Idyll Banter (6 page)

THE
CENTER
OF
TOWN

LOSING THE LIBRARY

ON A SUMMER
night in 1666, six years before she died, poet Anne Bradstreet watched her home in North Andover burn to the ground, taking with it one of the larger libraries in the New World. Publicly, at least, she approached its destruction with a combination of Puritan stoicism and faith, and bid farewell to the collection in a poem. Privately, was she somewhat less poised? I've always imagined she was, especially when she considered the ruination of all those books.

Lately, I've wondered as well how deeply her neighbors felt the loss of that library. I've envisioned them sifting through the black ashes in their black clothing and finding a charred spine from a book. A blistered cover. A flyleaf, singed along the edges.

This is, of course, conjecture. But despite the fact that she was a woman and that there were certainly leaders in her small world who frowned on her writing, I believe that Anne Bradstreet must have shared her impressive collection with her friends. If so, when she lost her library, her community would have felt the loss, too.

This summer, my small Vermont village lost its library. A hill town of roughly a thousand people, Lincoln sits in a valley midway up one of Vermont's highest peaks, the 4,052-foot Mount Abraham.

In the early morning hours of June 27, swollen by weeks of rain and four inches on the night of the 26th, the usually lazy New Haven River overran its banks and pummeled the town. No one was hurt, perhaps because the waters crested between 1:30 and 4:30 in the morning, so the roads along the river were quiet. But the rushing waters carved chasms in adjacent paved streets—one hole was an astonishing forty-five feet wide and thirty feet deep—and swept away steel and cement bridges that had stood for decades. Homes beside the river were flooded, and the banks were narrowed: Houses once ten to fifteen feet from the edge were now within thirty-six inches.

And though huge chunks of paved roads were chewed away and a pivotal bridge was destroyed, without question the greatest public casualty was that library: a library that doesn't bother with cards, because everyone knows everyone's name. Lost in the flash flood were nearly five thousand books, or eighty percent of the collection. Gone was the entire children's section—every book that wasn't checked out. Gone were first editions by Vermont writers Rowland Robinson and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

And gone was the library itself, the room by the river that had housed all those books for the last sixty-five years. The building was still standing once the water had receded, but the librarian, Linda Norton, vowed that she would never put books back in the room on the banks of the river.

The morning after the flood, when the rain had finally stopped and the New Haven River had fallen back behind its banks, a good part of Lincoln gathered at the library to begin sorting through the mess. As I watched my neighbors work, I was reminded of Bradstreet's loss and what her neighbors must have found and felt the next day.

Certainly, none of my friends had ever seen so many ruined books, and they were stunned. They moved inside the library with robotic deliberation, lifting from the floor the card catalogs, which had been spilled by the waters like ransacked dresser drawers, and tossing the books—saturated with river water and coated with mud—into blue recycling tubs.

Among the people who had come to clean up the mess and salvage whatever they could were teenagers and elementary school students, as well as senior citizens in their seventies and eighties. Many of them worked there all of Saturday, and then came back for more on Sunday.

It has been almost four months since that flood, and still I'm not sure which was more wrenching: the morning after the library was swamped, when my neighbors and I could see and touch the thousands of books that were destroyed, or the odd hollow that we endured in July, when the reality of a life without a library hit home.

Though Norton reopened a minimalist interpretation of her once splendid collection in the upstairs of the town hall in the middle of August—and though the community has embarked upon a capital campaign to replace the books that were ruined and to construct a new building in a new location—all of us in Lincoln learned this summer exactly what it meant to live in a village without a library.

   

We all understand on some level that there is something sacred about a book. Few people, after all, collect first editions of videocassettes or look for signed copies of CDs. So a roomful of books—especially a roomful of shared books, of books that have been savored and read and literally touched by one's neighbors—is particularly magical.

Lincoln has had a public library for ninety-nine years. Although a century isn't an especially long history for a library—the oldest continuous lending library in Vermont, the Brookfield Free Library, has been around since 1791—it isn't shabby.

Since the early 1930s, the library had been housed in Burnham Hall, a brick mesa of a building in the center of the village. Burnham's top floor was used for activities and town functions—everything from African dancing on Tuesday nights to the town's annual meeting each March—while the basement housed a dining room, a kitchen, and the library.

The basement library wasn't large: a mere five hundred square feet, plus a small storeroom in the back. It was never the sort of library where scholars would research Daniel Shays's insurrection or scan months of newspaper microfiche to understand the Vietnam War. The fact is there was no microfiche. The periodical room consisted of a card table with magazines, most of them donated: dog-eared
Smithsonians,
well-thumbed
National Geographics.

But it was always inviting and cozy, and somehow Norton had managed to squeeze six thousand books into the space by the time the New Haven River filled it with five feet of water. Six thousand is not a huge number—eight times that many books were damaged at the Boston Public Library in August when a water main ruptured—but it's impressive for rural Vermont. Moreover, those six thousand books were choice.

On any given day, Norton was as likely to display a new novel by the archly comic British writer Martin Amis as she was a new biography of the Vermont-born president, Calvin Coolidge. Though she was always careful to purchase a variety of mysteries and bestsellers—the staples of any library—she also acquired literary novels, picture books, and esoteric explorations of nature.

One day last spring when I was writing about dandelions, I wandered by her library to see what she had on the wildflower. I walked home with thirteen books.

   

Before the flood, the library was open three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. In addition, every Friday morning the library held a story hour for preschoolers and their parents.

Though the room's ambience was created largely by the novels and histories in their clear plastic coats, it was never a mere roomful of books. It was a gathering place. I don't recall ever visiting there and being alone. In the afternoon, I could count on finding any number of senior citizens—eighty-three-year-old Margaret Harris, perhaps, or sixty-six-year-old Darlene Simmons. In the evenings, there were likely to be younger adults and parents with their junior high school–aged teenagers—though Wednesday nights could also be a wonderful wild card.

Nancy MacDonald has been volunteering on Wednesdays at the library for two decades, beginning the year she was pregnant with her oldest daughter. One autumn Wednesday a few years ago, Robert Hicks and Reed Prescott III appeared about the same time. Hicks crafts harpsichords for a living, and Prescott is a painter. Hicks happened to have a harpsichord in his car, and he brought it inside and started to play. Prescott returned home for the painting he was working on, and he brought it back for MacDonald's and Hicks's opinions.

It was, MacDonald recalls, like a little salon.

With the library closed for most of the summer, MacDonald was lost on Wednesday nights. The first evening she would normally have been there, she turned to her husband and confessed that she felt like a ship without a harbor.

Libraries in many small towns are like that. They're community centers. It doesn't matter if they have carefully planned programs for adults—world travelers with their slides from Nepal, chefs with their recipes for ginger pumpkin mousse—or well-orchestrated story hours for toddlers. It doesn't matter if they offer adult literacy programs or seminars on estate planning. They're still magnets for human contact. That's probably why they continue to matter even now, in an era when so much research can be done electronically on the Internet, and books can be found online.

   

MacDonald wasn't the only Lincoln resident who felt a little unhinged when the library was washed away. Most of us did. Elizabeth Saslaw had to find new excursions for her five-year-old daughter, Bridgette. Marjorie Bernoudy, who had only moved to Lincoln in March, had lost what she considered her base—the place where she was meeting her neighbors and getting to know them.

Some borrowers, of course, began using libraries in neighboring towns, which graciously offered free library cards. Others bought more books than usual. And some simply reread books in their private collections.

But it wasn't the same. A library, regardless of its size, is a social center, and Norton never shushed a soul in three decades as librarian.

Not long after the flood, I went to a library in a nearby town. It was a Wednesday, and none of the faces I had come to associate with my library that day were there. I didn't recognize a soul. It's odd, but other people's libraries can be intimidating, while yours can be your very best friend. That's one of the things that makes a community's public library very special. Moreover, the faces you see at a library are young and old and determinedly middle-aged. By their very nature, libraries are generationally democratic. They cater to everyone. School and work or classes and clubs may separate us, segregating us by interest and age. But libraries remain one of the few places in this world that still bring us together.

The Lincoln Library reopened in temporary quarters on August 12 with about two thousand books: perhaps twelve hundred that survived the flood, and another eight hundred new (or almost new) ones that were donated in July. The week the library opened, the shelves marked “Juvenile Nonfiction” were completely empty, and the adult fiction section skewed heavily to the A's and B's, the books that had been on the very top shelves the night of the flood.

Norton estimates there are at least another two thousand used books that were donated that haven't been filed yet. Her guess is that perhaps a fifth of them will become a part of the permanent collection, and the rest will be sold to raise money for new books and a new building.

The Lincoln Library has never had its own building, and Norton believes that it is now time. Until then, the library will remain upstairs in Burnham Hall's large common room. And though it will take hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct a new library and restock the collection, my sense is that within two or three years the town will have both. Lincoln isn't a rich community, but it knows what it wants. We elect three selectmen to run our town, for instance, but five trustees to manage our library.

Moreover, on the morning after the waters had drenched much of the library and the town gathered to try to save what remained, I saw dazed adults crying softly as they worked. They didn't cry that day for the roads or the bridges that had been lost, they didn't cry for the Burnham Hall kitchen that was destroyed alongside the library. But they did cry for their books—just as I believe that Anne Bradstreet and her neighbors mourned theirs.

WALK THE POSTAL ROUTE WITH
A MAILMAN TO GET TO KNOW THE TOWN

TEN SUMMERS AGO,
I heard that an acquaintance from college I hadn't seen in eight years was attending the Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton and house-sitting somewhere in Bristol.

I thought it would be nice to catch up, and I sent him a letter with his name and the most precise address I could come up with:

ASPIRING WRITER

HOUSE-SITTING SOMEWHERE

BRISTOL, VT 05443

He received the letter the very next day, and for the last decade I have marveled at the mysterious power of the U.S. Postal Service's Bristol branch.

No more. The Bristol post office's secret is out, and it's a guy named Ron: Ron Williamson, to be precise.

Williamson is a mailman, and when he retires December 29, he will have been a letter carrier for thirty-four years and nine days. He might have been one even longer, but he taught school for ten years before deciding as a young man with a family that it made financial sense for his part-time job with the U.S. Postal Service to become his full-time one.

He is sixty-four, and he still walks eight miles a day around Bristol—the great loping strides of a man in excellent physical condition—with a mailbag slung over his shoulder that often holds thirty to thirty-five pounds of mail. He performs his foot route in the middle of the day, after sorting mail in the early morning and before delivering yet more mail by truck in the afternoon.

Last week I took a walk around Bristol with Williamson, and though I didn't need oxygen or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, I was tired . . . and mightily impressed.

Yet it wasn't simply Williamson's physical stamina that earned my admiration, nor was it his ability to sense black ice with preternatural skill. It wasn't even his cheerful indifference to the cold: Although the temperature didn't top eighteen degrees the day we marched around the village together, he didn't wear a glove on his right hand. A glove, he explained, makes it difficult to separate the mail at each stop.

Rather, it was the way the man serves day in and day out as one of those unobserved but vital buttresses that support a neighborhood, and, in fact, gives the word
neighbor
its profound resonance.

At some houses on our walk, we do not place the mail in the postbox, but we leave it inside the front porch so a senior citizen doesn't have to navigate the icy steps. At others, we deliver stamps (as well as mail) for the shut-ins who don't get out as much as they'd like, and we stay and chat for a few minutes because this visit might be all the company they will have for the day.

Williamson can rifle off the names of the families (and their dogs) on each and every street in the village, tell you who is home and away and (yes) the names of the house-sitters. He can tell you the history of each home.

There is the house in which Leena Ladeau lived. When she was alive, he couldn't pass by without stopping for freshly baked cookies or hot coffee.

Here is Sam McKinnon's house, and no one, it seems, has a better memory for Bristol minutiae than Sam, despite the fact he is flirting with the age of ninety-two.

Mail is magic. Even now, an era in which e-mail governs so much of our business communication and the telephone is our constant companion, the arrival of our mail six days a week retains the ability to excite us. There are a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which, I imagine, are the handcrafted nature of the personal letter and the reality that all mail allows for a critical third dimension—bulk, if you will, and I use that word advisedly—that neither e-mail nor the telephone offers.

But there is another reason that sometimes transcends the content: the delivery itself, and the way people like Williamson link us with our neighbors and remind us why we live where we do.