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“That perfume is enough to take the paint off a car,” Papa said when she was out of hearing, wrinkling his nose about the smell, and Mama laughed. To Skates, we must have seemed victims of rural poverty, and boy, did we smell. Skates gave Papa a hard time about needing to take a bath, and especially about us not eating meat.

“You’re too skinny. You need protein, working so hard out here,” she said. “Kids need protein too; are you sure it’s okay for Melissa?”

Papa was eloquent as always in his defense of vegetarianism, explaining that humans had been vegetarians for centuries, and animals had as much a right to live as we.

“Boots says he doesn’t believe in killing animals,” Skates said pointedly to Lyn in reply to Papa’s lecture. “Well, neither do I. I have the butcher do it.”

Everyone got a good laugh at that, and tensions eased, until Papa yelled at the boys for playing with their cork gun in the garden.

“No guns on my property!” Papa admonished.

“It’s just a harmless toy.” Lyn defended her children, but put away the gun.

“Why does he have to be so self-righteous?” she complained to her mother when Papa was out of earshot.

“If it weren’t for that motorcycle accident,” Skates liked to tell us, “your father would have gone on to become a respectable stockbroker like his own father.” Skates also liked to say, as only a mother can, that with his sandy hair and chiseled features her son looked like a cross between Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman. His desire to be a farmer was beyond her upper-middle-class sensibilities. Pour her another Scotch, and she’d look over her glasses and tell you the neck injury made him crazy.

“Why else,” she’d ask, “would a person with everything going for him move to the woods and live on a farm with no electricity, running water, or toilet?”

The accident happened during the spring Papa was considering enlisting in the army, on the verge as he was of flunking out of Williams College, the private liberal arts school in western Massachusetts that had also been attended by his father. Papa was on the cross-country running and ski teams and a fraternity brother at St. Anthony Hall. There he made two lifelong friends, Jan and Tony, who happened to own a pair of Triumph 150 motorbikes for riding the trails in the woods around campus. They were a handsome and athletic trio, skiing, mountaineering, and chasing women together, but Papa found himself lacking in commitment to his studies.

“There’s a nice girl in Bennington,” Papa told Tony one evening, it being customary for Williams boys to visit Bennington, Vermont, for the women’s college and younger drinking age. “Let’s ride your bike up there, find you a date, and take them out.” After dinner it was decided that the girl, Muffy, would come back to Williams, and they climbed on the bike, Tony, Muffy, and Papa in that order. They weren’t going very fast along the winding backcountry route, but darkness obscured a boulder lying on the tarmac. The front wheel hit the obstacle, throwing the bike sideways and tossing Papa across the road into a signpost.

“He let go to save the girl,” Tony said later. Muffy and Tony slid on the bike, which protected them from impact. In the aftermath, everyone was conscious, though Papa and Tony were soon in a lot of pain from road rash. As they waited for help, a party truck that some college guys had rigged up with couches and music in the back pulled up beside them. They didn’t want Muffy to get in trouble, so she climbed aboard and glided away on one of those couches as an ambulance arrived to take the two boys to the hospital. (In a happy aside, Tony and Muffy would cross paths a couple years later and, while commiserating over the accident, fall in love—eventually getting married and having four children.)

“We lay on gurneys beside each other, while the nurses picked stones out of our behinds, trying to hide our groans as the pebbles plunked into a metal bucket,” Tony recounted. Skates showed up at the hospital dressed for a party, pale hair coiffed,