Various Signs of Spring

I spotted a group of our local snowmobile club at the top of our rise yesterday un-Iwo Jima-ing their many flags that dot our back meadow through the winter and coiling in the thick rope that corrals the mobilers within a designated swath and my heart sang Joy! Rapture!  Now here was a sign of Spring! When the blossoming of daffodils and crocus are still a couple weeks away, green grass and the leafing of our trees ain't coming 'til May, and our pond is still frozen you grab for anything you can get.  And that sight was an unexpected gift.  It was sort of silly how happy it made me feel.  April can be the cruelest month up here.  You're grateful for the sunshine, but everything else stubbornly holds on to this grey, yellowy beige, or dulled white pallor, tree bark and trampled meadow grass and receding piles of snow, much of it in our backyard where the sun only shines on it in the late afternoon.  And that snow has ample amounts of grey gravel sprinkles on it due to our snow plougher Shannon's overzealous scraping of our driveway and parking area during the snowfall months.

But the flags are gone, the ropes are gone, our meadow has been set free.  I can imagine invisible maverick horses galloping free, FREE!!  This is good, this is very good.

Another sign of spring, of course, is the sap running.  As I mentioned in my last post, some tree tappers have inadvertently tapped a grove of at least 6 maples on our side of the property line.  2 days ago I trekked through the gullies and forests, following the green tubing to its source to see who I should contact to make them aware of their mistake.  It would be a rare thing that the sugarer would be the property owner himself, usually other people are given permission to come onto other's properties to "sugar" the land.  But the property owner might be a good lead to contact.  This particular property owner I would soon learn was a Mr. Junkins who owns quite a substantial chunk of terra firma back here, land which at one point a good while back had been a camp of some sort.  Mr. Junkins has no phone; his post office box is in New Hampshire and the sign I would soon discover on his property gate proclaims a different, darker version of that state's motto - "No Trespassing! Police Take Notice!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I trekked down through the gullies, the landscape looking a lot like "Winter's Bone," following the tangle of green, surgical tubing filled with bubbled, clear liquid, until it sutured into larger, thicker black piping.  A lot of this was along the VAST trail - or, okay this is a guess, the Vermont Automated Snow Travelers trail - which we and other landowners, Mr. Junkins among them, grant passage across our lands during the winter months.  But it not being winter and me not being on a automated snow vehicle, I was officially trespassing on this "his" land.  There were spots along the VAST trail and other makeshift roads a traversed where the thicker black tubing would come to a gathering section where a silver spigot was attached.  Here I surmised was where a truck with a big plastic sap collecting container - one of which gathers our spring water in our basement - backs up to the spigot in order to gather the clear nectar and transport it to a nearby sugar shack to boil and steam down to syrup.   The tubing and trail kept snaking down, down, down the hill.  Finally it all came to an end point and a fork in the road, both forks coming to a steep finish.  The right fork flowed down into a heavily rutted private road and this in turn emptied off to the left into what I surmised was Swamp Road, a back road which abuts a piece of our 55 acres.  There was an open metal gate spray painted with a big orange arrow directing snowmobilers and sap gathers "up this way," the way I had just come.   The left fork emptied down into a compound of sorts, the back of a pick-up with green and white New Hampshire "Live Free or Die" plates opened up to me.  There were a few other vehicles and junk arranged around a burgundy stained structure, part pressed wood, part black plastic.  It all screamed for snarling guard dogs, but despite the signs of habitation there were no sounds at all coming from the building.  I felt it wise not to step onto their property even though I hadn't yet seen the sign warning the police to beware.  Just something in the air, an intuition.  So I skidded down the right fork, slopped through the mud to the broken down mail boxes on Swamp and Hood Trail, the ame of the private road.  More no trespassing signs.

I can't lead you on anymore.

Nothing actually happened.  No one was home.  It was all filled with portent and anti-government showdowns and this land is my land, blam, blam, blam! but nothing happened.  I just let it be.  I trekked back home, did a little more sleuthing work.  Found out from our town clerk that Mr. Junkins had had "issues" with people in the past, contractors, etc.  Batteries stolen, charges made, whoohah.  Also, our friend Dale who also abuts Mr. Junkins property told us that during the summer there's a lot of target practice echoing over their hill from back there, target practice with what sounds like automatic weapons, assault weapons.   But that's Dale and that's hearsay, but I said it here.  Dale advised not contacting him at all.  Also, Mike Emerson, a stout, rather imposing figure who does a lot of sugaring in these parts and whom I had asked Dale to inquire about who might be sugaring up on our land, has been vandalized of late.  His sugar shacks along the road have been vandalized, that is - pumps taken apart, rolled down hills, lines cut.  I asked if this was a general wave of vandalism toward all sugar shacks and Dale suggested it was aimed specifically at Mike, that a few years ago someone had shot holes in his tanks.  "And so, " Dale concluded, "I don't think it might be the BEST time to be in touch with Mike about your tapped trees."

Okay, okay.  Let it go, let it go.

So Richard and I were very Green Mountain State late yesterday afternoon.  After a day of writing tax checks (Ugh!) and traveling around the area, running errands, and reading out loud to each other from an old Perry Mason mystery we somehow had gotten hooked on, we bundled up and took some pink, plastic boundary marking tape we'd procured from Dale (Dale's a realtor in these parts; he, in fact, represented our house when we bought it) back to the back of our property and amid all the green tubing we clearly marked our property line.  Afterwards, we hiked through an uncharted piece of our property together and came upon the most gorgeously preserved piece of stone wall.  It was like delicately laid grey eggs, perfectly put together by prehistoric someones.  There were pieces of toppled logs and branches in various stages of decay tilted across the wall, like wooden cannons against ancient battlements, vestiges of past strife long forgotten, and as we walked along the wall, we'd clean the way, lifting and tossing and shoving the logs this way and that until there was a clearly marked, unsullied wall to marvel at.  Down below to our left you could see the open cleared pastures of our neighbors Dennis and Judy and I was reminded once again that all this land, every stone walled piece of it, all the way back and beyond the disputed piece of tubed maples, was at one time, not too long ago, cleared land, treeless, grassy, rolling hills.  Amazing.  It opens one's mind, that thought.

Richard and I climbed up out of the woods, talking about the future trails we would clear.  I could hear the happiness in Richard's voice.  And we sat on the Adirondack benches at the top of the rise to look out over the rolling hills, down over our now unflagged, unroped meadow, to admire and take in the ending of the day.

Something to squawk about

Up in Vermont for Easter and the week following. Our young gander is the self appointed watch dog of our goose bunch. He squawks at least one time during the night and then off and on during the morning -- when someone's humping nearby or when the Canada Geese pair, patiently waiting for our pond to thaw, flies in for a visit. The wild and domesticated geese are getting along very nicely this year. We'll see if that changes once eggs are laid on goose island and the air becomes more territorial and North Korean. 

It's 28 degrees this morning. The last 2 dawns have provided a voila of newly fallen snow. So weird to have it dusting the frozen ruts of mud season on the roads. Hiked to the back of our property on Easter to discover that someone has tapped a whole grove of maples that we thought were on our land. Went down to the town clerk to get to the bottom of the controversy, but some lands have only been spottily surveyed. There's supposed to be the twisted remnants of an old barbed wire fence that went right along the border, but it's still below the frozen snow. More shall be revealed. It might have made it easier to take if they either had tapped them the old fashioned way with galvanized taps and buckets or that they had one new tap per tree. These tappers put multiple taps - popular, but not really good for the trees - connected by strands of colored plastic tubing which makes the backwoods look like a triage unit. Ugh.

Heard my first fox call the other night - the first that I was aware of, that is. Maybe that's what the young gander was squawking at. The howl - no it didn't sound like a howl, not in a wolf or coyote sense. It was so distinct, other worldly, spooky and wonderful, very much a creature of the night laying claim to its private part of the air, calling "I am here" in wildness. Cool.



It's a few hours later.  Been sleuthing up in the woods.  Went back the first time and right when the trail hit the shade of the woods it turned to a sheet of ice and my feet flipped out forward from beneath me and I slammed down on my back and elbow and head.  Resilience, thy name is body.  Thanks.  I skedaddled back down to the house for crampons and as I did I thought of my mom going ass over teakettle and cracking her pelvis.  She's just a twig.  A resilient twig in her own right - and she ignored the pain for about a week - but then had to go in and get patched up.  

I retrieved the crampons, slipped them on over my muck boots just before stepping into the icy shade of the woods, and was off Sherlocking.  Got to the back of the property, and traced the survey pin to several snatches of old barbed wire, over old logs, through thickets of saplings, down the hill to where the barbed wire abuts the original stone wall.  There are definitely 6 trees, possibly twice as many, that have been tapped on our side of the line.  Now to find the culprit.  Actually, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, that it's not an act of defiance or lack of courtesy, they simply thought they'd been given permission on someone else's land and didn't know that these groves were not included.  We'll ask for a couple gallons of syrup as compensation and ask them not to tap the trees again.  Our realtor friend Dale feels it may be Mike Emerson who has a goodly amount of the taps around.  More to be revealed.

Temperature is not 39 and all the new fallen snow has vanished.  Just the old piled up stuff remains.