Vermont’s Best Kept Secret
We knew that Robert Frost had lived somewhere in these hills, but where? As we drove westward along Vermont Route 125, my mother and my brother simultaneously commented on how perfectly situated the Bread Loaf Campus of Middlebury College was, with its sturdy green-roofed yellow wooden buildings nestled at the foot of Bread Loaf Mountain. “We have to be getting close now,” I said as we drove deeper into the Green Mountain National Forest toward the hamlet[1] of Ripton. I knew that Robert Frost had been closely affiliated with the Bread Loaf School of English, where he had taught almost every summer and autumn since the 1920s and had been one of the co-founders of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.[2]
About a mile down the road on our right, we pulled over at the Robert Frost Wayside. I jumped out of the car like a detective searching for clues and walked over to a sign with a large glass case enclosing laminated pages upon which thousands of words were printed. There were no touch screens in sight. Passers-by glanced up at the sign but quickly lowered their eyes and departed intimidated, but not I. Oh no, I got out my reading glasses, determined to figure out where Robert Frost had lived once and for all!
When I noticed my mother standing next to me, I excitedly shared with her all I had learned from the imposing sign. Back in the prehistoric days, Vermont had been covered with ice and the mountain range was created by glaciers. Turns out Mom had been wearing her reading glasses too; she started telling me about guys like Nathaniel Chipman and Joseph Battell who were credited with establishing the State of Vermont, Middlebury College, and nearby towns.[3] Great, so we were both tied for the coveted title of “Little Miss Smarty-Pants,” but what did any of this stuff have to do with Robert Frost?
Then I noticed something on the sign saying that the grove of pine trees we were standing under had been planted as a tribute to Robert Frost so that families could enjoy picnicking in the shade just minutes away from the rustic cabin where the great poet had once lived. “So the cabin must be somewhere behind this grove of pines,” I said, “but where?” The sign did not tell you how to get there.
Vermont is famous for its law prohibiting billboards since 1968[4], but not as well documented is the near absence of signs and markers pointing out historical sites or places of interest to visitors. I was wondering if this absence was purposeful. Could it be that Vermonters don’t tell you about things unless you really care to know them?
I pondered this question while wandering back towards the car to get my camera and join my brother who was communing with nature across the road. As I popped open the trunk, a couple of old-timers in a car bearing a Vermont license plate pulled up alongside me. I decided to try an experiment with mental telepathy. I looked them in the eye, flashed them my best toothy grin and gave them a good old “Hey, how’s it going?” all the while thinking of ideas from the Constitution like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the hopes that they would know what I was looking for.[5]
What happened next gave me goosebumps. The man told me (in an incredible New England accent) that if we wanted to see the log cabin where Robert Frost lived and composed most of his poetry for the last 25 years of his life, just drive out of the parking lot and head eastward (the same direction from whence we came) but don’t go too far; just a few yards away, we’ll come to an unmarked road where we’re supposed to turn left, then drive a ½ mile up the hill and we’ll come to the Homer Noble farmhouse. His wife told me (in the same incredible accent, of course) that’s where we should park the car and walk about 100 yards farther uphill to the cabin, where we could take pictures of the exterior but we weren’t allowed inside for historic property preservation reasons.[6]
After following our local tour guides’ step-by-step directions, we arrived at the white wooden structure identified by a small blue plaque as the Homer Noble Farm, which is now owned and maintained by Middlebury College as a memorial to Robert Frost[7], who used the property as his “summer home” from 1939 to 1963. Remarkably, the plaque didn’t say a word about the modest log cabin up the hill where Frost really lived.
New York Times writer Robert D. Kaplan, described the approach to the cabin with perfectionistic accuracy: ”To see the cabin itself, walk about a hundred yards beyond the farmhouse up a wide, grassy lane bordered by birch and fir trees until you see an opening on your left that leads into a mountain dell where the cabin is situated.”[8] While Kaplan’s article beautifully captures the subtle splendor of Ripton’s physical geography known as “Robert Frost Country,” what’s missing from his narrative is any attempt to describe Frost’s internal landscape. Maybe this was a purposeful omission - not unlike Vermont’s historical markers - that forces you to solve the riddle of the poet’s soul yourself?
What on God’s green earth would have prompted Frost to quit his full-time position as a Professor of English at Amherst College in 1938, purchase this 150-acre parcel of farmland, and return to this teeny tiny log cabin every year? Sure, it was close to the Bread Loaf Campus and it had a lovely view of Mount Moosamaloo[9] but there had to be more to the story. . . something profoundly emotional.
The key to this mystery lies in the unfortunate truth that great changes in a person’s life are often prompted by great tragedy. In March 1938, Frost’s wife Elinor died after suffering a heart attack while recovering from breast cancer surgery. Subsequently, the poet’s life began to disintegrate. Middlebury students and faculty whispered about Frost “suffering a nervous breakdown” and witnessed him exhibiting uncharacteristically erratic behavior – such as the notorious incident where Frost interrupted Archibald McLeish’s poetry reading.[10]
It’s not surprising that Frost would have come unglued when you consider the circumstances. Back in the day, it was customary for wives to take on the role of secretary to their husbands, and if the husband was a big shot, the wife’s job was bigger too, not unlike the role of the executive assistant in today’s corporations. Although Frost deliberately maintained the lifestyle of the humble New England farmer, there’s no denying that he was quite the big shot. With 3 Pulitzer prizes under his belt as well as a plethora of other awards and honorary degrees[11], Frost received a never-ending stream of offers to teach at colleges and universities, invitations to publicly recite his poetry, and buckets of fan mail. Who was going to take care of all these mundane tasks now that Elinor was gone?
Besides the ruination of the practical aspects of his life, Elinor’s loss devastated Robert Frost on a deeply personal level. She started out as his high school sweetheart with an intellectual capacity arguably equivalent to his own; they were co-valedictorians when they graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892. After they were married in 1895, Elinor became more than just a spouse; she was Robert Frost’s best friend and served as the inspiration for most of his poetry. As a couple, they had 5 children together and shared a lot of memories, including an unsuccessful stint at farming in New Hampshire and living in England for several years before the outbreak of WWI, where they were introduced to contemporary British poets who greatly influenced Frost’s work.[12]
Knowing this back story, it’s understandable that keeping up a full-time job may have become unbearable for Frost while he was mourning Elinor’s death, and he might have made the prudent decision to resign from Amherst rather than risk embarrassing himself. But without a wife and a job to give him a reason to get up in the morning, why didn’t Robert Frost’s life continue to deteriorate in 1938? Instead of dying in the depths of despair, he ascended to further greatness by winning yet another (his 4th) Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1943 and still kicking 20 years later, Frost was invited to recite a poem at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1963.[13] Was Frost superhuman? Quite the contrary, he was all too human. It took a woman to stitch the pieces of his life back together and give him the impetus to keep on writing prize-winning poems.
Kay Morrison was the wife of Ted Morrison, a poet and Harvard professor who had been the Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference since 1932. Having first met Robert Frost back in 1918 when she was a student at Bryn Mawr College, Kay decided to pay a personal visit to Frost in July of 1938 when she heard that he was having a tough time coping with the loss of his wife. Kay’s goal was to persuade Frost to continue his participation in the writers’ conference, thinking that the intellectual stimulation might set him back on track. Kay’s powers of persuasion must not have been too shabby because Frost ended up smitten with her and proposed marriage, which she refused because she was already married and didn’t want to leave her husband. Kay did accept Frost’s offer to serve as his personal assistant, however, and served as the poet’s “manager, mistress, and muse” for the next 25 years of his life according to Frost’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers.[14]
Whether or not Frost and Morrison were lovers is still a matter of considerable debate, but they undoubtedly had a tight bond. Frost decided to purchase the Homer Noble Farm rented the farmhouse out to the Morrisons so that he could keep Kay close by. Although Frost slept in the log cabin and did all of his writing there, Kay ensured that he did not live a reclusive life. Not only did Frost take all of his meals with the Morrisons so that he would never have to dine alone, but Kay encouraged students from the Bread Loaf School of English to visit him. Peter Stanlis wrote nostalgically about the first time he and his classmates visited Frost at his cabin in the summer of 1939. They walked all the way to Ripton “loaded down with a half dozen bottles of ginger ale, a large bag of ice, and packages of ginger snaps.” Frost greeted the students warmly and invited them into the cabin where they sat in a semi-circle around the poet and discussed the distinction between “intellectual” and “rationalist” and other philosophical questions.[15] Kay must have had the wisdom to understand that personal interactions like these worked as an antidote to the isolation Frost was feeling, thereby staving off the depression he may have experienced had he been left to his own devices. And Frost must have appreciated Kay’s efforts because he dedicated A Witness Tree to her.
As I surveyed the landscape surrounding Frost’s cabin, I could see how this would be an ideal place to work through the stages of grief and eventually tap into the power within to create fresh new poetry like a bear emerging from its den after a long winter.
There was just enough peace and tranquility to provide solace and just enough activity going on in the natural world to provide subject matter for contemplation. It was hard not to feel a dreamy sense of lightness. While walking downhill towards the farmhouse, I watched my brother compose a photograph with a leaf that had fallen from a nearby maple tree and a baby pumpkin that someone had kindly left on a tree stump to serve as artistic inspiration, no doubt. I watched my mother wave a milkweed plant she had found growing in the meadow; she laughed like a little girl as the silky white seed strands burst out of the pods and drifted away in the wind. Suddenly my brother was Man Ray and my mother was Laura Ingalls Wilder. How did that transformation happen? I felt overwhelmingly grateful that those old-timers had read my mind and told us how to get to this magical place.
As we were getting into the car, a couple who looked like they had just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting informed us that if we were to walk about 100 feet up the hill behind the farmhouse, we would find the log cabin where Robert Frost had lived and wrote poetry. “It’s not on any of the signs,” they said, “because we only want people who are really interested to know about it.[16]” We looked at each other and smiled, feeling privileged to have been let in on Vermont’s best kept secret.
[1] In local terminology, Ripton is considered a “hamlet,” not a village. This article about neighbors concerned about people shooting guns in the National Forest is a case in point. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/neighbors-are-fired-up-about-target-shooting-on-national-forest-land/Content?oid=8501904. I’m not even going to try to explain the difference between a hamlet and a village. Ask me about the fine distinction between a shopping center, a shopping mall, and a strip mall though, and I could give you a Bryn Mawr dissertation.
[2] Established in 1926, the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference is considered “the oldest and most prestigious writers’ conference in the country” according to The New Yorker. For more information about what happens there, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_Loaf_Writers%27_Conference and http://www.middlebury.edu/bread-loaf-conferences/bl_writers
[3] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Chipman and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Battell
[4] For more on the VT anti-billboard law, see Nathaniel Gibson’s article in the Rutland Herald at http://www.nathanielrgibson.com/yes-we-have-no-billboards-rutland-herald-article/2012/03/13/
[5] I’ll bet you’re wondering why I didn’t just come out and ask them where the hell the Robert Frost cabin was like a normal person instead of trying out this wacky experiment. I’ve asked myself this question many times and I still can’t come up with a legitimate answer. All I know is that the wacky experiment worked and I ended up with a much more interesting story to share with you just by being my decidedly abnormal self.
[6] An alternative to driving that may be preferable is to walk from the Wayside parking lot up to the cabin and back. I suspect the reason why this local couple suggested that we drive has to do with their expertise at mental telepathy. My mother is a senior citizen who has trouble walking any kind of distance, especially uphill, a fact that would have been obvious to them.
[7] In 2008, Middlebury College established a Robert Frost Cabin Farm Preservation Fund and a Writer-in-Residence position, which involves a faculty member actually living in the farmhouse. For more details, see http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/archive/2008/node/111607
[8] From Robert Frost’s Vermont by Robert D. Kaplan, The New York Times (Sept. 1, 1991) at https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/01/travel/robert-frost-s-vermont.html
[9] For more about Frost’s connection to Ripton, see Allison Flint’s charming article at http://www.onenewengland.com/article.php?id=396
[10] Stanlis, Peter J., Conversations with Robert Frost: The Bread Loaf Period (2009).
[11] Frost won the Pulitzer in 1924 for New Hampshire, in 1931 for Collected Poems, and in 1937 for A Further Range. He went on to win the Pulitzer a 4th time in 1943 for A Witness Tree. Throughout his lifetime, Frost received more than 40 honorary degrees. https://www.biography.com/people/robert-frost-20796091
[12] For more about Robert and Elinor’s life together and the British poets that influenced Frost’s work, see https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-frost
[13] JFK had this to say about Frost: “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-frost
[14] Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996.
[15] Stanlis, Peter J., Conversations with Robert Frost: The Bread Loaf Period (2009). This insightful volume summarizes discussions between Stanlis and Frost that took place between 6 consecutive summers (1939-1944) when Stanlis was a student at Bread Loaf Graduate School of English, plus additional exchanges at Bread Loaf in 1961-1962.
[16] Robert Kaplan attests to the validity of our observation that Vermonters are intentionally secretive about the cabin’s location. When he asked the manager of the Bread Loaf Inn why the cabin and the road leading there were unmarked, this is the response he got: "We only want those people who want to see the cabin badly enough that they'll stop somewhere and ask directions." https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/01/travel/robert-frost-s-vermont.html
