Idyll Banter

by Chris Bohjalian

  But I do love the magic of the Vermont foliage. Our house faces Mount Abraham and Mount Ellen, and the color is indeed spectacular. If there hasn’t been an early snow in the higher elevations, closing the gap road through the mountains, the tour buses filled with leaf peepers will drive right past my home. The autumnal exhibit in my village is so extravagant that five Septembers ago Priscilla Presley was here with a forty-person crew and a European advertising agency to film a television commercial for Indian Summer perfume. The European director wanted perfect foliage, and the location scouts chose a dirt road and a strip of woods just south of the town. The crew’s cell phones wouldn’t work in our hills, and they had to depend on the lone rotary phone in the local general store—a situation that probably went from quaint to annoying between days one and four of their visit—but otherwise the shoot was successful. The leaves were particularly brilliant that year.

  I had lived in Vermont for a decade before I learned from my friend John Elder that my state’s autumn beauty is the inadvertent result of man’s natural rapaciousness. Elder teaches in both the English and environmental studies departments at Middlebury College. The two of us were hiking throughout the Bristol Cliffs Wilderness Area and talking about the book he was then writing about Robert Frost’s appreciation for this section of the state.

  Although the steep woods were thick and the trees were tall, Elder showed me the places where the woods had been logged a century earlier and the oxen had pulled the fallen timber from the forest. There, on the trunk of an old birch, were the remains of an iron cable. Once that cable would have been attached to the yoke of the oxen, so that if the animals slipped, they wouldn’t tumble down the hill to their deaths.

  His point? The trees around us were barely eighty years old.

  Most of Vermont is like that. Despite two rounds of deforestation that laid the state bare, Vermont is now seventy-eight percent forest. Originally, man obliterated much of the forest at the end of the eighteenth century to make potash for gunpowder and soap and to fuel iron forges. Then, once the land was cleared, it was kept free for the merino sheep that energized the economy through the Civil War. Vermont, however, was never great sheep country.

  In reality, it has never been great farming country. The land is hilly, the soil is rocky, and the climate can be ornery. After the Civil War, both the people and the sheep left, often following the new railroads west, and trees returned to the meadows and pastures—though this time the hardwoods returned in slightly greater numbers.

  Still, even those trees didn’t last long. The Vermonters who remained carved out a living any way they could, and that often meant logging. Despite the pleas of some of the first conservationists, the hillsides were soon cleared once again. Fortunately for leaf peepers, however, hardwoods like maple grow faster than pine. In torn, muddy ground no longer shielded from the sun by evergreens, the maple seeds took root and the trees quickly flourished. The configuration of the forest changed, with the result that the woods here comprise far more hardwoods and far fewer evergreens than two hundred years ago, and flatlanders have a reason to visit.

  A dead leaf—even a magnificent specimen from a healthy red maple—is of little value. Preschoolers may trace its iconic fjords and bays and stencil upon its topographic veins; idiosyncratic interior designers may shellac clusters of them onto walls and boxes and place mats. The reality, however, is this: Once a leaf has fallen from a tree, it is well on its way toward decomposition. Either it will become a part of the carpet of humus that covers the forest floor (cuisine at the very bottom of the food chain), or it will be raked (often by an exasperated elementary school student). A leaf, like the rest of us, loses its looks real fast after death.

  Yet unlike the rest of us—combinations of cells, animals or plants, it doesn’t matter—the leaves that make up the Vermont hillsides die dazzlingly beautiful deaths. That is, in essence, what we are watching when we gaze at the annual autumnal fireworks in the trees: We are watching leaves die.

  The tree is preparing for winter, and a part of its process is the elimination of all those dainty leaves that are ill-equipped to endure the oncoming cold. The tree does so by slowly producing a layer of cells at the base of the leaf, thereby preventing fluids from reaching it.

  The leaves, meanwhile, stop producing chlorophyll—the chemical necessary for photosynthesis, the process by which a leaf uses sunlight to generate food. Chlorophyll is also the reason a leaf has such a rich green luster. When the chlorophyll is gone, however, the colors in the other chemicals (which have, of course, been there all along) become visible: the scarlet carotenoids of the maple tree, for example.

  That beautiful red leaf, in other words, is slowly starving to death.

  Often, leaf peepers (and the thousands of businesses that depend upon them) worry about the summer weather and what effect it will have on the timing of the color. In reality, weather has little effect: An unusually hot, dry summer might put some stress on the trees and may cause the foliage to peak two or three days earlier than usual; conversely, a cooler summer with plenty of moisture and clouds, like the one we just had, might prolong it an extra half-week. But these swings are marginal: Leaves change because the days are growing shorter, and there is no variability there.

  Sometimes weather can affect the brilliance of the foliage—a drought can certainly dull the colors, just as sufficient moisture in the soil will enhance them—but again, rainfall is a relatively small factor. The leaves are going to turn, and it will almost always be a remarkable spectacle to watch—especially when it’s part of a massive ribbon of color on a hill, with either a dairy farm or Norman Rockwell–esque village green in the foreground.

  Douglas Mack, the chef and co-owner of Mary’s at Baldwin Creek, a Bristol bed-and-breakfast with an award-winning restaurant attached, believes that it is exactly this combination of natural beauty and archetypal New England imagery that generates such devotion to the state. “There’s a decided homeyness that comes with crisp autumn air, the changing leaves, and a fire in the fireplace. It’s like coming home,” he says. “Suddenly, your marriage looks wonderful and your kids have turned out OK. That’s really what we’re serving up here.”

  And that might be exactly why it touches some people more than the view of a garden from an ancient castle keep. The leaves signal the onset of winter and the desire in us all to cocoon in a place that is warm, cozy, and reminiscent of something called home.

  VERMONT READY TO BE MIRED

  IN SPRING

  THE ROAD TO the center of Lincoln coils uphill for exactly 3.4 miles from Vermont 116. According to West Lincoln’s Art Pixley, it has been paved for forty-eight years. Pixley, sixty, has lived on the road since he was four and sold peas from his garden to the road crew when he was twelve.

  Before that road was paved, he says, leaving the mountain in March or April was an adventure.

  Apparently, however, so was simply crossing the street.

  Until she was married, Wanda Goodyear lived just east of the village, on the south side of Lincoln’s main road. Goodyear has six children, thirteen grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. A sizable number of our esteemed citizens might not be here today if one of Wanda’s neighbors hadn’t been home when she made the mistake of trying to traverse the street in the midst of mud season one day when she was six.

  “I was on my way to the grist mill across the street, and the road was just complete mud. The mud must have been at least to my knees, and I got so stuck that I couldn’t lift my legs. So there I was, smack in the middle of the road, unable to move. Finally I just started hollering. Fortunately, a fellow down the street heard me and was able to lift me out. He carried me home on his shoulders, as I recall.”

  Asphalt is one of the astonishing conveniences we take for granted—not unlike electricity. Just as the monumental ice storm this winter gave many of us an opportunity to experience life without Edison’s brightest idea, the imminent arrival of mud season will give us the chanc
e to brave the world before blacktop.

  And what a world it is. A sizable portion of the roads in Vermont are still dirt: Quaint stuff on a dusty August afternoon, downright magic when the foliage is right in the fall. But in April or March, a dirt road becomes a quagmire.

  Pixley says that when he was a boy, one of the principal north-south routes in Lincoln, Quaker Street, was simply called “the Mud Road.”

  I can understand why: My powerful Plymouth Colt (now long out to pasture) once got stuck so deep in Quaker Street slop that I had to climb out the window to escape. I considered leaving the vehicle where it was as a public service, figuring other cars could drive over the roof. The metal might be slippery, but at least it would offer a solid island in the midst of that muck.

  As recently as thirty years ago, Clara Hallock and her husband, Ken, would have to stop where the Quaker Street asphalt comes to an end and pull off the road to wrap their tires in chains before turning right and trying to scale Bagley Hill.

  Floyd Hall, who moved to Lincoln in 1936, can’t begin to count the number of cars he’s helped yank from the mud but guesses the figure must have three digits.

  “A Model A had a twenty-one-inch tire,” Hall says, “and the running board would be about two-thirds of the way up the tire. Before we paved the roads, it wasn’t uncommon to see a car sunk in to the running board.”

  Getting stuck in the mud could happen to anyone, and it did. Blacktop and four-wheel drive and tires that tower over toddlers make it less likely today than a generation ago, but cars still get beached in our bogs.

  Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for the smell of spring that comes with that slop. It’s uplifting and earthy, and it rises up from the ground on moist air. Often, it comes with the sound of frogs and birds you haven’t heard in two seasons.

  So while I certainly wouldn’t encourage anyone to try to navigate a dirt road over the next month, the fact remains there’s something to be said for experiencing our back country highways the way our grandparents did—before asphalt made local travel less full of surprises.

  SPIRITS LIVE AT BARTLETT’S SWIMMING HOLE

  SOMETIMES WE FORGET how powerful the New Haven River is as it surges west along the road linking Bristol and Lincoln.

  We know it’s there, the asphalt aligned with the aqua, even when the trees that separate the road and the river are as lush as they are right this moment. But we tend not to focus upon the waterway’s colossal power, or the fact its current is so pronounced and its falls so prominent that it was powering a hydroelectric plant in Bristol until 1959.

  At the site of the river’s most impressive natural drop, Bartlett’s Falls, there once was a dam and a pipe, called a penstock, that funneled the water downriver to the generating station just north of Bristol. The dam and key parts of the penstock were all but obliterated by the hurricane of 1938.

  It’s not possible to live in the eastern half of Addison County and not know about Bartlett’s. Today it’s a swimming hole, and on summer afternoons, it is packed: a Coney Island at the base of a steep embankment thick with maple and pine and ash.

  In the mornings, however, it is empty, and that’s when I like to visit. It’s not that I am misanthropic. But there is history at Bartlett’s, and it’s easier to feel its presence when the only sound is the falls.

  In all fairness, of course, that sound is loud. Bartlett’s is shaped a bit like the Canadian section of Niagara Falls. Horizontally, it is a wide, shallow horseshoe, which means it acts as a natural amphitheater. It exaggerates the already impressive sound of the water as it cascades a good thirty feet into the basin below.

  Unlike Niagara, however, the water doesn’t fall like drapes. Rather, it drops upon no fewer than six ledges as it makes its way down. Instead of one roiling mass of spray at the base, the air around Bartlett’s is filled top to bottom with mist.

  The remains of the dam are visible on both sides of the river, clusters of cement stanchions upon which one can sit in astonishing comfort.

  These days, the stanchion on the southern shore has the words “Divers Beware!” written in bold letters because it is unsafe to dive off those ledges or supports: Earlier this summer, one young man died doing just that.

  People also have died simply swimming near Bartlett’s, especially little children. Lincoln’s Bill James can’t drive past the spot without thinking about the four-year-old son of friends from Rhode Island who drowned there. And Bristol’s Jack Wendel can still recall the little girl who was caught in a nearby penstock close to sixty-five years ago, and died in the pipe under the water.

  The great irony of that hurricane of 1938 is not that it washed away a dam or a penstock built at the end of the nineteenth century, but that it annihilated the improvements made with enormous effort at the end of the winter a mere six months earlier.

  Some of the workers who constructed the new intake valve at Bartlett’s had boarded at Wendel’s house when he was a boy, and he remains amazed at the work they did in those still-frigid waters.

  Yet Bartlett’s is by no means a sad place, especially when the sun and the heat and the acoustics conspire to make it a classic Vermont swimming hole.

  But when you visit Bartlett’s alone, it feels different than when there’s a crowd. Sit in a spot in the shade, and it is dark no matter where the sun is in the sky. It is never quiet there, thanks to the falls, but it can be very still. The falls drown out the sound of most animals, and without birds or chipmunks or squirrels, it seems as though you’re completely alone.

  And if you do stay out of the sun, Bartlett’s grows chilly fast.

  In August, of course, that chill can be welcome. It is not only a respite from the heat: It is a reminder of the stories that live on in our ruins.

  THE VERMONT WOODS LOOK DIFFERENT WITHOUT ANY LEAVES

  RECENTLY I HELD a rifle in my hands and went hunting.

  Actually, that’s not completely true: I walked around the woods a lot with an unloaded eight-and-a-half-pound gun slung over my shoulder and sat for a long time on a snow-covered boulder the size of a school bus.

  My friend, Lincoln’s Bob Patterson, was doing the hunting. Most of the day I was simply trying to make as little noise as possible and to figure out how to tell Bob that I needed to mark a tree really badly, but given the amount of buck urine we were wearing I was concerned this would undermine our efforts.

  Deer, apparently, have a pretty good sense of smell, and would be able to tell from anything I happened to leave on a beech tree that there was a human in the woods who had eaten Lucky Charms and coffee for breakfast.

  I had a wonderful time that November day, even when I was sitting on that frigid boulder: I had clipped to the back of my belt an orange pad filled with pellets that apparently help preserve body warmth as they’re compressed. (Here, of course, is a real technological breakthrough: For once heat is being propelled against the human bottom in the woods, instead of the reverse.)

  This was the first time in years I had been in the woods in the winter without wearing cross-country skis, and I had forgotten how magnificent the experience is—and how different it is from tromping around the small forests of Vermont in the summer or fall. I was astonished at the visibility, and the vistas that opened up without any leaves on the trees. It was also a treat to see so clearly the different animal tracks in the snow: a snowshoe hare, a buck, a doe.

  Now I know some of you are wondering why a very public vegetarian was in the woods with a gun—albeit one without bullets. A big reason was that a character in a novel I’m writing is a hunter. But I was also hunting—pretending to hunt, really—because I had never done it before and hunting is an important part of Vermont’s cultural self-image.

  I did not, to be honest, have any overwhelming desire to field-dress a buck, but I did read a manual beforehand about how to do such a thing in the event we actually got a deer. Since Bob was kind enough to take me along, I felt I had a moral obligation to assist him after the kill wit
hout vomiting.

  Bob and I set off a little before sunrise into the woods high on the mountains here in Lincoln, and by mid-morning I had seen my very first deer beds: two small ovals each the rough size of an automobile tire, the snow melted in the shape of eggs, and the newly exposed oak and maple leaves on the forest floor still warm to the touch. Bob explained that these had been left by a doe and a fawn, and they’d probably been watching us before leaving. A few minutes later we found the tracks where the deer had actually crossed our path—small divots in the snow and the spongy mud, some in the much larger prints from our own boots.

  Shortly before lunch we discovered what Bob really was after: the scrapes on the ground left by a buck in full rut, and fresh hooking on the bark of a small tree.

  Bob didn’t get his deer that day, which meant I didn’t need the airsickness bag I had brought with me in the event that he did and we needed to field-dress the animal. The fact is, however, that given the single buck limit, all but one of the days when Bob is in the woods during rifle season he won’t get a deer.

  And that’s fine with him—and with most hunters. Certainly there is the sense of accomplishment and camaraderie that comes with bringing a buck home and watching it get weighed. But hunting, I learned, is as much about a good day in the quiet of the forest as it is about venison.

  SNOW COLORS VERMONT IN BEAUTY

  ONE PARTICULARLY HOT, humid September day when I was visiting my father in Florida—the sort of day in which Floridians try to remain inside their air-conditioned automobiles and homes, but still wind up drenched in sweat in the few seconds it takes to walk from front door to car door—I asked him why anyone would choose to live in a place where the temperature flirted with triple-digits as late as the first day of fall.