The Road Taken

Gang prepping for lobster dinner

Like all things in life, this party has come to an end. It has been a magical time of suspended animation where we as friends gathered. For almost a fortnight it has been about discovery, about nature, about beauty. It has also been about friendships and sharing and helping one another. My hosts Louise and Gordon could not have been more wonderful in opening their home to me and others and sharing their wonderful camp and their great pooches.

Our hostess Louise

As I said before this camp has a long tradition that is now in its third generation. Many a meal has been cooked to entertain friends and family over seventy years. The accommodations were sumptuous and anything other than what you think of as roughing it. Below is the little "performance cabin"

This sweet little one room cottage is the last remaining unimproved part of the camp has a famous history. It is here that the renowned Bach Aria Group often would assemble to play during weekends or summer holidays at the camp and create quite a classical hoedown. The cabin has two screen walls with awnings for privacy is a real gem of a place facing the forest. I hope one day to stay here.

A misfortune left me alone in the camp for four days taking care of the dogs and having sometime to think about next steps. When I was accompanied and busily having fun with others I did little thinking about what was to come after this holiday. I took advantage of the solitude for some thinking not that I have come up with anything revolutionary. I took a drive and revisited Breadloaf writers camp which had so struck me when Gordon and Louise took me there before. I had a moment to sit and contemplate some of the beautiful vistas.

Not far from Breadloaf I took a road less traveled to see the Noble Lesser farmstead near Ripton Vermont. It is here that Robert Frost called his summer home from 1939-1963. It is a simple and forgotten place.

I don't know how I managed to be the only person to make the journey up the mountain road and had it to myself for my entire visit.

Further along route 100 nearing Waitsfield I came to another solemn place. A memorial of little white flags: 1205 for Afghanistan and 4413 for Iraq representing all those dear young men and women who have given their all.

The following bend had a sweeping field of Joe-Pye Weed (Eupatorium purpureum) not a quite a memorial but almost a grand celebration of nature.

The sights of Vermont are truly stalwart. They are upright and towering and say take a look at me for what I am. I know I romanticize life a bit, but why the hell not!

Whether farm,

mountain or

glacial valley, I shall always remember this wonderful summer.

This road was near our cabin. It was a road that led to another camp where few summered and even fewer entered. I often looked wanting to enter, but never going further than to our fork. The vista and the tracks seem pure and should remain inviolate. I leave you with Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.