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Spring 2002
Today really felt like spring so I went for a walk. But first I spent way too much time trying to find the perfect hotels in London -- tough since I don't know London and I'm forsaking guide books for some reason. IE and Netscape both exhibited different annoying and counter-productive behaviors so it took me awhile, but I digress… So it got to be around 3 and I looked at the clock, swore at my sense of time, ate an eggroll (lunch I guess), chugged a diet coke, laced up my boots and chugged my way up the hill behind my house (isn’t English the oddest language?). The deer paths looked pretty inviting today. Something about the way last year’s grass lays and the winding narrow bald spot in the earth where the deer put their feet highlights the path in a way that only happens in the spring between snow and green grass. I just wish that deer were 6 feet tall and made paths that are my height. The ground floor hunting blinds positioned for the best field of fire are all along the paths up the hill. I pass two about 200 yards apart. Always makes me feel a little hunted to be walking along a deer path that doubles as a shooting gallery part of the year. Places where paths converge are good places for tree stands. The second tree stand I pass looks very well built with pressure treated boards, a green plastic clothesline guardrail, and a very solid looking ladder nailed part way up the tree just down from the platform. I climb the tree to the ladder and am just about to swing out onto the ladder to climb the rest of the way, when I realize that I’m alone in the woods, already 15’ off the ground and about to dump 240 pounds of me onto a ladder that’s been there for God knows how long, and if it goes I’ll definitely land on my back not my feet, and I think better of it and climb back down, disappointed. Wouldn’t have thought twice about it 35 years and 150 pounds ago (I was very skinny). Back when I was a lot less mortal and didn’t know that sometimes you fall and don’t get right back up, if you get up at all. Something about being in these woods on these deer paths makes me think of war. Makes me watch the distant bushes a little more carefully. Makes me check to see who I’m upwind from. Makes me pause for a second before stepping out into the open. Makes me careful not to break twigs with my feet or my body. Makes me place my steps on firmer, leafy ground where I’ll be harder to track. Makes me think like hunter and hunted. I decide that today will be a good day to follow the Old road all the way to the end. We rediscovered the Old road that used to run from Tracy Creek Road to Ridge Road this winter. I’d always thought that it started from Tracy Creek right next to our house and just petered out in the fields above us, but Barb found the real Tracy Creek end of the road about a quarter mile down from us and several times this winter we followed it up a ways. We also knew that there was a road next to the fields above us, running up the hill, and there was a road off Ridge that seemed to run in the right direction. And we have a map from the late 1800s that shows the road. But finding the Tracy Creek end and following from there was the key. We had always before missed the sharp zigzag the road took about a half mile up the hill, but this year we saw it clear as day. The Old road is lined with old trees on both sides. They stand out from the rest of the woods plain as day when you’re standing in the road. All of the land around here was cleared 200, 300 years ago and the trees have been growing back into the fields that were abandoned 50, 60 years ago when dairying stopped paying the bills. So the forest is patchy – part field and part pine and maple and oak and scrub -- and 50 years young, except for the trees along the road. Here and there the stone wall that used to run along both sides of the road still stands, a “dry stain dike” according to my Scottish fayther-in-law. Mostly the stones have been knocked down, fallen, or used for other purposes. But the thing that really makes the road stand out is its crown and the ditches that were dug on either side. The crown is about 6 inches higher than the forest floor around it, about 12 feet wide and the ditch on either side is about a foot deep, even after all of these years. Dug by hand through the woods for miles. In a couple of spots water broke out of the ditches at some point in the past and made it’s own way across the road, cutting feet deep gouges that would have to be filled if the road was ever to be used again. Of course the real obstacle to anyone using the road is the trees growing in it. The trees started filling in the road long before they started filling in the surrounding fields. The oldest trees growing in the road look to be 70 or 80 years old, but mostly the road is full of younger 10-30 year old trees. About three quarters of a mile up the road there’s a laid-up stone foundation in the woods, just above where the road zigs. There hasn’t been a building on it in quite a while – though there are no trees growing inside the foundation, so it’s pretty hard to tell how long – but the foundation is in beautiful shape. Not anywhere near ready to fall. For a house or a barn? Never was on the map. Laid up by hand, 7 feet high in a hole dug by hand. This winter we stopped by the foundation to marvel yet again at its seeming permanence and discovered at least one and maybe two deer carcasses down in the foundation. It was hard to tell for sure because the pelts were torn up and the bones were scattered and the heads were missing. There was a dead dog in there too. At least it looked like a dog – smallish like a terrier, long fur mostly black but some white around the face. Too big for a badger, dead too long to know anything for sure without poking around. Another one of those things that the 14-year-old me would have just done that now makes me hesitate long enough to think better of it. So up the road I went and sure enough, it goes all the way to Ridge and comes out right where I thought it would. There’s another old foundation there, this one pretty definitely a barn since it only has three sides. And there’s another one about 100 yards back from the road! Didn’t know about this one. I’ve followed the road in from Ridge before, but someone cut a new road up and to the right (they use it to get in to a pond back in the woods) so I never saw the foundation that lies in next to the Old road, hidden from the view of the new. The Old road feels full of ghosts when I walk it. The empty foundations, the broken walls, the old trees, the crown, the ditches, the effort, the toil, the long hard years. I walk the road and hear the quiet and remember a world where roads were made with sweat and blisters and pain and walked by the people who made them. Walking to the fields with the horses, walking home to dinner at dusk. The smells, the birds, the wind in the trees, the view across the valley. It’s easy to remember things from a past I’ve never known walking the Old road, through the woods in the quiet. I could take Ridge back home, but instead I take the new road to the pond in the woods, somehow not wanting to go back down the Old road and not wanting to experience the pavement and newness of Ridge. The new road isn’t really a road like the Old road – just a couple of muddy ruts, muddy since there’s no crown and no remarkable ditches. It twists through meadows that haven’t yet received their blessing of trees toward the top of the hill. I’m exposed up here, out in the open for the first time in nearly an hour. The hunted feeling comes back – a rabbit under a sky of unseen hawks. I miss the protection of the woods. Simon – I forgot to mention Simon, le dog, known to his friends as Muttley – is no friend of rabbits, or squirrels for that matter. He’s a piss poor enemy though. He’s not crafty, not patient, and he’s no match for the wee beasties in the speed department. Now he spots something in some undergrowth and leaps high! to get a better view. Two feet off the ground straight up in the air (he can still do that on 12-year-old legs?), eyes pinned to a spot about 10 feet in and then takes off, crashing through the brush. You go dog! May you live forever. Amen. The pond is full, what a beautiful sight! It was down about four feet a few weeks ago after the last of the snow had melted and it should have been full. Barb and I started conserving water after seeing that. But here it is deep and green and wet everywhere it’s supposed to be. Simon wades in and takes a long drink. The water is very green. I’m not that thirsty. It’s a man-made pond, a long way from anywhere (at least a mile). Someone built it, built the sortof road, and then thought better of it. Kids used to come up to party and do things that society (certainly their parents) might frown upon. Lately they’ve either stopped coming up or they’ve stopped drinking beer and using condoms. Or they’re a lot neater. Someone has chopped up a good-sized fallen limb in half with hatchet size bite marks, but just shoved it out of the way, no fire. Probably it was just impeding the progress of a snow mobile. Simon and I walk back down together through the woods to the Old road. Technically Simon and I walked up together, but coming up he was always off somewhere harassing small animals and claiming territory. Now he’s tired and walks behind me. Drafting. I don’t really want to walk down the same way I walked up, so we walk off into the young field woods and follow a deer path down until we cross the open field above our woodlot. I start to think about databases and Java Beans and Servlets, headed home, getting my head back in the game. The path into the woodlot is a little hard to spot, but we noticed this winter that a few years ago someone had tied a knot in the trunk of the young pine opposite the trail. The tree must have been very young and supple when it was knotted like that. The tree's about 8 feet tall now, the knot's about the size of my two clenched fists and about eye level. There are several other trees with knots, but this must have been the first. The woodlot is really just a place where someone deliberately left a bunch of oaks growing, probably because they made good firewood and they were probably unusual. The forest around here was all hemlock at one point, and supported a planing mill and a couple of saw mills, according to our old map. Several churches too. All gone now. The only remaining active church is down the road, the one my great uncle Walter started about 50 years ago. When I moved here and people heard my last name, they’d talk to me about what a tremendous man my great uncle was, even before I figured out we were related. People just assumed I knew. I talked to my dad about it and he said that his uncle Walter had started a number of churches and yes, he thought there was one in Vestal. Turns out the church on Tracy Creek was the last one. Great-Uncle Walter is pushing up daisies right down the road in Tracy Creek Cemetery. At least that’s what everyone says. I’ve looked but I can’t find the stone. We walk down through the woodlot, past more tree stands. It’s amazing to me that any deer survive to devastate our tulips in the spring, but they do, ‘deed they do. A friend of mine has solved the tulip-eating deer problem with what must be the world’s best deer repellent. All winter long he pees outside into a 5-gallon pail. If it gets to be spring and he hasn’t quite filled that bucket up, or a lot of it evaporates, he’ll invite friends and family to help him top it off (voice of experience here). It ripens considerably over the winter and in the spring he mixes a little soap and quite a bit of Tabasco with it and sprays it on his tulips. I don’t know how they survive it but they do and the deer sure don’t eat ‘em. What a surprise. As we’re coming out of the woodlot, I hear Spring. The peepers are singing. Last heard, oh, about 6 months ago I think. I can’t remember. The peepers are such a part of the evening sounds that they become the evening until one day they’re silent and it’s Fall. Sometime after that I notice they’re gone and the long evenings of summer too, and the seasons turn. They’re singing in Truman’s pond, and really going at it. Truman’s place is a few houses down the road. His daughter is married to Danny next door, whose father used to be the local weatherman on TV. Simon trots around the pond and in the pond and I’m afraid he’ll shut them up, but not this evening, no way. I walk down to the pond and peepers are all you can hear. Peepers are the whole world. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen the little frogs with the big noise. But they’re out today and early. Tiny, invisible, really loud, and looking to get laid. I listen, I look around, I take a breath and I drink in Spring. It’s not like I’m a really religious person, but every once in a while… Thank you God for the gift of another Spring. We walk through the woods to Danny’s pond. Danny’s pond used to be our “back” pond until we sold Danny the land. Well, really Barb sold Danny the land before I arrived and despite the fact that Danny is perhaps the worlds best neighbor (“any time you want to use my tractor, the keys are in it”), she still regrets selling the pond just a little. Danny put some Koi in the pond and later found one in a pool in the ditch below the pond. There’s a new piece of fence across the outlet to keep the Koi in. There are no peepers here, must still be a little cold here in the woods -- Truman’s pond is out in the open in the sun -- but there is the occasional croak of a bigger frog. I look at the leaves drifting on the surface and notice that one of the leaves seems to be in constant motion. Not drifting, but in a more jerky motion. Simon and I investigate. It turns out that the leaves are frogs and the jerky leaf is a ball of frogs. Frogs come and join the ball, are pushed out by other frogs, who in turn drop out or are pushed out, and at the center is a frog on its back. It never seems to come up for air. The water for several yards around the frog ball is full of frogs waiting their turn or gathering their strength for another go. We watch this intricate dance of pushing roiling bodies for about 10! minutes, until Simon thinks this bears much closer investigation and wades in for a closer look. All motion ceases. The waiting frogs freeze and the frog ball sinks out of sight, still writhing, disappearing like magic. We watch for a few minutes more and head for home, servlets, and databases cleaned out of my head. My head back in the game. Thank you, thank you, for the gift of another Spring.
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