on the ephimeral nature of human existence

The only constant is change. People imagine the shift from swampland to national capitol in Washington DC and know that a forest once stood where Portland Oregon is now. We see the Mayan pyramids in the jungle and know that a huge civilization once flourished around them. But farmland changes too.

Agriculture, by its definition, is the disruption of the natural environment. When the John Deere tractor or even the single ox returns to the barn for good, the land quickly begins shrugging off all the hours, days and years of human labor that kept it in its farm-able condition. It is amazing how quickly it returns to its preferred state. Land on our farm that was pasture only 50 years ago is a soft wood forest with trees 60 feet tall. Our town has a granite train trestle located in trees so dense you thought it was built by the Romans, but really it is only 150 years old.

There is a piece of land near ours that used to be a farm. Then it was sold and sold and sold again. It is now owned by someone (a nosy person can find out who at the town clerk's office) who pays the taxes but has never made an appearance in anyone's recent memory. I imagine a road ran by it at some point, but the trees have long since taken it back. In fact, the only way to access this land today is to go by foot across another person's property.

On this farm there was .... a sugar house. I can't really say how old it was. It might have seen the hay day of prohibition when people found it was way more fun to make moonshine out of sap than syrup. Its hard to say. By the time I saw it it was little more than a mound of moss covered rotting boards. But in between the boards milling and their decomposition, two things happened.

One was that someone put a cast iron laundry sink in the sugar house. It has an enormous backsplash but its only about 7 inches deep. 1931 is stamped on the back. I googled around trying to find another one like this on the internet but I had no such luck.

The other was that a couple of back to the landers in the late 60's lived in this sugar house. I don't know if they were sent up here from the city by their parents to keep them out of trouble or if they wanted to be like Thoreau and find their own Walden - what better place than Walden VT, but the old timers around here remember them. They didn't stay very long the old timers said. (You'd have to be a pretty fucking dedicated transcendentalist to want to want to live in a sugar house in the middle of winter when it's -40 degrees out). But they stayed long enough to have a baby in that sugar house in the winter. I guess everything went okay and everyone found out about it when the dad walked down the road to find someone with a phone he could use to call a doctor after it was all over. That child is older than me now and the sink that the blood was cleaned up in is now in my basement.

Peter and I took advantage of the snow last weekend to grab a sled and hike out to the remains of the sugarhouse. We brought a crowbar too but we didn't need it. The small amount of wood that was covering the sink fell away in our hands. Then we dragged it back to the main road to load in the back of the truck. I don't think what we did was too much like stealing, and I figured the sink would be happy being on a farm again. Maybe someday someone will come and pluck it from the remains of our house and wonder what all it has seen.

The only constant is change, but cast iron is fairly constant as well.