The day was warm and sunny and the woods smelled of high summer. The old mountain road was overgrown with the efforts of the forest to reclaim it’s own but was easily passable nonetheless. My father was slightly ahead of me as we followed the old road to the right into a long straightway that passed between what obviously used to be farmland with still standing rock walls lining either side of the road.

“There used to be a farm here”, my father said quietly, his eyes focused on another time and place far in the past, a big place that included several fields and pastures. The farmhouse that once stood out from the road on the other side of the two middle most fields on the right was a big white place he told me. No one had lived there even then but the house had still stood.

The thing that always made me love these hikes around the green mountains of Vermont in search of some long past memory of my father’s was that he was actually old enough to be my grandfather. It was 1974 and here I was all of 15 and we were heading up the same road that he went exploring back in 1932 when he was but one year older than I was at the time. And on these trips of ours, just myself and my dad, I was guaranteed stories of the past as it referred whatever particular adventure we were on and my father was an excellent story teller with almost perfect recall of his past and the related history that surrounded these mountains. A very personal history that unfortunately vanished along with the passing of my father in 2000.

This time we were on the hunt for a spring. A spring that ran from the ground at the very top of the mountain, ice cold and some of the sweetest water you could find he had told me. I didn’t doubt this one bit since Vermont has some of the best tasting spring water to be found anywhere or at least the water I’d had the pleasure to drink every time we made the pilgrimage to the old family farmhouse every summer from the southern coast of Massachusetts. Considering what the water there tasted like, it was no wonder. So that was an added bonus to our adventure that day.

We traversed up that long straight stretch of road, taking side trips out into the fields, looking here and there and searching for old farm implements that he knew had been there on his previous trek to this wondrous place. We had been hiking since mid-morning and it was early afternoon when we stopped and paid homage to what was left of the old homestead where once a hard working family had strove to bring out an existence form the land. Young children playing in the yard of the big, white farmhouse while the older ones and the father were out in the fields tending to the day’s chores. All that was left now was an overgrown field that contained a cellar hole in one corner that if you weren’t careful, you could easily step right into, it was that hidden form view. I felt a bit sad as I starred down into it. Nothing showed of the old place except a large mound of unidentifiable material which filled the old cellar half way to the top. But just because it was gone didn’t mean that life had drifted away because out of the peak of this mound sprang a young maple tree, tall and strong with a full crown of leaves that waved and whispered in the breeze as if it were telling tales of days gone by. This made me feel a bit better about the whole thing that life had indeed not entirely left but had sprouted anew in a different form. I said a silent goodbye to all those that had lived, loved, worked and died here and we turned and made are way back to the road.

He told me we were near the cutoff into the woods that led the way to the spring when we had reached the end of that long stretch–and to keep a sharp eye out to the left. The old path he had found way back when, was probably mostly gone by now but he would know it when he saw it. He told me to look for a break between a maple and an oak that were still fairly young when he had found them all those years ago, so they might be pretty big by now and that I needed to look carefully. 20 minutes had gone by when we finally we stumbled onto the very place he was looking for. We had actually tried that same place once before but we hadn’t realized that yet another tree that had seeded long ago and situated itself between that maple and oak, had grown tall enough to fool us into passing it by the first time. Once we had pushed our way past the now close set of the three trees, the way opened up and the old path lay before us.

The path itself was clear enough thanks to the high, closely packed canopy of the part of the woods we were traversing through and it led gently down into a hollow and up the other side, the amazing peace and quiet solitude of the forest surrounding us. The path wound around the various hummocks, boulders and other obstructions that one always finds in these parts and eventually led us to where another edge of the tree line opened up as my father had said it would, into a large meadow with the spring off in the upper right corner coming straight out of a large expanse of ledge.

And what we saw when we cleared that tree line stopped us dead in our tracks for we were not facing a peaceful meadow at all but rather a pond as big as the meadow had been or at least that’s what my father stated when he was through scratching his head. Then he chuckled and pointed out across the pond to where the large dome of a beaver dam and den rose out of the water and there was no doubt that by the look of it, it had been there for quite some time. Now we knew what had happened to my father’s spring. It had been keeping house and home for several generations of beavers over who knew how many years. And it wasn’t long before we spotted one or two members of the latest generation leaving their wakes across the surface. We watched this magical setting for nearly an hour before we got up and turned back into the woods and to the path which would lead us to the road and home.

On the way back we got caught in a good size thunderstorm that had plowed into the mountainside and were thoroughly soaked by the time we came to the end of that old road and my dad’s car. All the way down we were laughing, singing and poking fun at how we both looked like a couple of drowned rats. A good end to an excellent day.

I can’t recall now where that old road was or even what road we were on when my dad pulled over to the side and we headed into the woods all those years ago. It’s like the place closed around itself after we left that rainy late afternoon and has hid itself from sight since. I’m glad that it chose to open the way for my father and I when he wished to show his son a memory.

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