Ed and I usually don’t have to much elaborate on cycling projects that we pitch to each other, our thirty year friendship filling in the unspoken aesthetic foundation, a presumption that there will be some foolishness and unknowability and compelling mishap. These are southern Vermont landscapes that we’re both very familiar with. But he’s been looking at a map and there’s a chance for an unusual connector we haven’t been on.
We relegate forecasts for a grey cracking wet sky to the footnotes, start at the Harriman Reservoir aiming to ride around the Somerset Reservoir and back. A splendid plan, mist between the trees, we don’t know it as we set off that a forgotten forest double track will lead to cemeteries of pretty metal, then cemeteries of New England gravestones. Somehow the somber woods and mud and continuity of life hereabouts have the effect of lifting our spirits.
All day like a hazy dream. We stop to watch the torrent coming out of the outflow to the East Branch of the Deerfield. Stop for a lunch and to stare across.
Onward, dereliction emerges from the trees, we marvel at the juxtaposition of machine and woodland. Appreciate the obscure whys and whens.
The Triumphs are such somewhere cars for what is now this nowhere. What was a top down open road tousled hair engine roar, now a candied burnished quiet.
Warm enough. Effortful remembering to look up and around in spite of the rain. Walk another kind of cemetery, call out dates to each other, wonder after.
Ed explains to me the way the water in the massive wooden pipe—tarred and held together with iron rings, railroad technology—descends at a more gentle grade than the river so that when it reaches its end it can drop to produce more effective hydropower. The metaphor of it, I know it’s near, but I don’t have it.
