Category: STORIES

We came back to Willoughby Lake when the world was coming to an end.

In March, the virus was spreading fast in ways that proved it had a sense of irony, turning a conference of Biogen executives into a superspreading bomb. Around the time I learned about the conference I was riding the T (Boston’s dilapidated subway system), packed in with other riders cheek to cheek. The train had broken down and we waited, breathing together nervously, for an hour. It was in that train that our escape to Willoughby took shape.

Within a week my wife, Nancy, and I packed both cars to the gills with pandemic essentials, plus our cat—Worf—named after the security officer on Star Trek, and we headed North on Route 93 at warp factor 5 towards a situation no-one had been in before: a little town in Westmore, Vermont, twenty miles from Canadian border, at the dawn of the new plague.

Technically we were going from our first home, in Lexington, Massachusetts, to our second home. But to me our place in Westmore by the shores of Willoughby Lake in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom transcends the ‘first’ or ‘second’ designation. It’s my center. The roots of my whole being. A resilient branch of my family tree.

In 1907, my great-grandparents, George and Nana Myers, bought 200 acres of land in Westmore for their dairy farm, a sloping blanket of lush fields and dense forests that connects at its curvy apex with Willoughby Lake. According to family lore, George didn’t want to buy any of the beachfront because he didn’t think his cows needed it. Nana told him, “If you think we’re buying that land but not the lakefront you’re out of your mind.” Nana was clearly the sharpest tool in the shed.

Thanks to Nana, what became Willoughby Farm—still owned by the family— includes two beaches with beautiful vistas of the lake and the surrounding mountains. There’s Mt. Pisgah and Mt. Hor to the south, one big mountain that had been cleaved in two by a glacier, now with the long deep lake separating their rocky cliffs. The ridge of Mt. Hor is called Whaleback by the locals, its shape mimicking a leviathan. Close to the tail of the whale rises Mt. Wheeler followed by waves of undulating hills. At night, the Milky Way is evanescent above all of this, so bright no flashlights are needed to walk barefoot across the fields.

George and Nana ran the dairy farm until the late 1920s. When a young Robert Frost came to Willoughby Lake to write poems for his first book, North of Boston, he asked Nana if he could pitch a tent in one of her fields, and she of course agreed. The family farmhouse, the Homestead, looks out on Willoughby Lake. Frost speaks of the lake in his poem, A Servant to Servants. In my mind’s eye I picture the woman in the poem as my great-grandmother, because in fact she may have been Frost’s inspiration.

“You take the lake. I look and look at it.
I see it’s a fair, pretty sheet of water.
I stand and make myself repeat out loud
The advantages it has, so long and narrow.
Like a deep piece of some old running river
Cut short off at both ends. It lies five miles
Straight away through the mountain notch
From the sink window where I wash the plates
And all our storms come up toward the house
Drawing the slow waves whiter and whiter and whiter.”

When the Great Depression hit, Nana and George found the dairy business was too tough a row to hoe.

Without new revenue, they’d lose the farm. So the part of the land that George never wanted became their savior. Soon, red and white rental cottages sprouted up along our shoreline like wild roses. For five decades, Willoughby Farm cottages were a summer home away from home for families all up and down the Eastern seaboard. When George and Nana passed on, my grandparents, Fred and Harriet Fish, took over.

Through the 1960s my family would spend summers at our cottage—The Cheerio—a small rectangle packed with me and my four older brothers. In 1969, my grandparents gave four acres of Willoughby Farm to my parents, Janet and Bill. Dad promptly had The Cheerio dragged on logs up onto the land and built a whole new house on top of it. Dad loved nature with a passion, so designed the house to let in as much of it as possible. The entire front of the two story structure is glass, south facing for passive solar heating. My parents added onto the house when they retired in the 1980s and we bought the property from their estate in 2009. But given its history, it’s never felt like a thing we owned, but rather something precious handed down — from Nana and George, to Fred and Harriet, to Bill and Janet, to us. Our two children, Abigail and Nicholas, and their children, are next in line.

The ancestry of Willoughby Farm made our retreat here seem like we were going back in time. The rest of the world was in 2020 trying to figure out if masks were required, while Trump flailed and whined. But we were with George and Nana during the Teddy Roosevelt administration. The 60s and 70s were—and are—equally here. The Hobbit Hole my dad enlisted my brothers and I to dig in the early 70s (by hand) is still at the Western edge of our field, although the only creatures living in it today are bears and woodchucks.

My parents named the house The Hymn in honor of my grandmother who loved to sing them.

Gram was a woman of faith who lived well into her 90s. When she was very old and brittle, and always in pain, she often said her belief in the hereafter took the pain away. That and her love of family sustained her.

The Hymn is like a museum of family things. Wherever my parents traveled to they brought home ceremonial masks from different cultures and decorated the walls with them. Fierce African masks glare across the room at masks from China. Books are everywhere, with eclectic modern titles (The Buying of Congress, Mean Genes, the 911 Report) mixed in with books that belonged to my dad’s grandfather, Albert Kidder Page, who’d been a doctor in Boston in the late 19th century. Livingstone’s and Stanley’s illustrated Travels in Africa can be found snuggled next to The Joy of Sex. Birds of the Northeast and The Complete Guide to Ferns live in harmony with the complete works of Charles Dickens. A dark chestnut-toned antique dresser stands next to a groovy 60s-era chair with sleek blond wood and fluffy cushions. A chalkboard in the master bedroom has been preserved with my dad’s notes. One reads, “The future is friendly because it is us.” A chart shows the date of dad’s birth, 1920, stretching out through the decades to a question mark and the word “finis.” As if his life was a French film (his last scene was in 2011).

And then, of course, there are the ghosts.

People tell ghost stories to send chills up our spines. But here at Willoughby Lake the ghosts are a natural and comforting presence. While I’m at the beach, I might see out of the corner of my eye a fleeting image of my grandfather—always ‘Gramp’ to me—in khaki shirt and pants and cap, pushing a small red wooden wheelbarrow piled with brush down to the bonfire at the water’s edge.

My cousin, Sara, stays at the Homestead, and she hears things all the time that can’t be explained. My great-grandfather, George, died from a hernia in the Homestead stretched out on the dining room table. His wife, Nana, died on the stairs. Some echo of them remains. When Sara speaks of the ghosts she shrugs and says, “They’re good ghosts. They love us. So I’m not afraid of them.”

There was the night I was talking at the Hymn with Nancy about a story I’d read that chronicled just how often 4:00 am—the witching hour—appears in literature. Nothing ever happens at 2 am or 5 am. It’s always 4:00 am. Sure enough, at exactly 4:00 am the following morning the 1950s era black telephone on my father’s old desk in our bedroom rang. When I answered it there was total silence, and I hung up. The phone rarely rings at our house, and certainly never in the middle of the night. When we have a toast before family dinners we make sure to mention my parents because we sense they are there with us (although since the phone incident I haven’t mentioned 4 am).

I can understand why these spirits never left. It’s a really nice place to stay. Despite the late May snowstorms, and the swarms of black flies the size of hummingbirds in June, to those who’ve lived at Willoughby Lake it’s heaven. Or, maybe they all went to heaven initially and decided Willoughby was preferable. It wouldn’t surprise me if Robert Frost came back, too; most nights he’s still scribbling in his tent by lantern light.

When we arrived in March there was snow on the ground.

The weather ranged from cold and wet to colder and frozen. The news was not good. Mario Cuomo and other governors were begging for protective gear and test supplies. Trump kept calling everyone an idiot. Dr. Fauci told us we had to flatten the curve—not that we wouldn’t die anyway—but at least we wouldn’t die all at once. And every day I’d look at the buds on the lilacs along our deck for any sign they’d grown; they hadn’t. This fearful, frigid stasis lasted for months. After one May snowstorm, Nancy looked out at three inches of the white stuff and sighed, “Really?”

One week after that storm, when the snow had melted and the lilac buds had actually grown slightly in the growing sunshine, I burned the piano. I don’t think I lost my mind. But you can be the judge.

The piano had been rotting outside by the garage for five years. A family from hell had rented our house, and while they had promised to take their beat-up old Baldwin upright with them when they finally left, they did not. This couple—a school superintendent in Vermont and an out of work metal worker with a gun collection—had left other things behind as well, including bent spoons for cooking heroin (hidden under layers of ash in the fire pit in the field in front of our house, mixed in with shards of one of my mother’s antiques and other things they had broken while in our house). I hated that damn piano because every time I looked at it I was reminded of the dirt bag drug addicts who had turned the house into a squalid pit. So I’d dragged it out by the garage and left it there, meaning to have it hauled away but somehow never getting to it. The piano lay on its side, covered with snow in winter, and each spring slightly more decayed and sad.

In my family, musical instruments have always been treated with reverence.

Our music lifts us up out of our day-to-day worries. And here was this fucked up old piano rotting next to the house, a trashy reminder of the fools who may have pretended to play it, or tried to force their unfortunate children to play it. The instrument of Beethoven and Chopin, of Joplin and Joel, lay like a dead thing.

I think the act of ignoring it was a way to ignore my fury at the renters. I could jest that their staying for nearly a year in our family’s treasured heirloom was no big deal. A way of ignoring the mother’s excuse that she couldn’t pay the rent because her eight-year-old son was really sick in the hospital. The doctors, she said, just couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and it wasn’t looking good. This was told to us when, in fact, the kid was perfectly fine and at home. If you can call a kid fine who’s parents are evil, heartless addicts who left loaded rifles stacked by the open door as their mangy dog wandered in an out, and filth accumulated in the yard.

So, something in me snapped that day and I decided it was time to finally get rid of the piano.

The dump would have charged me by the pound to dispose of it, but all the metal in the sounding board (the heavy part) could be recycled. First, I pounded the piano with a sledgehammer to knock all the wood off the metal. The cacophony filled the air and surely reached across Willoughby Lake and beyond. The wood pieces flew off, bit by bit. Left behind was the heavy soundboard still held within a frame of wood I could not dislodge with the hammer. This chunk I lifted up to rest on its side, and while it was too heavy to carry I was able to jigger it corner by corner with great effort over to the fire pit, where I tipped it over with a final bang. I stacked kindling on top and lit it. Soon it was like a funeral pyre, the body of the piano flaming red and yellow and orange, the black smoke billowing up to the blue spring sky. The air held just a hint of the sweet smell of things beginning to grow, now mingled with harsh gusts of burning wood smoke. Not just any wood. A piano for God’s sake.

Outside that field, the world was still going to hell. But perhaps a bit more slowly than before. We all had started wearing our masks. There were initial signs—very preliminary of course like those lilac buds that were just starting to emerge from sleep—that the number of deaths in hard hit places like Italy had started to fall. The term “maximum death” had entered our vocabulary. There was news that some COVID-19 patients were arriving at hospitals with oxygen levels so low the doctors were mystified that the patients were even conscious, yet many were chatting away and didn’t need to be put on the dreaded ventilators. Somehow we were going to be ok. We were all going to be ok.

I stood by the fire and nudged pieces of wood into the flames to hurry them on. My grandfather stood there with me, his hands folded behind his back as he stared down into the flames at the gleaming gold piano soundboard turning black in the smoky heat. My father and mother sat in lawn chairs with their feet extended to get warmed by the fire. George and Nana were nearby, raking hay into piles. My grandmother—my Gram—lover of hymns, began to sing Amazing Grace and we all joined in.

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
was blind, but now I see.”

In the post-World War II economic boom, America mass-produced many things, from cars to TVs and washing machines, but making babies was our most prodigious accomplishment. My parents gleefully did their part in the baby boom production effort, with five of us boys born over an eleven-year period.

I use a euphemism like ‘production’ in relation to baby making because, like everyone else, I can’t bear to think of my parents having sex. But for the purpose of this story there’s simply no avoiding the word. My parents must have had plenty of sex, and my dad in particular found great joy in it for as long as he possibly could—certainly extending into his later life as a grandfather.

My mom, at that point, was not so interested; I know this because she would proclaim her disdain for sex publicly at the dinner table.

“I did my duty plenty,” she said, eyeing dad with unbridled disgust.

Just how interested was my dad in sex? After he passed away at the age of 92, I found out.

I was going through his extensive library one day and came upon a copy of Masters & Johnson’s book, Human Sexual Response, and as I leafed through the pages I was surprised when a letter popped out, and even more surprised when I discovered it was written to my dad from William H. Masters himself. The masthead shows that it was sent from the REPRODUCTIVE BIOLOGY RESEARCH FOUNDATION in St. Louis, Missouri.

The letter reads as follows.

“Dear Mr. Page:

We are writing in response to your letter of inquiry dated January 19, 1975.

Regretfully, the monograph discussed in the text HUMAN SEXUAL INADEQUACY has not been published to date.

Sorry we can’t be of help at this time.

Most sincerely,

W. H. Masters, M.D.”

I stood in dad’s library holding the letter, stunned and curious.

My parents were 53 years old in 1975, probably at an age when dad was still raring to go in the bedroom. So, did he reach out to William Masters—in 1975 already considered a pioneering legend in the field of human sexuality—in a desperate attempt to fathom why my mom didn’t want to ‘do it’ any more? Or did he secretly have doubts about his own sexual abilities?

And perhaps the biggest question: What exactly did William Masters not know about sexual inadequacy, or what did he choose not to share with my dad?

The book that held the letter so tight for fifty years did not include any overt references to sexual inadequacy.

Although there were intriguing chapters such as (and I’m not making this up) “The Artificial Vagina—ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY.”

I can only imagine what my mom’s response would have been if she had learned that dad was reading the chapter titled THE REPRODUCTIVE VISCERA—THE VAGINA (page 233). Surely any desire she might have felt to ‘do her duty’ would have jumped out the window and kept on running.

Some mysteries are better off not solved.

ADDENDUM: My wife, who is my toughest and wisest critic, said of this story, “I like it, but what does it have to do with being a good grandpa?” The answer is that I think that we as grandparents are often in long-term relationships, and we can learn a few things about how our parents worked through their marital issues—or didn’t. Instead of having a typical blog that offers advice (“Five tips being a good grandpa!”), I’d much rather tell stories that are rich with the ambiguities of life and let readers draw their own conclusions.

To fully appreciate this true tale, it’s helpful to understand my late father’s love of nature.

William Page, “Bill” to his friends, experienced the deep woods as a kind of church. The soaring birch and maple trees arcing over his path in the forests of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom formed the spires of a cathedral, the deep green moss and ferns beneath were holy velvet, the gurgle of water sprouting down the brooks were hushed conversations on weighty matters, the hoof prints of deer a sure sign that he was on the right track. The woods were wonderfully spiritual, without a trace of dogma. When I went on hikes with him, he’d often pause to examine a leaf or a curious formation of rocks.

Dad encouraged his many grandchildren, including my Abigail and Nicholas, to stop and listen to nature, because only nature could tell you everything you needed to know.

This was the man, who, at the age of 75, decided one crisp fall day to hike Mount Wheeler (solo) in the town of Westmore, Vermont, overlooking Lake Willoughby. In a land of craggy mountains, Wheeler is especially rocky and definitely not a place for anyone afraid of heights. At its base, the trail flows like a stream up through a stand of sapling maples, but soon a hiker is confronted by cliffs. The white trail markers on trees are replaced by faint and infrequent smudges of white on boulders. Wet moss often spans across a stretch of rock, making the “trail” a challenge for 25-year-olds and grandfathers alike.

After an hour or so of near vertical ascent, the intrepid hiker is rewarded with a long expanse of open rock above the tree line, with only short evergreens here and there clinging to small pockets of earth.

And it was here along this ridge that my dad hiked, filling his lungs with fresh smelling Vermont air, seeing below the broad undulating valley in peak foliage, and a few miles to the West the five-mile stretch of Lake Willoughby bracketed at its Southern edge by Mounts Pisgah and Hor. No doubt he was wearing his customary khaki shorts and red-checkered flannel shirt. His face was long and thoughtful, broad grey eyebrows like the wings of a seagull above brown eyes that sparkled as he hummed a folksong.

Dad paused atop an outcropping of rock along a cliff near the summit, a kind of pulpit, and suddenly, as he put it, “felt the call of nature.”

He unzipped his pants and unleashed a high yellow arc of pee that projected out and down. He followed the arc as it splashed against a rock twenty feet below that was of such a dark green hue it almost looked black in the shade of a pine.

The rock began to move.

Always attuned, as I’ve said, to the wonders of nature, my dad was quite surprised and not a little baffled that a mere stream of piss would make a boulder move, but when the rock stood up the realization that it was a black bear—a really angry black bear—gave him a tremendous jolt.

A casual observer, perhaps an owl perched in a nearby tree, would have been hard-pressed to determine who was more surprised, the bear being splashed by this red-checkered demon above, or my dad, who’s hair stood up and turned a whiter shade of grey.

The growling bear started up the cliff towards my dad.

You don’t have to be an MIT-trained engineer like my dad to know this bear was “pissed.”

Dad ran.

In fact, I think he set a land speed record for his age group as he raced down Mt. Wheeler, stopping only briefly to glance back in terror to see if the bear was on his trail, and not thinking to zip his pants until he arrived, safely, back home.

My dad told this story often, making his grandchildren peel with laughter until their sides hurt.

There is no moral to it, no scripture carved in stone. But I suppose we can draw our own conclusions about the wonder of nature, the importance of knowing the difference between rocks and bears, and why staying in shape in your 70’s is a very good idea.

#northeastkingdom #grandparents Proud #dontpissonabear