Ah-ha!

When I was a teenager traveling out west with my family, my parents excitedly announced that we were standing on the continental divide. You can imagine my lack of excitement when I ceremoniously poured the contents of my canteen on the ground and observed the liquid splatter like any other spilled drink back home. Truthfully I hadn't thought much about that day since except now and then when it served my purposes as bragging rights. But that changed this weekend in Vernon while on a Saturday bird walk led by Biologist Cory Ross.

You know how when you live in one place for a long time it's kind of expected that some things belong in a certain place and when that isn't so you feel like you are lost? It's like when living in Vernon the Green Mountains are always to the west but when you go to Bennington they suddenly are on the right.  It's times like these that I'm unsure if I'm really still in Vermont. Take the Connecticut river for example. If you live from Springfield, VT down to Vernon, the CT is to the east, cross the bridge into NH and the CT is to your west.  When trying to gauge where a child went shopping with their parents you might ask if they crossed the bridge. If the answer is yes it's pretty certain that they were at Walmart in NH.

So what does any of this have to do with a bird walk in Vernon? Well, as It turns out it has a lot to do with it. You see, Vernon has a hundred year old hydroelectric dam that spans the CT across from Cold Brook store on Governor Hunt road. There is a picnic area below the dam where bird watchers can get a pretty good look at any variety of waterfowl on any given day. Standing on the west bank looking east towards NH, we spotted mallard, golden eye and common merganser, pintail, and Canada Geese before we moved on to our next stop on Stebbins road which is left off of 142.  We drove half a minute to where the power lines are and walked a tenth of a mile to an overlook where we saw a flock of robins and a bald eagle. I kept looking over the river to the opposite bank and couldn't quite put my mind to what I was noticing, but something didn't quite feel right. It was cold and the group called it a day but my brain still nagged me into the evening about that feeling you get when something is on the wrong side of the Green Mountains.

It wasn't until I checked my pictures that I put my finger on it. From Stebbins road I was looking west across the CT river but I hadn't crossed over a bridge and I hadn't left the town of Vernon to get to Stebbins road from Governor Hunt road. I enthusiastically spouted, "I found the oxbow!" Wayne looked at me like someone who had just dumped water on the continental divide and mumbled, "We were still on the west bank." Yes that's true, but we were looking west over the river to VT.  Clearly my ah-ha moment was lost on him so I further explained that we could stand at the dam in the morning and watch the sunrise over the CT then go to Stebbins in the evening and watch the sunset over the CT all without crossing the river or leaving Vernon! Wayne otherwise engaged in galactic battle on his tablet, remained unimpressed. I on the other hand learned something very important this weekend.

Sometimes it takes forty years for a person to truly appreciate what's so exciting about that place where water flows west to the Pacific and east to the Atlantic. I hope that someday, one of our four adult children thinks about something lame that I was so excited about and shouts AH- HA! - Norma Manning

View from Stebbins overlook