Operation Barbarossa

The morning was nice but it was still dicey. When I left to go to the Hanging Mountain Farm sugar house by motorcycle it was about 50/50 as to how things would go weather wise. Arriving at there we had coffee and decided that a more ambitious route to a more distant house would be worthwhile. We headed off to Windy Hill Sugar House after some time warming by the boiler at Hanging Mountain Farm.

It's a little house with only about 5 tables and it's within site of the old home. The neat thing about Windy Hill is they offer oxen sled rides if the weather is right. It turned out that the weather was right, for oxen sled rides, but not motorcycles. It has snowed about 4" in the hills. I'd ridden up by back road and thought it was just drift. I figured once I made it to the turnoff for the state highway I'd be OK. Well the turnoff was about 3 miles beyond where I'd remembered it.

It's amazing that with a steady hand you can ride 3-4 miles in slush. When I did make it to the state road I continued up to get a coffee at the general store atop the hill and at least get a view. The roads were terrible and the conditions cold at that height. When we stopped at a post office on the way down they asked where we'd parked the snowmobiles.

We came into the valley and roads were again clear, if the weather was cold and stopped by Southampton Harley Davidson's Customer Appreciation Day. It's a monthly event with free food. We had corned beef and cabbage, I had a coke too. We chatted and talked bikes, they seem like genuinely nice guys. Best of all they heat the dealersip WARM! For all I say about HD and everything they are still motorcycles, if motorcycles with conchos. A good time was had by all. Of about 20 people we were the only riders save one HD that'd come in from a couple miles distance and whose rider was lovingly toweling down the primary cover. Harleys get about 50 MPG, I guess, on 91 octane.

So, I made it to the first sugar house of the year but didn't breakfast there, but did have coffee. I feel as if I have half killed winter.

My commute would take me 10.6 miles. Not far but I leave work around 6:30. It's around the time that the mercury really drops. The 7-day NOAA suggest highs in the low 40s and lows in the 30s. It feels like as soon as the sun goes below the horizon it's cold. Plus, there's assorted "wintery mix" weather almost every day.

As I am in this for the long haul a week more or less does not matter. I'll start commuting when it makes sense and not sooner.

I was up at Davenport's sugar house this morning (by car). Its setting is, in a word, spectacular. Inside the boiler room there is a window that they keep many syrups from years past to make a sort of amber stained glass window.

On the ride home though we passed through the great meadow that is between Whately and Conway. A seasonal river had formed from the runoff in the hills, perhaps a quarter mile wide in places, swirling and eddying, crisscrossed by islands and never more than a foot or two deep.

It is hard for me, with my farmer's past, not to imagine sinking boot deep in it and how the water flows above and below the soil, how it is cold and swift. It is hard to imagine not having to get a vehicle across it to plow; how a morass like that would swallow even biggest tractor and not so much as belch. It looked like the spring of 1942 down there.

It is hard for me not to think of that river as the lifeblood of winter lying wounded in the hills west of me.