They Call It Mud Season

And rightly so. The snows come, they cover the ground and look beautiful, and then – when the temperatures warm and rain begins to fall from the sky – they melt.  Onto frozen ground, at first.  Frozen ground doesn’t absorb water well, so the puddles of melt fill up all of the low-lying areas.  And then they freeze.  And they thaw and they freeze and they thaw.  Eventually, the ground also begins to thaw, and when it does, it releases whatever water fell on it in the fall before the frost set in.  Usually, while this happens, we get the “March coming in like a lion” and “April showers” that sound so delightfully poetic, but really mean days and days of leaden grey skies dropping mixtures of cold frozen and liquid precipitation, and finally, going to all rain.  Which combines with the thawing earth and the runoff problems to create giant natural tanks of mud.

This isn’t the nice kind of mud that rich people pay bazillions of dollars to be covered with by spa personnel.  This isn’t even the nice kind of mud that small children make mudpies from and get filthy.

This is Special Mud.  It’s black and slimy and has the consistency of a well-chewed Jujube.  To say that it is sticky is an understand of grotesque proportions.  This mud…sucks.  It will suck your shoe off.  It can even suck your boot off.   Popular wisdom says it sucks the shoes right off the horses, although my farrier and trainer don’t agree.  If you’re unlucky enough to be wearing those ultra-comfy looking ragg socks under your wellies, or duck shoes, the mud can even suck the sock right off your foot.  Really.  I’ve seen it happen.  There’s nothing quite like  standing out in a sucking mud covered horse paddock with the March wind screaming right through your skin and tickling your bones before it leaves out the other side with rain and sleet sheeting down sideways, trying to halter a horse that is High On Life and doesn’t want to be caught because it’s bored and this?  To a horse?  Some of the finest entertainment available.  And then the horse slows its rodeo down for one minute, you step forward softly so as not to set the blasted thing off again, and realize instantly that while your foot has risen from the mirk, your shoe has not.  And the mud is starting to fill in the hole where your shoe was last seen.  And now there’s no place to put your sock-clad foot.

Those moments are when you really know you’re alive, I tell you.

So, yes, Mud Season works.  I just feel that it is so much  more, this season.

For instance, it is also Chuckhole Season.  We didn’t have this issue in Texas.  We had other issues.  But this one is the one where the snow comes down and piles up on the roads, and in order for anyone to get anywhere, like ambulances and fire trucks, something has to happen to get the snow off the road.  In Texas, we called that “waiting an hour”.  In the north, we call that “a plow”. Here’s the thing about plows.  They’re made of metal.  The truck part is metal and the big scoopy scrapy blade is also metal.  I’ve actually seen a plow blade throwing off sparks from contact with the road surface.  Talk about a seriously cool sight.

Having a massive truck with a gigantic metal blade scraping the snow off the road at 30 mph sounds like an awesome idea until you stop and actually think about what it’s scraping against.  Asphalt, up here.  And asphalt is a surface known for being pristinely flat and smooth for about 5 minutes, until that huge truck with the giant wheel that flattens the road when it’s being paved moves 10 feet down.  After that, asphalt is known for its artistic texture.  And that texture?  Doesn’t neatly match the bottom of that giant metal blade on the plow.  Which means that the plow has a choice:  either leave a layer of snow and ice in any low-ish or wavy spot in the road, which is 1,000,000 per square yard of asphalt OR it can scrape the hell out of the road to get all that stuff off.  The problem with option 1 is that the road still isn’t safe to drive on, which is kind of the whole point of the plow.  The problem with option 2 is that any edge, angle, or loose bit of asphalt, which is only 10,000 per square yard, gets ripped right out of the road.  And deposited on the margin, where it can be found 2 years later with grass growing up through it.

I once had an entire clump of chives relocated 3 feet away by a plow.

So the plows, in performing their extremely valuable service for the safety of mankind, chew up the roads when they do so.  And what that does, it makes more low spots in the road.  See above, under March Like A Lion and April Showers to grasp the enormity of this statement.  And the road crews can’t patch all that stuff up until it’s warm enough, or dry enough, or both…I’m not sure, but what I do know, is they don’t patch that stuff in March.  Or April.

The upshot of all this dynamic physics is that by this time of the year, every road in town has had every patch from last year’s road repairs ripped out of the ground, and those holes have expanded from freeze-thaw cycles, and then the plows have created a fresh crop, to boot.

Every thoroughfare becomes a slalom course.  Unless you want to blow a tire (which I’ve done) or blow out your suspension (ditto) by driving over the holes.

We have chuckholes on my street that could eat small children.  We have chuckholes that have extended families, and they’ve all come for a long visit.  We have chuckholes that could hide the national debt of Greece.

It’s Chuckhole Season every bit as much as it is Mud Season.

It’s also Maple Season.  The nights are freezing, the days are warm, and the sap is flowing.  Farmers are out working the sugarbush with complicated arrangements of taps and hoses.  Farmers are out working the sugarbush with vats and snowmobiles.  Farmers are out working the sugarbush with metal buckets that wear pointy hats, and bringing it in with a horse-drawn sledge.  Farmers are staying up until 3am boiling the sap to make that maple syrup.  Farmer’s families are operating small seasonal restaurants and serving brunches comprised of rustic food like pancakes, waffles, and corn fritters, and bringing bottomless cups of coffee and pitchers of hot maple syrup.

Every country road features a small outbuilding with an oddly ventilated roof, huge stacks of wood, and steam pouring out through every hole in the building.

Maple syrup is expensive, no question…but if you’ve ever seen what it takes to get it from the tree into the plastic jug, you won’t blink at the price.  It would be cheap at twice the price.  This stuff was a specialty item in Texas, hard to come by and priced like an ounce of gold.  Here in New England, buying it from the farmer, it’s much less expensive, which means that one doesn’t feel compelled to “save” it for a special occasion, and one can cook with it freely.  I had a maple-brined turkey breast this winter that required the use of one whole pint of maple syrup.  This would have been unthinkable in Texas.  I might as well have filled a tub with 14K gold leaf to bathe in it, as use two cups of maple syrup for a single meal.

It was unbelievably good, this dish, I will say that.

So, hot farm breakfasts, boiling sap, and – of course – plenty of mud, and this is also Maple Season.

It is also Shedding Season.

The Wonder Horse doesn’t make much of a winter coat.  He makes some winter coat, but not like some of the horses at the barn who look like ultra-cute plush toy horses at this time of the year.  One of the horses that was at the barn last year?  Grew a winter coat four inches thick.  I swear it.  Huey doesn’t get a gorgeous fluffy winter coat.  He just looks…scruffy.  He gets a beard, which makes him look old.  Mysteriously, in the last month, he manufactured a beautiful set of curly strawberry blond feathers on all of his fetlocks.  Why curly?  Why blond?  Why now?  I don’t know.  I do know they are seriously cute, though, and I’m going to be sorry when they either fall out or have to get clipped off for a show.  The beard, I will not miss at all.  It makes him look like the guy who sits around under the railroad trestle all day with the bottle of Schlitz malt liquor in the brown paper bag.  I look forward to the disappearance of that beard.

This is the time of year, I read recently, when riders are covered in mud up to the waist, and with hair from the waist up.  True, because as the days quickly grow longer, it is the time to say “Adieu” to whatever winter coat the horse managed to put on.

A source of perennial amazement to me is how – despite the fact that Huey’s “winter coat” is barely perceptible – he still managed to shed like an over-stressed Persian cat.  It is a prodigious volume of hair that falls off of him.  And, usually, sticks to me.  This time of year, you can tell when I’ve been to the barn, because I shine red, all over, in the sunlight.

Of late, Huey’s coat has been notable mainly for the presence of large quantities of dirt, dust, and dandruff.  He is filthy.  Not in that fun photo op way of being entirely covered in mud.  No.  He’s just dirty.  It’s almost not worth brushing him, because the brush only brings up more dirt and then moves it around.  We are well past the point of brushes actually removing dirt.  The only thing that is going to remove dirt at this point is a large quantity of water, preferably from a hose with a squirt nozzle, a big bucket of shampoo, and another hose-driven deluge.  This, of course, requires temperatures that we’re unlikely to see any time soon, so I have to just remind myself that my horse really is red.

This is the horse I was issued at the factory.

This is the horse I have now. Note the scruffy beard, the filth, and the surly look in the eye. What you can’t see from this picture is the gummy texture off the mane.

One happy thought occurred to me this morning.  The dirty hair is falling out, yes?  And the hair that is replacing it clean, yes?  Then maybe he will be a Self-Cleaning Horse.

Yeah, I know.  I used to think if I lay out in the sun long enough, I would get so many freckles that they’d all blend together and make an awesome tan, too.  Spring blooms eternal in the hopeful breast.

So it is Shedding Season.

The last, but certainly not the least, is Spring Skiing Season.

Spring skiing is that bittersweet time of the year when the snow is at its absolute best, and the sun smiles down at the earth, and the cool breezes caress skin that has not been exposed in months…but it also marks the Beginning Of The End.  We have, at best, one more month of skiing, and then it’s back to the Ninth Hell of No Skiing for another 8 months.  It’s just so unfair.  It gets great right before it dies, just to make the sorrow of parting that much more painful.  I can’t dwell on this very long or I’ll go into a depression.

But it is also Spring Skiing Season.

Here are the goods.

Much Better Now

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love brought to me

twelve snowflakes flying

eleven ski runs open

ten powder stashes

nine wayward urchins

eight feet of falling

seven fan guns blasting

six chairlift buddies

five pints of beer

four Belgian waffles

three lifts a-running

two brand new twin-tips

and a tube of emu pain-relief oil

I Need A Fix

As day succeeds day here in the Blighted Northeast I grow more and more irritable.  Europe has been getting all of our snow for the last month.  Now the midwest has gotten our snow.  They’re struggling under the weight of feet of heavy, wet snow – the kind that brings down power lines, the kind the brings down trees, the kind that causes cardiac events in people who need to shovel it.

The kind we know exactly what to do with in New England, because that’s the only kind of snow we get.

Or got since we haven’t had bupkus for snow since Halloween a year ago.

Ski season ended a full month early last year, and it’s getting off to a very slow start this year.  The days it’s been cold enough to make snow are in the sad, feeble minority.  The days when wet garbage other than snow has fallen from the sky are in the aggressive obnoxious majority.  The days when the conditions have been minimally acceptable equal 6.  The days when conditions have been minimally acceptable that I have not been otherwise irrevocably committed to things other than skiing equal 0.  The days when skiing conditions have sucked because of ice, warmth, rain, and high winds equals the days I have planned to go skiing.

I’m feeling jinxed, here. I’m sure that the owners and operators of the ski areas feel this even more so.  But right now, I’m too wrapped up in my own misery to spare them any attention.  It’s Friday.  I should be, at this very time, booting up in the lodge.  Instead, I am at home watching sheets of cold rain wrap out of the sky.

AGAIN.

I lived in Wisconsin for 6 years, and so I’m getting a direct second-hand recounting of this tremendous storm.  I’m seeing the pictures, hearing the stories.

And all I can think is “You lucky bastards.  Getting real snow from the real sky.”

I shared this sentiment with Roy, who simply said “You are an addict.”

He then elaborated on that thought. “The kind that picks up cigarette butts from the street and lights them just in case there’s still any smokable tobacco in the filter.”

You know what?  He’s right.  And I’m still jealous of Wisconsin for getting all that snow.  It’s easier to put a power line back up than it is to manufacture a wide-scale snow base.

My name is Lori, and I need to ski.

Things I Learned From The White Ribbon Of Death

I had my first Ski Day of the season yesterday.  It was my prize for wrapping up most of the grading for the term we have just completed.  Grading is such a wretched nuisance that it requires either a carrot or a stick, or – in the case of Roy – both at the same time.  Me, I do better with carrots.  And what nicer carrot than a day on the hill, the first day of skiing since Seasonus Interruptus back in early March, and to have that day without a ginormous pile of nasty grading sitting in front of me?

No nicer carrot.  There’s not much I love more in the winter than a Ski Day.

So I took one.  Or, rather, I should say, I took a Ski Run.  As in one (1) run.  It was a One-Run-And-Done day, the kind that make a person grateful for the possession of a season pass.  This isn’t any shame on my hill, no, not by any means.  Given the weather lately, it’s a miracle that they were able to open at all.  We haven’t had any snow yet, and while it was nice and cold for a week after Thanksgiving – cold enough to blow some great snow from the fan guns – we’ve had a crummy, nasty, disgusting warmup over the past week.  Unseasonably warm temps.  And rain.

Rain.  We hates seeing rain in the winter.  We hates it, the nassssty.  It makes the air damp.  Nice snow, that doesn’t make a damp that will creep into any gap between buttons and zippers and send a clammy chill straight through to the bone.  It also trashes the slopes, nasssty rain.  It sucks the snow off, and it washes it away, and then it freezes what’s left, rock hard.

We HATES rain in the winter time.

And that brings me to Sunday, the day after a three-day thaw and a day and a half of rain and drizzle.  I knew in advance that the skiing was going to suck.  There’s a limit to even the greatest ingenuity, dedication, and skill, and we were well past that.  I knew.

But I also knew it had been two hundred and sixty-six (266) days since I’d had sticks in between my feet and a snowy hill.  And, you know, even I have my Limits.

So off I went, toting two pairs of skis along with me.  My big fat ultra-fun Rossignol S7Ws powder hounds, and my Volkl Tierra ice skates.  Both needed a wax-off, wax-on treatment from the shop on the hill, and by the time that was done, I’d have plenty of chance to hang out in the unseemly warm air and watch the hill.  And that’s when the learning started.

What I Learned From My One Ski Day, or Lessons From The White Ribbon Of Death

1. When the hill has been open for three weeks, and it hasn’t snowed yet, the conditions are going to be bad.

2. When there are only three top-to-bottom runs open on the entire mountain, conditions are going to be bad.  This is because every other desperate ski-deprived athlete in a four-state region is going to be skiing on the same three runs.  And in New England, we don’t have none of them stinkin’ wide-open ranges covered with thick drifts of powdery snow.  We have tight, twisty, narrow runs with precipices falling off to the side and covered in ice, just like Jesus wanted.  So not only is every ski-deprived athlete in a four-state region out on the runs, but  the runs themselves are 20 or 30 feet wide.  Which sounds like a lot…until you’re actually out on it.

3. Stop. Watch. Listen.  Then the VSR (Visual Slope Readings) return the information that there are multiple individuals wiping out at one time, or walking down the hill with skis slung over the shoulder, OR you can hear every snowboarder scraping their way down the hill, it does not matter how many Mary Sunshine Optimists promise you that the conditions “are soft”.  Take your ice skis not the powder skis.

4. The size of the critical mass of neophyte snowboarders required to completely plow loose snow off the surface and push it to the sides or the bottom of the slope, leaving only a bullet-proof crust of textured boilerplate ice, is never large under the best of circumstances.  When there are only two runs available and they are only 30 feet wide and there has been no fresh snow in three or four days, that critical mass consists of two. One 12 year old girl, and her brother.

5. Powder skis are not a good choice for icy conditions.  That’s cheating – I knew that one from last year when I lost five years off my life diving down a black diamond at Jiminy Peak on my fatty girls.  It got reinforced again.

6. It is possible to ski in control and brake on icy bullet-proof boilerplate, but doing so requires major effort from the quadriceps.  Times five if you’re doing that on a big fat pair of noodly powder skis.

7. The quadriceps muscles used to brake under those conditions do not, ever, get used in any other activity than skiing.

8. Items 5, 6, and 7 are raised to the tenth power when the slopes in question are covered with every ski-deprived athlete in a four-state region, including all of the ones who would otherwise be spending 100% of their time on the black diamonds or in the terrain park and every never-ever who decided to blow off lessons in favor of just winging it as they go.  Also, swarms of children under the age of 6.

9. And that goes times 100 when the runs are 20 or 30 feet wide, with dirt, rocks, branches, and logs on the edges where the actual snow has been plowed off.

10. It’s never too early to hit the bar in the lodge for a Cold One.  If the bar is open, it’s Miller Time.

Now, you may be saying, Lori, you know that powder skis are a bad choice when it’s icy. Whatever possessed you to take those things up in those conditions?

And to that I say It was warm, and I expected to be skiing on slush, not ice.  And the incremental danger of having ice-skis on slush is marginally higher than that of having powder-skis on ice.

The good news is I survived, the better news is I had the good judgment to bail out after one run, and the best news is that my favorite bartenders are back this year.

Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, today is the last day for a while of crappy warm weather and rain, and they’ll be able to blow some more snow soon.  I still feel like I’m waiting to ski.

Going Out Into The World

I’ve been so tied up with 1) Huey, 2) Huey, 3) getting a cold, 4) teaching, and 5) Huey lately that I haven’t had much of a chance to get out and really enjoy the New England fall.  Roy points out that this has not been helped by the fact that we’ve had some kind of record-setting rainfall this season.  Which is true.  Under items 1, 2, and 5 (above) I spend plenty of time fretting over Huey’s penchant for slurping out of mud puddles instead of his nice, hygenic water buckets.  This, mainly, because there’s so blasted many mud puddles.

My consolation here is that even if I could ride the Wonder Horse right now, I still couldn’t…because of all the rain.

With any luck, this will translate in a month or so to all the snow.

That time is getting closer with every passing day.  I thought I’d be all horked up over having to not be riding Huey all the time due to snow and ice…but hey, I can’t ride him anyway.  Or not yet, at least.  I almost hate to jinx things, but that leg swelling is coming down at an increasing rate – if it continues on <sound of knuckles thumping wood> next week at the same rate it declined last week, I’ll be calling the vet to come perform the follow-up ultrasound.

The possibility of lunging begins to assert itself.  Huey usually hates lunging, because, of course, it is boring…but my guess is that he’s passed that Critical Threshold of Boredom and that even lunging will be looking good to him about now.  Especially since he’s lost 1) his nighttime paddock-ranging privileges (holding too many early morning romping-and-bucking parties and getting the Senior Citizens all riled up and 2) his daytime hanging-out-in-the-paddock privileges when someone is riding in the ring.  Apparently the Wonder Horse started hiding in his stall last week, whilst peering around the corner and waiting for some poor lesson horse to come trotting ’round the bend in the ring, at which point Huey would shoot out of his stall door and pound down to the end of the paddock like he was erupting from a starting gate.  Thank the lord that of the two horses (that I know of) he has done this two, one of them was being ridden by his owner at the time, a girl with a very great deal of riding skill…and the other one was the ultimately bombproof boost-him-into-a-trot-with-a-stick-of-dynamite lesson horse.

I confess.  I was a Bad Horse Mom, because when I heard about all this, I laughed.  I couldn’t help it.  Naughty, wicked boy.  Hahahahah.

Even as I was envisioning the excited contretemps that would ensure if some other horse did this very thing when I was riding Huey in the ring, I still couldn’t help it.

Huey, I said, hahahaha…you REALLY should not…hahahahaha…do that kind of thing.  That was VERY bad of you.  Hahahahahaha.

Like I said, Bad Horse Mom.

Anyway, this weekend the rain finally cleared off, and really cleared off – so we had blue skies and everything – for more than one day.  This must be some kind of record in the last six weeks.

And thereupon, we set out briefly to See The World.  Amazingly, the incessant rain has not managed to utterly destroy the fall colors.  It just hid them.  With sun on them, the leaves are wonderful.  All bright gold and red and orange fluttering against the bright blue sky, all glowing and translucent where the sun falls through them, and shaded to a moody darkness of their brilliant colors in the shade.

Our rovings yesterday took us to the Strawbale Cafe.  One of the things that New England has it all over Texas with is Agri-Tourism. There is some agritourism in Texas.  Just not a lot of it.  After all, there’s minimal charm in 8,000 acres of beef cattle grazing on scrublands, or a patch of sorghum that is 3 miles on every side.

You just don’t get that kind of large-scale agriculture in New England.  In New England, it’s hills and rocks.  Mostly, it’s both.  Anything that isn’t hills and/or rocks is ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and wetlands.  Houston and Boston notwithstanding, it’s now generally considered to be a Poor Idea to drain off a wetland and erect a city on top of it.  A lot of the land is arable…but not on a profitable large scale.  The results is a proliferation of what I can’t help thinking of as Pocket Farms.  Farms small enough to fit in your pocket.  Lots of them are owned by the same families who first tilled the land back in ’77.  1677, that is.  The rest appear to be owned by hippies – both the old 1960s kind, and the new kind, who went to expensive private schools like Hampshire College and are doing things Scientifically…with horse-drawn plows, pigsties churning compost out of slops and used bedding from the horses, companion plantings for pest control, and things like that.  Stuff that is a really good idea, but which cuts into the kind of profits that a huge corporate farm wants to see.  Or is, otherwise, unworkable for a gigantic farm.

Because farming is one of those things that is subject to massive economies of scale, what this also means is that it’s very difficult to make enough money to keep a household on if you’re relying strictly on the vegetables you plant on the farm.  You might say “Oh, have cows” but dairy farming is an insanely hot button around here.  For good reasons, I’m given to understand, although I don’t have a terribly clear grasp of those issues myself.

So what happens here is that “farming” gets expanded a bit beyond the meaning it’s had other places I’ve lived, where it’s mostly about the crops.  Farms that are mostly about meat are “ranches”.  Not “farms”.  So I’m talking about “farms” here.  Farmers here do plant plenty of crops, and often sell direct to the public through farmer’s markets, or, more frequently, farm stands (a subject on which I’ve posted in the past). But the summer is just a small piece of the farm.  In the spring, a lot of it is maple sugaring.  That pretty much gets done when the weather is too cold to even think about planting, even if the ground wasn’t too soggy to take the tractor out in the fields anyway.

You don’t want to compact the soil, after all.

So the first “crop” of the year is sap coming out of the trees.  There are maple sugaring operations all over the place here.  Can’t swing the proverbial cat without hitting one.  Any large tract of deciduous trees you see, you inspect a little more carefully, and you’ll find lengths of plastic tubing strung below the branches.  That’s to make it easier to get the sap out, because the need to haul massive tanks of sap out of a forest that is planted on a rocky hill presents certain…challenges.  Challenges that are met by ATVs, in some cases, and horses in harness in lots of cases, and for the big-time operators, by networks of plastic tubing strung out all over the hillside.  This isn’t your Little House on the Prairie sugaring operation, with wooden buckets, you know.

Somewhere in there, some brilliant souls regarded the problem:  farms that are too small to take advantage of economies of scale + short growing season for crops + people who are passionately attached to the land + gorgeous scenery that contributes materially to the scale problem.

And to this calculation, they added in the final element:  proximity to major population centers full of people who can’t wait to leave and then come back and who have plenty of money to spend.

And the result of this formula is Agri-Tourism.

In the summer, it’s farm stands and CSAs, but mostly, it’s growing things.  In the fall, it’s Pumpkin and Harvest Festivals and Hayrides and Haunted Corn Mazes and Pick-Your-Own-Apples and Cider Donuts and Hot Cider and Smoked Meats.  And the larger farm stands erupts in decorations and out-of-state license plates.

It’s terribly quaint.  Even if you don’t like quaint you like this.  It’s impossible not to.  Even jaded high school students.  They like it.

In the winter, it’s sleigh rides and cross-country ski trails and jams, hot chocolate, and pies.

In the spring, it’s the Sugar Shack.  A slap-dash farm structure with a full-service kitchen, a staff of the farmer’s family members and close personal friends, folding tables and chairs or picnic benches, dishing up hot farm breakfasts – eggs, bacon, sausages (and because this is New England, veggie sausages too), and – most importantly – french toast. pancakes. waffles.  Why most importantly?  Because somewhere on the property, somewhere you can usually go and hang out while you’re waiting an hour for a table, is the farmer and what she or he is doing is boiling the sap.  There’s a massive metal evaporator, usually open to the air so you can look at it, sitting on top of God’s Own Wood-fired Oven – and cords of wood stacked ten feet tall right outside the door.  And that evaporator is chock full of maple sap.  And it’s boiling.  And out the end is coming maple syrup.  Which is making its way, with some delays for stuff like cooling off and bottling, onto the tables in the dining room.

Yes.  The Pure Hell of the New England Mud Season is more than compensated for by the fact that you can drive down a country road, park it at a table with a red checked plastic table cloth, order a $5 breakfast, and when your cup of coffee arrives…you can pour freshly made maple syrup into it to sweeten it up.

Really.  Life doesn’t get better than this.

The fresh maple syrup is, of course, also for sale in little handled pots right next to the cash register.  You can buy it and take it home.  And nearly everyone does.   The bottles are a standard type, in standard sizes…and built to fit right into the shelf on the inside of your refrigerator door.

I remember “maple syrup” when I was a kid.  It wasn’t any damned maple syrup.  It was maple flavored syrup.  No one had real maple syrup in the kitchen.  Couldn’t get it, for one.  And if you could, it was priced in the same tier as truffles.  The kind that come from the ground, not the kind made of chocolate.  Unaffordable to the upper-middle-class household.

Maple syrup.

I think I had that stuff maybe 5 times in my life before I moved to New England.  I didn’t think I liked syrup.  What it is really, is that I don’t like fake maple syrup.  I’m happy to pour the real stuff into my coffee.  And on my waffles, but only if I’m having breakfast at the Sugar Shack.  I do, however, love to cook with the stuff.  I made a turkey brine a few weeks ago that required an entire pint of maple syrup.  Even here, that’s a bit decadent.  In Texas, it would have been unthinkable.  (It was good, by the way…)

Ah.  Maple syrup.  Sugar Shacks.  At the end of every sugaring season, everyone says things like “Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this all year long?”

And the family that runs the Strawbale answered that call, and said “Yes.”  And now, we can get the Sugar Shack experience (sans live evaporators) in the fall, and winter, and summer.  Heavenly.

While sharing these thoughts with the proprietor, I managed to pick up some Highly Valuable Information…beyond the operating hours of the dining room.  The proprietor had a sense of history about the region, and the aforementioned passionate attachment to the land…and because of this, he was able to tell me why I have to do a new plaster repair every. single. year. in my house.  Fortunately, the guys at This Old House gave me a great line on plaster repairs, but really.  Annually?  The house was built in 1895.  Surely it ought to have finished “settling” by now.

But no.

And apparently, this is because my entire town is built on a hundred feet of silt.  And the elevated railroad bed right across the street that carries freight trains loaded with coal and scrap iron is also sitting on a hundred feet of silt.  Evidently, this entire area was a massive lake at the last ice-age, and silt was carried in off the surrounding hills and mountains, and laid up, right as rain, for my house to get built on and settle every damn time a train goes past.

I had wondered why, when the trains go by, the house quivers like it’s got a small earthquake under.  It’s the remarkably fluid properties of silt that does it.

I had wondered why, before we got the ancient cracked cement sidewalk out back replaced with a big gravel bed, every time we had a big rain I’d get water and silt washing into my basement between the gaps in the fieldstone walls.

It’s all on silt.

The guy I was talking to offered the insight that our downtown is low-rise (pretty much no more than 4 stories) because you have to drive piles so deeply to hit bedrock that it’s just not practical to do it.  He also observed that when the municipal parking garage three blocks away was being built, every time the pile drive nailed one of the supports, the entire downtown area quivered like a bowl of jello.

That must really have been something.

The things you learn from striking up casual conversations.

At least now I know that the incessant plaster repairs are not because of some structural defect in the house.  And I also know that there are not ever going to cease.  I might as well buy stock in Big Wally’s Plaster Magic right now.

Here are some pictures from our visit to the ski hill on Columbus Day.  Y’all come back, hear?