ROAD STORIES

The Maple Street entrance to the old road. Around the bend it becomes more trail than road. 

Sometimes you have to celebrate things that didn’t work out.  Or things that were left to fall apart.  This is about two of those.  

In 1979 a local guy (I’ll call him Fred) bought 28 acres of forested land, part of which is behind my field.  It’s the kind of purchase you (if you lived up here) would assume was for hunting purposes, because the piece was landlocked; no road led to it.  Logging could be problematic.  You could walk into it by way of a trail, although what begins as a road suitable for a tractor or an ATV, and has been used by a local farmer for getting feed to cows in the adjoining field, soon reverts to a trail once you pass the cow field.  

The trail heads down to the marsh.

The trail begins in Waltham, right next door in other words, and runs along the back of the field behind my house and continues through one or two other properties until it comes to a major impediment: a marsh created, and still being improved upon, by beavers. It takes up again after that gap, and just beyond is reinforced by also serving as the VAST––Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, snowmobilers to most of us––trail. Near Route 17 the VAST takes a left whereas the trail seems to come to an end with no clear route through a farm's back yard. What the “road” once connected to after that is anybody’s guess, although it probably linked up with what is now Field Days Road on the other side of Route 17.  The old road/trail hasn’t been maintained or repaired, or used, for that matter except for walkers and the occasional ATV.  In some places it has probably been misplaced.  

Fred thought maybe he could change that.  

Vermont’s mountain ranges run north-south, the spine of the Appalachians.  Almost all the early roads in Vermont ran parallel to the range.  It was always harder and trickier to build roads that ran through or over the mountains.  When Vermont became a state in 1791 this seems to have prompted some serious road building.  A case in point:  Shortly after 1791 the General Assembly voted to “view, survey, lay out, and alter or turn said road from Vergennes” south through at least nine other named towns to end at “Colonel Elisha Averill’s in Pawlet,” a town not very far north of Bennington.  It was to be called the Legislative Highway.  In 1812 New Haven (my town) laid out its portion and dubbed that segment the 1812 Highway. 

By 1995 this road had long disappeared from maps.  It had also mostly disappeared from sight.  In fact, it had disappeared so thoroughly that in 1926 the New Haven Board of Selectmen (we now call them Selectboards) voted to discontinue the road, officially closing it, thereby ending any commitment for improvements or maintenance.  And that, they thought, was that.

Fred had other ideas.  After many years rueing his inaccessable purchase, he decided to take action.  He would rue no longer.  He did some research, and in 1996 he petitioned the county court, arguing that the New Haven Board had no authority to close this segment of what was now called (laughably) the “North-South Highway” since it was, historically at least, part of the much longer road that extended clear to Bennington.  The county court ruled against Fred.  Undaunted, he appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court.  In its wisdom that court found the Board had indeed illegally closed the road in 1926 because it did not have the jurisdiction to do so; each of the eighteen towns along the Legislative Highway’s now moribund route would have had to formally agreed to the closure, since the New Haven portion was merely a segment.  Despite the thankless efforts on the part of one neighboring landowner (and owner of the swamped segment) who obtained the written approval of the governing body of each of the now eighteen towns in the road’s path and hoped to have them meet and agree to close the road officially, no such meeting ever took place. Doing New Haven a favor wasn’t high on those towns' agendas and, worse, the town of New Haven apparently didn’t give a damn. The trail/road’s status remained in technical limbo.

Until one day, when I saw someone I didn’t recognize on a tractor pulling a brush-hog at the back of my field. It wasn't clear who would choose to do this, or why.  The brush-hogger was, I learned later, a local acquaintance of Fred’s and, at the time, a New Haven Selectboard member who shared Fred’s mindset and was prepared to right perceived wrongs as he saw them.  I'll call him Donald.  After making his way cutting brush in my field Donald proceeded to my neighbor’s where he cut whatever was in his way–riding roughshod sounds like a good description–and replied in no uncertain terms to a neighbor who asked what he was doing on her property that he was operating in his official Selectboard capacity.  In reality, the Board had no idea what Donald was doing.  Donald drove on, passing closely by the next landowner who was out trimming his own brush, and letting that landowner know his was a hostile act.  Donald plowed right into the marsh for a number of yards before it became obvious he would be bogged down for good if he went an inch further. 

The "road" exits the forest at the left and (theoretically, at least) enters the marsh. A new beaver lodge can be seen at right, rear.

From another angle the beaver lodge is barely visible at far left.

The rest of the story can be told quickly.  Donald continued to carry on in many, mostly unpleasant, ways about this “illegality” (i.e., the wrongful methodology of road-closure in 1926). While he envisioned a paved road of county highway dimensions with cars and trucks driving back and forth, it seems no one (except possibly Fred) shared this vision.  Fred wanted access for himself, not necessarily for the rest of the world.  As Donald had essentially shoved this issue in the faces of the Selectboard members, the Board felt it had to do something, so it voted to spend $5,000 to survey the old road and at least establish where the darned thing actually was. That completed, and Donald by then no longer a Selectperson, the Board members seemed happy to have the issue behind them.  They made no commitment, nor is it likely they ever will, to maintain, repair or much less improve the road/trail.  I don’t know if Fred has other ideas.  Donald seems to have other fish to fry and has been busy opposing solar projects.

The "road" roughly followed the line of trees at the edge of my field.
A tiny red marker (at the end of a pole, middle left third of the photo) is a leftover survey marker.

Carly stands next to a new impediment on the "road."  The tree fell partially in late winter and an April storm brought it down significantly lower. 

And once upon a time there was (almost) another road: What the Legislative Highway could, perhaps, have been?

The designated path of the Green Mountain Parkway.

If you’d lived in Vermont before the interstates were built, you might have wept at the isolation.  When I was about seven or eight years old and lived in New York City my family began spending summers in Vermont.  We sometimes shopped at a little store in Newfane that had a butcher.  My mother got into conversation with the butcher, and he recounted how when he and his wife first moved up from New York City his wife cried and cried for their entire first winter. This made no sense to me because I was always so happy to be in Vermont. Why would anyone cry about that?

The building of the interstates, I-89 and I-91, in the late 1950’s and 1960’s ended that isolation and changed everything. It’s no good arguing any longer whether that was for the better or the worse because the change happened, and it's hard to imagine it otherwise.  But some changes are better thwarted, or killed at birth.

Lots of ideas get proposed because they are the thing of the moment, or because some other place has something that is judged to be really cool.  North Carolina began to build the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1936.  It must have been seen as a really cool thing, a marvel, years before everyone started owning not just one, but two or three cars. The very idea of driving on a highway like this evokes a 1950’s car ad (“Let’s go for a Sunday drive!”), engine purring as you drift over mountaintops with views to both sides, no traffic lights, no distractions.  Thrilling.  But now, not so much.  Today a highway on mountaintops may be seen for what it really is, an infringement on nature, every summit conquered by cars. The mountains themselves become less alluring.  You drive around curve after endless curve–not to even contemplate driving all 400-plus miles of it–and everything begins to look the same. Nature becomes boring. 

Is this really alluring? (From the Blue Ridge Parkway website).  Maybe if it was a trail...

What a terrific idea, Vermont movers and shakers thought when they learned about the new Skyline Drive (first proposed in 1924) in Virginia and the Blue Ridge Parkway (proposed in 1935).  Imagine: driving on the mountaintops!  In 1935 Vermonters proposed the Green Mountain Parkway that would run the length of the state, a north-south road, just like the southern parkways.  The mountains of Vermont are not as gentle, however, as the mountains of Virginia or North Carolina, so it wouldn’t have traveled over, say, Camel’s Hump or Mount Mansfield summits without blasting them to pieces, but it might have come close.

The plan was defeated, though not exactly handily, in a state-wide referendum.  The issue was complicated, the forces for building were powerful, and it tore the populace apart.  It wasn't a question of good conservationists versus bad developers.  On the pro side were the progressives, those with "modern" views, who wanted Vermont to be more like the rest of the country, a view held by important people and entities, including the leading newspapers as well as the federal government. The prospect of jobs, 16,000 of them, so soon after the Great Depression, was not negligible.  On the other side was fear, fear of a road opening the state to "outsiders," fear of involvement of the federal government through its land-taking alongside the road, and a concern that the road would literally divide the state in two. The fear of outsiders was itself complicated, as "outsider" incorporated notions of difference and unsavory associations that linked to the prejudices of the day (and surely this day as well).  An article in Vermont Digger of March 2012 suggested there was more than a whiff of anti-Semitism woven through the opposition.  All those New York people, you know.  To assuage those who were worried about despoiling the land, and to help sell the idea, a special national park-like designation was proposed for the area where the road was to end, just below the summit of Jay Peak (and where, ironically, today we have a dramatically altered Jay Peak anyway, only for a ski resort.)

In retrospect it is pleasant to think that the conservationists won, and in hindsight I suppose one could say they did. 

And there is still only a trail at the back of the field.

AS THE WORLD TURNS

Just fooling. It wasn't tulip time, but some color was needed through the dreary days of February, March, and yes, April

It was T. S. Eliot who said “April is the cruelest month,” though he may have meant it metaphorically.  It was true this year, though, literally.  It was not until the April 21 that we actually experienced a day of spring.  The poem continues:  

“….breeding 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

But he was thinking England, surely, because there were no lilacs breeding here, and in Vermont the lilacs sleep through even pleasanter Aprils.  Let me give you an example:  the crocuses below sprouted about a month ago, their usual time, but didn’t open until April 21.  They tried earlier, but there was nothing doing.  Too much snow.  Yet here the valley is Vermont’s "Banana Belt."

The snow melted two days after this photo, taken April 21.

*

It’s obvious to me now that I spent much of February, March and much of April in fairly thoughtless mode. I kept up with the carousel of our country’s news (read: Trump and his Cabinet of Destruction) with the steady horror at things falling apart.  And that, somehow, kept me mentally hemmed in.  What could I possibly say about it all?  Where to begin?  How could I think and write about small things and ignore all the ugliness?  Well, I will anyway.  Enough!

* 

Okay, now that it’s spring (fingers crossed), there has been a progression of events. After eight springs now (the first spring having been 2011) it has become predictable, more or less.   The first to be noticed was the red-winged blackbirds that returned early in April. I wondered how they could cope in the ice and snow.  It seemed too early.  Then goldfinches began to crowd the bird feeder, along with juncos, mourning doves, an occasional titmouse, plus the woodpeckers who have been nabbing seeds and suet all along when they’re not pecking on the house itself. Hawks, falcons, and crows began to dot the sky in greater numbers, sometimes flying low enough I hear the flap of their wings.  In the big pond visitors, besides the resident muskrats, included geese and ducks.  

Goldfinches waiting their turn at the bird feeder, and not politely either.  The bird feeder has since moved to its summer location.

Next in line were the frogs. Not the spring peepers you find in vernal pools–all the others. In abundance.  The natural pool was only completed in mid-August, so this is its first spring. Last summer frogs found it immediately. In April I waited over several weeks for the ice to disappear so I could see what lay below.  Finally the ice was gone, only to be replaced by a soupy slush.  When at last the water was completely unfrozen it looked dark with algae, the predictable result of six months without a filter pump.  

There had been plenty of frogs that found this man-made pond to their liking during the warm weather.  Why some preferred this pond to the more natural pond I can’t guess.  One day grandson Ben deported every frog he could find, about half a dozen, to the other pond–a kindness, because his sister doesn’t like to swim with frogs–yet hours later we again counted about half a dozen frogs in the pool.  Whether or not these were frogs he had missed earlier or whether they were our ex-deportees was never established. 

With the pump filter re-installed the water began to clear.  I skimmed out wads of algae, grayish-white to dark green, matted and slimy, and added some algae-eating bacteria.  As the water cleared I looked for frogs that overwintered, wondering if I would find any. Frogs need to burrow at least partially under mud in winter to survive.  Their bodies enter a state of torpor, a kind of hibernation.  They continue to breathe oxygen through parts of their skin exposed to water. ,They don't freeze as of course no pond or lake freezes all the way to the bottom. 

The new pool offers only stones for burrowing whereas the big pond is all mud. Would a frog really try to hibernate in the pool?

I soon found two frogs laying at the bottom of the pool, right-side up but splayed out, with legs spread.  The position seemed odd, but I hadn't been able to discover what frogs hiberating might look like.  Was it dead? Alive? Or still dormant?  When I found neither frog had moved, even after a couple of days, I took them out of the pool with my skimmer–still no movement­­–and slipped them into the big pond.  And there they remained for the next week.  When I checked them again, they were still in the same spot, only now covered with silt. I prodded them. Nothing. 

This frog in the big pond was surely dead.

Back at the pool, looking for other possibly dead frogs, I found what looked from a distance like a huge spread-eagled frog and caught it in the skimmer.  When the skimmer broke the surface I was surprised to find there were two frogs in it, one, oddly, with its mouth open and all four legs clamped around the body of a second spread-legged frog that looked dead.  Before I had a chance to move the skimmer there was a movement–it’s alive!– and it/they were both were back in the water.  Was this a thing?  One frog holding on to another?  Was this a kind of survival behavior?  Alas, the questions remain unanswered.  My only conclusions: (a) a frog in the spread-legged position is more than likely dead, and (b) a frog can survive winter in the pool, rocky bottom and all.  But if I were a frog, I wouldn’t count on it.  

The live frog clamped around the dead frog.  Why?

Another thing you notice before the leaves fill out and blur the landscape so beautifully is that the trees have been growing while you weren't paying attention.  Each spring becomes a sort of stock-taking in this way, as you find yourself remembering how everything looked just a short time ago.  In 2010 I see the house before the porch was built, the pond when its edges were kept trimmed like a golf course water trap, the always-weedy herb bed before the pool, the sapling maple when you could still make the whole tree shake by pushing the trunk.  I took my first photo of goldfinches swarming the bird feeder in April 20100.  Pictures of nesting barn swallows and hummingbirds soon followed.

The house as we first saw it.

The always-weedy herb bed, before the pool.

The pond, 2011; Carly, Ben, and Audrey actually swam in it, mud and all.

Kids on a bale, and a sapling maple tree

Couldn't resist this indoor one:  the TV/Libray room, 2010, partial wall at right still in place.

Anyway...

It won't be long before the humming birds will arrive and I will know for sure summer is coming.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH VERMONT

(a)   Nothing, really, or

(b)   Couple of things, or

(c)   See below

I’ve only seen coyotes up close, really close, once.  Other times the distance from them to me has been measured in yards: half a football field, a quarter of a football field.  Like that.  One night in Steamboat Springs years ago Ken and I were staying in an apartment complex that Ken’s son Luke was living in at the time.  A dumpster happened to be right outside our bedroom window.  Very late one night I woke from sleep when I heard dog-like noises coming from outside.  I sat up in bed and peered out the window.  A motion detector light spotlighted four, five, six seven coyotes just a few feet away, milling around, talking to one another while they and pored over trash that had spilled over the dumpster. The lighting was bluish and hazy, dreamlike. Fascinated, I watched until I grew sleepy.

Canus Latran

Here, usually late at night, there are frequent coyote vocals.  They howl and yip, sounding as if they are close by, as they well might be, although it can be hard to pinpoint their exact locations. There might be only a single howl, or at other times there are so many yips, yaps and howls that a small group can make noise like twice their actual numbers. In fact, that may be the idea.  They often get Skyler excited and he longs to get outside and bark at them.

Coyote hunting mice; Skyler shares that interest, but less keenly.

In Vermont coyotes are still regarded as varmints and, unsurprisingly, coyotes are targets of a permanent hunting season.  The "Whatever Season."  Anyone can kill a coyote, at any time of the day or night, in any season of the year, in any way they choose, using any weapon they have at hand.  No restrictions.  If that wasn't enough, there are coyote killing contests in Vermont.  You pay a small fee to enter the contest and win a prize for the biggest one you kill or the greatest number of coyotes you kill.  It sounds like an event from the 19th century.  But it continues, in the 21st.  [ACTION TAKEN! SEE NOTE BELOW.]*

Photo taken by Ben Huston's tree-mounted camera: coyotes at the site where a neighbor placed a dead ram.
The ram was deliberately killed because he had become highly aggressive. 

Ethical hunting, that is, hunting with respect for the animal being hunted (deer or rabbits, hunted for sport, but used for food) is not something I can object to.  I eat meat, after all.

Organizations dedicated to protecting and preserving wildlife in Vermont and in other states, as well as Canada, are working to eliminate these contests.  (Not our Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, however, despite their motto of protection and preservation.)  These horrendous contests have taken place for years from Montana to Kansas to Cape Cod (yes, even Cape Cod).  California banned them in 2014, calling them “unethical” and “anachronistic,” an apt description. There is not even inherent value in the results: coyote remains are considered garbage, a profound insult to the animal.  Several local contests have been shut down by protests or by a low number of sign-ups generally blamed on protests, but other contests keep popping up.

Although banning coyote killing contests is unlikely to change anyone’s basic attitude toward coyotes, it would at least dilute the stench that attaches to such mindless and unethical hunting.  It would be a step.  Like registering guns, maybe, or banning assault rifles, or limiting the size of magazines.  Of course, as with any gun control legislation, it’s a steep uphill battle because of our embrace of gun culture.  Even Vermont's own progressive Bernie Sanders is not known for gun control support.  The Wild West lives on, here as elsewhere, embedded in our lizard brains. I cannot help but reflect on the attitude of shooters who have no apparent compunction about killing animals for fun,** or seeing them only as moving targets to test their shooting capability, and speculate about how that ethic may shape attitudes toward other animals, perhaps even people, who are felt to be undesirable or threatening or ugly.  Without empathy or understanding for the lives of others–animals or people–these "others" can appear to be simply objects, merely a currency for self-expression.

Definitely not just Vermont.

**

Winter in Vermont should be our time for hearty cold weather sports.  It’s been challenging this year because the cold hasn't been sustainable.  One day you may be making tracks on skis and the next day you may have to make those same tracks on grass.  There has been so much ice so often I've had to wear crampons to walk to my car in the driveway for the past month.  It's almost a cliché to say  there's always a “January thaw” (one that doesn't always happen in January), but it helps explain the inevitable warmish and sometimes snowless period between snowstorms in a more ordinary winter. Climate and weather not being the same thing, it’s hard to know what is causing what, but this season certainly seems very far from normal.  This winter has offered a sort of temperature whiplash that may be becoming the new normal.  The season began well enough:  late December/early January was the model of an old-fashioned winter (or what we imagine was an old-fashioned winter) with its extreme cold and day after day below zero temperatures along with a good cover of snow.  But it was followed, alas, by doses of spring with occasional 50 degree differences from one day to another, a pattern that continued through the month of February.

The muskrat tunnel is/was in the lower right; photo days apart from photo below

Same place, slightly different angle, days later, or earlier; the pattern was repeated. Muskrat tunnel in the lower left.

We’re not the only ones affected.  What is happening to the frogs hibernating in the pond?  How are the muskrats surviving when their tunnels flood and freeze over, and then flood and freeze over again?  I won’t know about the frogs' fate until spring, but I’ve seen the muskrats emerge and push away the snow cover to feed in exposed grass. In the fall I counted four of them, but I’ve only seen two at any one time in the winter.  

After the snow squall at Rikert: Audrey came in 5th place in a crowded field.

I skied at Sugarbush on a day in February in spring-like conditions.  Later that same day I found myself in a snow squall at Rikert cross-country ski area watching Audrey in a race as the temperature dipped into the teens. 

Probably not wise to invest your money in ski areas in Vermont.  But it's not just Vermont.

**

Then there’s maple sugaring.  The time has come.  Or has it?  For a good sap supply,  the temperatures should be warmish during the day and below freezing at night.  What happens when the temperatures are in the 60’s in the day (February 21st!) and the 50’s (in February!) at night?  On February 19th it snowed.  This is crazy.  In our tiny sugaring operation we will get enough syrup one way or another, I suppose.  Son-in-law Chris just hauled out the taps and tubing and began hooking up the trees, but gathering sap and boiling hasn’t yet begun.

The sugarhouse, before sugaring

Vermonters worry about the health of sugar maples as climate change makes its impact.  Sugaring is an important industry here and will be at risk if sugar maples don’t continue to thrive in our warmer winters with huge temperature swings.  Right now most syrup producers, especially the larger ones, are upping their technology to draw larger amount of sap from trees.  New reverse osmosis machines can now refine the sap at levels that are three times as efficient as they were only five or ten years ago.  They pull much more sap from the same trees.  Forward-looking farms are powering their facilities using wind power, solar energy and cow manure. These efficiency gains may offset the shorter sugaring seasons resulting from climate change.  Ironically, there are concerns that this high tech-process will stress trees already stressed by climate change.  It is too early to know.

Oh, Vermont, it’s not just on you. 

**

*ACTION TAKEN:  On February 22nd a bill banning coyote killing contests cleared the Vermont House by a vote of 75-64 after considerable debate and intense lobbying by Protect Our Wildlife and others.  It should be noted that Louis Porter, the head of Vermont Fish and Wildlife, did not support this ban. The bill now moves to the Vermont Senate where the likelihood of passage is reasonably good.

**The rationale:  Supporters say they reduce coyote attacks on Vermont's deer herd (not validated by science) and help keep the thriving coyote population from spilling into residential areas (not validated by science) where the animals sometimes prey on cats and dogs or scare people.