Field Notes —

Reclaiming A Patch Of New England Sky

By Curtiss Clark

I would love to watch a time-lapse film of the hill where we live from the day the first settler decided to farm its sunny southern slope to the present. I know our house was built in 1790, but what about the barns? Was a shelter for animals built first? Who cleared the land of trees, and whose poor back strained to build the five-foot by five-foot 300-foot-long stone wall along the west side of the property? When did the crossing paths in the woods become the crossroads at the southwest corner of our dooryard? And who were the characters who cobbled together the various hodgepodge constructions that constitute our barns today? I have a lot of questions that a two-century fast-forward film would answer.

These questions arose for me as our back porch fell. Not of its own accord — though that day was near — but with the help of a couple of carpenter brothers who show up at our place periodically to keep things upright or, in this case, to pull them down when the cause is lost. The screened-in porch was the size of a living room. It was attached to the back of the house, I’d say sometime 40 or 50 years ago, and it sheltered innumerable summertime porch suppers over the decades. Its wobbly wooden underpinnings had rotted with the help of poor drainage behind the house, and it had to come down. We replaced it with a much smaller and simpler open-air overhang that returned the house to its original profile and created a terrace for plants and people in the footprint of the old porch.

Kate and I now spend a lot of time sitting out there in the lengthening summer evenings, enjoying a benefit we never thought about when we undertook this residential subtraction. We now have a beautiful piece of sky we didn’t have before. Birds, planes, treetops, and clouds make full use of it by day, while bats stir up static in the shadows at night, sparking constellations into view.

Without humans, the sky would be a paltry thing in this part of the country. I get a view of New England’s prehistoric sky from our hammock, which is strung between two hundred-foot spruces in a quarter-acre stand of trees planted decades ago as part of a Boy Scout project, I’m told. It is possible to swing there in the breeze, supine in the sibilant murmurings of the spruces’ nostalgic boreal invocations to Presque Isle, or is it Sebago, or Ossipee? I can never quite hear. But the sky is as spiked and splintered as it sifts down through the branches.

The old forests were stingy with light. It took men and women unafraid of bone-bruising labor to work those spikes and splinters first into small patches with some discernable dimension, and then to quilt those patches into cropped vistas of successive clearings in tight association with vertical rock and steep pitches of round-topped hills.

Even after all these years, there is a lot of competition for the New England sky, except along the coasts, where the sky opens up to swallow whole harbors, bays, sounds, and even the sea itself. But inland, the sky is constantly being jostled and is reframed in a new pose around every corner. It is not like the Great Plains, where everything east of the Rockies from the Dakotas to Texas is smothered by sky, and the landscape has to do something astonishing, like the otherworldly Badlands, just to get noticed. In New England, the settlers first had to pull the sky out of the trees before they started pulling the stones out of the fields.

So we are counting our new patch of sky as a home improvement wrought by deconstruction rather than construction. Rafter by rafter, post by post, the porch obstructions were pulled away to reveal an ethereal addition, renewed by every sunrise, scrubbed by every storm, the quintessence of climate control. Fast-forward another 200 years, the sky will still be there, as good as new and guaranteed for eternity.

(This and more than 65 other Field Notes essays are available at www. field-notebook.com.).