Welcome to Rumble

Rumble Strip, America Heilman.

I'm Erica Heilman.

Carl.

I was doing some reporting for my friend Angela Evansy's excellent podcast

Brave Little State. She was making a show about the Northeast Kingdom about what

makes it different from other parts of the state and And the guys at Kaplan's Army store up in St

John'sbury told me I should talk to Carl. They said, go about seven miles down this road,

then there's a road that kind of goes up to a Jersey farm on the left, and then there's a pond, but there's no sign to the pond.

Then after the pond, drive past the pull-off, and Carl's trailer sits way up in a field at the top of that hill. You'll see lots of pipes

and a lot of cars and trucks and lots and lots of hounds. But Carl wasn't home, and so I went

back the next day and I found him in the driveway, but he didn't want me to come into his house.

So we sat in his truck and talked.

Carl's trailer sits way up on a hill that looks out over the farm he ran for most of his life, then sold.

After he was done farming, Carl seemed to make a pretty smooth transition to

Mountain Man, which is how he described himself, and the name pretty much fits. He's private, he only goes to town to get something he needs.

His life is close to the ground to his dogs, to the outside. Here's Carl. You grew up on a farm. Right. You bought that over there.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Beautiful, beautiful farm. It's all right, but it's not big enough and it's, and the

seasons are too short, the taxes are just as high, and the driveway was so steep and stuff you couldn't get a whole

track to a whole load of hay it would pain the ass to get up the driveway

you'd have to hitch on another tractor on the front or something and a truck

didn't bother but then you get a poor year here and

...