Idyll Banter

by Chris Bohjalian

  “I wonder the same thing about you folks in Vermont come mid-December,” he answered.

  Touché. I know I pine for sweat on those brisk winter days when the temperature’s hovering between negative digits and insanity, and I know I’ll find myself yearning for anyplace warm come early February.

  Yet I don’t feel that way right now. The first real snow we had this year in Lincoln happened to come at night, but by the next morning the clouds had rolled east. The result? Light was pouring in through my bedroom windows as early as 4:45, filling the room with the sort of radiance and luster we usually expect in those months when the days last forever: The room had the glow of June or July.

  It was sixteen degrees when I went outside, but there was absolutely no wind, so if it wasn’t exactly sweater weather, nor was it call-of-the-wild, leave-no-flesh-exposed cold.

  And everything, of course, was white. We tend to modify fresh snow with words like clean and pure, and certainly they’re apt. But rural Vermont in those first hours after a snowstorm is more than clean and pure, it’s the sort of vast, trance-like world that fills fairy tales and dreams. Things move more slowly in snow—animals as well as cars—and the world grows quiet. Almost supernaturally quiet.

  When I stand outside at 5:00 in the morning in June, at the very least I will hear birds—robins and cardinals and phoebes—and I’ll probably hear the squirrels bending the smaller branches of the maples by the barn as they whirl among them like Berbers.

  When I stand outside at 5:00 in the morning in December, I won’t hear a thing. It’s not quite so cold yet that the trees or houses will snap, and so the world will seem soundless.

  And those trees that serve as playgrounds for squirrels in the summer? The first morning after a snow, they become elegant black and crystal sculptures: a willowy raven frame, layered with luminous sky-blown glass. That glass may melt before nine in the morning, but it’s still beautiful in the hours it’s new.

  The main road out of Lincoln in winter winds along the New Haven River, and driving along it immediately after a snowstorm is a wondrous three-and-a-half-mile excursion into a forest that seems genuinely enchanted: The trees form a silvery canopy along much of the road, the boughs bending beneath the weight of the ice and snow like frosted palm fronds.

  And even those parts of the world that seem downright prosaic in summer grow mystic in snow. My daughter’s swing set becomes albino white in the winter because the snow drapes the blue seats and yellow slide like folded hand towels and quilts. Her sandbox, shaped like a turtle with a shell for a cover, becomes a small igloo. And the patch of earth that had been the vegetable garden—a part of the yard that without snow this time of the year is a depressing brown square dotted with stalks from dead plants and the weeds that just wouldn’t die—becomes an elegant stretch of snow-covered beach, with tiny hillocks of chalk and what might be frozen foam rolling ashore from the surf.

  I might wonder why we live where we live in another two months, but I don’t at this point in December. The first snows are merely a gentle reminder that beauty in Vermont isn’t limited to the summer and fall. Splendor here comes in all seasons. Even winter.

  CHEATING DEATH IN THE AP-GAP

  WE’RE APPROACHING that time of year when the only mammals using the Lincoln Gap to cross between Lincoln and Warren are bears, deer, and people from southern climates who don’t comprehend the significance of a sign that says, “Road Not Maintained in Winter.”

  If the Gap is not closed by now for the season, it soon will be.

  This means the only way across the mountain is the McCullough Turnpike, or the state’s illustrious Vermont 17.

  Given the good number of folks in Addison County who commute to work in Montpelier, Waterbury, and the ski resorts lining the eastern slopes of the mountain, Vermont 17 is a busy road in winter.

  It is also, however, a scary one. The McCullough Turnpike twists tortuously between Bristol and Waitsfield, with roughly eight miles of stomach-turning switchbacks in its center that rise with serpentine splendor to the top of the Appalachian Gap. Without wanting to belabor the obvious of a road carved into a mountain, the turnpike’s distinguishing feature is that it is a steep drive up one hill followed by a steep drive down another.

  Yet I have a good many friends who work on the other side of the mountain, and thus traverse the Gap twice a day in the sorts of nasty weather that once excited the producers of Rescue 911.

  Bristol’s Nancy Luke is one. Nancy is the director of adult ski programs at Sugarbush, as well as a ski instructor. She drives daily on what has come to be called the Ap-Gap. Moreover, as a skier—someone who derives pleasure from sliding quickly down hills—she is the perfect sort of person to take on the Ap-Gap without fear or pause or a large insurance policy.

  Only once has Nancy failed to conquer the McCullough, and that was when the sand truck before her slid off the road at the summit. She was on her way to work, which meant she was just west of the peak.

  Both lanes of the road before her were quilted under so much snow they were impassable, and only her lane was plowed behind her: The other half of the road was still buried, which meant there wasn’t even room to turn her car around.

  Her solution? “I backed down,” she says with a shrug, humbly downplaying the world-class driving accomplishment of all time.

  Lincoln’s Bill Norton and Larry Masterson are not skiers, but given the way they drive they could be. The two mild-mannered accountants have commuted to Montpelier together for three decades. Since 1976, they’ve been part of a group who scale the mountain in a—Dramamine, please—van.

  Before the van, however, they were part of a foursome who often used Bill’s Chevy Nova. Driving a Chevy Nova over a mountain in winter is like sailing Kon-Tiki across the Pacific: a gesture that is intrepid, heroic, and dumb.

  Bill says the small group had a little trick to get the Nova over the mountain when the road was covered with ice or snow. Three of the adult men would sit in the trunk to weigh down the rear, while the fourth drove. To report this maneuver with scrupulous accuracy, I should note that Larry—an especially tall man—would actually sit on the edge of the trunk with only his legs inside it.

  Almost always this method succeeded, even that morning when from his perch outside the car Larry saw the sand truck backing down the hill in the Nova’s lane before Bill, but despite his frantic banging on the car’s roof was unable to get Bill’s attention.

  At the last minute Bill was able to swerve around the truck, riding one of the snowbanks like a bobsled driver in hot pursuit of a gold.

  All the group got to work on time, except Bill.

  “It was my car and I was driving,” he says, “so I thought I should be the one to clean up the trunk where the guys had been sitting.”

  SUGARERS SIGNAL END OF WINTER

  IT’S A SATURDAY morning in February, and while the sun will soon be high overhead, the temperature’s not going to climb above twenty today. It probably won’t reach fifteen.

  Still, it’s a wonderful day to be deep in the woods: Mount Abraham is a giant white snowball against a fluorescent blue sky, and the snow’s so fresh you can see the tracks of wild turkeys and moose stretching well into the trees.

  Five days a week, Don Gale and Evan Truchon are engineers who spend their days with computers. Today they are sugarmakers. Evan is knee-deep in snow, and Don would be, too, if it weren’t for the fifty-year-old snowshoes he’s strapped under his boots.

  They’re stomping high up one of the foothills in the National Forest that rings the western slope of Mount Ellen, attaching plastic tubing to maple trees. They’ve been hanging that tubing every weekend since the first of the year, and they will probably be back every weekend until the sap starts running in March.

  This year they’ve draped about five thousand new feet of tubing, bringing their total to somewhere between three and four miles. This isn’t a huge amount, but it’s not shabby. As Truchon observes, “I wouldn’t call our
sugaring a job because our hourly rate’s about a penny. But it takes a lot more work than any hobby I’ve ever had.”

  Yet, like most of the state’s 2,500 sugarmakers, Truchon and Gale are addicted. And while the part of the process most non-sugarmakers see—those spring days inside a sugarhouse that steams like a sauna and smells like a pure maple spa—is the part we tend to romanticize, these days in the snow and the cold of February are the ones Truchon and Gale like best.

  “We can be up here a whole day and not see another human being,” Gale says. “And some days it’s absolutely quiet: You don’t hear a sound but the crunching of the snow as you break a trail.”

  Today, however, they do have company (other than me) and there is noise. A woodpecker is trailing them, pausing always two or three trees from the maple they’re looping with the small links of hose they call “drops.” When the temperature warms, they will tap these maples, inserting a spout from the drop into the tree.

  And while they rarely see other people up here, they do see animals. Wild turkeys are common, and so are deer. Occasionally they see moose, including one early this year that Truchon watched lumber up to one of their lines, raise it with her nose, and then stroll underneath it.

  The one constant is the work: It’s always hard. Forty pounds of tubing might not sound like a lot, but it grows heavy fast when you’re climbing uphill, your feet sinking two and three feet into the snow. And then, when the pair arrive at a tree to attach one of the drops, they need to peel off the flaps of their hunting gloves—gloves in which the fingers extend only as far as the first knuckle, but have a special fold-over mitten—and expose their fingers to the cold. It’s no easy task to link two pieces of plastic tubing in sub-freezing weather, and they depend upon a thermos of hot water to make the lines malleable.

  Yet the two men relish this time. It may simply be that the labor is profoundly different from their work designing electrical boards or machines that grind marble: It is certainly not sedentary, and no part of it demands a keyboard and a monitor.

  But it might be more than that. It might also be the opportunity to get outside while there’s still snow and silence in the woods, and no leaves to canopy the trail from the sun. Soon the snow will be gone, and while these woods may not be densely aboriginal, they are deep and quiet and a pretty good stretch from a world of snowmobiles and skis.

  Here is not a bad place at all to savor the end of the season.

  SELECT NUMBERS SHOW A

  CHANGING VERMONT

  THREE WEEKS AGO I found the lid to my septic tank without having to avail myself of my neighbor Rudy Cram’s wisdom.

  Usually the only way I find my septic tank lid is by digging for nine solid hours, having my wife flush a toilet seven hundred times inside while I lie on the ground outside with my ear pressed to the grass, and then—when all else has failed—asking Rudy if he knows where the septic tank is.

  When it comes to houses, especially mine, Rudy knows everything.

  This year, however, I actually found the septic tank myself. I didn’t even need to wander around my yard like a somnambulant madman with a dowsing rod in my hands.

  I was very proud, and when I boasted of this monumental accomplishment to my wife, she observed that my newly found competency might have something to do with the reality that we’ve now lived in Lincoln for a decade and a half.

  Tuesday, as a matter of fact, marks our fifteen-year anniversary in this house in Vermont.

  In that period there have been enormous changes in our fair state, of which my ability to find my septic tank is only one. Depending upon whether one wants a VCR or a view, Taft Corners has metamorphosed from a cow pasture into either a convenient shopping mecca or a sprawl of cement bunkers.

  The Queen City’s iconoclastic firebrand of a mayor has become the Green Mountains’ somewhat more inhibited but no less independent congressman. And our legislative language is now peppered with wondrously provocative terms that meant nothing in the mid-1980s, including, of course, civil union.

  There have been a variety of more subtle changes, however, that in their own way are no less telling and bear testimony to the state’s transformation. To wit:

  • In 1986, there were exactly six traffic lights in the thirty-two miles separating my home and this newspaper’s newsroom in downtown Burlington; today there are nineteen.

  • Fifteen years ago, the state issued 91,039 hunting licenses to residents; last year it issued 83,593.

  • The deer herd numbered roughly 110,000 in 1986; today it’s closer to 145,000.

  • Number of Wal-Marts in Vermont in 1986: zero. Number today: four.

  • Fifteen years ago, there were a mere 1,267 Vermont-licensed attorneys in the state; today there are 2,688.

  • The state boasted 3,044 dairy farms in 1986; today there are 1,565.

  • Numbers are less exact for emu farms. In 1986 in Vermont there was either one emu farm or zero; today there are nine or ten.

  • Fifteen years ago, there were 8,267 serious crimes in Chittenden County; by last year the total had fallen to 6,630.

  • In 1986, Vermont Public Radio had two stations and 32,000 listeners; today there are five stations and 160,000 listeners.

  • If you wanted a cup of coffee in downtown Burlington in 1986, you were likely to drop into places like the Oasis, Henry’s Diner, or the Woolworth on Church Street. Now you’re likely to visit Muddy Waters, Uncommon Grounds, Starbucks, or Speeder & Earl’s.

  • There were approximately 310 country stores in the Green Mountains in 1986; today there are 210. And while the number of grocery stores has decreased as well, falling from eighty to sixty, the newer ones are twice as large as the older ones.

  • Number of snowmobiles registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles in 1986: 29,705. Number today: 36,077.

  And, of course, the number of hours it has taken me to find my septic tank has plummeted from nine to a fraction of one. This, in my mind, is an incontrovertible sign of progress.

  THE CHURCH

  WITH A

  WEATHERVANE

  ATOP THE STEEPLE

  A FENDER BENDER WITH BABY JESUS?

  I HAVE MANY FEARS, some more rational than others, but one is about to go away for a little while because Christmas is coming.

  For the next few weeks, I will no longer fear running over the baby Jesus in his creche.

  This is actually one of my more rational fears.

  Specifically, I fear that some day between mid-January and mid-December, I might have to pull myself together after a tremendous calamity has occurred for which I am responsible, and struggle over to the United Church of Lincoln and explain to the congregation, “Ummm, there’s no good way to say this, but I think I just ran over the baby Jesus. I’m really sorry, but I accidentally put the car into drive instead of reverse, and you know the incredible pickup those Plymouth Colts have.”

  This could happen. This could happen because my church’s almost life-size nativity scene is stored inside my barn after Christmas, and it is stored about a foot from the front bumper of my car after I’ve parked.

  Add to this the fact that I am an incredibly incompetent driver, and some days I am getting into my car at six in the morning—a time of day when I’m an even worse driver than usual, because I haven’t yet hooked up the intravenous caffeine feed that keeps me awake—and we have a prescription for disaster.

  Ironically, it was my lamebrained idea to put the creche where it is in the first place. About five years ago, the stewards asked if the church could store the nativity scene in my barn instead of my neighbor’s, where it had sat for years. I knew this nativity scene well, I knew the faces of the folks in the manger, and they seemed like nice enough people. So I said sure, they could summer in my barn.

  What I didn’t know was that the nativity scene weighed a little more than a backhoe. This isn’t one of those particleboard nativity scenes, this is no spit-and-polish plastic affair. This is a nativity scene with
a five-foot-high manger, wooden adults who have eaten well for most of their wooden lives, and a floor with an aircraft carrier hidden inside it to keep the thing stable when the December winds blow hard off the mountain.

  It takes six strong men to carry it the fifty yards from the church to my barn.

  For four years we put the creche in the back of the barn, on the wooden floor far from the car. Over time, however, the flooring began to sink under its weight, and the wall beside it started to sag accordingly.

  So this past January, I suggested we put the manger on the edge of the cement pad in the front half of the barn, where I park. There is just enough room in this garage bay for the nativity scene, the car, and one thin person to stand.

  Consequently, when I drive into the barn at night, my headlights beam the creche. When I start the car in the morning, there are three shepherds, Mary and Joseph, and the baby Jesus staring back at me from the manger.

  This is a very weird sensation: bumper-to-bumper with the baby Jesus.

  It is also, however, an extremely moving one. In addition to the symbolic meaning of the creche to Christians worldwide, this particular creche has additional meaning to the members of one small church in Lincoln.

  No one knows who built it. It appeared, mysteriously, on Christmas Eve, 1981, on the lawn of the church the year the church had burned to the ground. When I see the creche, I am therefore reminded that while one old church may have disappeared in smoke and flame, in its ashes was faith, and from that faith a new church arose.

  So in three weeks, when it’s time to move the creche back into the barn after Christmas, I probably won’t find a new spot. But I will learn to drive with the parking brake on.