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My childhood was defined by the land around me. My earliest memories are of hayfields, corn and woods. I lived a series of summers that merged into a single season, and a series of winters that did the same. Maybe life ends up being like that in retrospect: the circle of a single year, overfilled with memories.

When I was fourteen or so I walked up the road from my house and into the curved hillside of a hayfield. I lay down, letting the warm grass tickle my arms and legs. The sky was blue, the mountain loomed to my right, the valley spread down below me to the left. I was up to my ears in adolescence, looking inward with reverence and confusion. I loved everything around me with an intensity that I couldn't yet describe, and at the same time I wanted out. I was a budding poet, quite sure that poetry had to bleed out of you in order to be good. I tried to feel something profound in that field, but I didn't. Eventually I noticed a daddy long-leg a few inches from my head and retreated. The profound feeling came later, when I remembered the warmth of the sun, the sturdy connection between my shoulder blades and the grass.

There are more moments like that: When I got my rejection letter from Brown, I wandered away from my house so my parents and I wouldn't witness each other's disappointment. I sat on a rock deposited there during the last passage of the glaciers, and looked at the familiar fields, the mountains, the woods. There was something so comforting about the contours of my home, and there still is. But it's more than that. The shape of the land is something I have in common with the people of the past. It made them who they were, just like it affected me.

The past and the future are hard to think of in concrete terms. There's a shadow of unreality that cloaks all the things that have been or will be. It makes sense- in some ways the past and future aren't real. We can't touch them, we can't see them. This is why we keep making wars, why mothers decide to go through childbirth again, why we smoke cigarettes that might kill us in ten years. The only thing that's really clear, consistently clear, is this moment. And this one. And this one.

People-real people- existed in Danby hundreds and thousands of years ago. Most of the time I understand that fact like I understand the plot of Harry Potter. My mind can easily remember the story, but it isn't really... real. But there's a different recognition that brings me deeper. I experience it in flashes every once in a while:

I'm walking up the road from my house, pulling a red plastic sled that bounces and drags on the snowy gravel. Up ahead, the mountain is dark green and white, all the trees partially covered in snow. The wind is gusting so strongly that a cloud of snow hovers high above. Every once in a while, huge billows of snow burst out of the trees on the mountain like a volcano eruption, drawn out by a gust. And then, for some reason, I know that Joseph Soper saw something like this. He stood somewhere near me, his feet and face cold. He might have had a bit of a stomach ache from a weird bite of venison. He looked up and saw the snow blowing off the mountain. Maybe a hair tickled his face. He was there.

The moments are like that. I read recently about the oral traditions of Abenaki and other Native American groups. Erin Hanson, from University of British Columbia, writes that,

[an] important element in Aboriginal oral histories is the role the landscape plays byconnecting oral histories to lived experiences. As an individual moves through andexperiences the landscape, oral traditions inform his or her responses to it. Oral traditionscreate a space for interacting with the environment, and for many First Nations people, the landscape that holds these stories becomes an aid to learning their histories and a guide in decision making and problem solving.

I like the way Hanson describes the landscape as actively playing a role in the history-building of First Nations people. The landscape of a place can help you remember your past there, but it also influenced that past. Like many good stories, the story of how Danby's landscape affected its history begins long ago and far away.

Geology

I don't really believe in fate, or the idea that history is inevitably building to certain events or people. Things are the way they are because that's just the way it happened. That being said, it can be amazing to see how patterns emerge, how seemingly unconnected variables and insignificant events can lead to enormous change. Up until I started this project, I didn't know a lot about history and how the past affects the present. When I started researching, I thought that Danby owed its existence to a chain of events starting with the Pilgrims over three hundred years ago. In fact, Danby actually owes its existence to a chain of events starting over four hundred million years ago. So that widened the scope of my research a bit.

I'll be the first to admit that I've never been passionate about geology. Like economics, the bones of the world strike me as a complex and fascinating system that I ultimately can't take the time to figure out. Frankly, a lot of the literature on both economics and geology is criminally boring. As a reader of poetry, I get that you have to do the legwork to access the full pleasure of any subject, but it just hasn't happened for me and geology.

But the path of Vermont's history follows the contours of the land. The experience of every Vermonter, farmer or not, is impacted by the soil beneath our feet. A couple hundred million years ago, things were happening to the earth that would lead, with intention or not, to the world we live in today.

I first learned about Vermont's geology on accident, while climbing a mountain that had long been a fixture in the background of my life. There is no high school in Danby, so I ended up going to Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester. According to its Alma Mater, which we would sing during assemblies with accompanying pomp, circumstance and fist pumping, the school sits "in the shadow of Equinox."

Mount Equinox is the tallest mountain in the area, part of the Taconic Mountain Range. The Taconics run parallel to the Green Mountains in Southern Vermont, making a long north-south corridor from my house to Manchester (or at least that's how I saw it when I was little). That corridor is called the Valley of Vermont in physiographic terms (yeah, I don't know what that means, either).

A paved road winds up to the summit of Mt. Equinox, though you have to pay a toll at the bottom if you want to drive up. The toll booth also has a strange gift shop attached to it, full of kitschy Christian paraphernalia. There's a monastery tucked behind the summit, home to some monks that no one sees very often. There's also an abandoned hotel that suffers frequent invasions by bored and nosy high schoolers. Apart from that structure, the summit is largely undeveloped. There's a law in Vermont that prevents buildings from upsetting the aesthetic quality of scenery, and Mt. Equinox is visible from miles around.

Mt. Equinox was the site of my first Vermont geology lesson. When I was in my early twenties, a friend of mine sent me a letter inviting me on an educational hike. He was shepherding a dozen teenagers on a cross-Vermont bike ride, and they would be stopping at Mt. Equinox for a lesson from a man named Roger Haydock. I was working at a state park at the time, spending my days renting canoes to tourists, and would have agreed to anything that might break the monotony.

I arrived at the trailhead to find twenty or so dirty teenagers leaning their bikes up against trees in the woods. Roger Haydock arrived a few minutes later. He was self-taught in the geologic arts, and knew southern Vermont like the back (and inside) of his hand. He talked as we hiked, pointing out interesting features of the landscape and telling us the history of the area.

We were on a geology hike, but it seemed we were only talking about tree identification and fern growth. I wondered when all the rock stuff was going to happen. It turns out, of course, that plants are an indication of geological features. The forested landscape can tell the informed observer a lot about what's hidden beneath.

According to Roger, Vermont was in the southern hemisphere 450 million years ago. It was also an ocean. The eastern side of the state, as well as New Hampshire and everything else out in that general direction, was deep ocean. The western side of the state was shallow and warm. Over the millennia, tectonic pressure pushed the acidic rock formed in the deep water on top of the less acidic rock formed in the shallow water. This push created the Taconic mountains. As a result, Mt. Equinox is built from two different kinds of rock, one on top of the other, one alkaline and the other acidic.

Like this, kinda?

Eventually we reached a steep shelf where the vegetation switched abruptly from leafy, deciduous trees like beech and maple to coniferous, or evergreen, trees like hemlocks. We stopped and gathered around Roger and flailed our arms as the mosquitos caught up to us. This abrupt switch in foliage was where the deep, acidic ocean rock replaced the shallow alkaline (or not acidic) rock. The trees were a literal litmus test for soil quality.

Dorset Peak, the mountain that forms one side of my bowl-shaped home, is also part of the Taconic mountain range. Every winter snowmobilers chart a noisy course up an old logging road to the Notch. And every winter, my family treks up in their wake pulling a hodgepodge of beat up plastic sleds. At the Notch we turn around and sled down the mountain, a good twenty minutes of exhilaration. Or a good twenty minutes of pushing and dragging the sled back onto the track, depending on the quality of the snow.

I've always known about the line on the mountains where the woods changes from mostly hardwoods to mostly coniferous. In sledding terms, it means you're getting close to the Notch. But, according to Roger Haydock, it also means that you're stepping from the shallow tropical ocean into the deep, cold one. Just, you know, 450 million years ago.

So why should this matter, you ask? What's the narrative relevance of a prehistoric cold ocean vs. a prehistoric warm ocean? Well, first of all, it's really cool. Second of all, the type of soil in Danby affected the type of plants in Danby, which affected the type of farming in Danby, which affected the flow of European settlers to Danby, which affected the development of our town (and state) culture, which in turn shaped our history.

Back on Mt. Equinox, Roger Haydock had an explanation for the current conflict in the Middle East. The story stuck with me, glowing and solid in the sea of geological terms and phenomena that I still don't understand. This is the power of good teaching, teaching that's accessible and funny and relatable. I've learned a lot of pedagogical techniques throughout my education, but the really important lessons are like the one Roger gave on Mt. Equinox. I know nothing about rocks, but he made me feel like I could.

Here's his story: The acidic rock that got pushed on top of Mt. Equinox eventually eroded back down the mountain, turning into acidic muddy sediment across most of New Hampshire and some of Eastern Vermont. Then this microcontinent called Avalonia smashed into all that sediment and folded it like an accordion, forming the ripply mountains over on the eastern side of Vermont.

Fast forward a few hundred million years and Europeans are settling in North America. When the first settlers came north to New Hampshire and then the area of Vermont, they were culturally very similar. They were farmers, they were Yankees, they were rugged. But there was a big difference between the types of land they happened to have settled on. Those in New Hampshire farmed on the acidic soil leftover from the ocean, the movement of the plates, the accordion effect, etc. The Vermonters farmed on the relatively more alkaline soil, which tended to be more successful.

Of course, neither of the soils were as good as the stuff in the American Midwest. When the Midwest opened up to settlers, Roger said, a lot of farmers in the Northeast gave up on their land and hopped in a covered wagon West. The people in New Hampshire, with their unproductive soil, left sooner and more frequently. Vermonters left, too, but not enough for the agriculture economy to fail entirely. So, while New Hampshire turned to industry, building factories on their farmland, Vermont stayed agricultural.

After WWII, taxes in Massachusetts went up. So did disillusionment. Two kinds of refugees left the state and headed north: the tax refugees, who opted for New Hampshire, and the cultural refugees, who were attracted to Vermont. So while Vermont filled with back-to-the-landers and became more liberal, New Hampshire drove its taxes down and became more conservative.

Finally, you've got the 2000 elections. Bush, you may remember, won by a hair. A hair on the head of the electoral college. Roger told us that if Gore had gotten just a few thousand more votes in New Hampshire, the state would have gone to him and he would have been elected president. But the high number of conservative voters, drawn to New Hampshire by hundreds of years worth of socioeconomic factors, voted for Bush. Then Bush was president during 9/11 and had to decide what to do about it. The soil of the Northeast, in other words, was responsible for the war in the Middle East.

As I disclaimed above, I'm not a geology expert. I'm also not a soil expert (though my sister is!) or a plant expert (though my dad is!). And I'm not a history expert, or even a Vermont history expert. But as much as I can in this story, I'll tell you about how the land matters to history. Because it does. A lot.

Dreary Wilderness

The incidents, trials, and hardships underwent by the first settlers of Danby, cannot be fully realized by us at the present day. We are possessed with means to supply all our wants and demands, enjoy the luxury of peaceful homes, and are greatly in contrast with those hardy pioneers. They were brave and true men, inured to toil and hardships. Most of them were religious men of great physical and mental ability, but for which this would still be a dreary wilderness... It was no light task to conquer the primeval forest, nor was it easy to procure needful food for themselves and their animals while the work of clearing was going on. Many days of wearisome labor must pass before the land could be cleared and put under cultivation.

-John C. Williams, A History of Danby, 1869

First of all, let's talk about the "dreary wilderness." This is not a term thrown about very often in today's Vermont. "Pristine wilderness" is more likely, and this switch in terminology is important to understanding some of the differences between the mindsets of today and early America. When European settlers first came to the New World, they were faced with seemingly unlimited wilderness, filled with unfamiliar animals and people. The forest, untamed and uncultivated by "civilized" people, both symbolically and literally came to mean danger and even evil. The devil lived in the woods. In the time of British colonization, the ideal landscape in the British imagination was one cleared of forest and cultivated, with small farms as far as the eye could see. For French settlers in Vermont, the ideal was even more rigid: large manor farms with neatly trimmed lawns. Meanwhile, God had decreed the European settlers' Manifest Destiny- it was their fate to spread west, bringing the land and people they encountered into the starched and sometimes smallpox-ridden embrace of civilization. And that's just what happened. The clash of civilization and wilderness is at the heart of the American identity, from the pilgrims to the Wild West to the struggle over conservation still happening today. But, as I realized from Williams' unexpected description of "dreary wilderness", Vermont's (and the country's, I think) attitude towards nature has totally changed over the past few hundred years. Today, wilderness is seen as pure and good-untainted by humanity. Tourists come to Vermont to get away from the crush of civilization, to breathe fresh mountain air and relax in the quaint towns nestled into the folds of the wilderness-or at least some version of it.

The pendulum swing of our attitude towards wilderness is understandable. In Vermont in the second half of the 18th century, the wilderness really was a scary place for colonists. Up until that time, hardly any British people had explored the mountainous land that would become Vermont. There was an outpost called "Dummer's Meadows" near Brattleboro, and a few expeditions deeper into the wilderness, but mostly the land was considered too dangerous to settle. The provinces of New York and New Hampshire lay on either side of the disputed territory, and it was used as a conduit for troops during the French and Indian War. Soldiers from both sides traveled through not-yet-Vermont, and Native Americans, both Iroquois and Abenaki, lived and hunted there.

That being said, the land was also beautiful. Since starting my research for this project, I've begun to see my town in a new way. I love the long swaths of woods I grew up exploring. They make me feel small in a good way. But the trees I know are young and messy compared to the forest that Joseph Soper walked through with his belongings on his back. I imagine the land covered in a primeval forest, just as I imagine Williams' 1867 map overlaid on my modern Danby. Both are weird to think about.

What was the landscape like when Soper arrived? Williams, who thoroughly romanticizes the life and struggles of the first settlers of Danby, describes a rugged forest that could only be matched and defeated by equally rugged men. I think that he's mostly right, but the story isn't that simple. Unsurprisingly, given the time he was living and the ingrained injustice of colonization, Williams erases a huge factor from the European settlement and transformation of Danby and New England: Native Americans.

Native Americans

Williams' History of Danby delicately sidesteps the Native American populations of Vermont. In the meticulously detailed book here is no indication, apart from vague references to the dangers of the untamed wilderness, that anyone other than Europeans also occupied this land. And that oversight aligns with how history itself treats Vermont's Native Americans. Williams, a well-meaning and thoughtful historian and writer, was complicit in the prejudices and systematic cultural suppression of his time. And so am I.

Growing up, I had about the same understanding of Vermont Native Americans as Williams. In 5th grade, my tiny school (housed in an actual house) broke ground to construct a new building, and then immediately stopped because they struck Native American artifacts buried in the ground. I remember my headmistress, her face stuck in what was either a large false smile or a grimace, telling us that we'd hit a small roadblock in our quest for a new school. I gathered that it cost a lot to halt construction.

My class took a trip to see the archeological site and were shown cooking tools and arrowheads. Then the school building went up and life went on as usual. In our elegantly proportioned new building, I learned the standard lessons about Native Americans' relationship with the pilgrims and the Trail of Tears, but nothing more about the Abenakis. There is no state mandate about covering local Native American history in school, and while I'm sure some schools do, mine didn't. I had the impression that such knowledge simply wasn't available, that Native Americans of Vermont had disappeared long before anyone was able to record their stories.

But Native Americans did exist in Vermont and still do. There's an Abenaki tribe in the town of Jamaica, a 40 minute mountain drive from Danby. But they and the other tribes in Vermont didn't get official state recognition until 2011. Up until then, the official stance of the government was that Abenakis had hunted in and traveled through Vermont, but hadn't ever been permanent residents here. Incidentally, they also thought it would be a good idea to sterilize hundreds of Abenaki men and women during the Eugenics Movement in the 1930's. The only group considered equally "degenerate" by the eugenics committee were French Canadians.

So the same well-meaning ignorance or selective historical sight that John C. Williams had in 1869 still exists today. I looked further for a historical account of Native American presence in my area of Vermont, and found A History of Rutland County written in 1886 by H.P. Smith and W.S. Rann. In the first chapter of this book, the authors state that "The territory of Rutland was, beyond question, subject to the nominal jurisdiction of the Indians, by priority right of discovery." Later on, they briefly discuss disputes between the Iroquois and Abenaki tribes over ownership of the land, and note that the Iroquois had made "frequent petitions" to the local government, asking repayment for their stolen land. But even though the authors acknowledge the validity of the Native American ownership, they don't express any regret or remorse for the way Europeans overtook the land.

The British Colonies were required to reserve certain trees for the Royal Navy- to be used as masts. That's why there are virtually no old-growth white pines left in the Northeast.

The oversight of these historians obscures a pretty incredible fact about the natural landscape in the area of New England before the arrival of European settlers. Scientific research paired with historical accounts of early immigrants to New England show that some Native Americans periodically burned the forest to keep it in a manageable condition. These controlled burns wiped out weaker undergrowth and small trees, while the larger trees with thicker bark survived. The result was areas of cathedral-like forest, dominated by enormous old-growth trees with very little undergrowth. This made travel and bow-hunting easier for Native Americans, and must have been an incredible sight for Europeans first arriving in North America. By the time Europeans arrived, Native Americans in the Northeast were cultivating the land, too. They burned areas in the major river valleys to clear the land for farming. Many towns in the Connecticut River Valley are named Something-field (Deerfield, Greenfield, etc.) because when Europeans came to those areas that's what they saw: fields. But with the arrival of Europeans came European diseases that wiped out an estimated 90% of of the indigenous population. Many Native Americans who survived were eventually driven away from their lands by war, and by the time Joseph Soper sat down against a tree to die, it was probably easy to pretend that no one had lived or depended on those lands before.

Most of the Abenaki life in Vermont was based in the Champlain Valley and the Connecticut River Valley. But Danby is tucked alongside Otter Creek, which was also the site of Abenaki settlements and hunting grounds. So the story of Danby has to include the story of the Abenaki, as well as prehistoric groups that have been here since as early as 9000 B.C. But the Danby that I grew up in, the Danby of small farms and fields broken up by woods, was laid out by European immigrants. The story of Danby, then, also has to include the story of the British and French colonies.

Next up: The New Hampshire Grants