Dear Folks,
What a lot can happen in a month! Even a short month like February.
I just looked back at what I wrote to you a month ago:
I was complaining about oil at $1.30 a gallon; now it’s $1.90.
It was 20 below with no snow. Today it’s 60 degrees warmer than that, the huge snowpiles around us are melting, and Ken Hunt just dropped into the kitchen to say he’s gearing up for sugaring.
I was just getting into the joy of the teaching term; now I’m looking toward the end of the term just two weeks away.
I told you we had raised $1 million in private loan pledges for the Cobb Hill construction fund. Now, thanks to the help of some readers of this newsletter, we’re up to $1.6 million. (We’re thinking of posting one of those big red fundraising thermometers on the corner of the house.) And the Cobb Hill Fund has just received its first deposit in support of the organic farm.
Kerry was in EMT training; now she’s got a beeper and goes dashing out on emergency calls (which in Hartland are fortunately infrequent — they mainly seem to involve cars sliding off the road or people in their homes who need emergency trips to the hospital).
We were expecting that Amanda would have a baby in August and that she and Michael and Libby would move out sometime before then to have more space. Now she’s no longer pregnant, and Michael has already moved out.
Amanda learned early this month from a sonagram that the fetus within her had stopped developing. The miscarriage worked itself out spontaneously over the next two weeks. It was a sad time, but Amanda was brave and Libby, who has just started to go to the Waldorf school in Quechee, managed to stay her usual busy, chirpy self, keeping everybody’s spirits up. (Libby is subject to sudden fits of wild Irish step-dancing in the kitchen.) In addition to the emotional rollercoaster, everyone’s expectations and plans had to undergo major readjustments.
Maybe it was that combination that set Michael off, though it seems he has a history of some instability. Whatever happened (I was at Dartmouth and didn’t witness it), there was an outburst, he left and is staying at another place not far from here. Amanda is seeking a divorce. She seems fine and steady; we’re worried about him.
The good news is that when such things happen in community there are calm heads about and comforting support. We don’t know how this story will end — but then, when in life do we ever? Tune in next month.
After we had resigned ourselves to a permanently snowless winter, this month the snow came and came and came. Beautiful, cold, dry powder, followed by bright days; classic showy New England winter. Our fields and hills and forest trails are a winter gathering place for the whole town. Skating takes place on the pond over on the Curtis side of the land. The kids on their sleds gather at the bottom slope of the long high Hunt pasture. Our barnyard is a designated parking lot on the Hartland ski and snowshoe trail map. And the snowmobile club, the Hartland Hill Hoppers, maintains trails that connect to the statewide VAST (Vermont Association of Snow Travelers) network.
We love all this activity except the snowmobiles. It’s great to watch the skiers slide gracefully over the pastures. I like to look out the kitchen window at families circling round and round the flat ag field, pulling tiny kids on sleds or helping slightly older kids up after a fall on skis. Marsha and I do snowshoe tramping, sometimes breaking trail, but more often gratefully following already broken ski or snowmobile trails. The snowmobiles pack trails so hard that we can hike on them easily in our boots even when the snow is hip-deep just beside them. That is the one good thing about snowmobiles.
Until we moved here in December, I was only theoretically opposed to snowmobiles. I knew that they spew out much of their gas unburned, leaving hydrocarbon residues in the fields. I knew that their air pollution emissions per mile are about 300 times those of a car. I had seen how their trails in the spring regenerate grass more poorly — in mid-May you can still see where the snowmobiles trails were. We have been delicately negotiating with the Hill Hoppers to move their trail way to the rear of our land, up in the forest, away from our fields and houses-to-be. We know that nothing is more important to neighborly peace in this town than openmindedness about snowmobiles.
For all of snowless December and January my position on this matter stayed theoretical. Then the snow came,the snowmobiles followed, and I plummeted from rational objection to white-hot hatred.
I knew the things were noisy, but (since there were none around Foundation Farm) I had forgotten how ANNOYINGLY noisy they are, like ultra-loud whiny mosquitoes. I had somehow thought, having heard my snowmobiling neighbors talk about good clean fun out in nature that they ran during the DAY. For reasons I fail to understand, even on weekends 90 percent of them are out at night, often late at night. They have headlights as bright as cars. When I look out, the far side of our field looks like I-91, headlights zooming by fast and thick. Utter rage wells up. YOU’VE PAVED MOST OF THE PLANET INTO HIGHWAYS FOR YOUR F-ING OVERLOUD BRIGHT-LIGHTED INTERNAL COMBUSTION MACHINES, WHY DO YOU HAVE TO TAKE OVER THE FIELDS AND THE FORESTS TOO???
I was trying to keep it down, figuring Cobb Hill was going to have to muzzle me at town meetings, when Stephen confessed one day in the kitchen that he was feeling the same way. His anger was kindled by the reaction of the cows and horses. Angry buzzing machines just don’t belong here. They don’t belong anywhere on the land.
We’re going to have to have it out, first with our fellow CobbHillians, then with the neighbors. They do know they’ve been living on borrowed time. When the Hunts lived here, the ‘bilers could zoom all over the land with impunity. We’ve asked them to stay on designated trails, and we call in complaints when they stray. They’re good about policing themselves; they thank us for the complaints and generally behave themselves. But if I have anything to say about it, this will be their last winter on our land. If I don’t get community consensus about that this year, I’m sure I will once everyone else lives here.
Another thing that happened this month is that, after a flurry of activity, we once again canned our forest cutting plan. We keep getting enticed by the fact that our local forester tells us we have 500,000 board feet of pine and hemlock that should be thinned out of the Curtis forest, while we are about to order something like that much lumber to build 22 houses. I spent considerable time autumn before last walking through the woods with loggers and foresters, trying to plan how to cut lumber, mill it on site with a portable sawmill, and dry it in time for our construction. Last year the plan failed because a) we were getting so much contradictory advice from the “experts” that we couldn’t figure out what to do, and b) Cobb Hill didn’t yet have a clear enough design to know exactly how much of what kinds of lumber were needed, and c) we didn’t have any up-front money to pay for the logging and milling (we’re talking somewhere around $40,000 here, per 100,000 board feet).
Well, this year we’ve advanced to the point where conditions b) and c) were no longer true, so we went back to work on a). The contradictory advice continued, but Art Kirn, who lives over in the Curtis house, and who used to run a carpentry shop, so 100,000 board feet is an imaginable quantity to him, and who is retired and therefore has time to go visit sawyers and mills and drying kilns, spent a couple of weeks figuring out the whole operation. Our initial plan was to bring the logs down to a yard at the Curtis place, do the sawing there, stack and sticker the lumber to dry over here behind the Hunt house, right next to the building site, and use the slabs to burn in the sugarhouse and the sawdust for the compost heaps. Great plan, we only have to truck the lumber 1/2 mile from one end of our property to the other, saves fuel, improves the forest, saves us 30-40 percent on floors and siding and sheathing and gives us a few repair beams for our barns.
The problems began when Art decided we couldn’t do planing or ship-lapping on site, so the lumber had to get trucked to a mill. Then he got convinced that we had to kiln-dry it. Then he researched how long it would take a portable saw to work its way through 100,000 board-feet of logs. Pretty soon this job was requiring as much trucking as buying wood from the lumberyard, and costing as much too. Then, the week before the logging crew was set to go into the woods, the Act 250 folks pulled the plug anyway.
No, we still haven’t got our Act 250 permit, Vermont’s all-purpose environmental impact assessment. The administrator said that if we start cutting logs with the intent of using them ourselves, she’d consider that an illegal construction start. Furthermore, she said, the fish & game folks had to review any logging plan for impact on deer. (Some day I will unleash upon you my opinion of Vermont’s official sanctification of deer, the only wildlife species they seem to care about, with the possible exception of trout.). If we had been convinced at that point that we were going to save money by doing this logging, we would have fought it (and lied about using the lumber ourselves). But we weren’t convinced. So we gave up.
The wood is still in the forest, and now we don’t have to hurry to figure out our 200-year forest management plan. We can go more slowly, tree by tree, which is the way we should have done it anyway. On one of the most sparkling days of winter, right after an 18 inch snowfall, a bunch of us CobbHillians went on a snowshoe hike last Sunday, all over the forest. We went with Scot Zens and two of his forest-ecologist friends who are thinking of setting up a consulting business for folks who want to take a really long term view of forest management. They may make Cobb Hill a case study to show off their skills. We would like that. Anyhow, it was a great day to be out appreciating our trees, and the more we all get to know that forest, the more mindfully we will plan for it.
So thanks to Act 250, right?
We’re actually nearly through that process. We just got a ruling from the wastewater folks, after about a year of pleading, permitting us to design a graywater leachfield for only 90 gallons per bedroom per day, instead of the 150 gallons that is the state standard. We get the reduction because we’ll have composting toilets and low-flow appliances. For months and months, they were stuck at 97.5 gallons, while we needed 90 to allow all the bedrooms we want to build. We have to monitor our actual wastewater flow for a year, to prove that we will stay under the 90 gallons — and we already had to prove that we had the capacity for a larger leachfield if needed — and a backup to that one. So goes green permitting. It’s one of the reasons our simple small houses are turning out to be expensive. This wastewater permit cost us, I would guess, about $40,000 in professional engineering time.
Given the wastewater permit, we seem to have only two hangups left. One is the water supply permit, which depends on and was waiting for the wastewater permit. Our well is just a bit too small for the state’s assumed 150 gal/bedroom/day. Now that we’ve been permitted not to put OUT more than 90, we’re in a position to turn to the water supply branch of the Agency of Natural Resources (you’d think wastewater and water supply were the same branch, but they decidedly aren’t) and say we won’t need to put IN more than 90. This should work, we hope, and fairly quickly.
With water input and output done, we just have to figure out what to do about the Driscolls. They are our neighbor to the south, about the only folks whose view might be said to be threatened by the building of Cobb Hill (which Gene Driscoll contemptuously refers to as “the condo units.”) They have told the Act 250 commission that they want a screen of evergreens between their house and ours, a request that we think is totally reasonable. So I invited the Driscolls for a walk up on the slope to figure out the best place for us to plant those trees, which I have already ordered to be planted this spring.
I need to put this in the proper context for you city folks. The slope we were walking on is about two acres between their property line and our closest houses. We’re not building in their back yard. Invasion of privacy in the countryside is a relative matter.
The problem is, we don’t agree where the screen should go. They want it in a place that will shade our southernmost houses and that will break up the hillside of orchards and gardens we are planning. (I wish the Driscolls would admit that we might enhance their view, but that seems too much to ask.) We want it farther south, right on their property line, where we think the trees will grow best, look best, screen best, and give us more freedom with other hillside plantings. The Driscolls keep writing peeved letters to the Act 250 commission. Julie, the Act 250 coordinator, keeps saying to me, “can’t you find some way of making them really happy?” I don’t seem to be able to do that. A $4.5 million project may rise or fall on where to plant 20 balsam firs and white pines. This is how environmental regulation gets a bad name. (I’m actually very sympathetic with the Driscolls, and I like them. I just wish they could make up their minds to like us.)
Tune in next time.
Love,
Dana
