The Blood Mountain Blues, pt. 1
Escaping the world in Washington, Vermont
[this is part 1 of 2 about my time living on a farm in Vermont]
In October of 2022 I was putting up some wild numbers across America. I left Los Angeles on the night of the 4th and by dawn the next day was testing positive for Covid in a Las Vegas parking lot. The next seventy-two hours were a whirlwind of fast food, state borders, and foggy-brained madness. I passed through Albuquerque at 5:30am and saw a bunch of signs talking about balloons, not knowing it was their International Balloon Fiesta. I left in a pouring rain and drove 311 miles— well above my tank’s supposed capacity— to the next available Natural Gas fueling station in Amarillo. I fell in love with Oklahoma but can’t for the life of me remember where how or why— my photos from that week are blurry captures of road-side oddities and screen-shotted routes from Apple Maps. I remember hitting the forests of Arkansas after two days of desert and feeling suddenly claustrophobic. The exits extended to ten, then twenty miles apart, and in the pitch darkness I felt a tangible, covid-ridden fear. I slept in the back of my car in a ghost town, waking up every half-hour to google “murder news 2022 alma arkansas.” Eventually I made it to the tip of Blood Mountain, in an unincorporated town just outside of Washington, Vermont. I was there to look after some horses.
Thems the Blood Mountain Breaks
I found ol’ Glenn Mack and his dear Katharina on Workaway, a site where you offer labor in exchange for housing and food. We spoke very little leading up to my stay, and their profile offered nearly no information on what I’d be doing or where I’d be staying. The only thing I knew, and the only thing I needed to know, was that there’d be isolation. After three years of hectic, unexamined living in California I needed some altitude, some cool air, and a radius of about five hundred feet between me and any other living soul. I pulled up Dow Road, which I was told would be “pretty rough” but which was actually “borderline undriveable.” My thoughts filled with “visions of wooden demons and appendage-lacking murderers,” according to my journal from that evening, and I eventually passed the closest building to the main house, their barn, several hundred yards down the slope from Glenn’s. I entered their driveway and was immediately jumped by two ecstatic dogs with no concept of the pent-up anxiety someone has after driving twenty minutes uphill on a Class IV road.
After pulling two thawed steaks from the back of my car— much to the dogs’ excitement— I walked up the winding path to the front door where I could see Glenn, a lanky septuagenarian, and Katharina through the window. I stepped in and carried on a brief conversation about coffee and literature before Glenn walked me up yet another clumsy stone walkway through total darkness as the two of us spoke of grass which never loses its green and blueberry bushes pillaged by crows. He opened the door to the cabin, handed me a key, and as he walked away told me to meet him down at the house at 6am. Inside the cabin was a loft with a mattress and a sunken “kitchen” with a hot plate and sink. Beside that was the wood stove which would do my heating.
I remember thinking that it was the sort of cabin one dreamt about. And quickly after that, feeling some jaded disappointment in not experiencing the proper awe and appreciation one ought to have in a moment like this. My journal reads that my pile of shit to figure out continues to grow, faster than the pile of shit I’ve figured out.
I clearly had some work to do.
A day with Glenn would go something like this: at the crack of dawn I’d throw on some long johns and walk down to the main house, where I’d start a pot of boiling water, throw two english muffins in the toaster, and remove the bacon-only cast-iron from the oven to heat up the grease. Glenn would come in from feeding the dogs just in time to remove the soft-boiled eggs from the water, set the table, and plate our gourmet breakfast. There was never a single alteration to this meal. By week two I was subtly implanting new breakfast-ideas into Glenn’s mind— “you ever have a really good everything bagel? How about sausage patties? You like sausage patties? Let’s say tomorrow you and I hit the grocery store and buy us some sausage patties.” No luck. It seems as if the day the toaster was invented, ol’ Glenn Mack took one look and locked in his order til his dying day. “You ever think about switching it up, there, Glenn?” I once asked him. “Oh, sure. Sometimes I’ll hard-boil the egg.”
I’d step down the road to the pasture where Greta (Garbo) and Hedy (Lamar) were dancing anxiously in their stables. Glenn showed me where to get the food, how to bundle it, and how to get the horses from the barn and into the pasture down the road. As he did this, he managed to work in stories about filming a movie on his farm ten years ago, about the poker scene in 1970s San Francisco, about where he got the half-lingers and their namesakes and their namesake’s namesakes and about Katharina and every other woman Glenn ever slept with. This would’ve been the first moment where I noticed the extent of Glenn’s… tendency.
If I were to say that he talked a lot, it would be dishonest. It would be like saying that the sun is far away, or that heroin feels good. Glenn talked like an addict. Glenn talked like he’d spent the last three decades stranded on an island. He talked in such an unwavering and consistent way that one could put an empty balloon in front of Glenn’s face and watch it fill up with words before popping itself out of suicide. I had come up here to sit with some inner monologue which I felt pathologically out of tune with, and was confronted by another monologue. One which showed no signs of slowing down to breathe.
After feeding Greta and Hedy I’d do one of several tasks, including but not limited to: heading to the forests behind Glenn’s house to take down a few trees and chop them into firewood; clearing a massive and overgrown pasture for the horses; assisting Glenn and his sidekick Dennis on a new house being built on Dow; or rearranging the workspace in his garage to accommodate this year’s firewood. Beyond this, any wood I wanted to keep me warm throughout the sub-freezing nights would have to be chopped and carried up to the cabin on my own. At some point Katharina would call us in for lunch, then we’d return to work until she called us back for dinner. By the end of each day I was on the verge of collapse, and ol’ first-gear Glenn would be chattering away on his opinions about Ukraine or reflections on the Carter presidency. Without any service, and only candle-light to read by, I’d get through a minimum of a hundred pages each night. My first book was Woolf’s To The Lighthouse:
Both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years the gazer, and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.
The next morning I’d awake well before sunrise, the cabin frigid and wood-less, and start jogging in place until I could go and start breakfast. The stars would rotate over the night sky until the sun would rise over Mt. Washington, eighty miles west, where I’d hike as a child. I had six more weeks to go.
The Long Dark Walk To Being Okay
Glenn and Katherina live a quiet life. We still exchange letters, and they rant about national politics, tell me the local weather in painstaking detail, and update me on their cats (Cosmo’s kill-count was down to two birds a day when they put a bib on his neck, but in the years since he has figured out how to get his usual five or six, even with the handicap). They tell me the cabin is always there if I’d like to come back, but stepping away from life so completely is a difficult thing to do. Glenn did it in the early 70s, when he left San Francisco and found Blood Mountain. He taught himself to build houses, starting with my cabin. He lived there with his first wife as he built the main house, and in the years since has built three more along the road back to civilization. Each has since been filled by a family. He was working on #6 when I was staying with him, and would instruct me to cut boards for the front steps which I would attempt, screw up, and watch as he corrected my mistakes. The house slowly came together, their winter supply of firewood slowly reached a stack worthy of the bitterness on the horizon, and Greta and Hedy slowly adjusted to the reins we’d attach them to as we learned them to lead a carriage.
The house being built, which we referred to as the Red Roof House, was funded by the money Glenn received from his mother’s will. He expressed an anxiety over mismanaging his mother’s money, who fled from Nazi’s as a three-year-old and only died recently, aged 98. As he built the house, he’d whinge about how he sold it too early, and that now he was building it not for his own sake, but as an employee to another. This embittered him, and I saw what ownership meant to his generation. I wonder where that pride has gone— whether it was abandoned on the grounds of futility, or whether we opted out of it for conceptual reasons. Whether these two ideas— concept of utility and concept of necessity— are as separate as previous generations wished them to be.
Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live—
says Steinbeck.
for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died… This you can know— fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.
Glenn has plans, see, to build a theater in the woods. He’s showed me the large, cavernous section of the mountain in which he envisions hundreds of seats and the platform he intends to drag out for a stage. He tells me this, as if I can’t see that he’s 74 years-old, that Greta and Hedy would need a lot of training to transport hundreds of people up Blood Mountain in time for a show, and that there probably aren’t a hundred people within twenty miles. The town of Washington is so small that when Dennis gets mail sent to him, it just says: “Dennis. Washington, VT, 05675.” I’m serious. Go ahead and write him a letter, he’ll get it. Dennis is a socialist, by the way, as most Vermonter woods-people are. Dennis and Glenn often argue over the slim socialist margins which exist between them, while German-born Katharina watches on in disbelief. She, in stark opposition, is a democratic-socialist. Pretty much a right-winger, in that neck of the woods. In the middle of my stay we drove to a local union hall to see Bernie Sanders, and everyone hung out after to talk with him. I had a library copy of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which I asked him to sign. If you ever visit the Edith Wheeler Memorial Library, go check it out.
Grapes of Wrath, by the way, was book #2. I had learned it in high school but was due a re-visit. After reading Lighthouse, I got the idea that my own personal crisis was the symptom of a national crisis, or vice versa. I was working inward, from history to a national scale, perhaps in avoidance of getting closer and closer to the root of the problem, my Self.
And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country.
My stay moseyed along, and I prevaricated between the extremes that I would leave here ‘healed,’ and that one cannot fix oneself so deliberately. That true growth comes in brief spurts between arduous habit-building and engagement with the world. That in order to re-align one’s self and one’s values against the Self and Value-system of society, one had to be in society.
Glenn and I would argue, when I had the energy, about motivation. Not personal achievement (which we both held in high esteem), but social responsibility. He expressed disappointment in my generation— in us— and I defended our stance. “Where did all your protests get you? What did your visions and your optimism accomplish? The current state of things? Isn’t there at least merit in facing reality, and dealing with its impact? Mightn’t we be moving towards something productive?”
“You’re quitters,” he’d tell me. “It’s shameful. Once the last of us who believe in something are gone, I just don’t know what will become of you.”
And I could hear the bitterness in my own argument and the confusion I had towards the world as it continued to swell above me. Yet through all these whirlwinds, between progress and hopelessness, I found that the unnerving waves of panic which had come to define my waking life in Los Angeles were separating into a calmer flow. There would be minutes between each pulsing attack, then, by week 2, an hour. This struck me, the way growth does, in a single moment, one rainy day when I went on lunch break up to my cabin to start a fire and dry my clothes. I opened the door to the stove-room and was caught in an encompassing gray light, the sort you can only achieve at the top of mountain away from the world. It hit every beam and every plank just right, I wrote, and the motes from the smoky fire began to settle.
Peace found me, in a brief and gracious swirl. “You ain’t big enough or mean enough to worry God much,” Steinbeck says.
The Massacre
One night, Glenn and Kat attended a wedding and left the whole property in my hands. As they walked out the door I stopped them in their first-class attire and snapped a photo. Once they left, I got that childish rush one gets when their parents leave the house for the night, but couldn’t think of anything exciting to do besides kneel by the wifi router and wait for a single Youtube video to load. I ended up reading, instead, but did it in style, in the main house. That night was Voltaire— “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities— for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away? to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake which devours until it has eaten our hearts away?”
I let Bernie and Béla out for their nightly stroll, sat back and stoked the fire. Glenn and Kat keep a bowl of nuts which they’ve found around the property, and I snapped each open with a genuine excitement over how it would taste. After about twenty minutes, there was a loud yelping from outside. I jumped up, ran onto the porch, and called the dogs in. There was no response, and I went out into the pitch darkness and searched for any sign of them. There are black flashes around my feet, the occasional distant howl, hoot or squawk. Between them, silence. Chickens wandering everywhere. I soon came across a carcass, partly buried by leaves. There was fresh blood staining the ground around it, and just as I assumed the worst I hear a snarling beside me, turn my flashlight, and see Béla in a wretched stance with a chicken hanging from her jaws. She realizes it’s me, drops it at my feet and looks up proudly. As we continue through the woods I find four, five, then a total of seven dead chickens. She has broken into the neighbor’s coop, meaning an all-out turf war on our hands, and it would all be my fault.
I found the remaining the chickens and carried them safely to their coop as they pecked at my hands. Béla followed me with a disappointed scowl, as if I was harboring fugitives. I locked the gate and returned to the main house to try and send word to Glenn, but there was (brace yourselves) no service. The neighbor, I knew, was at the same wedding as them. They were seated at the same table, and soon enough Glenn would receive a text with the details of the massacre, would un-flip his phone and read it out loud because it was as fine an excuse to talk as anything else. When Katherina heard what the message was saying she would slam his phone shut and make sure the neighbors wouldn’t know until Glenn and Kat could get home and asses the damage.
To explain how the massacre resolved itself would include pages of Vermont legal code, an oral history of Northeast woods-people, and a group of Ulama with a lot of spare time. The short of it is that I was sequestered as a foreign entity, and that, so long as I remained on the terra firma of Glenn’s land, I would be considered a candidate for asylum and distinct from any local penalties. The first snow of winter fell that evening, and for the next ten days Béla would hop the seven-foot fence into the compost and retrieve one of her prized chickens, carry it to Glenn’s feet as he sat and talked from the couch, and receive a reward for her service.
It was week #3, and I was experiencing the whiplash effect of healing. The nights grew colder, and soon I found I couldn’t sleep more than a couple hours without waking up and fearing the silence, the darkness, the separation anxiety I felt from society and then the recourse effect of terror that confronted me whenever the thought of society materialized. “the moon rises so brightly it wakes me up. I quickly register the cold, and then the invasions begin,” I wrote at 3am. “I spiral, hard, down the predictable wormhole of the pointlessness of blah blah blah. I don’t have words for this. I am pretending to live. What’s that song? ‘if life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?’ I bundle into my sleeping bag and beg to something for sleep.”
The precipitation continued as rain, and Glenn and I would take breaks in the back of his truck, going back and forth with Dylan lyrics. At dinner we spoke of the DNC and Russia and films and there was a warmth and escapism in the small talk. I realize that Dennis’ accent sounds like Bernie Sanders’, that Katherina has a Bernie tattoo and Glenn named his dog after the man. Time and dates become confusing. They continuously ask me to extend my stay. “Stay the winter,” he says, and I can’t figure why I shouldn’t. Between Grapes and Glenn I begin to talk slower, more colloquially. The characters in that book are viewed from eye level, as opposed to Lighthouse, where they are seen from above by a wrathful demon. I begin to read through my journals from the past six years— 13 in total. How can someone (Glenn) go on talking and not ask a single question? Worried if the Joad's will get a pin-rod in time. Horses. Breakfast. Logs. Moving doors from one side of a barn to another. The pressure of winter; is there enough firewood? A fresh pot of coffee and nothing to write. Every crisis the worst one since the last one. This one is just beginning? Can’t be helpful. I crave so badly to be seen. I take what I want. There is way more catholicism in me than I wish to admit. I am an object. I give nothing of value. I don’t mean any harm. I am scared of everything. I am arrogant. I am a liar. I am not malicious. I don’t know how growth works. I ain’t big enough or mean enough to worry God, much. I still have to live. Steinbeck and the guilt of youth. Steinbeck trying to work sin against progress. Still having to live. Sanders seems like a tired robot— like they put him on stage and push ‘go.’ Why do I have stage fright? Why do I have any fright?
When I thought most I should die I woke up and realized I WAS. And I stepped outside and took deep drags of cool autumn air.
It was week #4. This is when I began reading Magic Mountain.