Spring has again come to the North Country, but this year we've had what used to be called an "open winter" - meaning that natural events like flood waters on the Connecticut and other Vermont rivers will not occur as they have for generations.
This used to be the time of year when school children were excused to flock to the river banks to watch the “spring drive,” when hard men turned towns like Canaan, Vermont and Woodsville, New Hampshire into something more like Dodge City, Kansas; a time when the pain and hardship and flat out adventure of it were brought home by woodsmen dancing with death on bouncing, twirling logs on swollen, ice cold rivers – from Canada to the sea.
Robert Pike was a storyteller of the first order and his two books, Spiked Boots and Tall Trees and Tough Men are true accounts of the spring log drives down the Connecticut. They speak of a land both divided and defined by a single river.
Indeed, waters often shape political divisions, just as they often carry our stories. H. L. Mencken once famously observed that America’s greatest tale was written by Mark Twain about two boys on a raft, one black and one white drifting down a river.
These stories are often about journeys, work, and the danger that flows with them – which puts me in mind of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove where the journey is from Texas to Montana, the work is a cattle drive, the danger is self-evident, and love emerges from an irrational combination of all three. The story was serialized on television, and in one of the final scenes, a reporter from the East tells the trail boss played by Tommy Lee Jones that he was a “man of vision” for being the first to drive cattle the 1300 miles from the Rio Grande to the Missouri. The old cowboy’s cheeks are wet with tears as he remembers friends lost on the trail. At the end of Spiked Boots, Old Vern, an aging “river man” weeps at the graveside of a long ago sweetheart he left to follow the river.
No weight room macho here - just the masculine honesty that comes from a mixture of purpose and work forged by pain and danger. One man a dust-caked horseman pushing cattle northward across the Great Plains; and the other, a tough old logger in spiked boots, dancing on spinning logs into the waters of history.
