By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I’ve never attended the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference held each summer in the Green Mountains near Middlebury, Vermont. So, this year I sent myself a note requesting the honor of my presence at the annual event.
Once I had my auto-generated invitation in hand, it really was quite easy to get there. I hopped on and off a couple of Southwest Airline flights, rented a car, and programmed our Google Maps navigator app with the appropriate final destination data.
Soon, my wife Vicki and I were driving up a verdant canyon carved over the last few thousand years by the icy cold waters of the Middlebury River. A few miles past Ripton, a quaint alpine village chartered in 1791, I reached the conference venue nestled on the western flank of Bread Loaf Mountain.
The Middlebury College Bread Loaf satellite campus—situated on a former historic inn, farm, and resort—is a collection of mustard-colored log-cabin-like buildings. They serve as summer dormitory, classroom, social center, and dining hall for the writing conference attendees and faculty.
I did not spend much time there, however, because when I arrived, the only other person present was trimming the lawn. He seemed way too busy to discuss writing with me.
So, I headed straight to what I hoped would be a one-on-one personal tutorial with one of the Bread Loaf conference founders. He taught there every summer for 42 years, in between winning four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry as well as the Congressional Gold Medal.
You may have heard of him. His name was Robert Frost.
I figured Frost would welcome the chance to commune with someone like me. He’d been dead since 1963 and probably wasn’t doing much else.
Our meeting site was the old Homer Noble farm where Frost stayed during many of his Bread Loaf summers. I got there via an unmarked (and easily missed) dirt road cut through the forest and camouflaged on both sides by dense arboreal growth.
Frost might have said the path “was grassy and wanted wear” or even called it a road “less traveled by.” (See Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” published in 1916.) Indeed, when first I turned onto it, my wife Vicki looked skeptical, and even gave her head “a shake to ask if there is some mistake.” (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” published in 1923.)
It was a fair question. Why would I take us off road looking for the spirit of a dead poet gone for six decades?
Frost and I have little in common. His Yankee descendants arrived in New England just after the Mayflower. His father was a writer and his grandfather a farmer. Frost attended not one but two Ivy League institutions—Dartmouth and Harvard.
He also farmed in New Hampshire for a decade, planting and tilling in his mind the rural images he made so famous in his later published works. When agriculture failed to provide an adequate living, he turned to teaching and writing, including poetry.
I fell in love with writing over fifty years ago in part because of one such Frost poem. In “The Pasture” published in 1914, Frost wrote, “I’m going out to clear the pasture spring, I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.”
I first stumbled across the poem in a book titled You Come Too, a collection of Frost poems for young people. I won it during a fifth grade reading and writing contest at South Clearfield Elementary in Northern Utah. The phrase “You come too” resonated.
It felt like a personal invitation to join Frost on a literary journey. Many Frost-related adventures and moments of intersection followed.
My parents were from Vermont. As I got older, I learned my mother’s beloved uncle was a Catholic priest who served a Middlebury parish during the same years that Frost taught at Bread Loaf. Middlebury was a small town, so they probably met.
In college at the University of Notre Dame, Frost was a muse for my protests against the global nuclear arms race. In my advocacy, I invoked his poem “Fire and Ice” from 1923:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
As a husband and father, while shoveling the greatest snow on earth off of my Salt Lake City driveway each winter, I’d recite Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The poet’s words helped me see beauty within the toil: “The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.”
My children heard me recite the poem so often that they memorized it too. One Christmas, they gave me a book with lovely illustrations for the words which made magical the mundane chore of shoveling snow.
And then, of course, in my graying years, I found myself on a Frost pilgrimage, driving down the road less traveled towards the Vermont mountain farm the poet purchased in 1939.
The dirt lane ended at a peaceful and picturesque scene, a white clapboard house resting in the middle of a mountain meadow. When I arrived there, I suspected Frost probably appreciated the metal gate and wooden pole fence guarding the entrance to the property.
He understood how “good fences make good neighbors.” (“Mending Wall” published in 1914.) Yet, the easily-breached walls did not hold me back and I walked around the house—remarkably indistinguishable from dozens of others I’d seen in New England.
A meadow of wildflowers surrounded the nineteenth century home. A few early blossoms peeked out at me, bringing to mind the 1928 Frost poem “A Passing Glimpse,” about spotting flowers from a passing train window. He wrote, “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those Not in position to look too close.”
Meadow flies—both dragon and butter—lived on the poet’s farm too, but even they seemed infected with Frost’s lyrics. One insect I encountered had “dust in his eyes and a fan for a wing.” (“One Guess” published in 1937.) The others were “flowers that fly and all but sing.” (“Blue-Butterfly Day” published in 1923.)
I walked along a mowed path up a hill behind the farmhouse, searching for Frost’s log cabin writing retreat. I passed a line of sentinel maple trees, and then spotted the cabin, hidden at the edge of woods that truly were “lovely, dark and deep.” (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”)
Frost used the weathered old brown shack to reflect and write, often escaping there while guests and visitors cooled their heels at the farmhouse below. In that cabin, he likely wrote most of the poems published in his 1943 Pulitzer Prize winning volume.
If I had stumbled upon the same isolated and somewhat-spooky cabin in some other woods, I might have been frightened or alarmed. Frost’s poetic imprint, however, imbued the shack with an aura much more serene than sinister. The abundance of birdsong multiplied the effect.
The surrounding maples, some caressing the old building, comforted me too. Frost once told another such tree, “That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.” (“Tree At My Window” published in 1928.)
I foolishly left my well-worn book of Frost poems in the car while I climbed to the cabin, so my planned ceremonial reading from it while leaning against the screened-in porch was not possible. Instead, I recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” out loud.
Mother Nature did not mind the dissonance of me speaking of snow in the early summer sunshine. And if my last minute improvisation bothered Frost, he said nothing.
After all, he improvised similarly at the John F. Kennedy presidential inauguration ceremony in 1961. Glare hindered his reading of a new poem he wrote for the occasion, so Frost recited another one from memory.
Before I left the cabin, I walked around its exterior, hoping to find a relic, perhaps a discarded scrap of paper with some Frost scribblings or musings on an evolving new poem. I fantasized about sharing a few original Frost words with the literary world.
Alas, there were none, and the old poet quietly reminded me, “As that I had no right to play With what was another man’s work for gain.” (“Two Tramps in Mud Time” published in 1937.)
I walked down the hill, back to the farmhouse and to my car. Thoroughly enamored of the rustic place, more of Frost’s words echoed in my head: “We love the things we love for what they are.” (“Hyla Brook” published in 1916.) As Vicki and I drove back down the dirt road away from the farmhouse and cabin, I realized that although my own writing journey with Frost started over a half century ago, it would—gratefully—take a lifetime to complete.
“And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.” (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”)
(Note: all the Frost poems in this post are from You Come Too, the very same book I have kept and treasured since fifth grade.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
