Aug 08 2015
Woodsy Interlude
I drove all around southern Vermont earlier this week, visiting libraries, thrift shops and church sales in my search for secondhand books. My fledgling book business is coming along nicely but it’s a lot of work, and it sometimes puts me in some funky situations. Wednesday evening, after a long day of book hunting, I headed for the nearby Green Mountain National Forest to spend the night before resuming my search the next day. Talk about out of context!
Car camping isn’t my favorite way to be in the wild, but it beats a motel room. Much cheaper, too. For a few bucks I could have stayed in a campground, but that’s not my style. I prefer running up some dirt road until I find a track slipping into the trees to some primitive campsite in the middle of nowhere. Places like that are few and far between these days, even in national forests, but they can be found if one looks hard enough.
After finding a place a mile up a forestry road, I threw up my tent and tossed a sleeping bag inside of it. Home for the night, just like that. Then I stood there in street clothes, looking around in fading light. A light breeze rustled the maple leaves overhead, otherwise all was quiet. I breathed deeply, relaxing in a way that’s hard to do in the developed lowlands.
Dueling owls hooted as I slept that night otherwise the forest was quiet enough for me to hear the leaves and twigs occasionally shed by trees hit the ground. Book sales seem noisy by comparison.
In the morning I quickly broke camp and followed Kelly Stand Road back to the lowlands. Along the way, I stopped to groove on a mist-covered beaver pond clearly visible from the road. A couple hours later, I was back in the business of sorting through books. I gravitated to the science/nature table, of course. That made the transition from wildness to commerce a bit easier.
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