LITTLE MOUNTAINS

Wynn Miller

FROM THE VERANDAH bar of the Wilmington White House, a grand 19-century farmhouse now a resort hotel, the white peak of Haystack mountain came into view, veiled in scudding clouds, above the gray folded hills of Southern Vermont. A seamless line of automobile headlights illuminated the Molly Stark Trail below.
A young woman read a paperback — Great Broadway Plays of the Decade. I ordered a stout, and tried to sketch the view of Haystack as it emerged and disappeared in the mist.

“That’s nice.” she said, indicating my sketch pad. “Are you an artist?”

“No.” I replied, and asked her “What do you do?”

“My boyfriend and I are theatrical producers in New York. We’re just up for the holiday.”

“Are there any great plays on Broadway?”

“Why sure, what do you mean?’

“Well, to judge by the reviews, they’re just hyped-up reruns of past successes.”

“If you mean like, Sting playing MacHeath, in Mack the Knife, I guess so. We’re not Broadway producers. We make shows for industrial and corporate clients — sales presentations, training films, that sort of thing.”

As we talked, I overheard a group of people at the other end of the bar turn their conversation to theater. After a while, her partner arrived. She introduced us. They were Lynn and Marty, two people among the more than six million Americans who spend perhaps fifty million days a season at ski resorts.

“How did you like the skiing?”

“It was okay,” Marty replied.

“Just okay?”

“There were only a few trails open, and they were icy.”

“Do you ski often?”

“I do, and Lynn is learning.”

“Last year we took the ‘excellerate’ program at Killington, which they also teach here.” Lynn said. “I can’t believe how quickly I’ve learned how to turn.”

A man seated nearby joined the conversation, saying he too had taken and enjoyed the lesson program. It turned out that he is a nuclear engineer with the navy, on leave, and he and Lynn got in a spirited debate over atomic power.

While they talked, Marty asked me “Did you ski today?”
“Yes,” I replied, “at Haystack. There were three trails open, and only about a dozen skiers on the hill. The cover was mighty thin.”

Haystack recently extended lift service up to a steep face below a high lake at the base of the summit cone, where slalom glades had been cut through hemlock, spruce and birch stands years ago. But those runs were closed — moss-green and autumnal — and only one boulevard and a couple of training slopes were open. I had watched in the rain as youngsters from the ski academy fluidly ran gates.

Christmas represents about one-third of the years’s gross receipts, as with other resorts, and Haystack, which operates in the shadow of its competitor upvalley, Mount Snow, was struggling to stay open. They are little mountains: less than 1,700 feet of vertical, none of it above treeline.

Route 100, a scenic highway usually listed by Road & Track magazine as one of the 10 best drives in America, follows the North Branch of the Deerfield river up a lush yosemite valley, providing access to Haystack mountain and Mount Snow on its western rim, several cross-country ski areas, and thousands of rooms in homes, condos, hotels and inns. The road leads further north past other little mountains, including Killington, which shares with Vail, Colorado and Mammoth Mountain in California the distinction of being the most-frequently visited ski resorts in the country. Near big cities, they are outposts in a wilderness whose populations are growing much faster than the nation as a whole.

A yosemite valley is one that has been deeply scoured by glaciation, marked with steep side gulfs, and sometimes filled with botanical growth. Wrote John Muir:

The walls of these park valleys of the Yosemite kind are made up of rocks, mountains in size, partly separated from each other by narrow gorges and side-canyons…the parks they inclose look like immense halls or temples lighted from above. Every rock seems to glow with light…
There are many yosemite valleys identical in general characters, each presenting on a varying scale the same species of mural precipices, level meadows and lofty waterfalls…The position of each valley upon the yosemite zone indicates a marked and inseparable relation to the ancient glaciers…
John Muir

The Deerfield River valley was once richly farmed, and its timber harvested. While some maple sugaring still takes place, its main crop, like that of its famous paradigm in California, is tourism. Its mountains rise no taller than the altitude of Yosemite’s floor. Unfettered by government, its valley hosts clusters of shops and businesses, and outdoor amusements by the score.

* * * *

THE SUN DIPPED behind the hills, briefly imparting a copper cast to the mountaintop. At the White House, jacketed men and gowned ladies filtered in to set down to dinner. Marty and Lynn ordered a bottle of champagne to celebrate New Year’s Eve with, and we said good evening to each other. I went out to the car and drove down into the town of Wilmington to meet my sister, Margot, then to her colleague Linda’s house for supper.

The little house was filled with aromas of meats and vegetables, and wine flowed. There was no formality among the guests, salespeople for resort vacations. Jim, their leader, a tall young man with a thick Boston accent, brought his father, George, a resort developer. Eddie, Lucille, Joe and Felice were already there. They were mostly newcomers to town, maybe even carpetbaggers.

After a while, talk turned to tourism and the valley. Business was down for them, even though the weather kept visitors off the mountains and in town. There were plenty of lookers, but few closings, on the time-share condos they sell at the old inn by the river. But Jim hyped it anyhow.

“Did you see the two pigeons I took today? A Beantown flatfoot and his wife, with a hard-on for a Red Week…they couldn’t shell out their money fast enough!”

“That’s your luck.” Eddie said. “It took me nearly two hours to get my suckers to the table — and I had to use the hammer just to get them to take a Blue Week.”
Eddie is one of those who came to the region in the Sixties, part of the influx of hippies who haunted these hills, gone up the country to paint their mailboxes blue. “Way back then,” he said, “my claim to fame was when I painted “Nixon Sucks” on my VW Bug, and drove it up to the Vermont Inn, where the former president spoke.”

George, a slick salesman who’d spent years on and off in this neck of the woods, encouraged this kind of banter, which went round and round for a long while, till I finally asked him “What was it like here, when Mount Snow was the ski capital of the U.S.?”

“Do you remember the indoor skating rink, air cars connecting the hotel with the base lodge, the heated swimming pool at slopeside?” Margot asked. They had been a part of our childhood, eagerly awaited when reports of snow in the hills reached us at our home on the coast every early winter.

“And how.” George said, rubbing the gold Corum watch on his wrist. “It was a spectacle — Disneyland. Walt Schoenknect [the resort’s developer] was a true promoter. He made it fun, with all his buildings painted in bright colors, ‘Japanese dream pools’ in the hotel, a water fountain that sprayed a flume 500 feet into the air…”

“Yes, he was an innovator.” I replied. “And he loved skiing. I also remember his other great idea.”

“What was that?”

“He was the first person to apply to the Atomic Energy Commission for peacetime use of the atom bomb.”

Everybody turned and looked at me, puzzled.

“Yes. He proposed to explode one at the base of the mountain, in order to increase the vertical for skiing. They turned him down, of course.”

“No bullshit?” Jim said.

“That would have been hot skiing.” someone added.

“That’s true.” George said. “He was ahead of his time. We were developing Chimney Hill then, in the ‘sixties, when it all began to fall apart. They sold it to some Japanese investors, absentee landlords, who simply didn’t have the vision.”

“Wasn’t Chimney Hill was about the first condominium ever?” someone asked.

“Yes, I guess it was. 56 homes on the old road to Haystack, back behind the ski area on Binney Brook. It spurred growth in Wilmington.”

“I remember.” Eddie said. ” But that growth was so explosive that, as I recall, the entire town got dysentery one winter.”

“Yeah. But it’s different now. The big resorts out West are where the action’s gone.”

“Maybe so, but there are a lot of tourists even now. You can still wait in line 45 minutes at the lift.”

“And we’ve had to drink bottled water this week.” Lucille added.

“It’s up to the town to fix that problem.” George retorted.

“But big public works require money — and the ski areas get all of it.” I said.

“Not really. Years ago, the townspeople said the same thing. So one season Walt gave all of his customers their change in silver dollars. Pretty soon every gas station and grocery store in the valley was inundated with silver. That shut those small-town hicks up, all right.”

“Yesterday I saw a plan to connect the lifts and trails of Mount Snow with Haystack. That will give the ski area more than one hundred trails.”

“Mount Snow always wanted to do that, but never could. Now that it’s owned by Killington, though, it might happen. Haystack has reopened its golf course…there’s a lot going on here.”

At a few minutes to midnight we all ushered into the living room to watch the ball drop in Times Square on television, toasted each other and the new year. Then we went out onto the porch and looked over the hills. It was cold. An inch of new snow, fallen earlier in the evening, shone brightly under a full moon. Not enough to ski on.

* * * *

NEW YEAR’S DAY DAWNED CLOUDY, and the rain began early. I spent the day with Bill Ash, manager of the Sitzmark cross-country ski center in midvalley.

Bill grew up in the valley, as did his parents and grandparents, and has seen it go from agriculture, to ski center, to refuge (for hippies in the sixties), to circus. He has skied over most of it and fished the rest. He augments his modest ski area income with a logging and construction business in summer, and was faced with an unpleasant decision.

We walked past the tennis courts to the ski trails in the rain. Four inches of cold water streamed over our shoes, and grass poked through yesterday’s ski tracks on the fairways. He’d just opened the area for the year two days ago and, reluctantly, decided to close it today.

“Like to open.” he said. “But even if there were enough snow to ski on, people’d get cold.”

Bill and I once served together on the Vermont Nordic Ski Patrol, and we remembered just such a day of weather during a Fall training session, when we were warned of the dangers of hypothermia on this kind of cold rainy day.

“Ay-up. Got to watch out for people.”

We went into the warming hut and tidied up. A few callers asked about conditions, and were told there’d be no skiing. Then we went over some maps of the region, and Bill showed me how, many trails from the cross-country and downhill ski areas of the valley connect, and how they might form an enlarged network if the proposed expansion of downhill skiing were to occur. The valley is the southern end of the Catamount Trail, a 280-mile ski touring route among the mountains to Canada.

We agreed to meet at his house for pot luck later, and I went for a drive. Leaving the valley, I ascended Cooper Hill on a steep grade. Reaching its crest, I turned off onto a dirt road that led to the summit. Rain became snow, and I parked at the end of the road and listened to the peculiar sound of wind in the mountain trees. It is a sound familiar to the ears of mountain visitors, and would seem to take all cares with it.

Yet altitude is heir to many things, one of which is acid rain. Half of the Red Spruce population here has died from this byproduct of distant industry — not as grim a toll as has befallen Bohemia or Kiev, but nevertheless a reminder that alpine problems are not solely caused by alpine visitors.

Leaving that place of relative solitude, I wound down miles of sodden, rutted country roads past farms and fields and vistas of wooded hills beyond, to an expansive mountain meadow. A tiny town is there, its only visible resident a setter dog who watched me turn around at a dead-end. Exiting the meadow, the road descends sharply through a narrow, steep glacial gorge dotted with rich glens where water pools in the course of a racing brook.

At Wardsboro, I stopped for a slice of pie. The bakery, the front rooms of a small house, was warm and fragrant. A man peeled apples. He looked a Vermonter, with crested brows and furrowed skin, but his accent gave him away. He was born in Brooklyn, having moved here 35 years ago, to ski and operate an orchard. He said that these environs were too harsh, the growing season too short for the crop, and that they are better cultivated in the wider, lower valleys to the East, a conclusion his late neighbor Scott Nearing also reached, when he led an earlier wave of back-to-the-land people, in the midst of the Great Depression.

Driving back down to the Valley on Route 100, I encountered fresh snow and geared down, making the hill which marks the top of the North Branch watershed. Over to the West a few miles flows the Main Branch of the Deerfield, beyond Mount Snow and below Stratton, another major ski area.
In the 1840 “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” Presidential campaign, Daniel Webster stumped for William Henry Harrison there. He addressed a rally of thousands, who’d traveled for days on the Tamarack Trail, at a huge log cabin built for the occasion, in what are now the dense woods of the Green Mountain National Forest.
Dammed, the Deerfield’s main branch forms Vermont’s largest man-made lakes, Somerset and Harriman Reservoirs, used to cool the waters of the nation’s oldest nuclear plant, at Rowe, Massachussetts.
According to contemporary news stories, the Yankee Rowe reactor was a timebomb. A “senior NRC official was quoted as saying the reactor vessel’s condition could lead to an accident involving a large-scale release of radiation….the situation is ‘extremely serious and very dangerous’” the official said, reinforcing an earlier statement by Pryor Randall, an NRC official who, in 1990, said keeping Rowe going was a “gamble”. It is ironic that this area is the official safe refuge for New-York-City area residents in case of nuclear catastrophe in the metropolitan region. {The reactor has since been shut down, the first permanent decommissioning in the nation.}

The entrance to Mount Snow was a traffic nightmare, filled with cars bearing suburban license plates, erratic drivers and cranky kids. Throttling down, I drove at a crawl and eventually reached Bill’s house.

* * * *

His sister Niffy was there, as was Margot, friends Al and Sandy, Carl, Sherrie and Art. There was turkey and ham, organic beef, ziti, salad, bread, wine and pie.

Sandy, visiting from Philadelphia, was exercised. Shopping at a quick-stop, she’d observed a fight between two women struggling over the last copy of the Sunday New York Times.

“These tourons.” she cried “What gets into them? They come to the country to relax, and what do they do? They elbow you off the sidewalks, and drive like maniacs.”

“You’d think they’d get a clue.” Margot said, too polite to use her favored nickname, flatlanders, in mixed company. “They come in to restaurants in big, loud parties and leave tiny tips for the waitress.”

We all laughed at the story of the fight for the newspaper, and expressed empathy for waitresses. Niffy, a practical nurse who’d left the Valley for Burlington, the state’s largest and most commercially diverse city, sang the common refrain of the upcountry blues.

“They may bring some business with them, but they’re able to pay so much for houses that they’ve driven the cost of living too high for most of us to be able to afford to live back home anymore.”

Al joined in. “Freakin’ slobs — they come up here and burn gas and wood, throw trash out the windows, “dis” us every which way from Sunday — didn’t anyone teach ’em not to shit where they stomp?”

“Didn’t you used to run bus tours from New York City?” someone asked me, in an accusatory tone.

“Yes.”

“Tell us all about it.”

“Back when I used to work in Manhattan, I and my friends at work liked to play together too — we had a softball team in summers, but nothing to do in winters. So to keep us together and fight cabin fever, I started to organize trips to ski resorts.

“The first one was classic. We chose Mount Snow. Coincidentally, the Mogul Meisters ski club scheduled a trip on the same weekend as we planned to come, and had half a bus free, so we split the transportation.

“Friday afternoon it was snowing. My people were excited. We all got together to meet the bus on the corner of 52 Street and Third Avenue. We loaded our skis, gear, and an outrageous amount of liquor aboard and left on schedule, at five p.m.

“Our driver takes us up Third through heavy traffic, all the way to Harlem, where she gets hopelessly lost. We arrove at Pelham two hours late. The Mogul Meisters were mad as hell, and things only got worse when we ran out of drinks. Our people wanted to stop to buy more, to which the club refused. One fellow got so abusive to the woman in charge of the Mogul Meisters, I had to deck him.
“We had great fun skiing that weekend — Saturday morning dawned clear and the mountain was covered with powder…from the top we could see peaks in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachussetts. After a warm-up run, I took a few of the better skiers aside and showed them a route few know about — the grand traverse.
“It starts at the summit — the section called High Traverse — and cuts across all the falline trails. We rode across the mountain on our right skis, following the terrain, some drops and some smooth sections, then turned and went back across on our lefts. After a mile or so of straight running, it turns into the Low Traverse, and repeats — back onto the right ski, across Sundance and Standard and Canyon and all the other thin trails, exiting onto the wide-open slope of Snowdance, the only western-style ski slope east of the Mississippi. Over a couple of big rollers on that, and we were back in the woods, all the way across the mountain and finally to the base, through tamaracks and maples, spruce, pine and laurel.
“It’s a wonderful experience, Walt Shoenknecht’s crowning acheivement as a ski-area designer: a true Alpine route, perhaps four miles in length, etched on a little mountain in the wooded East. Nobody else ever attempted to cut such a trail in this part of the country.
“The next day we skied among the birches on the steep North Face in more fresh powder, and were pretty tuckered out when we boarded the bus. The Mogul Meisters were still sullen, and wrote me a nasty letter to say they’d never take a trip with us again.”

As we ate, the conversation turned to other things. Carl, a nuclear engineer, told of the sense of atomic power, and of its demise as a source of electricity. “Atomic energy is about as life-threatening as a hangnail,” he said, “but people have blown it out of proportion, and there’s not a single plant planned for construction in the U.S. anymore.” Consequently he’d moved here, bought forty acres and was at work building several log homes upon it for sale.

Bill told of skiing up and over the mountain to Somerset reservoir (the Somerset road forms part of the Low Traverse). We wondered when the rain would end, and conjectured on whether the lack of snow, with its high albedo reflecting heat into the atmosphere, would encourage global warming. Al told a story about the Civil War, and Margot cracked jokes at the expense of everyone, especially herself. After good coffee and better pie, weary from good times, from jostling with tourists and confronting the weather, we all went home.

* * *

Flying West from Boston after the holidays, on a Northwest Airlines jet at dusk, I flew over a lighted ski area near Boston. The white of the suburban mountain’s ski trails was vivid against umber ground. A few minutes later the thin trails of Mount Snow came into view — and the trail of Route 100 was a serpentine of electric light, starkly defining the valley out of a vast dark woodland. The grandeur of its steep fens, the scale of its terrain, and the quiet following a raucous holiday, were invisible, but its velvet texture and seeming wilderness were enhanced by the distance.