Author Archives: Sandy Stott

It’s the season when moose are on the move, and, though I’ve yet to have a spring moose-meeting, it’s also the season when, as the woods thicken with leaves, I savor past meetings. Here’s one from few years ago in southern Vermont.

More to Say

I’ve studied the map’s contours and know that I have a modest ascent of some 600 vertical feet to begin this day. I like climbing as a starter — it suggests a steadiness that can become automatic, the sort of walking where my Limmer boots kick out the cadence and I can watch the trail and nearby terrain rise and then slide away. The uphill work brings the outrush of breath that is as close as I come to making music. It is, of course, a monotonous music; it continues the way a steam-engine chuffs as the wheels turn and turn. But I also find my breathing aligning with remembered soundtracks; a few of these hover just behind my measured breaths — today, and for this walk’s duration, it’s the old (The Band, especially their song, “The Weight”) and the relatively new (Jack Johnson and his jaunty, though dark, ruminations about “your shadow”, which “walks faster than you”). My “music” becomes the measure of my walking; it is the sound of miles passing under my feet.

I am many bars of song into the morning and nearing the top of a nameless elevation, peak 3025, when something makes me glance up. There, ten uninterrupted feet away is a moose; I could touch him if I reached with the pole in my right hand. I say “him” because as we exchange a first long look, I note his rack of antlers. They are symmetrical and two pronged; they even look a little silly on his large, elongated head, like a tiny tiara. I say, breaking the silence between us, “You are new to all this, aren’t you?” The moose regards me without expression; he stays put. “Well, Mr. Moose, what are we to do next?” I say, keeping up my end.

The trail bends a bit at this point, passing ten feet to the moose’s left before it drops over a ledge and away. I wonder if I can walk this periphery or if it will take me inside whatever zone of anxiety the moose has set for himself. Faintly, I recall that this may be “rutting” season. “The rut,” intones some guidebook from my past, “is a time of unpredictable behavior for a male moose. They are best avoided during rut, when they have been known to charge people, cars, even in an unconfirmed tale, a train.”

Well past such avoidance I slip into the stasis of wonder. Thirty seconds pass. I consider it good news that the moose continues chewing the poplar leaves he’d been stripping from the stunted trees. Who charges anything while eating?, I think. The unpredictable, I answer. I would be less unnerved if a few of these wrist-thick trees were interposed between us, and yet I know that even this small moose (I figure he weighs 400-500 lbs) could snap such trees like balsawood were he to run at them. I’ve been as close to a moose before (specifically ten ledge-supported feet above a huge, fully racked male a decade ago), but I was unobserved and the wind was blowing my scent upslope, away, as he browsed his winter diet of twigs. The unblinking stare of this minor moose keeps triggering small explosions of speculation: “What’s next? What’s next?” cries the little man in my mind who likes to be in charge.

Next, finally, is a sidestep I take to the left; the moose turns a degree to face me. I step left again; the moose turns the next degree. We repeat. Until I am the same ten feet distant but now at the point where the trail begins to depart from this grove. The moose has shifted stance for each step I’ve taken, turning about 20 degrees, and we look again across the narrow distance into each other’s eyes.

A flutter of more remembered mooseology, this from an article on wolves, their lifetime dancing partners in fully-fledged woods, heartens me. My moose is behaving just as genetic wisdom would have him: over long generations moose have learned that running from their primary predators simply exposes their flanks to attack; better to face any threat head-on with your bulk and lethal hooves. (This hard-wired strategy accounts also for the burgeoning problem of car-moose collisions on New England’s roadways. Threatened by the rapid approach of a car, a moose will face it down; drivers, applying the lessons of their own logic, expect a moose to run deerlike, or at least step out of the way. Locked in strategies with no overlap, they collide, and the car is wrecked and the moose dies.) I resume our conversation: “Well, now that worked out as it should, eh Mr. Moose?” I add the Canadian “eh” in deference to his northern roots. And then, as I turn to walk away, he too turns back to the leaves, and I watch the long, head-high shanks of his hindquarters and the young, defined muscles that shift him silently back into the poplars.

Late spring. Evening. Approaching Concord by car in a hurry, I lean into the curve that emerges from the woods just before the bridge on Lowell Rd. Fifty yards ahead a woman with one arm extended scurries across the road. I tap the brakes, slow down to look as she reaches the west shoulder that drops off into the Concord River’s flood plain. Across the road her car idles, its flashers on.

In her hand is a medium-sized turtle, and she bends over the bank’s slope, places the turtle there, then straightens and looks out to the river. The turtle takes a step and disappears downhill into the grass.

I cruise into town, still decelerating, and, as I slow, an image from my recent walk in the Carlisle Cranberry Bog rises from memory’s soup. It lays a claw over consciousness’ rim and climbs out like a turtle. There in vision’s sidebar is movement, a stone walking impossibly over the flat bog. It tilts to shift a leg forward, and, as it does, my mind finds the familiar: turtle. They are on the move today, and, as I circle the gravel track with my dog, we see four more, snappers between eight and twelve inches in diameter hunkered down in depressions, claws hugging the ground, laying white eggs in the dark earth.

Snapperface
photo credit: John Drew

By the time I reach Keyes Road, the story of the Lowell Rd. scene I’ve just witnessed is complete. The woman has rescued the turtle from one of our fast lanes and carried her to safety. I park and start walking. I think about what it means to stop for turtles.

I suppose the woman was hurrying too. It seems we always are. Still, when she shifted her foot to the brake, and, at least temporarily, chose the reptile over her destination, I say she became more herself, that is, more human. Of course she stands in stark contrast to those drivers who veer to hit what they catch in the scopes of their eyes or headlights, but she also offers a change from the rest of us too, the passersby.

Bypassing is one of our national habits. Who among us has not mastered the art of averting his or her eyes when street-people approach? How adept the studied disconnection of bus and subway riders when an older person hobbles in and must stand. How poor our hearing when violence erupts. How quickly we pass by turtles in the road.

To reach down and lift, by its rough-edged carapace, the kin of snake to safety is to reach across an ancient breach, to remedy a story of human separation and disconnection we’ve told since Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Such a choice on Lowell or any other road, mindful of the turtle’s beak and hooked nails, careful of the oncoming traffic, joins one with another. In that moment we stop passing by; we stop wandering; we come home.

1971 at a small college to the west:

I shift, redistributing my weight on the folding wooden chair. The sun catches in the black folds of my gown, and there the heat grows intense; it seems to swim up in waves before my eyes, which stare vaguely at the figure on the stage. A rivulet of sweat trickles down the center of my back. Were a race of ingested chemicals loose in my bloodstream, the waving arms and the white angel’s robe before me would say “hallucination.” But the hand of the sun and the bass throb of headache and the heavy morning light of May say simply, “He is just a man, a speaker; sit.”

A phalanx of black-gowned, degree-hooded professors sits patiently on a stage stretched across the courtyard’s only shade and listens while the white-clothed poet dismisses their world with a flip of his raised hands. “What do you know?” says Robert Bly to me and my rank of classmates. “Not much,” he concludes for us. “Yet.” I shift again, glance down the row to my friend Tim, try then to cast back to the comfort of last night’s darkness and its final raucous cries, a night of raised glasses and imagined worlds that are already washed up on the day’s sun-warmed rocks. “But here’s how you can begin to learn. To learn about the real life of this world. Borrow five hundred dollars from your parents, and go live in the woods.” Professors stiffen visibly; I settle back in my chair and eye the poet. “Go to the woods where the world is formed,” Bly says.

Though Henry Thoreau is still a distant, future reading and walking companion, I, an indifferent student these four years past, straighten a little in my chair, begin to take notice of instruction even as the gates of school are swinging shut. The poet’s arms rise and fall, miming flight even as he urges it. He cites others of his ilk, composers along the world’s margins, layered, revered presences in classrooms but unknown elsewhere. Here is Thoreau again — “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life…”

Already though, in my little square of faux-shade cast by the mortarboard, I am drifting; only this light puff of advice nudges me now toward the woods.

Another wind blows high over the country, a kind of reverse jet stream that courses from east to west. Big-bellied planes descend from it and disgorge fatigue-cloaked eighteen-year-olds and fat-wheeled vehicles on the airstrips of Vietnam. Bly has been invited to this launching of young men because he is famously against this poorly-explained war that seems intent on soaking up a generation of unaffiliated young men. Yesterday, in the school’s chapel, he railed against the distant war and its besuited prosecutors. He implored our cohort of three hundred soon-to-be graduates to resist; he talked about loss of humanity, loss of self, and he read anthem-like verses from the long generations of robed poets, who turned from the savage beauty rendered by their ur-brother Homer and said “no.” He read to young men who sat there counting the touches of the slow finger of the Selective Service as it pointed singly to birth-date after birth-date. I weighed mine against the coming months. One hundred and fifty-five. The current call had reached seventy-seven. Up high, the wind roared.

The sun lies in tiger stripes across the rugs in the quiet house. Both parents are at work, and my brother still has weeks of school before late June’s release. At the breakfast table, slowly eating milk-sodden cereal, I sketch the lines of my plan. The five hundred dollars is out of the question. Already, the past four years has added a complex of debt to my parents’ calculations, and I am the first sibling out of the house. But there is the old house, a thin-walled, unplumbed, old clapboard cape set at road’s end on a New Hampshire knoll, looking out over reclaimed pastures and guarded by a paternal barn. There is the old house. And around it there is the valley, circumscribed by the high arms of two ridgelines that sweep finally up to the mountain.

My parents bought the house and surrounding land ten years ago as a place of distant retirement, and as a family retreat. Summers of sawing and scything and winters of trudging and skiing have taught us all the valley’s first lessons, given us first rewards — small but open fields for meandering and berrying, and thick, regrown woodlands for a sense of original land. I first drove myself there a little over four years ago. In a rare instance of overlap where school and life intersected, I wrote about this journey and submitted it to the college’s student literary magazine. Its near-acceptance — they asked for revisions, and I never gotten around to making them — was a high point in an otherwise mired, final year. I still had the dog-eared sheets and the note asking for revision. The house and the essay are the thin walls of my plan; they are a beginning.