Heavy Lifting

As time passes, staying fit for farm chores can be a job unto itself.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM HAUGOMAT

n December 2018, I was teaching as an adjunct at Sterling College in Craftsbury, Vermont. This arrangement granted me access to the school’s facilities, which included a small subterranean space crowded with iron plates and dumbbells, along with an assortment of complicated-looking machines that to me seemed like an invitation I did not wish to accept.

What compelled me to first enter that room? I can’t say precisely, but I suspect it had something to do with the simple fact of December, with its long nights and short, brutish, dark days. December is a cooped-up-feeling month—everything seems a little too close and a little too slow for my tastes—and I suppose the notion of pushing weights around felt like an antidote, albeit an unlikely one.

The other thing is that I had long struggled with an iffy lower back. I’d always chalked it up to being tall and gangly (because surely it couldn’t be for lack of strength, right?), and I’d just sort of lived with it. But every six months or so, my back would go out, usually while working in the woods, and I’d spend a few days hobbling around or (as was becoming more frequently the case) flat-out in bed, waiting for my spasming muscles to relax themselves while loudly bemoaning my circumstances. This did not seem like a promising trajectory, and it was very much at odds with perhaps my foremost fantasy as it relates to aging, which is that I’ll still be cutting and splitting our firewood when I’m 80. I couldn’t be sure that lifting weights would make this possible, but I was pretty certain it wouldn’t hurt.

Along one wall of Sterling’s weight room, there was a row of large windows right above ground level; on one of the sills, someone had left a bottle of smelling salts, which serious lifters like to inhale immediately before extreme efforts. I guess the way it works is that the ammonia provokes a surge of adrenaline, which makes lifting heavy weights just a bit easier. I never cracked that bottle, but I like the idea of the salts; they spoke to me of a purity of purpose and intent that felt like the answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking.

Shortly after I started lifting, I asked my friend Annie to introduce me to her friend Ted, an ex-national-class powerlifter in his 70s who was living out his retirement deep in a

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