My introduction to rural northern Vermont did not start well. It had snowed hard. My son and I had shoveled out the driveway of his newly purchased home in the hill country. Driving my truck out onto the main road, I drove up the hill and backed into my son’s neighbor’s driveway in an attempt to turn around.

The neighbor, whose reputation preceded him and whose name I already knew, was waving frantically at me from his woodshed. I stopped the truck and rolled down the window and turned off the heater fan so that I could decipher this man’s shouts.

“Get off my land,” the man with the white beard ordered. “You have no right to turn around in my driveway.” His big German Shepherd growled as if to punctuate his master’s ire.

Not wanting to make matters worse for my son’s neighborhood relations, I assumed an apologetic air.”I’m sorry, sir, I meant no …”

He didn’t let up. I began to get hot under the collar.

“What’s your name,” I asked in a low voice with a glare and a scowl.

“Ricker. Larry Ricker,” he replied with a little less gusto.

“Oh, I know you. You’re the plowman around these parts. Any chance of you plowing my son’s driveway?” I asked.

The conversation became less heated. Before the day was out, we talked hunting, horses and why so many of Mr. Ricker’s neighbors have big white letters painted on their cow barns that read “Take Back Vermont.” He plowed my son’s driveway at no charge. In kind of a tacit apology, he, a native Vermonter, explained how carpetbaggers from other states were moving in and trying to change them and their state in ways they didn’t appreciate.

My introduction to this flinty Vermonter left me a little wary of introductory meetings with other white-bearded men in flannel shirts working manure spreaders behind dairy farms. Wanting to hunt Vermont turkeys near their back forties, however, I knew that I would simply have to work at winning them over.

During four days of turkey hunting I got to know some of these hard-working rural Vermont folks and their land. I liked what I saw. No, it was more than that. I discovered for myself a new-old frontier and was smitten by it.

The first morning of our hunt, Diane and I awoke at 4 a.m. to 3 inches of fresh snow. Not an ideal day to hunt longbeards, but we did see some hens and tried unsuccessfully to lure a Jake across a field in a spitting snow.

During the week we saw a dozen or so lone hens feeding in green fields along edges of hardwoods but the males – wherever they were – were not in a talking mood. The last morning, while walking a power line, I held an abbreviated conversation with a distant Tom, but he was not interested in coming closer to check out the source of the “sexy” purrs.

In Vermont, all you need is the price of a license to hunt turkeys. Unlike Maine, there is no permit drawing and you can kill two birds. Everybody hunts, and on Sunday, too. Although I met a local hunter who did bag two Jakes in one morning, most hunters I talked with were finding uncooperative gobblers who just weren’t in a talking mood. And as one hunter told me, “If they won’t talk, you can’t find them.”

I came back to Maine without a Vermont turkey. But I brought back a bigger prize, a discovery that the Green Mountain State is a spectacularly scenic and topographically unpredictable state that gets under your skin. My previous exposures to Vermont were superficial. A wedding in Rutland. A day of fishing on a famous trout stream. A visit to a Maple Syrup farm.

There are two Vermonts, I suspect, just as there are two Maines. A woman I know said that she was attracted to Vermont because it was a “politically progressive state run by intellectual liberals.” That’s the part of the Green Mountain State that never held much attraction for me, and apparently neither for those white-bearded cattlemen in their flannel shirts who paint signs on their barns.

The Vermont I got to know was the one I beheld at daybreak. Hunkered down in a turkey blind, I sat reverently as the morning sun cascaded across the endless rolling green hayfields and hardwooded hilltops. The lime-green buds of new growth contrasted sharply with darker green hemlock boughs that held up remnants of snow from the night before. Small birds sang. Roosters crowed. Among the distant hills, lights twinkled back at me from hillside homes as residents started their day.

At mid-day driving the incredible network of winding, unpaved back roads looking for hunt options, I saw modest homes nestled in the hilly back country. There were some places that bespoke outright poverty and a hardscrabble existence. But always the scenery and breathtaking vistas.

Above all else, these northern Vermonters, whatever their politics and wariness of strangers, are people of the land, even today. It seems to me that this is more true for northern Vermont residents than other rural New Englanders. Gardens are being turned over virtually everywhere you look. Chickens run loose. There are hog pens in the most unlikely settings. Even the smallest homes are raising a beef critter or two out back. Working dairy farms dominant the landscape almost as much as the spiraling hills and deep valleys.

If the signs “Take Back Vermont” mean what I think they mean, it is easy to appreciate the rural Vermonter’s sense of the land and suspicion of outsiders. Cynics or Vermont’s transplanted “urban” progressives may toss their proverbial noses in the air, sniff and say that more needs to be done to help these folks and enrich their lives.

What a fool thing that would be.

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WCME-FM 96.7) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is paul@sportingjournal.com.

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