The Farm in the Green Mountains Read online

  —Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  The Farm in the Green Mountains

  On lofty meadows—yet by woods surrounded,

  You stand secure, though wind and weather blown,

  As if you were by heaven only bounded.

  You gave me, in America, a home.

  With bloodied hands I learned how to attend you:

  The fireplace took much heavy wood for heat.

  And while moons waxed and waned and were again new,

  I lived with spring and tree and animals in peace

  Until a new call to the stage returned me

  To share the fiery drama of the day.

  Yet when in dreams the farm appears before me,

  By northern lights back home I find my way.

  —Carl Zuckmayer

  THE JOURNEY TO AMERICA

  In may 1939 we received the news that our visas for America were ready for us.

  A few days later we received the news that we had been exiled, lock, stock, and barrel, from Germany and Austria. We began to say goodbye.

  We had been living for more than a year in Chardonne-sur-Vevey on the Lake of Geneva; we loved the landscape, the village, the vineyards, the house. The hotel owners had become our friends.

  We had celebrated Christmas and New Year here, and the golden wedding anniversary of our parents.

  Now we had to celebrate our departure.

  Our parents came once more from Germany, our friends from Austria, Italy, Germany, crossing the border with great difficulty in both directions.

  We sensed the approaching war in our bones; we were emigrants; we celebrated our departure as something final and unalterable. We said “Till we see you again” and had only a glimmer of hope of “seeing again.”

  In all the years in America we longed for Chardonne; you could almost call it homesickness, although we had lived there only one year. For us it was the one place in Europe that was full of untroubled memories.

  Our house in Austria, our apartments in Berlin and Vienna had been confiscated, plundered, destroyed—those were nightmares. But we could dream of Chardonne undisturbed, and true nostalgia recalls the unchanged and the changeless.

  We came to Barnard, Vermont, for the first time, five weeks after our arrival in America.

  The first five weeks after our arrival in New York, we lived in the apartment of a friend whom we had known since 1925 in Berlin. She was in California when we arrived.

  We spent five wild, mad weeks in New York; we were constantly invited out, taken to the World’s Fair; we saw negroes dance in Harlem, ate spaghetti with the Italians, drank tea in Chinatown, Spanish wine in the Spanish quarter, coffee in Jewish coffee houses, beer at Maxl’s in the German section, and ate Wienerschnitzel in an Austrian bistro.

  We saw everything, we went everywhere, but never found ourselves. Our friend, who had flown in from California, arrived suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of this tornado and said, “Let’s go to Vermont.”

  She went on ahead, and three days later she called up to say that she had found a small house for us in Barnard.

  A few days later we traveled to Vermont, our first trip on an American train.

  That was a surprise.

  The train was called an express and took seven hours to cover a distance which it could have covered comfortably in four. It stopped at innumerable stations, stopped with a sharp jolt and started up with equally violent jerks. Only the well-upholstered, velvet-covered seats protected us from broken bones. Sometimes pieces of luggage fell down with the violence of stopping and starting. The passengers laughed and made jokes about it.

  That was the first time that we met the slow tempo of America and the friendliness and even temper of the Americans.

  It was a hot day, but it was cool in the train.

  The air conditioner worked like a heating system in reverse: the windows were hermetically sealed to keep the cold in the cars and the heat out.

  It was a strange feeling to be shut in behind windows that could not be opened and, when we got out at the stations (we got off and on at several out of curiosity), to come out of a refrigerator into an oven.

  Before our arrival at the stations, a bell began to ring, clear, piercing, and insistent. The bell hung in a little tower over the locomotive, and I could imagine a sexton ringing it, one whose other occupation was shoveling coal. The bell probably comes from the time when it was used on the prairie to drive away herds of buffalo who stood in the way of the train.

  After seven hours we arrived a little late. Not at the usual station that we always used later; our friend Dorothy [Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961), American journalist] did not want to meet us there because it is a railroad junction, an ugly town with red brick buildings and the unsettled look that clings to transfer points.

  Dorothy was waiting for us at the station with her station wagon, a car that looks like a delivery truck with windows and holds either nine persons or fewer people and more luggage. The luggage can be shoved in through a rear door that opens up. You can also carry schoolchildren, ducks, geese, goats, pigs, and pieces of furniture in it; in short, it is a most useful vehicle for country living.

  We drove from the station and the town of Windsor out into the Green Mountains toward Barnard.

  The state of Vermont is called the “Green Mountain State.” It is surrounded by New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, and borders on Canada in the north.

  When I describe the location of the farm where we live to our friends, I say: seven hours by rail from New York, four hours from Boston, three hours from the Canadian border.

  Vermont is a small lumbering state with about 350,000 inhabitants in 9,564 square miles. It has great, dense woods and mountains up to 4,000 feet high. Its symbols are the red clover and the hermit thrush. Its capital city is Montpelier, which has only 8,000 inhabitants, and the largest city (Burlington) has a university and 27,000 inhabitants.

  The winters are long and unimaginably cold.

  The Vermonters raise milk cows: Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, and Ayrshires. They have large chicken and turkey farms. They raise special varieties of seed potatoes, and they have magnificent apples, when those are not spoiled by frost. One of their chief products is maple syrup.

  Among the states they are a relatively poor state, but they are not afraid of their poverty; they don’t love wealth, they have little to gain and not much to lose. This modesty and this moderation give them an independence from uncertain times and arm them with pride and fearlessness.

  We arrived late in the afternoon in Barnard, a little village next to a lake, Silver Lake. Dorothy took us to the house she had rented for us. It was not far from the lake and from the “general store,” the one store in the village. A large village common stretched from the house to the graveyard.

  When I went into the kitchen and considered how I would manage to start housekeeping in a strange place in a strange land, I opened a cupboard and found everything there—simply everything.

  There was salt and pepper, coffee and marmalade; there was everything from shortening, rice, flour, even baking powder, to a jar of pickles, all neatly arranged. Butter, lard, and meat were in the icebox, and as a special “house-warming” Dorothy had put two bottles of Rhine wine from her wine cellar in the icebox. Cigarettes lay on the table in the parlor, there were flowers at the window, wood was piled up neatly next to the stove.

  That is not an unusual kind of American hospitality, to fill cupboard and chest for new arrivals and greenhorns with everything they need for a good beginning.

  The furnishings were very old-fashioned. The few fine pieces stood in dark corners, while furniture and other things from the nineties were pushed out into the light. Porcelain Dutch girls held books; an open Indian head served as an ashtray; you could hardly see the walls for framed mottoes, heads of presidents, and pretty girls; the furniture was elaborately carved; and there were so many rocking chairs that you could hardly find a solid place to sit. The
lampshades were so embroidered or such dark pink that the light spread only gloomily from under them.

  The owner of the house, a feeble old lady, was staying with a relative in another town, so I could clear away and store the bric-a-brac that bothered me most.

  In the kitchen I found 212 baking pans; with them began my enthusiasm for baking, which has stayed with me ever since.

  In this house we spent three months of our first summer in America.

  We were dismayed, astonished, and impressed by a lifestyle that was so new and different.

  That summer the war broke out in Europe.

  The next summer we were in Vermont again.

  Autumn, winter, spring lay between the first and the second Vermont summer, only three seasons; to me they felt like ten years.

  I can remember little of that time. I only know it was filled with false hopes, lost illusions, self-protection, uprooting, and the fight for existence.

  It was the first phase of emigration with all the stages of the impersonal, general fate of the emigrant.

  It was the usual course, one had no right to be an exception.

  There were the other emigrants: the manager from Bielefeld, who thought he had prospects of a position in a large department store. There was the well-known lawyer from Berlin, who dreamed of an offer to be consultant to a corporation. An extensive practice awaited the famous heart specialist. The writer believed that he had a contract in his pocket which would assure him the production of his play on Broadway. There was the great actor, for whom a career in Hollywood beckoned.

  But it all happened differently, quite differently.

  The manager was happy when he found piece work, perhaps stuffing dolls for the Christmas market in a factory. The lawyer ran upstairs and down with a box of sausages and sold them mostly to emigrants, because his English was too poor for American customers. The heart specialist sat in a wretched corner somewhere and crammed for his examinations like an undergraduate. The writer— if he was lucky—was retrained in Hollywood. The actor was there, too, waiting nervously for a bit part where his foreign accent could be hidden in the noise of the crowd.

  Nothing has changed: America is still the land where immigrants, sometimes even natives, begin as dishwashers, but only very few end up as millionaires. It is a new world, and everything that happened in the old one is forgotten and is not chalked up against you on the big board of the new world, but it isn’t written up to your credit, either.

  It is called starting from the beginning. “To start all over again” is one of the most meaningful sayings which America has produced.

  In Europe it would be “to start from the bottom.” The way this worked out was that the plunge was easier to bear for emigrants who had been on top in Europe than for those who had not experienced the “top” in Europe either, and who now desperately tried in wild fantasies of homesickness to make up for what they had missed.

  The women were usually the point of stability in the first years of the emigration story. They became cleaning women, or they sold soap and brooms, and in this way they made possible the studies and professional training of the men. Many men felt themselves lowered and insulted by this, and it was a long time before they decided to throw overboard their ballast of prejudices, class feeling, and desire to dominate, and so to lighten the lifeboat significantly.

  Yes, it was that. At first it seemed like being in a lifeboat.

  The ship on which you had lived had gone under; you floated on the water, had some provisions, and hoped to reach land before a storm. You saw water and sky, but as yet no coastline.

  In that first autumn, winter, and spring, our family was scattered to the four winds.

  The children attended different schools in different states.

  Zuck [Carl Zuckmayer, the author’s husband] tried without success to find a gold mine in Hollywood and then took a teaching position at a college in New York.

  We found an apartment whose rent was affordable. I kept house and cooked—still an unusual activity for me at that time. The cooking, contrary to expectations, succeeded so well that I thought of developing my skills to apply for work as a temporary cook.

  Zuck worked on a book and on much besides that was not marketable. The war smoldered in Europe, and we lived in constant fear of what would happen next.

  Zuck had received an advance from an American publisher and had to finish his book as quickly as possible. Therefore we sublet our New York apartment for the summer and rented again in Barnard, and again for three months.

  This time it was an old farmhouse, built like a big cabin, which was distinguished by an unusually low rent. It was a strange, old-fashioned farmhouse, lonely, set on a hill above the lake.

  Whereas the house in the village had too much furniture, the farmhouse had too little.

  Dorothy helped out. She drove up with a truck and brought chairs, tables, curtains, bedspreads. We papered the walls, hung up curtains and pictures. In two days the house was livable.

  Water had to be brought from a spring which was three minutes away from the house. Snakes lived by the spring.

  Zuck said they were a harmless kind of snake, but I wouldn’t fetch water for anything.

  There was no plumbing, no bathroom, and a strange toilet in the barn with two seats next to each other, probably so you wouldn’t have to be alone at night in the dark.

  We used oil lamps and candles and a stove in the middle of the kitchen. The sink was ancient, of black iron, and in the middle was a hole through which the water drained into a pail below. Sometimes the pail overflowed and flooded the kitchen with dirty water.

  It was a very old farmhouse with lilac bushes around it and a wonderful view of the lake.

  The last owner had had to leave the farm because he was over ninety years old.

  Once a neighbor, who sold us her home-baked bread, stopped for a visit.

  She went into Zuck’s room to collect her money for the bread. She sat down in a rocking chair, began to rock, and talked about the weather and the condition of the roads, and Zuck praised her bread.

  Suddenly she stopped speaking and stared at the bed that stood in Zuck’s room.

  “Oh,” she said, “that is the bed in which Mrs. Hawthorn died. I used to visit her often before she died.” Then she looked at Zuck. “It doesn’t bother you,” she said, “to sleep in a bed in which someone died?”

  “No,” said Zuck. “It doesn’t bother me. Back home we generally sleep in beds in which people before us have died.”

  It was a beautiful summer on this farm, and we had many guests.

  Once, when there was a full moon, we had unexpected guests late at night.

  Dorothy brought a load of friends and her stepson in her station wagon. They were celebrating his twenty-third birthday.

  There was a party.

  We sang songs in all languages. They understood our songs, we understood their songs.

  It was almost dawn, but the moon was still shining, when we found the birthday son sitting on the meadow, cowered down in boundless and complete despair.

  They picked him up and drove home with him. “Strange,” I thought then, “that these young people can take so little and get into such hopeless depression.”

  Three years later, before his twenty-sixth birthday, he fell in France.

  At the end of this summer, we took a long walk, Zuck and I.

  We went through woods and past many occupied and unoccupied farms.

  We had packed our lunch and found an old woodshed where we could eat it. It leaned far to one side, bent from age and snowstorms, and only the wood piled up inside held it from collapse. It was the beginning of autumn and a beautiful day.

  Zuck sat leaning against the wooden wall of the shed and smoked his pipe.

  I sat munching an apple.

  “Would you,” said Zuck, “would you like to stay in Vermont?”

  “Yes,” I said without thinking, “I would.”

  In that moment I kn
ew that it would work out that way someday.

  Later we often passed this woodshed on our way to the next town.

  It didn’t fall down until the autumn when we went back to Europe.

  BACKWOODS FARM

  For three summers we had been summer guests in Barnard.

  After the third summer we became residents.

  We had given up our New York apartment in headlong haste and decided to move to the country. The decision had been made surprisingly fast, but it was no surprise.

  In America there are many farmers who come from other professions and have started out as amateur farmers.

  The reason for their move to the country is usually that they must reduce their cost of living.

  Indeed, in the ill-famed depression years, many families, instead of committing suicide, bought themselves a lifeboat in the country to keep their heads above water, with a couple of chickens, rabbits, a potato and vegetable garden, and that way tried to work at building up their threatened existence again.

  We belonged to some extent to those people who could point to a large and serious shipwreck as the cause of their moving, and we wanted to try our hand now as amateur farmers.

  Life in the country as such was not an unfamiliar lifestyle for us. We were accustomed in Europe to spending the greatest part of the year, or the whole year, in the country. We did not yet suspect how big an adventure we had let ourselves in for: we had no idea of Vermont winters, and we didn’t know what it means to have a farm without adequate help.

  In that third year we lived in the same house in Barnard that we had rented in the first year. It was centrally located and gave us more time to look for a farm other than the rustic, but impractical, house on the hill.

  First we had to get a car, for in America a car is not a matter of luxury or pleasure, but a necessity.

  The nearest small city in which one can shop is nine miles away, the nearest railroad station twenty-four miles, the nearest larger university city twenty-nine miles. Auto salesmen overran our house.