylvania, came to Craftsbury for college, and married into one of the town's old dairy-farming families. Jody has a small cottage industry handspinning wool into yarn for sale, and she knits exquisite lace shawls. She's experimented quite a bit with dyeing her yarn naturally from wild and garden plants. And other artisans I know, turning bowls, weaving black-ash baskets, making snowshoes, carving beautiful doors, are all making connections to this land, crafting nativeness.

A new nativeness must also take delight in and continually expand our understanding of the wild creatures with which we share this place. The citizenry of the woods and the fields; the lakes, ponds, and rivers; the marshes and swamps and bogs; the alpine summits. Being able to recognize the field marks and songs of many of Vermont's two to three hundred species of birds, for example, enriches every walk and enriches life, brings more meaning and sense to what one sees and hears every day. It brings more beauty into one's life, blurriness resolving into individual creatures whose ways of living one can gradually come to know, to admire, and to cherish.

After decades of studying birds and plants, I have undertaken to become more acquainted with insects. In the past few years, outstanding guides have been published for a few groups. More than 130 kinds of dragonflies and damselflies here? Who would have guessed! They've flown back and forth past me for years and I've never taken a close look. And the butterflies! How easy it is to overlook all but the most obvious, the morning cloaks, the swallowtails, the monarchs, the white admirals. But down there in the grasses and weeds are the dozens of kinds of skippers, doing whatever it is skippers do, I don't know, but I want to find out. What a richness there is, how endless the pleasure of discovery, and how satisfying to come to understand better who else lives here.

We must craft our native hearts and native minds. Hearts and minds that can learn how to carefully and properly shape to our use the land and resources of Vermont, that find deep pleasure in making here a lasting human culture that also embraces the lives of the non-human, and that understands, too, when wildness ought to be left alone. And we must allow ourselves in turn to be changed by this place, as all native creatures are changed and shaped by their places, as over generations they adapt and become embodiments of their places. We must, literally, incorporate lush fields, fertile river bottomlands, windy lakeshores, tumbling rocky streams, and green mountains. Otherwise, in the end, we are all just visitors.