Held, In Place
My first real work as a young man was teaching school in Ohio. At the time, teaching seemed to be the most bearable alternative to being a student, and I worked at it penitentially, taking care to be as clear and thoroughgoing with my students as I had been distracted and superficial when I was a student myself. For several years my life was almost entirely bounded by scholarship and schoolwork.
I married a woman I fell in love with at Middlebury, and my feelings for her are so continuous with my feelings for the place, it would make no sense to try to untangle them. Our first significant purchase, perhaps not surprisingly, was an old farmhouse and 18 acres of land in Cornwall, Vermont, a sprawl of rolling meadows and farmland directly west of Middlebury. The house and acreage cost $14,500, and we got a mortgage to finance most of that sum. The acquisition was completely irrational and an unbroken joy. The weathered clapboard house was 200 years old, creaky and jerrybuilt, but more than habitable. Only a feeble trickle of water came from the faucets, and the principal water supply was from a rain cistern in the cellar. The front of the property fell away to a panorama of Green Mountains. White birches hissed and rattled outside the windows to our bedroom. Languid cows from the dairy farms on either side of us would amble over broken fences and peer at us through our kitchen window.
Owning that house was another waking dream. Because of my teaching job, we could only live in it during the summers, and in the winters, we rented it to young faculty at the College. We found it impossible to lock up the house and make it secure, but people tended to come and go peacefully, even though we did not always know who they were. We were so thrilled to own it that we invited our Ohio friends to visit. The first summer we were there, we had 88 houseguests in 66 days.
Strangely, as much as I loved the Cornwall house, I felt that I did not have a right to it, that somehow it would be taken away. As it happened, no one took it away, but we sold it a few years later when we had children and needed a home of our own in Ohio. That necessity mitigated what might otherwise have been grief, but I sensed I would hear the Call again.
In the early 1980s, I published a novel and in consequence was invited to be a teaching fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. I joyfully accepted and for the next 10 years taught fiction and nonfiction writing there. I was long familiar with the rambling yellow frame buildings that compose the Bread Loaf campus. Dozens of writers from Robert Frost forward have tried to convey the crisp, elevated atmosphere of the place that is at once pastoral and alpine. A writer friend, Ron Powers, has called the intensely radiant afternoon light of Bread Loaf “prior light.”
During one of my last summer stints at the Writers’ Conference, the Call registered with a new urgency. I was sitting in the Bread Loaf Little Theatre listening to a Middlebury classmate and friend, Gary Margolis ’67, read from a collection of his poems and found myself overcome with a feeling I couldn’t quite name. I realized that Gary’s poems were a touching extension of every voice that had informed and changed me over the course of my years at Bread Loaf. I remember looking into the exposed beams overhead and thinking of how many transforming moments I had experienced in that room and that it was just one remote room in the complex of Middlebury College, where I had once come of age and where I had met the friends who have sustained me, where I met my wife, where I had been challenged to contend with the ideas and possibilities that have shaped my life’s work. And I remember thinking: I have been held in this place.
Because I am the one held and not the holder, I cannot bring this reflection to a tidy and masterful closure. There has been the Call, and most recently it has called me back here to live. Retired for over a year now, I am a house-holding citizen of Ripton, Vermont, a little hamlet on the mountain road from Middlebury up to Hancock. We have once again found a very old house, and it is wonderfully habitable. The water in this one too only trickles from the faucets, but behind the house a rushing stream (a roaring river after heavy rain) reminds us that we have all the water in the world.
There have been humbling surprises. Great winds and early snows have overwhelmed trees and power lines, and we have come to know, and rather to like, the uncertain feeling of a dark house and no telephone. In the darkest spell of such nights, there is just the invisible whoosh of the river over rock. But of course day breaks, and an unseasonable warmth returns, and—lo!—thousands of deep red lady beetles darken our windows, flit along the ceilings, burrow into folds of the curtains. I ask a neighbor about this, and he says, “they know it’s about to get cold.”
I suppose they do know, and now we know. I suspect we have a lot to learn, but of one thing I am certain. I am held here for life. I have been called to this place, and the happiness passes all understanding.
Richard Hawley has written 18 books of fiction and nonfiction and has contributed stories and essays to a number of publications, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, Orion, and Commonweal.
