Part I: Mud Season Choreography
I am unable to adequately tell you about mud in Vermont. I want to try, but it’s useless and it frustrates me. Like the northern lights or fireflies, mud season is a you-had-to-be-there phenomenon. What one experiences, in life, as oh hot hell I’m going to high-center right this moment or imminently slide into the river just renders as a few placid, shruggable undulations in photographs.
See? It’s infuriating.
Both cars mud-ice impacted in their wheels and brakes and pissed off about it; they need to be soothed. The road was still frozen this morning, sparred with ice crystals, driveable. I think: If I can beat the road, I can get the VW to the village car wash and back again and maybe it will stop driving like it’s on spin cycle with an unbalanced load.
As I mince-flail-mire toward the highway, I (hallelujah!) confront a Town grader, and it hups up into a snowbank to give me room to pass. I wave, hoot, thumbs-up, wild with gratitude. This buys me time — it should be able to do a pass before I’m back with the VW and maybe, just hells-yes maybe, I’ll be able to attend to the GR, too.
With the Golf, I opt for the automatic side of the carwash. This turns out to be a mistake. It lures me in, smears the car with a fleece of blinding foam and then lights up the green “OK, we’re done here” light and stops doing anything at all. I stick my head out the window to see and mince around to the manual side, pay again, wash it all off by hand. It is one degree below freezing.
Then, later, not much, I’ve made it home, swapped cars, yes!, and, then, once again in the village, feeling punchy, I hard-turn into the Dollar General parking lot[1] like an asshole. Fortunately the Tacoma I’ve hooked around rudely belongs to my friend CP and his squiggling happy puppydawg. I tell him that England last week was just great but that I have returned to a hellscape of mud. He tells me it’s never been this bad, the mud. He grew up directly above my house, like literally straight up — you should see the view up there — and his parents still live there and he tells me that no one has ever seen anything like this.
Vermont is the most Wish You Were Here state in the country, it’s legitimately like the postcards, but mud season undoes it. It’s like phenological puberty.
Part II: Love and Driving
I’d just finished shammy-ing off the GR after a full manual wash (the car dry, me drenched) and was back on my way into-through the village when my car read out a text from an immediate family member informing me of a concerning, immediate medical situation with another immediate family member. I pulled into the village green next to the pie shop, stared out across the highway at the public tomb and the whole timbre of the morning pivoted so instantly it’s like I’ve just woken up. It’s too windy and I am unmoored by the sudden frantic love I feel for everyone in my life. I am so small and huge. To hell with this (please let it never stop).
Then I know for the next while I’ll be useless for anything but driving. I’ve already got the GR under me, unstabled, clean, on snow tires but still pliant. I suffer an irrepressible need to take the Grafton Road because it’s perfect. To Grafton village, seven miles, then back, and then I do the trip again. The first pairing to set the lay of the road conditions in my mind, the second to fly. Window just cracked to hear the sound of the car, keeping just tight enough on curves not to throw myself into the forest. There’s nothing but shoulderless road, trees, patchy snow, inclines, declines, the occasional back-set old house, pond. I encounter only one other car.
Pausing for a "Shrubbly" soda at the Grafton Village Store. All of Grafton looks this precious. It’s ridiculous.
It’s still not enough. South, to I-91 and then south again, south of Bellows Falls, stopping at Allen Bro’s in the tawny winter marshes next to the Connecticut River, to stand for a minute inside the shop with the people milling around buying coffee and sandwiches and knowing each other, being awake, alive. The wind steals all of my hair with it when I step outside again but gives me in recompense the scent of cider doughnuts.
North again on the Vermont-empty freeway, I tap up into three digits briefly to see if the GR will come unseated in the unsettling wind gusts. It doesn’t. Cautious, but I’d cleared the stretch for state troopers on my southbound pass.
Southern Vermont keeps unfurling for me willingly but I’ll need to set myself down somewhere. And so into Springfield, to BRIC at the haunting old Park Street School, here, where I can write it down, say it in public and regret it. Or not.
This tangential errand because I left every charging cable I own on an airplane a few days ago, my fastidiously-crafted kit. Good work, Gardner. DG had twenty-four kinds of USB cables and every single one of them was USB-A-to-C. My car is new enough that it only does business in -C, so that side trip was for naught. ↩︎