Growing-up on a hilltop farm with a barnyard gulch was like buying a house in the suburbs next to a playground. Endless discoveries and treasures awaited us. And by treasures, I mean old milk cans, horse shoes, weathervanes, skulls, broken jars, various animal skeletons, car parts, old tractors, various pieces of old buildings, canning supplies and loads of lifestyle items like beer cans. You know, the good stuff.
Using one’s senses helps uncover great treasures on any archeological dig and also some key discoveries like active sewer lines. In fact it turned out that many of the sewer lines in town were gravity run so the waste would just travel from the farms to the gulch and the River below.
Well, dad became the health officer of the town quite quickly — I mean who after all wants their mischievous kids spelunking amidst old car parts AND a live sewer? My sister and I were like canaries in a coal mine - we would go down and find the mess, and then dad would hire a team to clean it up. It was a win-win situation, really. Except for the two junked Chevy sedans we found. We begged our parents to let us keep them as “our fort" and we even brought friends over to play in them. I mean, who needs a treehouse when you have a turquoise Chevy with a bright white steering wheel? It was like something Olivia Newton John or Audrey Hepburn would swoon over, cigarette in hand. Unfortunately, our dad, had to come in and ruin our fun by doing soil tests and he took them away because apparently, they were leaking contaminants into the soil. Another clean-up leaving nothing, but healthy soil and water for us kids. Thanks dad! (Despite my interest in all this soil stuff now, I can still feel the fury when he took them away!)
The truth was for a century it was cheaper and faster to just toss stuff over the bank. In those days, “out of sight, out of mind” was the old adage that rang true to most homeowners. My favorite summer job was working in the sewer patrol at an organization called Save the River. We would boat around to houses on our list and ask permission to flush dye down their toilet. Most of the time we would note the dye coming out in the River and mark it on the map. Before the Clean Water Act there was no active discussion about how the waste at the top of the bank impacted the lives of our neighbors living downstream and certainly no concern for the rights of nature and what we may be dumping into the River.
After years of exploration trying to find the equivalent of the two old car wrecks, I hit the jackpot with a tractor seat — my dad, of course, made me dig around to see if we could find the rest of the machine — (he spent a great deal of time cleaning up the mess generations before us had left on the land). That thing was like the holy grail of forts! I remember taking the tractor seat all over the property to see if I could make another cool fort — the vegetable garden, the beaver dam, the apple tree (hard to balance on the branches) and finally the hen house — that beloved chicken coop finally served as my new nirvana after school. I mean who needs Snapchat and an Xbox when you've got a tractor seat and a bunch of chickens?
Now as the land speaks to me again and I walk along the River and dream of the forest gardens, growing potatoes in place of our forts, baking biochar in the barn, fruit and nut trees on the sloping hillsides, hemp in the hay fields, rice along the River and other crops on this sacred organic land, I feel the same joy as when I discovered that old seat. The thrill of uncovering uncontaminated soil and clean water is priceless. Plus, a farm with no more land junk to clean-up – allealujah thank you, dad!
Love this! We had the same kind of dump on our land in the Catskills, right down to the historic cars half buried in the hill above the creek that winds through our valley. Blue ribbon trout streams be damned… thankfully humans have somewhat evolved from those days. Maybe some hope for the future?
I think every house that was ever lived in by real Vermonters has a gulch...ours does, just below the lowest of several natural terraces, out of side and mind, and close enough to our neighbor (a very real Vermonter) that half of the all rusted metal may well be his. The tangled piles of chicken wire, sadly, belong to us - relics of a prior owner's venture into the mink business. A few years ago we had some work done on the house and the crew were all local Bridgewater guys who lived within a mile of us, so we would leave some beer in the ice box and sit around after they were done for the day, catching up on small town gossip. At one point I made a comment about what my brother and I call a "Bridgewater septic system" which is a 55 gallon drum with about 50 bullet holes in it. One of my neighbors laughed and said "my grandmother's septic system was a 1958 Ford...they just rolled it in, ran a pipe through the window and covered it up. "