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In Jericho, Vermont, retirees Norman and Dorothy Gnagey have found a respite from their worldly adventures in a quaint country home surrounded by a spread complete with pole beans, walnut trees, and a goose named Goosie.
Norman and Dorothy Gnagey live in a white country house on a dirt road in Jericho, Vermont. It is a quiet road. Only four homes are perched next to it, all in view of each other. Speed on the road is limited as much by potholes as it is by the chickens, geese, and ducks that waddle across it at all times of day.
As we walk down the road towards the Gnageys’ home, it is clear that it is from their yard that these animals have strayed. A gray duck ahead of us rustles through the grass and easily manages to find a hole in the fencing that separates the Gnagey property from the road. Quacks. Shrills. Cuckoos. A chorus greets his return to the pen.
A healthy spruce tree towers over the front yard. Between it and the road, where we stand, is another coop, this one on wheels and empty. Its residents are milling about through the flowers against the house.
The plump little chicks – brown, white, and black – follow us to the front door behind the spruce tree.
Looking to the right, we see a natural garden of sorts extending fifty feet away from the house. Perhaps we best call it a spread, for it is held in only by the forest of birch to the rear, a mild-mannered fence, and the dirt road.
Affixed to the garage to the left is a sign, which says, “Pennsylvania Farmers Association.”
“Come on in,” says an unhurried voice from within, after we knock on the front door. Norman and Dorothy are expecting us. Inside, a stairway connects the two levels of the simple home. At the top, Norman waits, smiling. As we rise to meet him, he hunches over and extends a hand to greet us. Besides his posture and wispy hair, he has aged well. To the contrary, his eyes beam a youthful intensity most of us lose halfway to his 86 years of age.
We follow him around the corner to the couple’s living room where Dorothy stands, equally exuberant. We all sit, Dorothy in an upholstered chair, Norman and us on a couch covered in a fabric of marigolds.
Lying on the coffee table in front of us there is the Daily American and New Republic, which are two newspapers that the Gnageys receive from Pennsylvania, National Geographic, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week, another newspaper folded to the funnies, and a thick, ornately decorated copy of the King James Bible. There is also a brochure for a travel company. “Natural habitat, Adventures, The world’s greatest natural expeditions.”
Norman opens the Bible with a steady hand. It has a musky, pleasant smell, one of the faithful. The couple received it as gift when they married in 1948.
“We don’t open it as often as we should,” says Norman. “You could spend a half hour a night reading it.”
As he holds the heavy Bible in his lap, paging through it devoutly, he reads aloud certain parts of the text.
“Dorothy refers to it much more than I do.”
“Oh, here’s one,” he continues after pausing on a certain page. “The two great commandments. Of course, everyone knows those.”
The couple attends Jericho Congregational Church just two miles down the road almost every Sunday, but they sometimes drive to hear their daughter Anne play the organ at Richmond Congregational Church.In the living room, a display case stands containing various items. Dorothy rises to introduce them. Her hands pass over the model Sphinx, a conk and crab, and the other treasures, looking instead for something else. “Queen Nefertiti must be downstairs,” she relents.
We follow her, as she walks downstairs. To a greater extent than Norman, Dorothy has defied age. She moves quickly and upright in her plain, white walking shoes. Her skin is soft, and has retained the firmness and lively color of youth.
Downstairs, we walk up to another display case, this one larger than the one upstairs.
“Good night, it was $500 for that case,” exclaims Norman, whose tardiness downstairs is explained by his newly donned shoes.
Dorothy hands us the pride and joy of their collection: a carved emu egg from Australia. Aboriginals carved the granite black egg, revealing an ivory white depiction of the flightless bird, with its giant wings unfolded. As we study it, Dorothy smiles proudly like a child whose mother is admiring a drawing, about to attach it to the refrigerator with a magnet.
She carefully takes the emu egg back from us and hands it to Norman, who admonishes her for taking it out in the first place.
Next, after the emu egg is safely back in the maple-trimmed case, Dorothy hands us a curious-looking metal model car. It is from Madagascar, the couple tells us. The car is made of a white aluminum can. Lait concentrè sucrè is spelled out in blue bold lettering around the top and doors. Bottle tops serve as wheels. The windows are cut crudely out of the metal.
Madagascar, Kenya. Thailand, India, Bhutan, Nepal. The Galapagos Islands and La Selva Jungle. China, Hong Kong. South Africa, Botswana, Victoria Falls. Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe Islands. Egypt. Germany, Poland, Czech Republic. Brazil, the Amazon, Machu Pichu. Moscow, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Sea of Okhotsk, Japan. Alaska, the Bering Strait. Antarctica, Patagonia. Bermuda. Canada, the Hudson Bay, Lake Itasca. Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti. Hawaii.
The Gnageys have traveled everywhere.
On the way back upstairs, we see a dramatic picture in a black frame on the wall of the landing. A polar bear, his fur stained red with blood, is devouring a seal on an ice floe.
Dorothy snapped the picture from an old, rusty-hulled Russian ship. The crew had not seen a polar bear eating its catch in the seventeen years they had trawled the waters, Dorothy remembers them saying to her that bright day in the Bering Strait between Russian and Alaska.
“Oh, he worked so hard, that bear, hauling it onto the ice,” she recalls. “After he checked that it was dead, he put his head down and jumped into the water. He came back up clean, he’d gone to wash his hands, you see.”
Dorothy settles again in the upholstered chair. Norman takes a seat next to us on the marigold-adorned sofa. On the coffee table, resting on a stack of newspapers is a bowl of blueberries that the Gnageys grew themselves.
“We have blueberries on our cereal every morning,” says Norman, starting to explain one of the secrets that have kept them going around the world for so long. “And there’s that other stuff, too. What’s that called Dot?”
Norman tries to explain to Dorothy what he’s talking about, though it is not entirely clear what that is.
“It’s on the table in the kitchen,” Norman suggests. Dorothy walks into the kitchen and returns cradling a canister of powdered soy protein in her hands.
“I don’t like it, but it’s good for you,” continues Norman. “But good night, it would take us weeks to finish this can.”
Dorothy takes over. “First, I put a handful of the blueberries in the bowl, then a few spoons of the powder.” She acts out her morning breakfast routine with her hands and an imaginary spoon. “Then I pour on skim milk.”
“You might as well drink water,” Norman cuts in. “Only 2 percent for me.”
“We both grew up on a farm, Norman and me,” says Dorothy. “We had dairy cows on our farm, but the milk truck didn’t fetch the milk until eight or nine o’clock. They were kept in ten gallon tanks…”
“You know, the ones everyone uses to prop up their mailboxes these days, all rusted out by now,” adds Norman.
“I knew I wasn’t allowed to do it, but I woke up early one morning, about five, and thought, ‘I’m going to drink some cream,’” continues Dorothy, her eyes glimmering as if she were six years old again.
“I got a cup, popped the top off the can. Oh, it was good. Oh, I was sick after that. Oh, how I was sick.
“Never after that, never again was I tempted by cream. Only that once.”
Norman and Dorothy grew up only five miles apart from each other in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, which is on the state’s border with Maryland.
“I tried to ask Dorothy and her sister down to the drugstore after the movies, but Dorothy refused,” remembers Norman.
“It was after church, Norman,” Dorothy reminds him.
“So I moved on, decided that there were more fish in the sea.”
“I felt sort of guilty for doing that to him, so I wrote him an apology letter a while later,” says Dorothy.
“When I got that letter, I figured that I had better reply,” explains Norman. “I didn’t want to be rude. And so the letters continued until we liked each other.”
After they married, the Gnageys took a sabbatical of a honeymoon. Over the course of seven weeks, they drove to California and back, stopping where they pleased. Five-dollar-a-night hotels were their lodging, while food from the grocery store was their sustenance. In travel, and in each other, they found enjoyment.
“Anyone in their right mind wouldn’t go there, all there is, is snow and ice,” says Norman, referring to Antarctica. Regardless, the Gnageys flew to South America and took a ship onward to the frozen continent in 1991.
“We were acting like a bunch of kids,” says Norman.
“We sat on trash bags and slid down the snowy hills,” adds Dorothy, beaming again with youth.
“And on that trip, I swam in the water,” continues Norman. “Cold.”
Mary Susanne lives in Houston. She is a professor, teaching science at a university.
Norman (Jr.) lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, but owns property in Somerset County. He is a building contractor.
Anne lives in Jericho, a mile from her parents. She is a biology professor at Vermont Technical College.
Marcia lives in Boston and works as an anesthesiologist.
These are Norman and Dorothy’s four children, from oldest to youngest.
The Gnageys lived in Somerset County for the first seven decades of their lives. Norman studied agriculture at Penn State and taught that subject and science in a high school near where he grew up. Dorothy attended Case Western in Ohio and went into nursing. They also farmed.
November 9, 1997. Norman and Dorothy left behind the farm that they loved, the only home they had ever known, and moved to Jericho to be closer to their daughter Anne. All of their children had moved away.
As we walk out of the Gnageys’ home through the front door, the heat hits us as an oven greets a turkey. The air conditioner perched in the living room window gurgles with coolant water.
“When we came here, this flower bed was such a mess,” says Dorothy, pointing to the first area of the spread, to the left of the giant spruce tree. “I worked and I worked. There was so much vegetation.”
We follow Dorothy, skirting the flowerbed. Norman approaches with a wheelbarrow.
Dorothy surveys the flowerbed, filled with weeds and black-eyed susies. A thriving vine is choking some of the plants.
“That’s a bad vine, my opponent,” says Dorothy, as she sizes it up. “This has been such a good growing year. My, we have had so much rain.
“Up here, I’ve started. It’s going to take a lot of work.” Dorothy starts pulling at the vine. The Gnageys’ neighbor drives by on the dirt road, but neither Dorothy nor Norman notice him until the cloud of dust whips through the yard.
“You’ve got to get the roots out, or you’re defeated,” continues Dorothy, tugging at the vine while Norman dutifully prods the base of the vine with a spade.
“I do most of the digging, practically all of it,” mentions Dorothy with a satisfied grin, after Norman is out of earshot, dumping the wheelbarrow full of dirt.
When Norman returns, he takes charge and shows us the rest of the spread. He mentions that it is actually his daughter Anne and her husband Tom who planned the spread, tend to it, and harvest the results.
Across the grass median from the dilapidated flowerbed, there are shoots of asparagus, more than six feet high. Behind it is rhubarb.
“I cut off a few pieces and bring them in. Dot puts them in pies,” Norman says.
“The problem is they take so much sugar, though,” adds Dorothy. “And I don’t like to eat so much sugar.”
“And we’ll circle around here,” continues Norman, as he retraces his steps a bit toward the house. “You know what this is? I don’t want to doubt your intelligence.”
Norman is pointing to a neatly arranged plot of assorted types of yellow and green lettuce. The leaves are wrinkled and lush. He picks one and hands it to us. We put it on our tongue. It is awfully bitter, but tastes as natural as the Earth.
Moving away from the house again, Norman, who is wearing a flat-topped straw hat and has his shirt collar flipped up, shows us a stand of milkweed, with its thick, fuzzy foliage.
“The monarch butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves…”
“So I don’t like to destroy the leaves,” Dorothy interjects before Norman can finish. “There don’t seem to be many butterflies anymore.”
Next to the milkweed, Norman points out his newly planted tomatoes.
“They should be staked. I’ve had them this tall before,” Norman says, holding his hand to his forehead. “I needed a step ladder.”
Norman kneels down ever so carefully and picks up the dirt lying around the tomato plants.
“I top dress with horse manure and sawdust, which keeps the weeds down,” Normans says, looking up at us with a smile. “Oh, I love this stuff.”
Norman goes ahead towards a tall walnut tree that stands in the center of the spread. It guards the gate leading to the heart of the Gnageys’ spread.
“I brought this one up from Pennsylvania,” says Norman. “It was a one foot tall seedling. We gave another one to Anne and Tom.
“Why do we keep this gate shut?”
“The rabbits and deer,” responds Dorothy.
After passing the strawberry patch, broccoli, and a dense, green bed of foliage, which Dorothy says will grow beautiful yellow flowers, we come to a plot with nine meticulously laid rows of soybeans. On one of them, and then another, and then all over, Norman and Dorothy meet another one of their enemies.
“It’s a Japanese beetle!” cries Dorothy.
“Bring it here, Dot,” shouts Norman. But he quickly finds a few of his own. “You squish them like this here with your fingernail.”
As he presses his fingers together, the bug explodes, its yellow juice staining his hands. “Fortunately, there are more leaves than Japs.”
“Oh, these Japs, oh, I have to kill them,” moans Dorothy, squeezing multiple bugs in her hands, the black bugs scurrying in complete disorder. “I don’t like to do it; I don’t like to commit murder.”
On the potato blossoms, across from the mutilated soybean plants, Norman finds another bug.
“It looks nice, not like a Jap,” mentions Dorothy.
“It’s a potato bug!” yells Norman, surprised by Dorothy’s compassion.
Her expression changes when she hears that. She takes the bug from Norman. “I’ll behead him!” she says excitedly. Orange juice flows down her fingers, dripping to the ground. “Oh my, he was juicy.”
“Of course, rock picking is a never-ending job,” says Norman, as we step over a pile of fieldstones gathered in the middle of the path that divides the spread in two.
Across the path from the soybeans is a pen of meat chickens. Though it is only July, they are already plump enough that they waddle around their yard. Clamshells, licked clean, and other food scraps lie about.
An old sail serves as the roof of their home, shading them from the high summer sun.
Even though there is ample food in the pen, they peck through the wire fence to the grass outside. Norman notices this, chuckles, and remarks, “Well, the grass is always greener on the other side.”
Past the chickens, further on down the path, there are more tomatoes. On the left, beside the soybeans, are scallions shooting up from the soil like green fingers. There are also onions, but the bulbs lie hidden beneath, their presence marked only by their short green thumbs.
The path makes a “T” as it meets a rectangular plot containing beans. They climb up three teepee structures, each formed by three ten-foot tall poles. Past the beans, there is one more rectangular section. This one is filled with oats, still green with summer.
Separate from the fenced-in part of the spread, about fifteen feet away from the oats, is a 12-foot square plot with wooden boxes stacked two to four high. Around the square is an electric fence.
“Honey bees, each one of them supers,” explains Norman, seeing our interest. “In this hot weather, they’re really working hard.
“When I was younger, I brought home some hives from Penn State,” continues Norman. “I was going to be a big shot in the bee business. After half a dozen stings, though, I said, ‘Goodbye, bees.’”
“When we were in the Amazon,” interjects Dorothy,” I remember the tremendous rainstorms and the ponchos they used.
“Once, we went on this really bouncy bridge… through the forest canopy.
“We were stopped one night, beside the river, and all of a sudden, my back was covered in bees, swarms and swarms of bees,” continues Dorothy, now swatting at the imaginary bees with her eyes closed, visualizing that day. “And they were stinging me over and over again.
“‘Run,’ I thought to myself, but they kept following me. The night after, even narcotics didn’t relieve the pain.”
Back in front of the Gnageys’ home now, with the spruce tree standing overhead, chicks peck at the grass around our feet.
“Here, chickie, chickie, chickie,” mutters Dorothy, pursuing an ivory-colored chick with her hands stretched out in front of her toward the aimless creature. Dorothy proves quicker, catching the chick by the wings and bringing it to her arms to cradle. “Good chickie,” she says, stroking it gently.
She passes it to us. Its heart races wildly, its nails digging into our hands, while its eyes search frantically for a way out. Shrouded in soft feathers, its body remains calm until, suddenly, it takes off, and flies to the ground.
On our hands, it has left a little, brown reminder of its visit, which brings Norman and Dorothy to a polite chuckle. |
