Unstitched - An excerpt from Brett Stanciu's new book

One Monday morning, with a few spare minutes before I needed to be on my way to work, I walked along the Lamoille riverbank in Hardwick. At a swath of long-stemmed rudbeckia, I paused and picked a bouquet, remembering Seth Hubbell, a man who had written a short memoir about farming as a colonist in this valley. In February 1789, not far down the river from that turnout, Hubbell packed a snowshoe trail into the Vermont woods with his wife and five daughters. For tools, he carried one ax and an old hoe. Growing faint from hard labor and hunger, he sometimes caught a fish from the river and roasted its unsalted flesh over a fire, devouring the creature steaming hot with his fingers. I imagined him kneeling on banks of the flowing river, teeming with aquatic life, the soil around him harrowed open to the sky, exposing fat grubs and scurrying ants, the soil’s dampness quickly drying in a breeze sweeping down the river valley. Hubbell contemplated a sky never crossed by contrails, gazing up at great migratory sweeps of geese and passenger pigeons, now long since extinct. During his early years farming this land, Hubbell buried his first wife and a daughter; at the end of his long life, he counted with satisfaction his progeny of seventy-six souls. Like so many others, I had an idyllic notion that the world was greener and lovelier in another place or time. But while rhapsodizing about Hubbell farming this fertile piece of earth was easy, I knew such dreaming was indulgent. The wolves of hunger clamored at Hubbell’s door.

I wandered back to my car and paused for a moment before I opened the door. I scanned the strip of green field and the empty dirt road. Twenty-five years ago that summer, my husband and I had bought that hunting camp and eight acres up the road. I no longer even knew where he was. Rumors circulated that he’d wandered off to protest the North Dakota pipeline. As the morning grew hotter, I stood there remembering the final time we’d met at this roadside turnout. In those days, we were still married, trying to figure out which way our lives would turn. Three miles down the road from our house, out of our daughters’ curious ears, we sat in his truck, arguing. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the passenger window, thinking about our daughters, home alone, who would be wondering about dinner. Three coyotes trotted by in the field and disappeared over the riverbank. he kept talking and talking. I unrolled the window and listened to the coyotes yipping as dusk swallowed up the remaining daylight.

Brett Stanciu’s new book, Unstitched is available at Penguin Random House