Not All Roads Go Through

This seems a simple truism, and, of course, it is. There are lots of dead end roads in the world; I even grew up on one (it might be amusing one day to wax lyrical on the obscene phrase "cul de sac" that my mother unwittingly liked to use to describe Oak Knoll). There are dead end roads and roads to nowhere all over the place.

But the Delorme Vermont Atlas let me down today. Not all roads go through -- not even those that look like they should. Usually, Delorme is precise: if you look carefully, for instance, you can see that Buck Hill Road East and Buck Hill Road West in Hinesburg Do Not Meet -- you can't get there from here. But Hayden Hill Road? It ought to have gone through. And if it had, I would have come out on the other side of Hayden Hill on Texas Hill Road, neatly on my way to Huntington.

Instead, I had an adventure. When I got to the big broad stretch of the road where the schoolbuses, snowplows and mailmen turn around, I just kept on going, blithely and quixotically trusting in my map. Besides, there were tire tracks! That meant people had driven this way. The road (such as it was) kept going, down, down, down, getting more and more rutted, and rocky. It wasn't long before I was in first gear, threading my way gingerly among the ruts and the (large) stones that were scattered here and there. Down, down, down... I laughed nervously as I heard the alarming sound of small rocks bouncing beneath the vehicle. Down still more.

Suddenly, I looked ahead and spotted two things. Up ahead, the texture of the road seemed to change as it turned to the right -- and was that a house through the trees? Maybe! I must be approaching the other side of the road, Hayden Hill East. But not yet. I wasn't there yet, alas. Closer at hand was a creek. And yes, it went right across the "road." Uh oh.

Now, I've always been completed fascinated by fords. I find the idea that I could just drive my car across a stream bed completely irresistible. I remember using a ford in Owings Mills, MD once, with Margery, and Robert and Pat and I drove across at least a couple of fords out in the back country of New Mexico, visiting Riley. I also used to drive regularly across a small ford in Simsbury, CT, except when the road was closed for flooding. So exciting! The drama! The danger! So naturally, I forged ahead.

Crunch. Whirr. Whirr. Oh, shit. The bottom of the Subaru was stuck on the edge of the creek. Whirr. The tires were racing. So was my heart. Oh, shit! In a total panic, with a rush of adrenaline, I threw the car in reverse and held my breath. Puh-leeeeeeeeese.....

Phew. The car sailed back UP and over the hump, and blessedly, blissfully, thankfully, there was a space right there to turn around in (I was NOT looking forward to backing up). I should have stopped and taken pictures, stopped and enjoyed the stream, stopped and listened to the silence of the woods, stopped and rested the poor car... but no. I was too shit-scared for any of that. I high-tailed it back to Hayden Hill Road West, and headed straight down the hill towards the paved roads of civilization.

Not all roads go through. I could probably have gotten through this one with a jeep or an ATV or a Hummer or something, but the Subaru Forester was just not going to cut it. And maybe, just maybe, those tire tracks I noticed were from idiots like me, who innocently trusted their Delorme atlases ,and then had to turn around just before the creek, just as I did. Not all roads go through. Nope. You can't get there from here. Not no way, not no how.

The Day Before Deer Season

Come this time tomorrow, and I'll feel like I'm living in a war zone. I drove by that hunting camp up on Quaker Street yesterday (a hunting camp on Quaker Street... oh how ironic!), and it was buzzing with activity: three pickup trucks, and the neon Budweiser sign lit up like a Christmas tree. I heard from Meg and John that the busiest day in the local liquor stores is the day before deer season starts. Scary.

Fortunately (or not), I finished my new hat. It seemed like such a good idea! A lovely pattern called the Clapotis Cap, knit in double stranded Lion Brand Microspun. But... well: I think the results speak for themselves. Is it a bathing cap from the '60s? a beauty salon hairdryer hood run amok? A poisonous mushroom? I doubt anyone is going to mistake me for a deer, which is, of course, the main point -- and I will roll up the brim so I can see.

Astro and I have been taking some really nice walks recently, and I finally got around to taking the camera with me. He's definitely ready for deer season, with his spiffy little bandanna on! Though since he's only about 12 inches high, I don't worry TOO much about him being mistaken for a deer. But you can't be too safe, especially when the hunters are fueled primarily by Budweiser.

A lot of our walks have taken us out through the neighbor's sugarbush. We bought our house from Mahlon Norris' granddaughter, and "Norris Sugarworks" is right next door. Kelly and Kathy tap thousands of trees, and sell their maple syrup and other goodies at the Jerusalem Corners Country Store, about three miles away.


It's a beautiful place to walk -- a clear road, open woods, and now that the leaves are gone, you can see so far through the trees. I used to think I was hearing birds in the trees, but recently I've begun to realize that some of the sounds I hear are actually chipmunks, who see Astro coming, and send out a warning to their fellows!

During my first walk through the sugarbush, I was so surprised to realize how close we are to the hills behind the house. Our house is really on the very edge of civilization, with nothing much beyond us but mountains until you get to Huntington.

It's hard to imagine what this land was like, once. Hard to imagine what it was like to have to farm it, especially. Now, I imagine that this area here was always the sugarbush, or nearly so, so the early settlers of So. Starksboro probably didn't try to farm right here. But not too far away, they clearly did. Just out the back end of the sugarbush, we come to what I have taken to calling "the silent meadow." If the wind is right, you can't hear a single sound down there. It's like a deep secret of the woods, a treasure that no one knows is there.

It's not empty or wild: in the picture, the equipment you can see down at the bottom of the meadow is logging equipment: a wood splitter, a tractor, and some trailers. And you can see the electrical fencing around the edge. There aren't any animals in there right now, but clearly, someone was pasturing horses in there this summer, because there's a lot of poop in the meadow (which Astro found very, very interesting...). And, of course, all along the left side of the meadow are the traces of Kelly's taps: the long plastic tubing that leads back to the reverse osmosis thingamajiggy that is the first step in modern maple sugaring.

But what I really like are the older traces of occupation in the meadow. When you walk around old roads and meadows in New England, you notice rustic stone walls around the edges. They have a very practical origin: this is very rocky land, and you need to do something with the rocks that will otherwise break your plow! I grew up with just such an old stone wall in my back yard in Lincoln, Massachusetts: it used to seem so strange to me that my back yard, covered now in century-old oak trees, used to be someone's field or pasture.

Here in Vermont, there's another sign that I never noticed back in Lincoln: apple trees. I've learned a lot about apples and the uses of them in colonial New England recently, mostly from Michael Pollan's fantastic book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Apples weren't just a snack, or even a component of pie, they were a crucial part of the colonial diet -- as cider, alcoholic cider. When Johnny Appleseed was planting apple trees from seed all over America, he was not growing Macintoshes or Macouns or even my beloved Cox Orange Pippins. Because apples do not grown "true to seed," he was necessarily growing bitter cider apples, not sweet eating apples. And whoever used this meadow once upon a time planted apple trees along the edges: shade for hot laborers on a summer day, and cider for the cellar. I tasted these apples, and they weren't bad, actually, though I couldn't identify if they were any particular varietal. Now, I suspect this tree provides a useful draw for deer hunters. It's now illegal to "bait" deer with apples, but it is legal to shoot deer who flock to the apples fallen under a tree (and we saw some deer poop, so I know they flock here). So I suspect that early tomorrow morning will see a deer hunter up in the seat I saw in a tree across the meadow from this one, waiting for the deer to come looking for the apples (and if he's extra smart, he'll probably shake the tree tonight!).

There's another sign of old farms that is less concrete than apple trees or stone walls, but it's so clear nonetheless. I almost can't define it, but I can easily tell the difference between a new logging road and an old farm road. I think it has to do with the trees that grow along the edges of the old farm road. Look at these, for instance, on the road that leads from the silent meadow down to the farm:

There's a thin line of trees "of a certain age" that grow along the edge of the road, clearly delineating the difference between road and old meadow. On the left, there is still a meadow (though it is quite overgrown), but on the right, it's now woods (part of the sugarbush). But the straight line of trees is still there. A logging road doesn't have that distinction, and the trees seem to be more organically, randomly, placed. Here, the randomness of nature has been replaced by the orderliness of the New England farmer. Sometimes, you come across a giant, centuries-old maple tree, like the one my neighbors call "The Mother," sometimes an old apple tree with just a few pathetic old apples lurking in the boughs, but more often, it's a mix of trees, but always in that straight line.

I leave you with a final shot of the paddock at the bottom of the road, warm in the late afternoon sun, with long shadows leading towards the mountain. Happy Deer Season. Run, little deer, run! run and hide!

Today's Road: Hillsboro

I've started a "thing" of trying to drive down one new road every time I'm driving somewhere. That's getting a little challenging when I'm headed down to Middlebury (though still far from impossible), but easy as pie when I'm headed north. Recently I've checked out Little Ireland Road, Lafayette Road, Belden Falls Road and today, the road that leads to Hillsboro.

I'd always wondered a bit why the sign on rte 116 read simply "Hillsboro," and not "Hillsboro Road," but I guess it's because Hillsboro was considered a neighborhood of Starksboro, and this is merely the access road? The other day, I was really surprised by how far up Little Ireland Road (and then Ireland Road) continued, with houses and farms and more houses and farms -- the most beautiful farm was located way up Ireland Road. But the Hillsboro road was quite different. Though both roads are dirt, the Ireland Road is wide and clear and well-graded. The Hillsboro road was not: 2 ruts, with broken branches frequently strewn across it. I wouldn't much like to be going up there during Mud Season -- and I very much doubt it gets plowed in winter. After a mere 3 or 4 houses and camps, it's clear that there are no more utilities going up the road -- no electricity, for example. It almost seemed like a private road, really, but there were no signs telling me to stop, so I didn't.

Though I passed a sign on the left saying "Starksboro Municipal Forest," things didn't get interesting until a couple of miles in. And then, I realized I was in old farm land. There's a certain look about Vermont roads when you're in the vicinity of an old farm. It's unmistakable -- I spotted it on my walk around the woods here the other day, too, just up from the paddock where the Norris horses are. The road runs carefully between banks on either side, usually with classic New England stone walls. But even when there aren't the stone walls, it's still clear. Is it the banks? the mature trees? the occasional enormous maple tree? I'm not sure. But suddenly, through the seeming wildness of the woods, you know that people used to live here, farm here, work here.

I say "seeming wildness" because Jan Albers' wonderful book Hands on the Land has taught us all that Vermont was not always so wild, that all or most of these forests and woods, sylvan idylls now, were once fields and pastures. In the nineteenth century, many of them were homes to merino sheep (ah, happy sheep, and happy shepherds!). But the bottom of the market fell out on merino wool with the growth of the Australian market, and merino sheep were seen no more. Moreover, upland farms, with their shorter growing seasons and rockier soil became less practicable, so people moved down -- or out. And the woods moved back in.

Hillsboro, sadly, is clearly no more. Once there was a community large enough to have its own cemetery up there, and now, there is nothing I could find but trees. The cemetery was not as large as the So. Starksboro cemetery, but it wasn't just a single family affair either. It was certainly dominated by Hills, however! Lots of them. The saddest tomb was of someone named True Layn and his wife (Anne?). Four of their children were buried with them, and three of those died by age 8. The fourth, a daughter, died when she was 21. I wonder if they had other children. I hope so.

When I came home, I checked out Bertha's Book, the indispensable compendium of Starksboro history, to see what Bertha Hanson had to say about Hillsboro. Hillsboro was actually one of the first little communities she wrote about, back in 1957, but she didn't have too much to say, except to tell the story of the four Hill brothers who settled in various parts of Starksboro (not just Hillsboro) in the years around 1800. Heroic Samuel Hill hauled all his worldly goods from Barrington New Hampshire by dragging them on a hand sled in 1798! But by 1870, there was only one Hill family living up there, though once there had been a schoolhouse, a society of Baptists and other families, of course. As Bertha wrote: "changinge social and economic conditions led many of the second generation to move away from the hill farms. Some went west, some went to other towns, others bought land in the valley." (p. 14)

And thus, Hillsboro became the quite place in the woods that it is now. From the cemetery, I could look off to the south and see what I assume was Little Ireland Road in the distance. But once upon a time, the land must have all been cleared, just as it appears in the cheerful photo on page 15 of Bertha's Book: "Haying in Hillsboro."

I suspect that the road continues well beyond the cemetery, but I wasn't able to follow it, alas. One of the super-centenarian maple trees had fallen just across the road about a hundred yards further on, blocking my way. Perhaps the approach of hunting season will inspire someone to clear the road. I'll certainly go back and check again.