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!