Cornish
I met Harold in 1983, a few months after my wife and son and I moved to town. Early that winter, my wife became concerned by the amount of time it had taken the town to plow our dead-end dirt road after a snowstorm. She went straight to the highway garage the next day and tacked a stern note to the door, addressed to the road agent. “Dear Mr. Morse, …” It probably was a risky move for newcomers to town, but the result was that Harold pulled into our driveway a day or so later, and by the time he’d left, my wife was charmed, we had hired him to plow our long driveway that winter (it was one of his side businesses), and we’d gained a friend.
That was not unusual. Harold was the first acquaintance or friend of many people new to Cornish over the years.
“So many people told me that when they first moved to town, Dad was the welcoming committee,” Sherrie Bulkeley, Harold’s oldest child, said. “If somebody new moved to town, he was going to drive by til he met them.”
Harold was one of the disappearing generation of elderly Cornish residents who’ve been here since childhood. He was born in Cabot, Vt., but his mother moved the family to Cornish when he was young. He attended a one-room schoolhouse just a couple of miles south of his home off Route 120. He joined the Army during the Korean War, and was stationed in Washington, D.C. He was part of an honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Va., and carried a flag at Eisenhower’s inauguration. He was, his daughter said, very proud of his military service.
He married, began raising a family in Cornish, and held a few jobs, including helping to build Interstate 89 in Vermont. The marriage ended in 1971, and four of the five children moved to Vermont with their mother. Not long afterward, though, Bulkeley moved back to Cornish to live with her brother Skip and their father, who, she recalled, was particularly strict with her.
“I had a 9 o’clock curfew when I was 17 years old,“ she said. Once, while in high school, she concocted a plan to sneak out of her bedroom window with a visiting friend to meet some boys just down the road and go to a party. Harold apparently noticed them escaping, and when they heard him going outside, they scrambled back into the house. It was Harold, then, who met up with the young men. “Well, boys,” he said, according to what they told Bulkeley later, “I think it’s time you went home.” He was carrying a shotgun. They went home. From then on, whenever boys visited his daughter, they had to come inside, where the shotgun was always leaning against the wall next to the door.
He became Cornish’s road agent in the early ’70s and held the job, with a break of two or three years, until he retired in 1994. Traveling the roads for a living kept him familiar with what was going on all over town — who’d moved in or out, who was renovating or building, who was haying. Who had fruit trees near the road that might be too good to resist. “He had his eye on everybody’s fruit trees,” his childhood friend, Marilyn Wallace, said. “Everybody’s fruit was Harold’s fruit.”
Wallace attended that tiny school with Harold 70-plus years ago and lives not far from his hilltop home. “When you went to a one-room school, you were kind of like extended family,” she said. No surprise, then, that the two of them talked almost every day in recent years, just to be sure that each was OK. “We’d check up on each other because we were both alone,” she said. “Probably he on me more than me on him. … He almost had a daily routine of going around and checking on all of his old friends.”
Leaving his job as road agent didn’t keep Harold off the roads. He still drove around town to see what folks were up to, checking in on those friends, stopping to watch — and maybe comment on — the work people were doing in their fields or on their homes. “He called himself The Inspector,” Bulkeley, who still lives in Cornish, said laughing. He also stayed busy with his “retirement” businesses: operating his small sawmill, plowing driveways in the winter, mowing and haying in the warmer months.
I doubt there was a day that he wasn’t on the road until his health started declining in recent years. He drove, and he stopped to talk. He went out to get ice cream (one for him, one for Roger). He went to the general store to visit and chat, which in Harold’s case often meant telling stories, which many people who knew him, including his daughter, will tell you that he embellished liberally. (That’s why I never knew exactly what to make of his story that someone once hanged himself in the silo out behind our house.)
“He was legendary. He was a legendary storyteller,” said Marie DeRusha, who had a long-term surrogate father-daughter relationship with Harold. DeRusha learned early on to take the details of Harold’s stories with a grain of salt, but she does credit him with her decision years ago to stay in town. She’d moved to Cornish in 2000, having fallen for the town while passing through it frequently on trips between her home in Nashua and a friend’s home in Vermont. It took her a while to get to know anyone; that changed when she started working at the Cornish General Store. “Harold was one of the first people I really met in Cornish,” she said. “We became friends.”
Still, she wasn’t settling in. “At some point, I just decided that I didn’t want to be here.” She shared that with Harold, and one day he said something like, “Let’s take a ride.” He picked her up after work that day and they cruised around town, Harold sharing tidbits about Cornish’s history, quirky features and other details that made it special to him. The rides continued over the course of a couple weeks. Eventually, he just said: “You can’t leave because you’re supposed to be here, girl.”
“And I thought, ‘You know, I think you’re right.’ It’s his fault that I ended up staying here.”
She learned how to drive a tractor from Harold, and now owns the tractor she learned on. He taught her how to hay. “He taught me a lot about patience, and not just from driving behind him,” she said, with a little poke at his road speed.
The drives didn’t end with his initial effort to keep her in town. Every holiday season, for instance, he’d pick DeRusha up and drive her around the area looking at Christmas lights. Sometimes to Enfield’s famous LaSalette display, and often just around Cornish, where he would sometimes stop to talk with someone he knew who’d put out an ambitious display. She’d sit in the cab next to Harold, the heat blaring, while the old timers yakked on until they ran out of things to say. “Then they’d just turn to yuppin’” DeRusha said. “One of them would say ‘Yup.’ Then three of four minutes would go by, and the other would say, ‘Yup.’”
Harold did give the appearance of a stereotypical New England good ol’ boy. The chewing tobacco, the old and sometimes tattered flannel shirt, the big belly, the hat — bearing some tractor logo or another — perched on his head. The stories, embellishments and all. But he was no two-dimensional figure, and what many in Cornish will remember about Harold is all that he did to help his neighbors. “He was a good friend to his friends,” Bulkeley said. “And even if he didn’t like you, he’d still help you.”
“If he liked you,” Marie DeRusha said, “he’d go to great lengths to see that whatever you needed would get done.”
Needed or, I would add, just maybe wanted. I once told him, back in the 1980s, that I was thinking about asking him to saw some lumber so that I could build my son a treehouse. Not long afterward, I woke up on a weekend morning to the sound of Harold unloading a big stack of boards onto my driveway. I got dressed and went outside to ask what was up. For the treehouse, he said.
“Wow,” I said. “Thanks. What do I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
I tried to insist, but he shut me down. “I guess I can cut some lumber for a boy’s treehouse if I want,” he told me.
“I understand he did that for a lot of people,” Marilyn Wallace said when I told her that story. “It was a thing he had about kids and treehouses.”
Here’s my favorite story about Harold, dating back to the 1990s. I arrived home from work one spring day to find that our garden had been tilled. I hadn’t arranged for it to be done, but I had no doubt who had come by with his tractor and broken the ground for us. The garden wasn’t even visible from the road, so he’d had to make a point of going out back to see it.
I didn’t run into Harold for another week or two, until a Saturday morning when I was working on my house and his truck rolled to a stop out front. He got out to see what I was up to, and we chatted for a few minutes about the reconstruction of my front doorway. It’s an old house, and he knew its history, had known all of its residents for more than half a century. Eventually, I said: “Hey, Harold. Thanks for tilling my garden.”
“Ayup,” he said.
“What do I owe you?”
“How about 10 bucks?”
The garden was big enough that anyone else would have charged 50 or 60. So I said: “Ten bucks! How about nine?”
Without a missed beat, and in his perfect rural drawl, he replied: “Well … all o’ nine’s better than none o’ ten.”
I laughed and gave him the 10, then watched him amble back to his truck, pull himself up into it, and head down the road at eight or nine miles an hour.
Harold died after a lengthy decline in his health, one that eventually left him barely able to walk, although I and others saw him driving around town long after we’d thought it was beyond him. He was in a nursing home in Claremont, being taken to Lebanon for dialysis three times a week, when he reached his end point. “He knew,” his daughter said. “He told me, ‘I’ve had enough, Sherrie. I don’t want any more.’ He was tired.” She ended his treatments, and he died in a matter of hours. With that, Cornish lost one of its more colorful, larger-than-life characters.
“He loved it,” Bulkeley said of his reputation in town. “He loved that people knew him, and that anybody could talk to him.” She also told me when I ran into her at the post office a couple of weeks ago that she had just developed a roll of film he’d left on the seat of his truck. He always kept a disposable camera with him, and the pictures on that last roll said a lot about Harold. They were scenics. The view toward Vermont’s hills from his porch, and many photos taken from the seat of his truck along Cornish’s back roads. He’d lived here for about 75 years. He’d been road agent for 20 years. And until the month he died, he was still taking pictures of his town.
Steve Gordon, who lives in Cornish, is a former Valley New writer and editor. He is now a massage therapist in Hanover and Cornish, and executive director of The Hand to Heart Project. He can be reached at gordons.cornish@gmail.com.