The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life, by Helen Whybrow, released this summer, is a raw and richly resonant telling of seasons on the land on a Vermont hillside. This account of life and death on a farm strikes close to home not only for the proximity of Knoll Farm in central Vermont, but also the author’s childhood spent here in the Upper Valley. Raised by parents who had immigrated from England to a small family farm “in a fold of damp earth in ancient hills that slope down to the Connecticut River,” she and her sister’s days were spent on barn chores and showing their cows as die-hard members of the local 4-H club.
After high school she roamed widely for a decade until she found her way back to the farm for two years, during which time she met her future husband while working together on an anthology about land conservation. He had fallen in love with a Vermont farm that had put out a call through a land trust for applications to steward its 200 acres. They drove out to visit, trespassing, as she put it, “on a trail of blind love.” In 2001, they became the keepers of the farm, renaming it Knoll Farm, on a proposal that they would preserve the buildings, tend the land and animals, and create an educational center.
For Helen, it was the sheep that anchored her to the land. They became her teachers, helping her become “a good shepherd, not just to them, but to a place that is my sustenance and joy as well as my unending labor and worry.” She recounts the history of sheep farming in Europe and in America, and especially the radical transformation of the New England landscape in its service. She quotes George Perkins Marsh, of Woodstock, VT, who wrote presciently in 1864 that felling the forests “has been attended with momentous consequences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configuration of its surface, and, probably, also to local climate.”
Quotations from the French writer Jean Giono, and especially his lesser-known work The Serpent of Stars, are braided through the book, weaving a luminous counterpoint to Whybrow’s own descriptions of the natural world. “The earth sighed a long sigh, so soft, so calm that no more than two or three eddies of birds rose,” he writes, and she follows with an account of swallows in her barn, the broods that survive and the broods that don’t, and the “delicate microzippered fibers” of a their wings.
Her writings about the farm and the natural world are precise and evocative: “clumps of slush swirl in the meltwater of the barnyard swale.” New leaves on a sugar maple in spring look like “the crumpled trembling wings of a bat, poised about tasseled blossoms of the most delicate red and gold.” We get accounts of hunting coyotes and birthing lambs, and of their daughter Wren learning to drive stick shift “delivering blueberries in our old farm truck.” Apples from a 200-year-old tree are “small and golden, their skin with the roughness and earth patina of unglazed clay.” Walking out to her sheep, she almost steps “on a newborn fawn the size of a cat, with eyes like wet river stones.”
More than anything, The Salt Stones is a meditation on what it means to belong. “Belonging,” she concludes, “is more about the ritual and dedicated attention within us to something beloved that matters.” In nature, she writes, “I feel a belonging with and a belonging to, a kinship, a reciprocity as well as a longing for greater intimacy and knowledge.” Belonging is a practice, an act of resistance “against dimishment–diminishment of ourselves and of the more-than-human world that offers all of us a home.”
Whybrow notes of Giono’s writing that “the land is the main character. The wind, the hills, the night, are all creaturely, animate, and insistent, both threatening and life-giving. Everything is connected and yet unknowable.” These words characterize her own writing as aptly as they do his. The Salt Stones closes with a shepherd’s glossary, containing treasures such as the word rooing: “collecting the wool fleece found on fence wires or twigs where it has naturally snagged.” This could as well be a metaphor for the collecting that she has undertaken in this book, the gathering of sheep and land and family and seasons which is its own kind of belonging and, in this world more than ever, its own form of resistance.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.