Here in northern New England, we wait all winter for the next season—Mud Season. By late April, I am sick and tired of snow and cold, and ready for some warmer weather. It’s not a pretty time of year; it’s the season of sand covered roads, dirty snow banks, and gray, rain-filled skies. There are leaves to rake, limbs and branches to pick up and broken trees to knock down and saw into firewood. There’s a winter’s worth of sand to power broom off the lawn and back into the street as blackflies attack every square millimeter of exposed skin and invade every orifice.
hoto by Flickr User lachlanhardy
I start preparing in November for Mud Season, when the sun starts gaining strength, the days lengthen and, consequently, the ground starts to soften. Each fall, I push little white plastic dowels topped with baseball sized red reflectors every eight feet or so along the edge of my asphalt driveway to help my friend, Barnie, who plows my dooryard, remember its bends and boundaries.
By mid-December every year, it becomes clear to me that Barnie views my strategically placed reflectors as targets. He, unfortunately, is more accurate with his Fisher plow blade than with his deer rifle. So, by January, the little woman and I are driving with two tires on asphalt, and two on the lawn we spend six to seven months each year manicuring to resemble the fairways at Pebble Beach. After February, the ground starts to soften; so you can probably imagine the condition of the sod along the edges of my driveway after Barnie plows, following a mid-March snowstorm. I can tell Barnie feels bad about the condition of my lawn each spring because it is reflected in the bill he sends each April: “Plowing – 2 storms: $50, Landscaping – no charge.”
I get itchy each April to get upta camp. After a long winter, I’m anxious to get the place opened up for spring fishing. The road into camp is about a mile of hard packed dirt with a sprinkling of gravel on the surface. Every April, Winnie and I load up the old F150 with the tools we’ll need to repair the damages inflicted by Mother Nature over the winter, along with just enough provisions to get us through a weekend, and head north.
It seems to be the same every year. The first quarter mile, which is plowed by Roscoe Leonard—who lives year-round on the camp road—is a bit muddy but well enough traveled to get us to the stretch of road that winds its way through the woods to our little piece of heaven.
It happened again this April. I drove the pick-up in past Roscoe’s place and jumped out to remove the padlock from the cable I stretch across the camp road, each winter, to keep trespassers from stealing my five dollar Zebco fish pole or the little woman’s velvet Elvis picture.
As always, I walked up and down the road a bit to test it for firmness. After jumping up and down a few times, I proclaimed it as passable. “Look dear, it ain’t budgin’ under my hundred and seventy pounds.”
“What about the other thirty pounds?” Winnie inquires. The little woman is hilarious. “That’s what you said last year. Are you sure? ‘Cause I don’t want to go through that again!”
Anyway, a half hour later Roscoe is there with his John Deere, ready to haul my F150 out of the mud for the fourth April in a row.
“Figured you’d be needin’ me ‘bout now. There’s a lot of frost in the ground this time of year . . . every year,” he grinned. Seems like everybody’s a comedian.
It was painful handing $40 over to Roscoe, but I knew it wouldn’t hurt near as much as the fourth annual “I Told You So” tongue-lashing I was about to endure when I climbed into my truck for the long ride home.