Dispatch from the Northeast Kingdom, 1

It strikes me that folks might like to know a little more about me, including why I live in northern Vermont when my Gideon Stoltz mysteries are set in central Pennsylvania.

I met my future wife, Nancy Marie Brown, in the 1980s when we both worked on a magazine published by Penn State University. At the time, I was building a house on 25 wooded acres in Bald Eagle Valley about 20 miles west of Penn State and its surrounding town, State College, where I had grown up. I did most of the work myself, with a few hired experts, and stretched the project out over several years so I didn’t have to take out a bank loan requiring monthly mortgage payments.

Nancy and I on Naskur and Saedis, about to ride out from home on a brisk November day.

It seemed like a good path toward becoming a freelance writer, for whom income can be sporadic, to say the least. That had been my goal since the 1970s, when I took my first job out of college working for the Pennsylvania Game Commission in Harrisburg as a writer on Pennsylvania Game News, a monthly magazine covering wildlife, conservation, and hunting.

Twenty years after Nancy and I married, and with our son in high school, we decided to leave our Pennsylvania home, mainly because the area was growing by leaps and bounds and had more traffic and development than we were comfortable with.

I visited a friend in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and liked the area. This three-county region, often referred to simply as the Kingdom, starts at the border with Canada and extends south about 60 miles. The least-populated, least-developed part of the Green Mountain State, it reminded me of central Pennsylvania when I was growing up: a mix of farms, forests, and small towns.

We found a beautiful piece of land, 120 acres, with pastures and hayfields for our horses and woods and wetlands that are home to snowshoe hares, fishers, black bears, ravens, songbirds, and the occasional wandering moose.

The property came with an old farmhouse (perhaps as old as 1821: while remodeling, I found a board with that date scratched into it). We insulated the house heavily and replaced all the windows. And the wiring. And the rafters, roof, and siding.

We heat our old/new house with wood. Three cords each year feed a small cast-iron stove that cheers up the kitchen in spring and fall, and a big soapstone stove in the living room that pumps out heat in the depths of winter. When it’s really cold (think 30 below), I fire up both stoves.

Each day I take a 45-minute hike (or snowshoe; the Kingdom averages over 100 inches of snow a year) on roads that I keep open with axe and chainsaw.

I like seeing the woods in their different seasons and moods. Well, the bloodthirsty blackflies in May, and the pestiferous mosquitoes and deerflies and the trail-spanning spider webs in the sticky July heat, can certainly try one’s soul, as can those frigid January cold snaps. But I get out there every day, rain, snow, or shine. My personal trainer, an Icelandic sheepdog named Edda, insists.

One of my great pleasures is riding our Icelandic horses. These days my main riding horse is a 13-year-old chestnut mare. Her name, Sædis, means “Sea Goddess” in Icelandic. She offers plenty of calm forward energy. She’s surefooted, with a reaching walk, a ground-covering tölt (the smooth four-beat gait for which the breed is prized), and a strong canter. We make a good team.

In the past I published many nonfiction books about nature and wildlife, most of them with a Pennsylvania slant. The knowledge I gained stands me in good stead when working on the Gideon Stoltz mysteries, set in the 1830s in my old central Pennsylvania stomping grounds.

I enjoy thinking up the plots, situations, and characters with which my fictional horse-mounted sheriff must contend.

I remain fascinated by Jacksonian America: its citizens, good and bad; its religious zeal, social reforms, developing technology, and deep and troubling controversy over issues such as income inequality, foreign immigration, and race. Those times and themes seem to echo through the years to today.