My youngest and I hike in a nearby state park that, as a family, we’ve visited for years—Elmore Mountain. Mid-August, in frothy opulence, does not disappoint: rocky mountain path surrounded by leafy forest, summit view, lake, the nearby store where I once bought my daughters ice cream cones and we now eat sandwiches. The trueness of hunger, the satisfaction of satiation.
Fellow novelist Catherine Tudish and I make the long trek to Manchester, Vermont, to read at Northshire Bookstore. There and back, hours filled with writing talk, life stories, the fried dumplings we eat at a fancy bar, the lingering hours at the bookstore’s closing, me buying one and then two books, stashing these in my bag. We talk and talk as the twilight slides into darkness. I laugh and say two days from now maybe we’ll still be driving around Vermont, and Catherine gently prods me to turn left, go right…
Later, after I leave her at her farmhouse and the massive hydrangea — white shot through with pink — shimmering in my headlights, I listen to the Rolling Stones, and now I am keenly intent on the back road through the darkness, cell-free Vermont, navigating by the few road signs I pass. I’ve driven here, but never in the impenetrable darkness. The night is hourless, and I’m giddy, sunroof open, car heater on, giddy not with any kind of writerly fame but enmeshed in this road and this darkness that I know will of course inevitably end somewhere. Giddy with the joy of my third book that has now reached bookshelves, the story of my troublesome main character Avah Lavoie a rough-edged young woman in search of her own coarse salvation. The novel begins in a sour hangover and ends in hunger: appetite.
Home, gracious I’m tired, but I stand holding my books and wallet and looking up at the constellations in their complex gauze, the Milky Way’s arc, bridged over my house and garden, apple trees and that giant goatsbeard and compass flowers shadowy creatures. The thin thread of crickets. I’m furiously hungry.
“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner
Stony Soil Vermont 
A day well-lived 💚
Thank you!
💚
A fine, evocative, true post.
Thank you for reading!
Thank you!
Brett, What’s the Stegner quote from? It immediately brought to mind a bit from the documentary film “Look and See” about Wendell Berry. Immediately following that first thought, I recalled that Stegner was his mentor at Stanford. The scene from the film is of two horses, perhaps draft horses in pasture. The filmmaker’s voice comes in beginning to ask him something about his worldview, introducing the question with “as a child of divorce…”. The view remains of the horses, but his voice interrupts her, somewhat emphatically, saying, “We’re all children of divorce…”.
If you’ve not seen the film I recommend it highly, I was skeptical when I first heard about it, assuming a film about Wendell Berry couldn’t possibly do justice to him and his work. However, I happened to see it first last February when the Library of America did a weekend free screening of it—the “free” turning viewing it into a nothing ventured, nothing gained enterprise. I ended up watching it 2 or 3 times that weekend, subsequently bought the DVD from the filmmaker, and have watched it several times since. It’s available on http://www.twobirdsfilm.com. On the website of the Library of America (LOA.org), there’s video of an interview with Mary Berry, Wendell’s daughter, and Laura Dunn, the filmmaker, which makes the film itself even more special. Regards, Barry
“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.” ― Wallace Stegner
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Good morning, Barry,
The quotation is from Angle of Repose, my old copy kicking around that I probably picked up from a free pile. I’m a HUGE Wallace Stegner fan, as I am of Wendell Berry, too. I haven’t seen this documentary, so thanks for the tip and the link.
The Stegner quote you used is definitely a reflection of Wendell Berry.
Overcast August morning here…. singing crickets and sultriness, storm clouds, and the maples already showing crimson….