[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 146 (Monday, October 3, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6041-S6043]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO HOWARD FRANK MOSHER
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, one of the great treasures of Vermont is
Howard Frank Mosher. Mr. Mosher is a writer who knows and understands
Vermont, and in books like ``Where The Rivers Flow North,'' he makes
any Vermonter know they are home.
A recent article in The Burlington Free Press by Sally Pollak speaks
to the man he is, and I would like to take this opportunity to share
this with the Senate.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record,
the article to which I referred.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Burlington Free Press]
All Roads Lead to Kingdom County
(By Sally Pollak)
(Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher has lived in the
Northeast Kingdom since 1964 and the region is character-like
in his books. Free Press Staff Writer Sally Pollak and Free
Press photographer Glenn Russell spent a day traveling the
roads in the north country with Mosher, listening to his
stories and discovering his sense of place.)
Irasburg--The tan Nissan rolling down the dirt road in
Brownington came to a slow stop, and the man behind the wheel
surveyed the shallows and grooves of mud in front of him. The
place he wanted to go was on the far side of the mud pit, and
up a small hill that curved out of sight.
Two men with trucks were on the other side of the mud
ravine. The Nissan driver left his car to approach the men. I
was in the
[[Page S6042]]
back seat of the Nissan. Glenn Russell, a Free Press
photographer, had the front seat.
Through the window, we watched the three locals talk mud,
and discussed if we'd try to forge the muddy road if we were
driving. No way, I said.
Glenn said he might if he were Howard Frank Mosher, our
tour guide that day. Mosher knows the people and trucks
around here; he can always get a tow.
Mosher, meanwhile, had made another arrangement.
If he couldn't get to the other side of the mud, where
Margery Moore, 91, his longtime friend lives, then Moore
would come to him. One of the men Mosher had been talking to
was her son, Michael; he'd pick up his mother in his truck
and drive her through the mud to Mosher.
While we waited for Moore to arrive, Mosher, 68, told us
stories. Delightful and engaging tales--warm and humorous,
with a north country bite. The kind of stories you might read
in his Kingdom County novels.
And now here we were, deep in the Northeast Kingdom on
Moore Lane in Brownington, waiting to meet a woman of Mohawk
ancestry, whom Mosher got to know 47 years ago, his first
year in the Kingdom.
She showed up in a big blue rig to say hello. Her son
lifted her from his truck and helped her into a wheelchair.
Moore greeted Mosher with a hug.
He gave her a copy of his most recent novel, ``Walking to
Gatlinburg.'' After some talking, we headed back to the
Nissan.
Michael Moore called to us as we walked to the car: ``Don't
let Howard lead you astray out here!''
To read Mosher is to be led, if not astray, then away--to a
place that is, at once, invented and familiar, enchanted and
real, made-up and true.
The truth can be found in Mosher's evocation of the place
he calls Kingdom County, a rugged, rural border landscape
where people scratch out hardscrabble livings, go without
spring, learn to read the woods and rivers, build strong
allegiances and cast a wary eye on newcomers. Mosher's county
and the characters who inhabit it are informed by and created
from the landscape and people around him: He uses for his
material a place that is distinct and fascinating, yet one
that's been changing--maybe merging with outer and other
regions--even as Mosher put pen to paper: making it last.
In Mosher's 1999 novel, ``The Fall of the Year,'' the
book's central figure, Father George Lecoeur, is writing ``A
Short History of Kingdom Common.'' Mosher, too, is the author
of a history of the Kingdom--his history is contained in the
thousands of pages that make up his 11 books.
The words Mosher uses to describe ``A Short History,'' can
be applied to his own work. They are narrated by Frank
Bennett, Father George's adopted son, as Frank settles down
to read the history: ``I could hear Father George's voice in
my head, hear its slightly speculative, wry resonance. And at
that moment, whatever else I still did not understand about
the events of the past summer, I realized that long after the
passing of the hill farms and the big woods and Kingdom
Common as we had known it, these stories would remain: a
golden legacy, to me and to the village, from Father
George.''
A special place
Mosher and his wife, Phillis, a retired teacher and school
counselor, have lived in the Northeast Kingdom since 1964. It
is where they raised their two children, Jake and Annie.
Advertisement I was like a kid in the backseat on a recent
drive to the hot spots of Mosher's adopted home turf.
The kid thing involved a surprise and recurring attack of
carsickness: no fun! On the upside, it meant that as a
passenger of Mosher's, even a newcomer from Burlington, I was
given a free pass to the Kingdom, embraced by the old timers
on Moore Lane.
Like a kid who (still) believes in the grownups up front, I
saw the world through the eyes and observations of the
driver--which thankfully transcended my own hazy vision. As
we pulled out of the driveway of his Irasburg home, not far
from the town green, Mosher enticed us. First stop, he said,
was a place he'd had an ``epiphany.''
What and where it was, we'd find out when we arrived at the
scene: Orleans' sleepy main street. This is going to be a fun
trip, I thought. Anyone who can have an epiphany in downtown
Orleans, is the right person to ride with.
The street was deserted the day Mosher steered his
grandfather's Super 88 Oldsmobile into town. He and Phillis,
farm kids from upstate New York barely in their 20s, were in
Orleans to interview for teaching jobs.
The Kingdom quiet was busted that day by two rough-looking
drunks in fisticuffs, fighting their way down the otherwise
empty street. Mosher rolled down his window to speak a
sentence that revealed the budding wordsmith within: ``Could
one of you gentlemen please tell me how to get to the high
school?''
We'll do you one better, promised the brawlers. We'll take
you there. With a welcome from Mosher, they climbed into the
backseat of the Oldsmobile and directed the teaching recruits
to the school.
``I was beginning to get the idea we had come to a special
place,'' Mosher said. Just how special, was soon to be
revealed: After the gentlemen disembarked from Mosher's car,
Phillis turned around to peek at the two. She saw they had
started punching each other again, and suggested Mosher take
a look.
``Well, honey,'' she said. ``Welcome to the Christly
Kingdom.''
Reciting Frost at a covered bridge
Kingdomy words like Christly--if there's another word like
Christly--were flowing from the front seat, sprinkling my way
that day.
Gool, Glenn said. What is that word?
It's a dam, Mosher said.
At least he thinks it is, and that's how he uses it. He
picked it up from the locals many years ago; people talk
about taking a walk to the gool after supper.
What about carcajou? Glenn asked.
``Wolverine,'' Mosher replied.
We talked about poems and poets and novels and writing that
day in the car--and outside it, too.
At a covered bridge in Coventry, which Mosher noted with
appreciation was set afire after it received historic
designation, we talked about Kingdom colors and seasons,
poised for change. The novelist recited a poem by Robert
Frost: Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Switching tenor and tone, Mosher launched into a story of a
Depression era whiskey runner and friend who, fleeing the
law, missed the curve at the bridge and wound up in the
river. He hid in the river while the feds passed by on the
bridge above, satisfied his thirst, and finally made his way
to Barre.
Stories like these, which Mosher heard from Kingdom old-
timers and which still give him a kick, persuaded Mosher he
had found his living and writing place. (``Imagine if
Faulkner got here first,'' he said.)
Wise people of the Kingdom
Mosher found, in the woods and village, not just stories,
but wisdom and guidance and important friendship--in
particular from two people. As a pair, the two are as
improbable as Mosher's talking turtle or spire-climbing
tomboy.
James Hayford, who died in 1993 at age 79, was a
Montpelier-born poet who settled in Orleans, where he had a
teaching career. Hayford studied poetry with Robert Frost at
Amherst College, and captured the life of his village in
verse.
The memory of meeting Hayford, at a teachers' party in
Orleans, is as vivid as the day his kids were born, Mosher
said. Hayford, a scholar of Vermont, assured Mosher he would
find his voice as a novelist.
Frost had assured Hayford he would find his poet's voice,
Mosher said.
From Moore, a close friend, he heard real life stories of
traveling in a boxcar with a menagerie of animals, of cooking
in a lumber camp and waitressing in a dance hall. He heard a
different voice assure him he'd find his way.
After her first marriage fell apart, Moore allowed herself
to cry only after her sow's 13th--and final--piglet was born.
``Margie, my girl,'' she said to herself. ``What have you
done with your life?''
``And she told me that right when I was trying to figure
out what to do with mine,'' Mosher said.
In their ways, characterized by a fierce independence of
mind, Hayford and Moore are among the great people he has
known, geniuses to some degree, Mosher said.
``They could've gone anywhere, done anything and been
anything including president of the United States,'' Mosher
said.
``What they wanted to do was live in the Northeast
Kingdom.''
Mosher spoke wise words of his own that day from the front
seat. After asking if we'd like to stop for lunch at
McDonald's--holy moley! McDonald's in the land of the
localvores and I'm carsick!--Mosher said something I've
passed on to my daughter.
He told Glenn and me he's never known a person who pursued
an interest in the arts and regretted it.
But he could think of many people who turned away from
artistic interests and talents, and did.
Go back while you can
Teachers' pay wasn't so great in Orleans back in 1964,
Mosher discovered not long after the drunk brawlers guided
him to the school. By then, however, he'd had his first
Kingdom epiphany--and that was clearly worth something.
Still, the working plan was to teach a few years, save
money and go to graduate school. Was it possible on a salary
of $4,100, and less than that for Phillis? Sensing hesitation
from the teaching recruits from upstate New York, the
superintendent asked the couple if they fished. When they
answered yes, he took them to the Barton River.
The trout were jumping that spring day, making their way up
river.
``I looked at Phillis, she looked at me,'' Mosher said. The
sight of the fish jumping the falls persuaded them to move to
Orleans. They accepted the teaching jobs, and taught for a
few years before moving to California, where Mosher planned
to get his master's of fine arts in writing. He scrapped that
plan after eight days, long enough for a truck driver to pull
up to the Moshers' car at Hollywood and Vine in L.A., and
deliver a message on seeing their green license plates. ``I'm
from Vermont, too,'' the trucker driver
[[Page S6043]]
said. ``Go back while you still can.'' The stories Mosher
wanted to tell were rich and ready and far from Hollywood and
Vine. ``I cut myself off from all my material before I
understood it well enough to write about it,'' Mosher said.
They headed home; Mosher to write, Phillis to teach. ``We
knew right away we had found a gold mine of stories,'' Mosher
said. ``And we found out nobody had written them. I couldn't
believe it. It took me 15 years or so to begin to figure out
how to do it.''
Much of his first novel, ``Disappearances,'' was written in
the library/opera house in Derby Line, a granite and brick
building that straddles the U.S.-Canada border. Mosher would
place half his chair in the U.S., and half in the foreign
country, when he wrote. He sometimes got such a kick from his
own work, he created a disturbance. Or so the librarian
thought. ``I would burst into gales of laughter with each new
outrageous passage,'' Mosher recalled. `` ` Mr. Mosher,' he
was warned, if you can't control yourself, we will have to
ask you to leave.' ''
Keep the kids out of the mill
Talking in hushed library tones in the dual nation reading
room where he wrote Disappearances,'' Mosher said he was
amusing himself during the writing of the book. ``But I was
also in a state of desperation,'' he said. ``There's a degree
of desperation about the writing.''
Decades later, Mosher is amused by the response to
``Disappearances'' of Wallace Stegner, the famous novelist
who lived in Greensboro. Stegner read Mosher's book to write
a possible blurb for the cover.
Stegner, the story goes, didn't get too far before
crumpling up the manuscript and throwing it in the fire,
announcing: ``This book is a hymn to irresponsibility.''
``I didn't know enough to use it,'' Mosher said.
Mosher drove us past the place in Irasburg that would serve
as a springboard for perhaps his best known story: the house
where a black minister was living in the summer of 1968, when
his home was shot at. The racial shooting, which came to be
called the Irasburg Affair, informed Mosher's 1989 novel, ``A
Stranger in the Kingdom.''
We visited, too, a place that will figure in the book
Mosher is writing. His forthcoming novel also has a black man
as a central character: Alexander Twilight, believed to be
the first black person in the country to graduate from
college (Middlebury, 1823).
We walked outside the wonderful stone schoolhouse,
reminiscent of the Middlebury campus, Twilight designed and
built on a quiet plateau in Brownington. Twilight was
principal of the school, and a minister and state legislator.
``He had a dream,'' Mosher said of Twilight.
``There's no doubt about it.''
When the Moshers started teaching in Orleans, they were
instructed by the district superintendent to ``keep the kids
out of the mill.'' The administrator was referring to the
Ethan Allen furniture factory, which appears in Mosher's
novels as American Heritage.
Mosher, whose first apartment was next to the mill, said he
heard the words ``keep the kids out of the mill; keep the
kids out of the mill'' rise in rhythmic chant from the
plant's vents outside his window.
It is unlikely the long-ago superintendent, issuing that
directive, had in mind the manner by which Mosher would
fulfill the mandate. But any Kingdom kid who has found his
way to Mosher's novels, is transported to a place that is
true to the mill, and the river nearby, yet worlds apart and
away.
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