NORTH CANAAN — Their average age is 23. They have been volunteer fire company members for as long as 15 years, or as little as a month. But the number they all have in common is 200. That’s how many hours they have now completed in Firefighter 1 training. The seven newest firefighters on the Canaan Fire Company are anxiously awaiting the results of the written exams they took in late January. All were confident, but quickly noted they passed the physical training for state certification and can now serve on active duty. They have up to a year to retake and pass the written test, if needed.Now they may serveFor Shanna Foley, Ben Gustafson, Leo Gustafson, Cody Luminati, Trevor Neely, Minh Tran and Jason Zucco, this achievement is just the first step. It allows them to put on turnout gear and fight fires, attend to motor vehicle accidents and do all the other things firefighters do. They know further training and recertification requirements are endless. They know that being a volunteer will eat up a large chunk of their lives. They know the sacrifice will be everything from missing sleep and meals to being away from their families at the most critical times, and putting their own lives on the line.But this group has a leg up. Seldom do so many train at one time. They took advantage of that at every chance they got.“We did everything together,” Foley said. “We drove to fire school, ate dinner at the firehouse while we studied and practiced everything as much as we could, with help from a lot of the members.”They forged a tight bond that they know will carry on. During training, when physical and even psychological limits were pushed, all they needed to do was remember their motto: I got your back.They gathered yet again at the Canaan firehouse last week to speak with The Lakeville Journal. They were happy for a delay in getting to the evening’s real work: helping to stuff 2,200 envelopes with the Canaan Fire Company’s annual appeal letter and tickets to the Feb. 18 dance. (There are just some things one can’t train for.)Failure not an optionDid they ever think some of them wouldn’t make it?“We wouldn’t let anyone fail,” said Leo Gustafson. “It was as simple as that.”The classes spanned five months. Tuesday and Thursday nights found the future firefighters huddled over dinner and the books at the firehouse, or out back training with ladders and hoses. On alternating weekends they spent eight-hour days at the Burrville Fire School in Torrington, getting a workout that they likened to basic military training.What was the hardest thing each overcame?Being young, none of them figured they would need to bump up their physical training ahead of time. Being young, they managed to survive anyway.“We all knew what was coming,” Luminati, 19, said. “I’ve been a junior [firefighter] since I was 14, and I’ve been around the fire company my whole life. I guess being in a little better shape would have helped.”The Gustafsons, 19-year-old twins, are carrying on a family tradition. “It was a little easier than I thought it would be,” Leo said. Ben agreed. The worst part was “Doyle,” their instructor, who started out as Mr. Nice Guy. “The next thing we knew, he was screaming at us like a drill sergeant,” Leo said.“We had to drag a 180-pound dummy and beat a tire with a sledgehammer until they said to stop, and run up five flights of stairs, with a backpack, on air,” he said, describing some of the more demanding episodes.“Don’t forget about the big tractor tire we had to drag around,” Ben reminded him.Personal journeys, triumphsFoley has been there before. She signed on as a junior at 14, was certified years ago and has been on active duty, now serving as a captain (along with her brother, Bobby). But she didn’t pass the written exam, and didn’t take it again within a year, so despite her experience, she had to start from scratch.For Neely, the hardest thing was “getting up at 6:30 on the weekends.”Zucco agreed, but added that while the weekend physical training was definitely a challenge, the hands-on learning was fun and beat studying.He doesn’t like heights, but that doesn’t excuse him from climbing ladders.Tran found her diminutive size was not going to win her any reprieves.“I found strength I didn’t know I had, thanks to these guys and everyone else in the class. I definitely came a long way since September.”She found ways in which her size was an advantage, such as when the trainees had to crawl through a maze. Then there were the other times. During ladder training, she was part of a team — a decidedly shorter member. “We were running with the ladder and my feet just came off the ground. Someone asked why the ladder suddenly got heavier. I was just hanging on.”Tran is claustrophobic.“The first weekend was airpack training. I think I cried through that entire weekend.”“She did,” Foley chimed in. “But I had her back.”
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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