Coming Home 2 - Reservoir Walk

Second post in a four-part narrative.

When I drove into the dooryard, I was immediately faced with another example of neighbors looking out for each other. My friends Derek and Missy had given the lawn one last mowing. It looked like it was ready for a third cut of hay last time I was here. I knew it was them because I caught them at it back in August. I didn’t insult them by offering to pay, but said what my old friend Leon Carpenter always said when you did something for him,”Thanks a lot, until you’re better paid.” If you thanked him for a favor he said, “What good are neighbors if you can’t use them?” Derek and I have swapped a lot of work over the years, from picking up equipment for me with his log truck to digging his septic system with my backhoe and many more. We have never kept track but hopefully it’s a version of what Mac Parker (Great Vermont story teller presumably laying low after recently being released from jail) called a Giving War, where each side tries to outdo the other. I thought I had him recently when I took my portable sawmill over to his camp in Rochester and we sawed out a bunch of hemlock logs into planks for a new bridge — but then he turned around and brought his mini excavator up to our wood lot and we worked on the roads for two days. Curses! Now I’m just waiting and watching. I know I’ll have a chance to get him back.

I had come to the farm with a fairly long list of things I needed to take care of, but the house was empty and cold. It was also the second weekend of Deer Season and in recent years if anyone asks me if I hunt I’m apt to say, “Well, if it’s a nice day, I’ll take my gun for a walk.” So in keeping with my tendency to never do today what I can put off until tomorrow, I decided to go for a walk. So I grabbed a grain bag out of the barn to sit on and my old rifle and headed for the woods.

My mother, Marjorie, said her mother, Olive, never made her do anything. Marjorie was the kind of gentle, tractable person that that probably worked. So she thought she could raise her kids the same way. Being the oldest, I was the experimental prototype. She had to give up on that program a little later, but in those early years I pretty much ran free. One of my early favorite escapes was to the hotel reservoir. It still is and that’s the direction I headed.

The old Hyde Manor hotel is our next door neighbor to the south. Sometime in the 1800’s, when the Manor was 200 rooms and a famous summer retreat, they sent a crew on the mountain to the head of the brook where springs bubbled out of a steep sided ravine. They built a 20 foot high dam of laid up stone. Eight feet thick at the base, two feet wide at the top, probably about a 150 foot long curve, in towards the water, against the pressure. No concrete or mortar. They impounded about two acres of crystal clear water. To keep it that way, they never cut the trees around it. In my youth it was surrounded by towering pines. I say “was” because not too many years ago, greed took them down. But left alone, nature recovers fast and, once again, the dam is surrounded and shaded by a good mix of pine and maple.

My walk brings me to the brook a couple hundred yards below the dam. I turn and walk up the brook, a series of little falls with steep hardwood slopes on both sides, leading to the dam. A twenty foot cascade of water pours over the spillway. Numerous leaks keep the stones in the face wet, dark and studded with emerald green moss. The boom of the cascade mixes with the higher pitched burbling of the brook. I walk up around the end of the dam, lean my rifle up against a tree, walk out on the dam, clean a few branches out of the spillway, lay my grain bag down on the damp lichen covered stone, sit down and smoke a bowl. I look out across the pond and remember a sunny winter day and a big beautiful beaver lying  on the fresh snow, no marks, no blood, no tracks, a mystery still. I continue on to the far end of the dam where a giant pine stood when I was 12 and my father told me to “Stand right here until we come back.”

 My father was a sporadic presence, but if you could ever count on him (which you actually couldn’t), it would be that he would show up in the middle of the night before Opening Day of Deer Season after the bars closed in New York, probably with a friend you had never seen before and probably drunk. Deer Season and Opening Day were a big deal then. I remember our High School Principal, Mr. Breen, coming on the intercom on Friday and saying, “Deer Season starts tomorrow and lasts 16 days. You only have school eight of them, and I expect you to be here.”

     Some of us were, some of the time. But that was later. The year I’m talking about, I woke up to the sound of loud voices in the dining room directly below my bedroom. I threw on clothes and went down to find my dad and his new friend, Red. “Hey Tedder, meet Red.”

 “Hey, Ted. You a deer hunter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, he follows me, but he’s never been by himself. But he’s getting pretty big. Maybe it’s time. What have you got for a gun?”

“Grandpa’s 20 gauge?”

“Oh yeah. What have you got for shells?”

“6’s?”

“Birdshot? Jesus!”  Alright, I’ll tell you what. You can come out with us this morning. It’s going to be light in a couple hours. As soon as the stores open, we’ll go get some slugs.”

    They left me under the big pine at the end of the dam. “OK. You stand here and watch this trail. We’ll be back in an hour or two and take you to the store. With that birdshot, if you see something, you’ll have to aim right for his head. Stand right here until we come back.”

     I should stop here and say something about how hard it is to see a buck in the woods in deer season in Vermont. My father (who wasn’t a patient hunter) hadn’t gotten a legal deer in years. He was the kind who couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes, and so he usually came home having walked ten miles and seen five or ten does and about ten “flags,” the term for a Whitetail deer’s butt. The Vermont Whitetail buck is one of the wiliest, most elusive animals anywhere. That’s why they were comfortable leaving me so poorly armed for just a couple of hours.

   So when they had been gone just a few minutes and I heard leaves rustling, I thought they were coming back and started walking to meet them. 55 years later, the sight of a big 6 point buck walking up over the knoll to meet me is still burned in my brain. We stared at each other for a very long few seconds and then I remembered my instructions and I took my shot. He reared and spun on his hind legs and disappeared back over the knoll. I ran to the spot and found a drop of blood. 10 yards further another. I tracked the world’s thinnest blood trail the rest of the morning and finally gave up and walked home to find that the deer had run down the trail and been killed minutes later by a hunter standing beside my grandfather. He had a pellet hole in one ear, the source of my blood trail, and one grazed horn.

  For the next few years I was a serious deer hunter. Why wouldn’t I be? All you have to do is walk up in the woods, sit down for a few minutes, and a buck will come strolling over the hill. The rest of that deer season and the next I got up early and hiked over the ridges, past the reservoir and down the old hotel bridle trails to the one room school house on Burr Pond. I would hide gramp’s 20 gauge in the leaves, stare out the window all day, not listening to a word Mrs. Desjadon said, retrieve the gun and walk back by way of Billy Golightly’s meadow, where I would sit until dark expecting that lightning strike to happen again at any moment.

Billy Golightly was long gone by then. All that was left of his farm was his eponymous meadow, strategically placed in the woods halfway between school and home, and a couple of cellar holes, grown over with blackberry bushes and grape vines. The story was told in my family that when my grandmother, Olive, came as a young woman to live at our farm in the valley an old man walked by on the road and she asked my grandfather “Who’s that?”

“Billy Golightly.”

“No, really. Who is it?”

“Billy Golightly.”

And she became angry because he wouldn’t say who it really was.

    The reality of deer hunting set in after a few years of shivering under hemlock trees with the water running off the end of my nose, but I have to say the hunger for the chase that I experienced that morning has never completely gone away. For a long time, I was like the dog that comes running with a big grin and his tongue hanging out every time you call because one time you gave him a piece of cat food. And every single encounter with a buck, most of them mere seconds, is seared in my brain along side that one. 

    The hunger’s not completely gone, but definitely going. I never liked the killing part. I never hunted squirrels or even fished much because the ratio of killing to hunting was too high. The chase was so hard and the sight of a buck so thrilling that I stayed interested for many years. But as I have gotten older and faced my own mortality, the killing has become more and more painful — to the point where I am letting go of raising cattle. I have always felt that each person should look at the evidence and opinions and then decide what feels right for them. For me, coming from many generations of husbandmen, on this land, it feels right that there should be animals here. Generation after generation, just like the people who have cared for them. Without the people, those animals would never have lived. Most of the ones I have raised lived a fairly idyllic life right up until the lights went out – instantly – while eating their last meal. We all have our allotted time. A mosquito maybe a month. A home grown, free range meat chicken maybe eight weeks. A grass fed, rotationally grazed steer 18 months. When something happened, sickness or a raccoon for instance, to cut that life short, I felt grief and responsibility. But as long as the flock or herd was healthy and content, it felt like they belong here, same as I do. But something has changed. I guess I’m getting ready to go. And when it’s time for one of them to go, I transfer some of that longing to stay onto them. It’s deeper and at the same time simpler than that. I look at that steer and I just feel sad at his life ending and I don’t want to see him go.

   Needless to say, hunting has lost a lot of its charm. Because there’s also the suffering part. Not theirs — mine. I always tell young people when it comes to hunting deer the rule is “Suffering equals Success”. Faced with any choice, choose the one that involves the most suffering. Walking or sitting; Sitting for long periods is infinitely more difficult and more successful. Nice day or rainy? Take a guess. Warm or cold? Ditto.

Now, like I said, if someone asks if I hunt I’m apt to say, “Well, I take my gun for a walk, occasionally, if it’s a nice day.” On this day, I walk back down the brook to the next ridge— then walk back up the brook to find my forgotten rifle.

The next ridge down from the dam is the top of the old ski tow. The rope tow machinery has 6” diameter elm trees growing up through it. 150 years ago, the hotel cleared what wasn’t already sheep pasture and made this into one of the country’s first golf courses. The land is so steep and uneven that it’s hard to picture a golf course but I can show you a perfectly flat rectangular tee on a 30 degree slope – with an 80 foot pine growing out of the middle of it. The guests complained about the difficulty enough so they built a new course across the road. All of the old course grew back to woods – again. Then in the early 60’s the new owner, Eddy Dhlos, decided to build a ski trail and rope tow. I was maybe 14 and I worked dragging brush into piles and burning it along with a couple of other local boys. Chain saws and chain saw skills weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. Eddy bought a Homelite that probably weighed 50 lbs and hired a black man from Yonkers, where Eddy was from, to run it. He was the first black man any of us had worked with and we were in awe of him. His name was Forest and he was big and strong and experienced and he handled that chain saw like it was a toy. He cut as fast as 3 of us could drag and pile. One day I was on the top ridge where the remains of the machinery lays now, 100 yards above him, and he was gassing up the saw. I heard a loud “whoosh”and turned around in time to see a fireball blow him backwards down the hill. We ran to him but he was already running down to the hotel. Eddy rushed him to the hospital and  we never saw him again. The ski tow only lasted a few years and now, fifty some years later, it’s back to woods – again.

  As long as I have walked these hills there has been a game trail along this ridge carpeted with wild thyme and lined with sumac. We pronounce it shoe mac, by the way. Every year there comes a time in mid winter when there is nothing better to eat and seemingly overnight sumac becomes the food of choice for the deer. I come to a depression in the ground beside the trail and time travel again. When Josie and I were a new thing, probably fall of ’74 or ’75, we lay down in that depression. A 4 point buck running down the trail froze standing right at our feet. We froze too and stared in each other’s eyes for a long few seconds before he bounded away.