Published January 7, 2009

Book review

Perimeter Check: Essays from Vermont’s Upper Kingdom, by Paul Lefebvre, published by Beck Pond Books, 170 pages, $14.95.

Reviewed by Howard Frank Mosher

In 1964, when I first came to the Northeast Kingdom as a 21-year-old teacher, fresh out of school myself, what I discovered was a gold mine of unwritten stories. For the past decade or so, Paul Lefebvre, one of Vermont’s best journalists and writers, has been entertaining readers of the Barton Chronicle by recounting many of these Northeast Kingdom stories in a regular column entitled “Yours from the Perimeter.”

I’m delighted to report that Mr. Lefebvre’s columns from 1997-2004 have now been published in a wonderful new collection.

Perimeter Check: Essays from Vermont’s Upper Kingdom is one of the best books about place that I’ve ever read. But where, precisely, is the Upper Kingdom? I tend to think of it as the wild and beautiful country stretching north and east from Island Pond to Canada and the Upper Connecticut River. Mr. Lefebvre, who was born and raised in Island Pond, defines it as follows:

“The Upper Kingdom is often seen as a desolate place with tracts of big woods spotted with beaver bogs and bracketed by backroads that seemingly go nowhere. It is where people come to hunt moose and spend deer season in hunting camps with outhouses and wood-burning cast iron cookstoves that once graced the kitchens of old farmhouses. It is where people come to put themselves in touch with a different, more rural part of Vermont, a place where they might rub shoulders with the past. Or put flowers on their ancestors’ graves. Or start a commune on the cheap. Admittedly, it is also where people come who have no other place to go.”

The Upper Kingdom, as Mr. Lefebvre describes it, is a place where boggy trout streams sometimes disappear underground, hunting rifles are passed down from generation to generation like birthrights, drinking water may still be piped from the spring to the house through eight-foot-long, hollow “pump logs,” and aging mufflers are wired onto hundred-dollar rigs with coat hangers. Radio reception was so spotty in the remote Island Pond of Mr. Lefebvre’s youth that Boston Celtic games “faded in and out with such alarming frequency that no victory was ever as sweet as it might have been. A fast break would disappear into silence, irretrievably lost as if fallen through a hole in the ice. Jump shots would varnish in the air, and if a fight should break out — like the one that occurred one night between Jungle Jim Loscutoff, Boston’s best hatchet man, and Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Sixers — there would be no telling who was up or down.”

And then there’s winter in the Upper Kingdom. No one has ever written better about our North Country winters, with their maddeningly frozen water lines and cars and roads. Mr. Lefebvre absolutely revels in describing what it’s like to climb into a pickup on a forty-below morning when the driver’s seat is frozen “as rigid as a church pew,” play a Kingdom version of flies and grounders called “scrub” on an April ball diamond lined with banks of snow, and everything and anything having to do with getting up a winter’s supply of firewood:

“I don’t know if I get my fondness for fireplaces from my aunt or not. From her, though, I learned the charm of setting in a fire — crumpled newspapers, criss-crossed layers of kindling topped off by a piece or two of hardwood too big to break across your knee — so all you had to do at night after coming over the threshold was check to see the damper was open and light the paper with a match. Presto. The room would become friendly and warm.”

Most of all, Mr. Lefebvre’s Upper Kingdom is defined by the people who have lived there. Surely, they must be among the most independent-minded individuals left on the face of the earth. My favorites? Well, there’s Little Eddy, “one of the first traders in the Upper Kingdom to deal in dented-can goods,” whose store in a converted one-room schoolhouse looked like “a scene out of the Great Depression.” Then there was the tough-as-nails straw boss Paul worked for summers on the railroad. One rainy morning up in the Wenlock Woods the old foreman drew a line in the dirt with the toe of his boot. “All those who want to work, step over that line,” he roared out. “All the rest, go home.”

I was especially intrigued by Irving Fishbone Stevens, the itinerant peddler of “Irving’s Fly Dope” and former “King of the Hoboes.” Not to mention Olga Zagorodni, Island Pond’s Russian-immigrant mushroom picker, and Chief War Eagle and his son, Don Eagle, both one-time professional wrestling world champions, who lived on the shore of nearby Spec Pond and taught Indian ways to the town kids.

At the heart of Perimeter Check is Mr. Lefebvre’s own extended family of Upper Kingdom relatives and friends. It’s no coincidence that the book is dedicated to Paul’s parents: his father, Teddy, a wise and witty railroad man who loved to go to deer camp but preferred to “run the frying pan” than hunt; and his schoolteacher mother, Evelyn, whom he describes as “something of an incongruity to these parts, a native who didn’t fit. She disliked guns and hunting, mistrusted men in pickup trucks, abhorred farming and animals, and hated the ignorance that accompanies poverty.”

As a young draft resister during the Vietnam era, Paul Lefebvre was offered an opportunity to move to Canada. At the risk of going to jail for his personal beliefs, he chose to remain in his beloved Upper Kingdom. Here is how he explained his decision to a friend:

“I can’t leave. I just can’t do it. Not the place where I was born and raised. It’s in my blood. Can’t you see? I can’t do it. I’ve got two sets of grandparents buried [in Island Pond]. It’s always been home to me. It’s the only absolute I know, and I’m not going to let the government drive me out. Look, Canada might be all right for some, but it won’t work for me. That’s all.”

It’s possible that a reader from, say, New York City or California might wonder why, for all of its unspoiled beauty, anyone in their right mind would choose to live year-round in a place as out-of-the-way and unsparing as Paul Lefebvre’s Upper Kingdom. Speaking personally, Perimeter Check has reaffirmed for me why I’ve lived in the Kingdom for upward of half a century, and hope never to have to live anywhere else.

Thanks, Paul. Keep those columns coming.

Howard Mosher, who lives in Irasburg, is the author of many novels and short stories set in the Northeast Kingdom, including Disappearances, Where the Rivers Flow North, and Stranger in the Kingdom.