covered bridges half marathon: Yankee Notebook: A lot going on in the quiet woods

Mist hangs thick above Hellgate Pond. There's not a breath of wind. The woods are so wet I can hardly hear even the sound of my own feet in the duff. Neither the deer nor I are relying on our ears today; it's eyes only.

In spite of the stillness, the pond seems to shimmer, as if with life just beneath its surface. Could anything lively still be moving around down there? I know there are brook trout in here. Dozens of tiny ones are hovering in the inlet, and a friend of mine says he once caught a pair of 11-inchers here.

But these New Hampshire woods have been so thoroughly logged and fished in the past 100 years that there's no way to know whether they're direct descendants of the post-glacial inhabitants, or whether somebody lugged some buckets up here from the Dead Diamond River some years ago. A couple of battered aluminum boats upside down in the mud beside a corduroyed landing suggest that fishermen come here occasionally to try their luck.

The pond is shallow. From space (see Google Earth) it appears almost perfectly circular: a tiny tarn scooped out and dammed by the last ice sheet about 10,000 years ago. It might long ago have become a quaking bog, and then a wet meadow, but for its location on a north-facing slope that ensures the constant trickle of an inlet and occasional beaver activity.

The last chapter of beavers pretty well wiped out all the birch and popple, and spruce seems to be replacing them. So there's nothing here at the moment to induce any furry, exploring hydraulic engineers to set up housekeeping. It'll probably be awhile before they come back.

Protected by more than 27,000 acres of limited-access woodland owned by Dartmouth College, Hellgate Pond doesn't see too many visitors. Delicate as it is, surrounded by a thick, moss-covered spruce bog, that's probably a good thing.

I've often sat for hours at various points along its shore, enjoying the long view in my search for deer, but I've never seen one here. Today I've seen no signs of deer. They seem to have left the territory.

It's been a wet week — raining off and on all across northern Vermont and New Hampshire on the way here, and alternately fogging over or drumming on the metal cabin roof ever since — and none of the others in camp has sighted a deer.

Still, the young hunters are out of bed shortly after 4. Together we enjoy the traditional grapefruit juice-and-rum eye-opener invented by the late Pete Blodgett, Dartmouth Class of 1925, and called Frugal Brugal (Google for citation). The cabin itself is named for Pete, who was even more unforgettable than his invention.

After breakfast each day the young ones have headed out into the soaking-wet woods, not to return till well after dark. We older ones, our hunting fires banked a bit by time, have washed up the breakfast dishes and settled down to days of snoozing, reading, writing and occasional walks between the hard rain showers.

The cabin has been as quiet as if we were all studying for our medical or law boards. The big cast-iron box stove, designed by and made for the old Brown Company logging camps, ticks softly. The intermittent showers drum loudly on the metal roof — one was so fierce last night that it woke us all up — and then die slowly away.

I brought my old beat-up 15-foot aluminum canoe with me, with the idea of paddling down a few miles of the Dead Diamond. It's a lovely run, full of little riffles dodging around downed trees and dozens of meandering bends doubling back and turning the canoe every which way.

Quite a few years ago, returning from a hunt just at dusk and following my compass due east, I struck the river, took off my boots and socks, and waded it. In the next half-hour, following the same course, I had to wade it twice more to get it finally behind me.

This morning, with the possibility looming of a few hours without a shower, I trudged down to the suspension bridge across the river. The placid gurgling of two days ago had been replaced by a smooth, purposeful sheet of black water moving about twice as fast as before down the visible straight stretch before swinging right and vanishing into the brush.

I looked at the canoe waiting on top of the truck; considered both the joys of an exciting run and the discomfort of soaked feet; and finally weighed my capacity, diminished by age and arthritis, to climb out of the icy water and make it through the entangling brush to the road in the event of a capsize in a bad spot. It wasn't difficult to make the decision, but it was difficult to accept it.

So instead I'm sitting on the upturned bottom of one of the aluminum scows, my feet resting on a couple of wooden slats nailed to the corduroy of the landing just above the surface. Instead of my rifle, I'm carrying my cane, which, given the density of the deer and the slippery sogginess of the footing, is far more practical. I have a few things with me — a knife, a butane lighter, a small flashlight, a space blanket and a big Snickers bar — just in case.

I decide the case at the moment requires the Snickers bar, which I discovered years ago during the 200-mile Alaska Ski Marathon doesn't freeze hard, even at 30 below. Here, late in the November afternoon, it's ambrosial.

Robert Frost has, as usual, said it best: "Not yesterday I learned to know the love of bare November days before the coming of the snow." But today I'm thinking more of Longfellow as I sit and watch a lens of mist form about eight feet above the little pond: "A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

What about the thoughts of old guys? I wonder. They're pretty long, too. And I wonder if theirs, like mine, reflect that regrets over things that shouldn't have been done are less painful than those about things not done.



Willem Lange is a writer, storyteller and retired contractor who lives in East Montpelier. His column appears each week in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus. He can be reached through his Web site, willemlange.com.


Source: rutlandherald.com