In Vermont: Mind over Mud

By Jane O'Reilly

"I remember a few years back, over on Tadmere Hill," recalls John Mach, patriarch of Pawlet, a town in southwest Vermont. "I was going along and I saw a hat in the road. I bent over and picked it up, and there was my old friend Henry Wheeler up to his neck in mud. So I said, 'Henry! Can I help you in any way?' And he said, 'No, that's all right, John. I've still got a horse under me.' "

This tale, oft told, always with a perfectly straight face, moves north each year with the melt. It is as much a harbinger of spring as a robin. Mud season is not winter and not quite spring. It is something in between, a few weeks transcending transition to become a season in itself. First comes a slow drip. Then a tentative trickle. Then the melt begins in earnest: a rush, a gurgle, a cascade. The earth squirts, muck and mire suck at boots, downhill becomes a torrent, uphill becomes a bog. Snowbanks dissolve, flowing over ground already saturated. The frost comes out of the earth, and a normally flat, hard roadbed melts into mud three feet and four feet deep.

The water runs off under roots, around rocks, channeling down the dirt roads, washing away culverts and shoulders and gravel. At night it freezes again, heaving the roadbed up into ridges like a freshly plowed field. By dawn the ground is reglazed with ice. With the sun the gurgle and tumble start anew. The soil undulates, like a waterbed.

To Vermonters, mud season is mystical and inscrutable, a time to celebrate survival and renewal, even as they curse the ooze underfoot. It is a time to kayak on flooded rivers, to boil maple sap, to do some spring cleaning (Vermonters say, with reason, "I'm going to hoe out my house"). It is a time to stand outside in fresh air hinting of the grass and lilacs to come, and to be hugely entertained by the sight of neighbors and innocent strangers dealing with the mud.

"People drive up to a big mudhole and they are filled with awe. They get so excited they don't know what to do," says Mach. "They blow their horn hoping the mud will go away. When it doesn't, after a while they back up about ten yards to get a running start. Well, the mud might be a foot deep and the ruts two feet deep. Their wheels get cross-rutted, and the mud just drags off their muffler and shoots them across the road into the bushes. It's very interesting to see people scratch their heads and try to figure it out. Some just abandon their cars and start walking. Especially if they are in the mud over the door handles."

Central Vermont is enjoying the precise mid-stage of mud season. In Montpelier, the nation's smallest state capital, Nona Estrin says, "We've finished watching the snow melt, and we are about to begin watching the mud dry. Both are bona fide full-time activities. You may have a full-time job, but watching spring come is the romance in your life." An administrator with the state senior citizens program, she has been up since 5 a.m.: "I don't want to miss a moment, there is so much going on at this time of year." Squelching down the hillside behind her house, she point out the day lilies and ferns pushing up through the puddles and picks wild leeks for breakfast soup. An intense aesthetic response to mud is characteristic of Vermonters. In Montpelier's Horn of the Moon Cafe, a superannuated hippie explains, "Mud is, like, very natural. . . you know, like earth ... it, like, binds us together here in Vermont."

A few miles to the south in Brookfield, Postman Julian Hill offers another favorite vernal incantation. "In Vermont we have seven months of winter and five months of damn poor sledding." Hill, sporting a T shirt with the motto OLD POSTMEN NEVER DIE, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR ZIP, drives 63 miles a day on his rural delivery route. Detours add five miles in mud season. "I've had to jack myself out two or three times this year," he says. "The trick is to get under the car with this thing called a handyman jack, get it up three or four feet and then swing the car sideways onto solid ground."

Warning signs sprout on trees along the unpaved roads. FROST HEAVES . . . BUMPS . . . CLOSED. Only the foolish travel back roads without chains, winches and, for real safety, four-wheel drive. Brookfield has 76 miles of town road, and only four miles are paved. Citizens who are dissatisfied with the correlation between taxes paid and quality of road surface tend to complain. As a consequence, many road commissioners and some selectmen in Vermont tend to acquire unlisted telephone numbers after about a year of public service.

In Brookfield, the chairman of the board of selectmen is Dairy Farmer Charles Keeler. His phone is still listed. Standing in his barnyard, a seasonal bog, he says, "You can plow snow, but not mud. There's not much you can do about mud except wait for it to go away. The only thing to do is add gravel--18 inches is a pretty good surface--but mud season occurs before the town gravel pit melts out."

Mud season is an unpredictable phenomenon, different every year. Explains Earl Bassett, who is visiting the Keeler farm on business: "There are always spots you don't anticipate. You just drop in, and the wheels aren't touching bottom any more, and you sit there until someone pulls you out." Bassett qualifies as an expert since he drives 42,000 miles a year. His business is artificially inseminating cows. Even the cows must be able to spot his license plate: TORO.

The sound a vehicle makes as it drops into the mud is a kind of ominous smush. Some people find it so depressing that they try to avoid mud season altogether. Jackie and Al Wilder, who run the Fork Shop Restaurant in Brookfield, closed up in March and went all the way to Europe. "Nobody can get to us over the mud anyway," says Al. They came home expecting tulips and sunshine and found instead all the pipes in their house frozen. It's not nice to avoid Mother Nature.

Up above the Wilders' house, on Bear Hill Road, Farmer Gaylen Brown is setting out to collect, from 1,000 buckets, the last of the maple sap. He pauses to bulldoze a passer-by out of the bottomless depths across from his house. The Browns have farmed these 175 acres for almost 70 years. His daughter Theresa, 19, and son Willis, 20, are the fourth generation of Browns on the place. "Mud season's not so bad as it used to be," says Brown. "We used to have to hitch up the horses to the wagon and draw out the milk in cans to the nearest hard road to be collected. That would go on for six weeks every year. Roads got better once they had to get the buses through to these consolidated schools. And the bulk truck comes every day to pick up the milk. Everything's changed."

From an office in Montpelier, Ray Burke, the Vermont state highway dispatcher, is relaying news of mud and disaster to state road crews. "Mud is part of Vermont living," he says, "you try to organize your life around it. Pretty soon it dries out and then, pretty soon it comes again." On particularly bad nights, he gets out his guitar and sings something to cheer the boys up. The Vermont highway department is noted for its esprit de corps, and Burke's songs cover the traditional themes so comforting to men who must battle not only raging storms but also bureaucrats and politicians who would budget perfectly good funds for, say, schools instead of roads. One song celebrates the good wives left behind when a blizzard must be cleared away, and another the sad fact that stoicism is necessary in a poor state like Vermont: "You gotta drive that hunk of junk, son," goes the refrain. "You gotta drive it by yourself."

The state and town highway departments are separate entities in Vermont. It is never a good idea for someone who lives on a dirt road to get on the wrong side of the town road commissioner. So mucky can be the results that the names in the following cautionary tale have been omitted to protect the hapless. It seems that a flatlander (a non-Vermonter) moved in and stood up and spoke at his first town meeting. Not only is it impolitic and impolite for newcomers to speak before an introductory period of about five to ten years has passed, but this newcomer also complained about a narrow bend in his road. It was the first the road commissioner had heard of it, but he took pride in his job and fixed it right away. He never heard a word of thanks. But at the next year's town meeting, he heard the newcomer complain that the road had been widened too much. Ever since, the newcomer's road has been the last graded in summer, the last plowed in winter and left absolutely impassable in mud season. The road commissioner promises he will put a load of gravel on that mud -- some day.

-- By Jane O'Reilly

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