Loudon Young

Loudon Young died at his home in West Glover on Tuesday morning.  A proper obituary will appear in next week'sChronicle.

It would be impossible to do justice to Loudon's impact on this newspaper.  But the attempt must be made.

It began 34 years ago with a friendship.  On one side of the friendship was a 26-year-old dropout from Toronto who shared, with a few friends and family, some crazy ideas about subsistence farming in Vermont.

On the other was a 40-year-old farmer who grew up on a West Glover dairy farm, and took it over after his father's untimely death.

If you asked Loudon if he'd lived there all his life, he would surely answer, "Not yet." 

But now he has.

No one who knows Loudon will have the slightest difficulty understanding why I would pursue his friendship. 

Loudon's reasons must have been more complex. 

First of all, he was an enormously curious man.  If some people with long hair and one Jersey cow had moved to the farm next door, he wanted to know all about them. 

And the way to find out was to knock on the door on a dark afternoon in February and kill some time in conversation. 

I sometimes think that curiosity is the most humane impulse we humans share. 

A strong streak of curiosity will trump a lot of the more negative reactions we bring to encounters with people who are different from us. 

Loudon wanted to know what the hell we thought we were doing on the farm next door, and the only way to find out was to ask.  Maybe not ask directly; maybe just talk about this and that long enough for the answers to emerge on their own.

Loudon was an epic and brilliant talker.  When Harlan Burns sold farm equipment, he and Loudon could spend pretty much an entire day, between chores, talking in the dooryard, sustained only by Burnsie's cigars, Loudon's straight Camels, maybe a can or two of Schafer beer, and their mutual love of conversation.

Arlene, Loudon's wife, once confessed that on busy spring days when she thought Harlan might come by, she'd pack Loudon a lunch when he set off to fix fence, so he wouldn't be around when Harlan arrived.

The trouble with curiosity, once it's properly exercised, is that it leads to sympathetic understanding, which in turn gets in the way of things like fear and loathing. 

Loudon would put all this a lot more simply:  "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins."

That was one of his least original sayings.  On the morning after a party he might greet me with, "Fuzzy, your eyes look like two skunks' touchholes in a stone wall."

If we'd spent a day cutting pulp in the winter woods or putting up sugarwood, it might be, "One thing about working for yourself; you can work as hard as you like.  Isn't anybody going to try and stop you."

Or to that casual greeting, "Hey Loudon, what you up to?" the response would be, "If I worked for you, I'd have to tell you."

Another thing that made the friendship possible is a bit more complicated.  In the mid-sixies, most Americans saw themselves as embodiments of the straight-ahead, organization-oriented values that had swept them to such affluence in the post-war era.  When a substantial part of my generation rejected those values in the rudest possible way, most Americans were threatened, and reacted accordingly.

I don't think Loudon saw himself as part of the American mainstream.  He felt attached to a much richer culture, the farming culture of northeastern Vermont.  It was a culture he liked, and I think he also liked the sense that it was different from the national culture that had left it behind. 

So his new neighbors had a problem with mainstream values?  So what? 

If we insisted on heating our drafty house with wood, he could at least make sure we kept the chimney safely clean. He'd been heating with wood all his life, so far.

If we wanted to make hay with a team of horses, he could offer a word of advice now and then.  The chief problem, he said, is that the horses are smarter than you are.

Loudon had worked with a horse for years, but stopped after he was compelled to put it down with his own hand. The experience was so painful that he determined never to let it happen again.  When a tractor suffers its final breakdown, he noted, nobody has to shoot it.

We made exactly enough hay to feed the horses who made the hay, with a bit left over for Flash the cow. 

"If I had two cows," Loudon said one morning as he walked past the pasture where I was milking Flash into a bucket, "I'd sell one of them and buy a milking machine."

About three years into the friendship I told Loudon I was planning to start a newspaper, and asked what he thought of our chances.

Not much, he said.  Loudon was a pessimist in matters of economics, maybe because he was born in the worst of the Great Depression, in 1930, and grew to substantial size before he owned his first pair of shoes.

Nobody with any sense, he'd told me, tries to make a living around here on any one thing.  A newspaper struck him as a risky violation of that rule.

But a couple of weeks before the first Chronicle went to press, in late March 1974, Loudon showed up with a column.  It was on yellow legal paper, carefully transcribed in Arlene's fine hand. 

I was a little concerned.  In my experience, people who talk brilliantly had trouble getting that brilliance down in writing (and a lot of good writers hardly talk at all).

But Loudon wrote exactly as well as he talked, with an intimate style that kept your attention right down to the polite thank you "for reading mine."

The column appeared on page four of our first issue.  It is in this week's issue on the back page (of this section), where Loudon's columns ran for years.  We became known as the newspaper people read backwards. 

I didn't care about that, of course, as long as people read it.  And Loudon's column was one of the main reasons people did.

After a few years Loudon suggested he might try selling a little advertising.  He'd paid the merchants of Orleans County a lot of money over the years, he said, and maybe it was time to get some of it back.

By then, it came as no surprise that Loudon could sell ads very well.  I can't think of anything Loudon wouldn't have done well, if that amazing curiosity led him to it.

He sold ads so well that I tried to talk him into turning his cows over to his sons, and doing it full-time.

Loudon thought about that for a while, and decided against it.  The thing is, he said, he liked his cows. 

This from a man who had at least 85 terms for the common milk cow, none of them suitable for this newspaper.

But the fact was, Loudon liked cows so much that, against the best advice of his doctors and his family, he never stopped going to the barn in the morning to get chores started.

After producing a remarkable string of columns, week after week for years, Loudon stopped.

Surely, I pleaded, he could come up with something once in a while.

Loudon shook his head.  Writing is like shoveling cow manure, he said. When you get to the bottom of the pile, you stop shoveling. 

There might have been a Chronicle without Loudon's friendship and support.  There might not. 

That's much less important, on this sad Tuesday morning, than to say a simple Thank You, Loudon.  Thank you very much, indeed.  — C.B.