Fixing Trucks and People

The days grow short and the nights long at this time of the year, and in this northern location the sun is down shortly after 3 p.m. and it is near dark an hour later. It is an indoor time for most, but it's important to get out into the natural world, always, and it's always here at the door. Birds are coming now to the feeder, the usual chickadees and nuthatches and goldfinches. There've been a few snowfalls but so far nothing to get the tractor with the snowblower out for. They'd predicted a big storm earlier this week, so I spent an hour removing the sickle bar from the tractor and attaching the snowblower. But the snowstorm inundated the northern third of the state only, and nothing fell here. And today it warmed above freezing for the first time in ten days or so. The snow melted back to a few inches of cover at most, with many bare spots. 

This morning I drove my truck into the local garage for repairs. It had been jittery at speeds of about 35 mph and above. At first I thought it was the tires out of alignment or balance, but as it went away when I would ease off on the throttle, it had to be the engine, I thought, so I expected a tuneup. But it turned out to be the universal joint that needed replacing, and fortunately the garage was able to get the part and the mechanic do the job in about an hour, for seventy-five dollars including labor. This mechanic has worked on my trucks for twenty years, and I've come to appreciate his diagnostic skills, his ingenuity and abilities with wrench and torch. The garage is less than ten minutes' drive from the house, and usually I can get an appointment within a day or two of my phone call. In an emergency they work on a vehicle right away. 

Fixing cars and trucks on this island is a lot easier than delivering medical care, apparently. I sometimes wonder that it's easier to get your truck fixed up than to get yourself fixed up. Who has a doctor these days for twenty years, when doctors are moving about so often? A mechanic is a vital part of the local economy, but also a part of the community: relationships with customers matter, reputations are important. A person who is a failure as a mechanic does not leave the community but finds another job; a doctor who is a failure is covered by malpractice insurance and moves elsewhere. A doctor's kindly bedside manner is a thing of the past--no doctors make house calls anymore, and if they are brusque with their patients as they shuffle in and out of several waiting rooms, they justify it in the name of efficiency and the economics of health care. In the office for medical care, a patient feels like a part moving down the assembly line.

When I was growing up, my family was close to another family whose head was a country doctor. His name was Fred Zipser. I didn't know much about his practice then. But now I recall that he was a family practitioner in a small town, he made house calls, his office where he saw patients was a part of his home, and his wife kept the books. Does this kind of doctor exist today? Only in the world of alternative medicine.

I was lucky for the past five years and was taken care of by a local doctor who was willing to spend time talking with me, not just about my physical condition but also about my life and what was on my mind. I know she was unhappy with the way modern economies in medicine translated into a loss of facilities at the hospital where she practiced--obstetrics for example--and also the way they translated into bean-counter productivity, seeing more and more patients for shorter and shorter periods of time. She is moving to a different part of the state, and soon I'll have to choose another doctor. I'll be lucky if I can find someone who shares her medical philosophy and who is curious not only about my health but about my life.

The full nine

Nine inches of wet snow fell on the island last night. Evidently the snowfall tapered off a good deal as one went inland. This morning I was out shoveling. Getting the snow blower going seemed like too much trouble, as I'd have had to take off the sickle bar and put the blower onto the tractor, and I just didn't have enough time to fuss with it and get everything else done today that I needed to. 


Checking Newell Cotton's diary entries around this time for snow, I find that on Dec. 7, 1896, "It snowed hard for a short time." On the 6th he'd written, "No sledding yet."


 

Too Soon Snow

The weather forecasters are calling for five to nine inches of snow tonight, with colder weather ahead and the possibility of an even more serious storm in five days' time. The coming of the snow and cold means that this and succeeding snowfalls aren't likely to melt away until March, unless this is a December without much snow at all. An early snowfall in October (I have seen them as early as Columbus Day) or November will melt, but December's snows can pile it on or, worse, melt halfway and then freeze to ice under foot, requiring a good deal of attention when walking about. The alternate freezing, snowing, thawing, and icing can last for weeks.


And so the possibility that the ground may be covered from this evening onward for a few months required me to cancel my planned reading and writing in favor of choring about, as my 140-year-old acquaintance Newell Cotton put it. More on this unusual companion later. Choring about meant wrapping the young apple trees trunks with their plastic winter guards. It meant cutting down a few trees in the wet area down the hill behind the house. Most of all it meant carrying wood from the pile that is still outside over to the storage area on the porch--three cartloads worth, each taking a half hour to load, haul, unload and stack. When the wood in that storage area is used up I will probably need to haul wood over from the barn because what is left of the wood pile behind the store will be frozen over. Then next summer I will put the wood from that pile into the barn where it will dry again and be ready for the winter. But I expect to be able to spend more time on the wood overall, because unlike this fall, when I have been traveling to Providence and coming to Maine only on some weekends, next fall I will be on leave from teaching as I enter a phased retirement which will require that I teach only in the spring semesters. I look forward to being able to spend more concentrated time here in the fall, which is surely the most beautiful season in this state.


Oddly, as the first flakes of snow fell this afternoon, the mail brought the Fedco seed catalog, with its confirmation of the late tomato blight that caught my ripe tomatoes before I could harvest most of them. I had thought they'd escape it, because my potatoes did. But according to Fedco, this past growing season was the worst in Maine in the last 40 years. I can believe it.

The weather forecasters usually get excited by the first significant snow storm of the year and they tend to predict more than what falls. But generally the winter forecasts are more reliable than the summer ones. I can only attribute the problems with the summer forecasts to a bit of wishful thinking, or hoping, applied in this case by the forecasters to the tourists who come to the state of Maine to enjoy the summer. Tourists want optimistic forecasts, days that are partly sunny, not partly cloudy. A spell of fog and rain, which can sometimes last for a week or more here, is not likely to bring them in; and although it's hard to believe that the forecasters have one eye on the weather and the other on the tourist bureau, the forecasts in the summer behave as if they do. 

A word about the aforementioned Mr. Cotton. I came into possession of some diaries kept by this man, who lived on a farm in Grange, New Hampshire, near Lancaster, way north in New Hampshire but at about the same latitude as my place in Maine. He is not a relative of mine. I imagine he might be a descendant of the Puritan John Cotton. The diaries run from 1888 until 1900. I spent some time this summer reading them, and I will consult them as I move through the seasons. 

Mr. Cotton was a small farmer who, when the diaries I have began, was living on his parents' farm; in a few years he married, and brought his wife to live with his family there; gradually as his parents grew older he bought the farm from them, while they continued to live there and he assumed the major responsibility for operating it. And so the daily diaries are filled with farm doings--what a northern New Hampshire farmer had to do to scratch out a living in the last years of the nineteenth century. In this case it appears that Mr. Cotton spent most of his time working with wood, haying, growing vegetables, making butter from his milk cows (which he sold in town), selling surplus crops (especially potatoes), and hiring himself out to work for other people--notably a sawmill operator named J.W. Whipple. He also exchanged work days with friends and relatives as they helped each other with some of the larger farm tasks.


What was unusual about Newell Cotton was that in addition to farming he wrote. Not just in his diary, but he wrote news items for local papers, as well as short non-fiction pieces for newspapers in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. He also attempted to write stories and longer pieces of fiction, and had some of his stories published. I am on the trail to track them down. He read considerably--fiction, mostly, but also history. His diaries chart his ambitions, successes, and failures as a writer. Also, unusual for diaries in that time, he occasionally discloses his feelings. Given his busy schedule, as a farmer, and a father of two daughters, he found time to write chiefly on Sundays and rainy days when he had finished "choring about." I have searched for information about him--when he was born, when he died, and so forth, but have turned up very little. My recollection now, without consulting the diaries, is that he was born about 1870. 

The Cotton farm usually had snow by December 5. The winter months' work mainly involved wood, particularly chopping and splitting it up "by the door" -- just outside the house, I assume. I don't know how many cords he went through in a winter, burning wood in fireplaces to heat his house, but the usual amount was 14 cords in New England. Given his location, he may have burned as many as 20. That is a lot of wood to work up every year. Thinking about it makes me realize how small a job I had in carting all that wood to the porch. The wood stove here is far more efficient, the house is laid out in a way that the heat goes upstairs, and of course I have a backup oil furnace. For Mr. Cotton and his family, it was much harder.