For the next several weeks, the back-woods dirt roads in New England turn to grease. The phenomenon is known to every man and child who has ever had to take a side road in early spring. You don’t have to be the child of a log-cabin birthing to know how mean our local rural roads can become when the frost goes out.
We once had a New Hampshire home that we reached by way of a five-mile dirt road. It was tortuous and ornery at the best times of year. The town didn’t plow us out winters, they dug us out.
When the frost left us late in March or early April, we steered our auto dead center over the crown of the road, or found ourselves up to our arm pits in brown ooze. Six inches to left or right of the packed rut spelled disaster.
There was no turning-around in the main stream of those semi-fluid country roads. Passing was impossible. Backing up was the only way to stay out of trouble — backing up until we found high ground on which to turn off was the only option.
Actually, those were dramatic. Seen from the vantage of these improved years — and added miles of blacktop. It’s pleasant to look back on the call, “get a horse,” usually delivered by some rustic standing high and dry. Plenty of country folk alive today have heard that piece of mockery. Once you and your Ford were ankle-deep, a horse, or better yet a team of horses, was required to extricate you.
Despite the hazards, we used to like to cruise the back roads at this time of year — it was a good way to find how the deer had survived winter.
Town crews spend a lot of the summer cutting back brush that threatens to take over rural roads. It’s not much of a leap from one of those lanes into the woods, where roots grow barely beneath the surface from the ditch on the left to one across from it on the other side. Given a year or two to get a toe hold, there would be no road at all, so cutting must be done.
Deer benefit from that. First, buds in the woods swell among the cut brush. Sun gets in, and its warmth along with the pruning promotes copious browse, which is most attractive to winter-weary deer.
We once had a pattern of spring trips and long hikes in southern Vermont for the purpose of counting deer. We used to see 50 or more in a single day’s tramp. It was a grand experience.
Snow was piled three and four feet deep in the woods, pure and gleaming white under a sun that had already passed the spring equinox. You could hike in a T-shirt.
Once two of us left our car at a turn-out on an April brown-butter road, driving as far as we dared. Then, we hiked as far as the time of day would permit. It was a new road to us, so we had no idea what we would find.
After a couple of hours and about five miles in, we left the narrow road and emerged upon a small cottage. Two noisy police dogs and a drift of smoke from the chimney told us someone lived there. Before we could turn back, the door to the cabin opened and a woman appeared. She asked us to approach and sat on her porch talking with us.
She had been the chief nurse in a New Jersey hospital before retiring to the woods. She had wanted to get as far away from the madding crowd as her vehicle and legs could take her. She spoke about many things. But, it was not a monologue — our conversation was memorable.
There she lived all by herself, chopping her winter wood and hiking the long road in all seasons to the grocery store, her dogs her only companions.
The slick and bottomless spring road meant nothing to her — she didn’t own a car.