(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange has been crossing the Green Mountains for almost forty years, but his latest trips have a new purpose.
(LANGE) I’ve been driving across Vermont for almost forty years, the first time to interview for a job at Dartmouth, and since then mostly to get to hunting camp in the Adirondacks. But lately I’ve been commuting across Vermont. Well, halfway across. We’re living temporarily in Orford, New Hampshire, and building a house near Montpelier, so I’ve been wearing a groove in the route from here to there. It’s not an unpleasant commute at all: less than forty-five miles over good roads all the way. And every time, I see something new that I haven’t before.
If you look at a map of Vermont, you can see the straightest old roads go north and south, and the difficult ones go east and west. The road from Orford to East Montpelier is a classic, if gentle, example of that. It follows an ancient trade route the Connecticut River upstream to Bradford, then swings northwest up the Waits River.
The Waits has to be one of the most beautiful rivers in Vermont. Rapid, rocky, and accessible for almost its entire length, it looks a lot like the Queen’s private salmon river beside Balmoral Castle. But the Waits has no more salmon.
Its name kept ringing a bell Wait. So I stopped at the logical place to ask: the Waits River General Store. Bill MacDonald, the owner, brought out a well-thumbed volume of local history.
Joseph Wait was a Captain in Rogers’ Rangers during their 1759 attack on the native village of Odanak in Quebec. During the retreat, the main party split up to hunt and try to evade capture. Wait’s party, hunting down this little river, shot a deer. They left part of the carcass in a tree for their fellow rangers behind. Wait’s men named the river after him.
Past West Topsham the route follows a tributary west to a shallow beaver pond. This is always a symptom of change; beavers like headwaters because there are no floods there. And sure enough, about a mile beyond the pond there’s a sharp summit, overlooking the great St. Lawrence watershed.
I turned north again onto a back road that took me up Orange Brook to its source at the Barre waterworks; then over still another height of land and down another brook valley to the Winooski River at Plainfield. On my right rose Spruce Mountain and Signal Mountain, their tops frosted with fresh snow what in Anchorage they call “termination dust”: When the snow reaches down to the base of the mountains, fall is terminated It looked as though my pleasant commute would soon be getting a little slippery.
I crossed my fingers and hoped the excavator would get the driveway graveled; hoped the power company would hook us up; hoped the well driller would show up; hoped we’d get a few dry days so we could put in the septic system. Robert Frost, as usual, says it best: Miles to go before I sleep.
This is Willem Lange up in Orford, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work.