The Walls in the Woods

Here is a thing to look for that will change what you see for the rest of this drive, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it.

Walk fifty feet into almost any patch of woods along this road and you will find a STONE WALL. Not a boundary for a field you can see — a wall running through mature forest, with big trees growing along it and out of it. New England has, by some estimates, well over two hundred thousand miles of these walls. Enough to go round the world several times.

Every one of them was built by hand, one rock at a time, by somebody clearing a field. And the reason there were so many rocks is the glacier: it ground up the bedrock and dumped an unsorted mess of boulders and clay across this whole region, and then frost heave pushed a fresh crop of stones to the surface every single spring. Farmers called it the New England stone crop. You cleared the field, you ploughed it, and next April there were more.

So the walls are not really walls. They are piles — the place you put the rocks because you had to put them somewhere. The tidy fitted ones near the house were built with care for show; the rough tumbled ones out in the woods are just the field's rocks, stacked at the edge of a field that no longer exists.

And that is the melancholy part. Every wall in the forest is the outline of somebody's failure — or at least somebody's departure. A man cleared that ground with a team of oxen and his own back, farmed it for thirty years, and then he or his children walked away to Ohio, and the trees came back over the top of it.

Look for them. They are everywhere, and they are the most honest history in Vermont.