We Pushed beyond the Devil and Happy Hill

 

In the winter months with the leaves down on the ground, I contemplate walking the ridge between Scott road and Huckle Hill.  I am particularly fond of the hill that terminates the southeastern end of this ridgeline. I imagine that it is to the east of where Scott and Vernon roads meet, while Huckle Hill lies to the west. Wayne of course believes otherwise, he thinks that the state line where the two roads meet is on the side of this hill. Who am I to disagree?

 From a distance, the hill looks as if one could see clear into three states, and then once finished drinking in the sight, a person would simply need to sit and slide down into the river valley below. Of course, having hiked with Wayne in Satan's Kingdom before, I intimately understand that couldn't possibly be so.

I was able to find on a map of Vernon, a place marked Happy Hill, and I wonder if this could be my hill?  Pond Mtn, The Pinnacle, Bald Mtn and East Mtn are along the state line listed east to west and in that order. Charles Hill of which I have found previous mention in historical journals, is behind Lily Pond and is also noted in Vernon, VT Nearby Mountains 

It appears fairly laughable to think that I am attempting to pin point on maps, a place where I have often driven through and that which I can plainly see out of my living room window. But truth be told, I have on more than one occasion, intended to take a well planned out leisurely hike and was instead confronted with what morphed into a big reality check. While Happy Hill seems like a friendly enough place, I have my doubts that I have any business at all bushwhacking up something called the Pinnacle!

An 1869 Beers & Co. map of Vernon depicts Pond Mountain spanning District 5 and into District 9 along the VT, MA border. Pond Mountain is 1,200 feet ASL, whereas my hill is around 500feet ASL.

 

What would I gain if I didn't at least try? 

Tyler cemetery sits in the foreground of Pond Mountain as seen from Pond Rd in Vernon. 

We began our attempt at the state line. Our plan was to hike just left of the state line in Satan's Kingdom / MA wildlife management area. We parked at the granite marker at the end of Scott road.  The state line between MA and Vernon has recently been surveyed and the pink tape on the trees is still present

Wayne, not wanting to disturb VT property owners along the line decided to hike even further to the south of the yellow blazes. This meant that we would not have the blazes to guide us; but nor would we risk confrontation. Going deeper into Satan's Kingdom in order to reach the Pinnacle was to be our hikes ongoing theme.  

For my part, seeing the steep, rough, ice covered terrain before me, I decided that the local dog would know best how to navigate it. I'm not too proud to admit that the dog was a far better hiker than myself and I might as well get this over with now. I shed a few tears and uttered a few unsavory words climbing up this hill and then down the other side. Honestly, I'm not even sure why I thought this to be Happy Hill! 

I have a Vernon friend who positively skips up 4000ft mountains, sometimes three at a time and always sharing pictures of her smiling with hands raised to the heavens at every peak. She once informed me that there are no cold days, just bad gear. I think that it would be fair to say, that I learned on this hike, that my new footwear was better suited for walking downtown than scaling ledge.

All excuses and complaints aside, lets go for a beautiful walk in Satan's Kingdom.

This winter, Wayne and I have noticed a lot of trees and limbs on forest floors. We look for signs of logging, did someone have a need and so felled the trees?  We wonder if it was a blowdown, had there been a strong storm that uprooted the trees? Perhaps it was disease that weakened them? What exactly has caused so many trees this winter to succumb? Then I remember that it's February and the snow cover this winter is slight. Maybe we are only noticing them because they aren't being hidden by a thick white blanket of snow. There is a peacefulness about winter, it hides what is evident.

It is truly a beautiful place, once the details are glossed over. 

We happened across what appeared to be a well worn trail. I was tempted to change course; but like the bear that went over the mountain...

We came to see what we could see.

And so pushed up towards the higher hill in the distance.

Only to discover ourselves on a ridge with no place else to go but down.

 

I don't fully understand what it is that drives me to do these things. There was a well worn path behind us, and yet I found myself looking for dog tracks on that ridge. Wayne has a way of knowing when I am about to come unglued.

 

There was no turning back, mostly because I had lost my trekking pole down the slope and needed to retrieve it.

Wayne waiting for me to collect myself.

Wayne took a minute to decompress and to wonder out loud why he agrees to go on these crazy adventures with me. 

We were standing on another opportunity to abandon ship. Wayne voted to hike on this trail further south. I on the other hand decided that I was ready to head north. In any case, there was what appeared to be an open field a little bit to the west that Wayne wanted to check out. So of course we headed north on the trail.

Sometimes on these explorations, we begin to think that we have strayed too far off course. Sometimes others leave us an encouraging sign.

The hill was within reach, all that we needed to do was take the shortcut and do a bit more downhill bushwhacking.

But still, we held to the trail.

Which brought us to a young stand of Eastern Hemlock teaming with life.  It was Wayne who first noticed that the trees were filled with Dark Eyed Juncos. The unassuming Junco is my favorite bird to visit our yard in the winter months. There is something about these small black and white birds, patiently waiting on the ground for for an opportunity to glean the tiniest of  morsels that fall from the gluttonous frenzy at the feeder above. And then when the bounty of spring and summer arrives, they leave my yard and disappear deep into the boreal forests to nest in the old stumps of conifer trees.

I once watched a news segment where an Ecologist stated that the best time to visit a wetland was in the winter. He said that in the winter you could get a closer look at what was there. 

Wayne studies the mountain from the wetlands.

A Cattail disperses its seeds during the winter months

Holding on for some outward sign.

Abandoning my thoughts of reaching the Pinnacle, I begin to think about what waits for its opportunity below this frozen shelf.  

And how it is some things that I think couldn't possibly be here, somehow still are. 

No, one cannot claim the mountain tops with a belief that only they can slide into the river below. There is too much work to be done between the two.

 -Norma Manning 

Owls Are For Lovers

 Dan calls to the Barred Owl during Owl Prowl

Here is a bit of trivia that is going make quite a few of us seem old; Owl Moon by Jane Yolen was written thirty five years ago. While I'm not feeling particularly old, being older seems to be an ongoing theme with me lately. For example, I offered up my Snow Lion sleeping bag to Kayden who searched online and found its corresponding 1970 catalogue. Ugh! What was I doing with a 52 year old sleeping bag? Because I distinctly remember getting that bag closer to the 80s, I convinced myself to feel better about owning a 42 year old bag. What? It's still in good shape. Just to pile on the mothballs, this week a kindergartner asked me, "Mrs. Manning, were you alive in the 90s?" while another observed that the Classical music her teacher was playing was in fact, "Valentine's noise." I quickly informed the group that Chopin was my favorite. What was I thinking?

In the early weeks of February, the Kindergarten science unit is adaptation. The classrooms fill with sciencey books on animals along with five and six year old fact loving reporters, "Mrs. Manning where is Australia? Do you know what these tracks are from?" Idk, Opossum? To which the small scientist gleefully laughs and announces, "No, a Kangaroo!" Well then, I guess I should have payed better attention to our classes' Bonnyvale Environmental Center winter animal tracking lesson. Each year Seth brings in his collection of hides, pelts, antlers, claws, teeth and bones for the children to closely examine. The students create art, role play, compare penguins and they become authors and illustrators. But my favorite time spent is reading aloud books like Jan Brett's The Mitten and of course Owl Moon. I'm all for tapping in on the facts of life; but these children still retain a contagious, glorious sense of wonder that infects even the most sensible. I find that as I grow older, I too am increasingly stirred by the intersection of what is and what might be.

Call it hope, call it romance, or call it science; January into February is for lovers:  Lovers of the new year, lovers of snow,  lovers of equality, justice, freedom and history.  It's also for lover's of spring like Punxsutawney Phil, and gardeners who receive seed catalogues in the mail, lovers of football, of the outrageous like Squirrel Appreciation Day, love with a purpose and love for the sake of love. 

"Great Horned Owls are our most common owl but they have gone silent. They have laid their eggs and the female is on the nest. Sometimes we can hear the male; but the female doesn't want to attract predators to the nest and goes silent. The eggs are laid so that the owls hatch and leave the nest when the rabbits are being born The male brings baby rabbits to them to teach them to hunt rabbit." -Dan

I look around the small group, there are couples like Wayne and I, an older single person and what looks to be a young teenager and her mother. Thanks to the kindness of Christine who gifted us her tickets, Wayne and I are at the Hitchcock Center in Amherst MA for the Owl Prowl. It's 7:30 pm the Saturday before Valentines Day and I am having second thoughts about being in the city until 10:30 at night. I mean, at that hour, even the college kids have gone home for the evening.

Leading up to this weekend our local Vernon Vermont Facebook page had begun to fill up with Martin's account of huge flocks of Gold Finch at Vernon's bird feeders, Bethany's fox sighting, Ali's Piliated, Karla's mystery snow track,  Jason's bobcat, Matt's videos of a Redtail Hawk eating gray squirrels, Paul Miller's amazing Snowy Owl at the farm, Diane's flowers and Ed Sr's stunning bluebirds. 

"We're from Vernon, VT" was met with some confusion. "The south-eastern most town in VT" didn't seem to clarify things much and who on earth, I thought to myself, leaves VT to see owls in the city anyway? "We had a Snowy Owl sighting" I offered, and with that Dan relieved my discomfort by informing the group that there is currently a Snowy Owl invasion mostly in the Midwest due to an abundance of food. With that I showed everyone Paul's photograph. 

Now I could fill this page in with all sorts of information about owls that Dan shared with us, like the fact that Great Horned Owls nest in old Red Tailed Hawk's and crow nests. I could even share my own accounts of the owls that  have visited our yard right here in Vernon and the owls that we saw and heard on the Owl Prowl; but what I really want you to understand is that owls are for lovers.

 Owls are for a teenage girl, who every time she saw an owl, grabbed her mom's elbows and exclaimed, "Aren't they cute!" Owls are for a grown man who tells a group of strangers that he has been calling owls since he was a kid and that last nights group had twenty mile an hour winds and they didn't see a single owl. Owls are for children who cut and paste together owls at school and then color them in with rainbows. Owls are for Wayne who practiced his Barred Owl call for the duration of our hike in the town forest this afternoon and then presented to me hot cocoa in a VT owl mug! And owls are for my Palentine Christine who gave up her chance to prowl for owls because she knew that Wayne and I love doing things like this. 

But if by chance, owls really aren't your thing, then perhaps tracking bears (?) in the town forest is.

or deer

Or maybe, just maybe, your love lies with a certain coonhound who is all too eager to help you appreciate the view from the town forest floor.

then asks for a treat from the person she loves the most

reminding me that owning a 42 year old sleeping bag and being alive in the 90s isn't really all that old. Especially once you have discovered, that all of that "Valentine noise" is just the world asking who, whoo, hoot, do you love? I have to leave you now, I need to figure out how to get back up!

-Norma Manning 

The World Needs Vermonters

My grandmother Claireanna Provost 

Growing up in the military, my mother always made a concerted effort to keep us connected with our family in Vermont.  Mom of course, told us the family stories and showed us the photo albums; but she also paired us up with cousins for letter writing and gift giving at the holidays. No matter where we were living, Vermont was home. We spent summer vacations in VT, which was no small task packing five children into the car and feeding us from the back of a station wagon on the road. I learned to drive between Colorado and VT.

When the war came to our family, mom saw to it that we landed in VT and then afterwards convinced my father to take an assignment in Burlington. Those four years were the longest that I had ever lived in one town.  What I think that mom didn't realize at the time, was that though she moved 22 times in 20 years, we would have been Vermonters anyway. In fact, three of her five children have homes in VT. Even my brother who lives in NH is a Vermonter. I believe that it wasn't what my mother told us, or even our visits to VT that made us Vermonter's, it was instead how she lived her daily life, it was her VT ethic, it was the fact that she carried VT within her.

For my mother's part, she was the daughter of a French Canadian immigrant father and a first generation (French Canadian) American mother. My Grandfather came to VT as a child along with his parents and nine siblings and extended family. His father came to work in his cousin's granite shed in Barre, and by the age of thirteen my grandfather had dropped out of school and began work in the stone sheds too. Tuberculosis Silicosis claimed his lung as a young man and set him to work at GMP as a troubleshooter on the dams. My grandmother, I never met as she passed when my mother was six. My grandfather remarried a Georgia, VT. farm girl and lived in VT until his death. He always flew the American flag; but the peaks of his house were painted Canadian red. Mom was VT born, raised and educated. She received a college scholarship from Montpelier and attended a Vermont college; and like her father brought Canada to Vermont, mom brought VT with her to all of the places that life took her.

Why, you must be wondering, am I belaboring the point of VT heritage in a blog about Vernon? It is because twice in recent weeks I have again heard exclusionary statements about who is and who is not a true Vermonter.

While watching a selectboard meeting discussion on whether or not to discontinue our town college scholarship, one member stated that it should be discontinued because, "They leave Vernon and they don't come back." This struck me, because as a graduating senior at Bellows Falls Union High School, all but one of my applications for scholarships were rejected on account of I hadn't lived in VT for my previous high school years. The one scholarship that I did receive was for forestry and natural resources. 

The other statement was made directly to me on social media when discussing a proposed town plan in the North East Kingdom. The proposal to concentrate development in one area of town so as to conserve open lands, is not a new discussion to VT.* I would even venture to say that open lands are a part of VT heritage. Vernon for example, voted to make a statement that we value our farmlands and that development should focus in other areas. Though Vernon has no zoning, Vernon is a great supporter of funding farmland conservation. In the course of the discussion however, two contributors took exception to my open lands mindset and told me to, "Move back to where you came from" and "You're no Vermonter, you must be from NYC" Yikes!

Wayne was born and raised in BF. Lord help me, I married not only a Vermonter; but an honest to goodness BF boy! Wayne's father's family is buried up to Perkinsville with dates going back to the 1700s. Wayne's grandfather was great friends with Calvin Coolidge's son. They once set out to walk from one end of VT to the other; but Adwin had a bad leg and didn't complete the journey. Wayne's grandfather worked for the Creamery. Wayne's dad installed and maintained milking parlors for R.N. Johnsons on farms right here in Vernon. But before that, Wayne's dad was in the U.S. Navy right out of high school. 

(Addendum) Quite a few readers wondered why I didn't include Wayne's mother in this piece and so I am adding it here now. Wayne's mom proudly hails from Littleton NH where her mother ran a boarding house. As a youth she worked summers and slept in the barn of her grandparents establishment in the center of Wilmington. At the The Crafts Inn, Janice began as a bread girl because as she was fond of saying, "I was well bred." She attended Keene State gaining her teaching certificate and subsequently taught in Bellows Falls. I met Wayne when she was working at JCP in Brattleboro.

After graduating high school, Wayne attended a Vermont college prior to joining the Navy. Wayne worked at VY from '91 until it closed. He then commuted from Vernon to work at Indian Point in NY. I suppose that makes Wayne a New Yorker too. Our eldest daughter mustn't be a Vermonter either as she was born in S.C. and lived her first year there before we left the Navy and moved to Hinsdale, NH. She didn't move to Vernon until she was 14. But get this, Kayden calls herself a Vermonter from Vernon. She has traveled all over the world, lived in China three times, worked in Boston for years and currently lives in San Diego, CA. This weekend she is participating in wilderness survival training in the desert. I am positive that she introduces herself as being from VT. She carries the VT ethic with her. 

With the exception of one year, my father's mother lived her entire life in Chittenden County. She traced her family in VT to the Green Mountain Boys, back before VT was a state; and yet there are those who would dismiss my family's heritage. There are those who would judge us that left these Green Mountains and equally so, those of us from away who choose to live here now. It's continuity on this land that they value most.  I want to say to them, that while it's true that Vernon needs Vermonters, it's also true that the world needs Vermonters right now more than ever. The world needs educated, hard workers that come from and value the land, the hills, the lakes and the rivers. Farmers, woodsmen, fishermen, hunters, those who intimately understand the importance of their relationship to the environment.

We may be a small state; but we have a mighty message. Our message mustn't be lost in the bickering of who belongs at the table, we don't have time for that. It's in everybody's best interest that we encourage and support those who carry out into the world, the VT ethic. -Norma Manning

"People have always had to leave in order to find good jobs to support their families; but VT was always home, it's who they are and many return back to VT when they can." -Annette Safford, aged 84.

Further Reading:

* Vermont has Conserved One Third of the Land Needed for an Ecologically Functional Future, The University of Vermont, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources