Idyll Banter (15 page)

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 without 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.

“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.