The next morning I got up, got dressed, pulled the firewood off the sugarhouse wall one log at a time, and lifted out the little tin box Lyle hid there in 1998, the year a man from the state first came up our hill with papers, and inside was the thing that turned the power company around.
The lineman had pointed at my oldest maples and told me the transmission line needed a hundred-foot easement, that the trees and the sugarhouse had to go, that if I did not sign the state would give them eminent domain and take it for less, that I could not boil sap forever at my age.
He did not know what Lyle did after the last time somebody came for this hill.
In 1998, when a man from the state first walked up here eyeing our woods, my husband placed the entire sugarbush into a permanent conservation easement with a Vermont land trust, recorded forever, which legally protects the maples and the sugarhouse and makes running a transmission corridor straight through them all but impossible.
Lyle built that sugarhouse board by board, and he was not about to let anybody take the hill where we boiled sap all night every March. So he did the patient, permanent thing. He worked with a land trust and put the whole stand under a conservation easement, the kind that runs with the land and binds every future owner and stares down even the power company, and he sealed the papers in a tin box behind the firewood where the woodsmoke would keep them dry.
A conservation easement held by a land trust is not a fence a utility climbs easily. The protected status forces the line onto another route, and the land trust itself has lawyers whose whole job is stopping exactly what that lineman threatened.
I called the land trust the same afternoon, and the woman there pulled our file and said, Mrs. Corliss, we have been the co-holders of this easement since 1998, and we will fight any taking of these trees with everything we have. You are not alone on that hill.
When the lineman came back, I did not argue. I handed him a copy of the recorded conservation easement and the land trusts name and I said, Ill think on it, I told you. Ive thought. My husband protected this sugarbush permanently in 1998, and a land trust holds it with me. Route your line somewhere that isnt legally conserved forest. These maples are staying, and so is the sugarhouse.
He read it a long time, and the company, once its lawyers met the land trusts lawyers, moved the corridor to the far side of the valley.
You cant boil sap forever at your age, he had told me. Maybe not. But the trees will boil for whoever comes after me, because Lyle made them permanent. I sugar every March still, with the neighbors boys, and the sugarhouse smells like woodsmoke and syrup, which is to say it still smells like him, on a hill no power company will ever clear.