Habit-ation

There is a boulder in my backyard

that is in the habit of being there

each morning as I

look out the window.

Its stubbornness pisses me off.

The sun

is in the habit of rising each morning

(or the earth is in the habit of turning)

as I am in the habit of rising each morning

and going to work.

I am in the habit of shifting to third gear

at thirty five miles an hour;

I am in the habit of assuming

this is the same road I drove yesterday;

I am in the habit of thinking of other things.

***

Summer:

on a hot day, the haze dissolves all detail

in the green mass of Styles Peak.

On West Knoll, pines recede into the hill

like caves carved of darker green.

The notch is hidden by leaves.

The garden blocks my view of the valley

(corn and pole beans).

***

Autumn:

Looking out toward Mad Tom Notch,

October, bare trees, cold wind and clear sky;

yesterday crystalline snow flurried in occasional sun,

lodged between blades of grass and sparkled.

I can see the Dawson fields along the river now,

with the corn down and the leaves off the trees.

Until snow cover you can really get a feeling for the lay

(and pay) of the land.

The downed leaves coat the ground,

accenting the erratic topography of the valley walls:

burnt orange cross hatched in gray trunks,

jumping off gray cliffs now visible.

Gray is the color of November,

the time of cold rain from snow clouds,

the sloppy transition from green to white

in the season we call Fall –

really on Summer and Winter are seasons,

with the solstices their peak.

Even more than Spring, Fall

is an inversion,

where the weight of previous development tips,

and

Fall is a seam, not fabric,

the year is a patchwork of days,

sewn with the thread of the Ecliptic

to the nights,

and

we are left to say what we will.

***

Assignment:

show the difference between

driving to California in a big Winnebago,

or a Mercedes, or an old V-Dub bus, or a

Porsche, or in a truck, or a school bus,

or on a motorcycle, or a bicycle, or

hitchhiking;

cruising to Florida on a houseboat, or a

forty foot Chris Craft, canoeing from White

River Junction to Springfield (or from Great

Falls, Montana to New Orleans), float trips,

swimming the English Channel;

driving to the summit of Mount Mansfield

or climbing it by the Sunset Ridge Trail;

walking the entire Appalachian Trail;

climbing a tree.

Draw a line that connects all these points.

Do not imagine that this line is a proposed freeway.

***

The roads in Landgrove run out of the valley at five points: 1) at the narrow northwest end, a fork in the old Peru- Weston road chooses between the Mount Tabor road -- almost due north, up and around the NE slope of Pete Parent Peak, following Utley Brook upstream to Mount Tabor Brook, up to and through Devil’s Den, across Ten Kiln Meadow, and down along Big Branch, staying on the steep northern slope of the gorge, to Otter Creek and the villages of Mount Tabor and Danby on US Route 7. 2) a steep ascent to the gently sloping plateau south of Holt Mountain summit. That road is met just as it rounds the last ridge by a road (3) coming from the lower end of the present village (Clarksville on the old maps), which climbs directly from the stream to the saddle SW of The Pinnacle, and after rounding it, beelines for the Weston road. From that intersection the road crosses Morgan Hill, enters the town of Weston, and drops steeply down into the village beside Wantastiquet Brook, where it meets Vermont Route 100. At what was once the Landgrove schoolhouse (now the town hall), approximately two thirds of a mile NW of the present village, at the widest point in the valley, 4) the Peru road bridges to the SW bank of Utley Brook and crosses the valley, winding for a moment north, around West Knoll, to Hapgood Pond, and then two more miles, on pavement, to the village of Peru, on Vermont Route 11.

The ‘Derry road’ (5) leaves the upper (south) end of Clarksville and forks, the Flood Brook road cutting to the north of Badger Hill and meeting the highway (VT 11) at the Flood Brook Bridge, about two miles south, halfway between Peru and Londonderry. It immediately forks again, already in Londonderry, Reilly road to the right, up over the south side of Badger Hill and straight out the highway; the left fork follows the SW ridge above Utley Brook three miles out to the same highway, closer to the village of Londonderry. (The Londonderry town line is right at the end of the village -- the township of Landgrove is shaped like Oklahoma standing on its handle, and Clarksville is at the base of the handle, so the only road heading south out of the village which doesn’t immediately enter Londonderry is the Flood Brook road.)

There are no other roads in Landgrove but a little section from the town hall to the road around the south side of The Pinnacle, and dead end’s (that used to go through) leading to isolated houses.

This is a description of the present roads. According to my topo maps, jeep trails continue from the end of most of the dead ends, and some are improved at both ends, i.e.: some portions of the same old road will seem to be dead ends as the road is no longer passable for a certain distance, though once it was, hinting that the importance of that particular road has declined, like Old County Road in Landgrove, and Old Tavern Road in Weston, both of which are part of the old Ticonderoga Road which was a major passage through the Green Mountains during the Revolution.

***

Assignment:

think about the difference between

a road being called Londonderry Road

because it goes to Londonderry;

a town being named for its first (European) settler;

a bridge being named for the Governor

soon after his death;

a university building being named after

a wealthy patron;

an office building being named after the owner;

a development named something like

"Glenwood" or "Fairacres"

Then:

think about the fact that if you are in Londonderry, that first road (above) is called Landgrove road, and that when villages become towns they often change their names, and that if Ed’s friend Harold lived next door and Ed was a surveyor, or a highway engineer, then Reilly road might be Harold road, and when the old bridge on it was torn down, and rebuilt, it might be named after someone else, and the same for college buildings (which students have their own names for anyway), and that the man who built the office building will die sooner or later, and the building will fall down within 15 years, and that around here the forest can eat a "Glenwood" or a "Fairacres" whole in a decade, so only people who really know the woods are aware that it ever existed, reading the softwood trails in sugarbush that mean an old road went through, and the piles of rock that were once the foundations.

Think about all those stone walls out in the woods