The question in last week’s Letter—How does the Story of Goose Landing begin?—was actually a trick question. How so? Underlying our hearing of the question we find our assumption of time’s direction of travel—past, present, future. But this place—in its wildness and abandonment, in the simple fact that the last human who lived here, Henry Schermerhorn, never married and left no descendants—mischievously and mysteriously upends the stepping stones on that familiar, linear path. Just yesterday, as my neighbor Marion and I led Trevor and Angus around the old Farmhouse—their daily training routine—the calves paused at a flat, rectangular stone set carefully atop smaller stones, creating a platform about eight inches off the ground. Marion says, “This looks to me like it was for arriving guests to step down out of their carriages.” And then I notice that this flat stone sits directly in line with the house’s front door, the one that nowadays often sits unused on old farmhouses because it faces the busy road rather than the driveway. In this case the “busy road” amounts to a grass track, lined on both sides by stone walls as it climbs the gentle hill to the farmhouse and barns with their grand old Maples and Black Walnuts before heading, still lined by stone walls, down into the woods. On the survey map handed to me at the closing a couple weeks back this partially-grown over grass track that bisects the 115-acre Farm is labeled “Vanornum Road—Qualified Abandonment, Sec. 234 of Hwy Law, 30 Oct. 1931.” Apparently the road was one of the main routes from Keeseville down to Lake Champlain and the village of Port Kent.
This is so wonderful Adam, I’m so enjoying your tales of old Henry, your awesome neighbour Dave and your two young oxen! Thank you