Idyll Banter (14 page)

THE
GREEN—
AND THEN
SPECTACULARLY
YELLOW
AND
RED—
MOUNTAINS

WHY THE GREEN MOUNTAINS
TURN RED

I AM STANDING
in the remains of a turret in Scotland's Edzell Castle, staring down into the restored Renaissance garden that a British nobleman designed four hundred years ago. This castle is a gem: It has the power of history (Mary, Queen of Scots, visited here), the aura that permeates any relic the size of a football field, and a vast garden with roses, statuary, and hedgerows trimmed to spell out the inspirational motto of the Clan Lindsay, when seen from above.

When the British couple beside me hear that I hail from Vermont, however, the subject turns instantly to leaves. Specifically, it turns to Vermont leaves. An elderly French couple quickly chime in, wanting to share their memories of a September visit to the Green Mountains in 1979 and how they had never seen anything like the Vermont foliage. I try to steer the conversation back to the castle in which we are standing, but in the opinion of these four Europeans, the Vermont autumn is infinitely more interesting than a castle built centuries ago.

The Vermont foliage is like that: For two or three weeks in late September and early October, the trees explode in an absolutely phantasmagoric display of color. The maples—a third of the trees in the state—turn shades of crimson and cherry and red, the birches become an almost neon yellow, and the ash becomes a purple that is as flamboyant as my young daughter's most vibrant Magic Marker. The color moves inexorably from north to south, from the higher to the lower elevations, traveling through the trees like a tsunami.

And along with those colors come the leaf peepers. Roughly four million people visit Vermont in the autumn, almost seven times the state's population—spending close to a billion dollars, according to the state's tourism department. Several upscale bed-and-breakfast owners tell me they are likely to do a sixth of their annual business during that three-week period when the leaves may be at their best.

Moreover, while the tourists may be visiting in large measure because of the foliage, it's not merely the colors in the trees that have drawn them: It's the notion that the whole Vermont landscape is a throwback, an unspoiled glimpse of agrarian America. The dairy farm may be beleaguered in Vermont, but some 1,600 still remain, and it is easy to find a hillside speckled with Holsteins or discover a red barn beside an elegant country skyscraper of a silo. Though the woods don't feel exactly primeval, there are numerous pockets in the state where the trees still grow thick and the daylight can disappear. And while we do have Wal-Mart now—four, in fact—we also have iconic New England greens surrounded by white clapboard churches with elongated steeples, nineteenth-century Greek Revival “cottages” with slate roofs and gingerbread trim, and Victorian homes that boast fish-scale woodwork along their front porches.

Yet there is an irony to the foliage display the Vermont woods offers its guests every year, as well as to the notion that the state's remarkably beautiful landscape is the product of centuries of careful husbandry of the countryside. First, Vermonters almost completely deforested the state not once but twice in the last two-hundred years; second, if we hadn't leveled the forests, it is unlikely that our hillsides now would be exploding with myriad shades of red and yellow and orange.

   

I grew up loathing leaves. I was raised in the sort of mannered New England suburb in which lawns were supposed to be appropriately manicured every day of the year when they weren't buried in snow, and so I spent a great many September and October weekends as a child trying to keep up with the waves of leaves that would fall to their death between our house and the cul-de-sac on which we lived. (Autumn leaves to an elementary school student must be something like the mail in December to a postal worker: The leaves just keep falling and falling, and no sooner is the yard clean than a wind in the night blankets the ground with them once again.)

Consequently, it's probably no accident that my wife and I bought a house with few trees when we moved to a village in central Vermont. There are exactly two maple trees in our front yard, and two more on the edge of our driveway. With the exception of a pair of lilacs, all the trees we have planted in the fifteen years we have lived here are evergreens.

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 chance 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.