Lambs, Ticks & a Big Blue Church
I was never a big outdoorsy person. But I was a Vermont kid, so outside was just where life happened. Spring and summer nights meant Kick the Can until it was time to go home. Summers also meant shoes off and trekking the Castleton River behind my house in West Rutland. It was more of a stream, and my friend, Patty, her brothers, and I would catch crayfish to see how many we could get, then let them all go. Such innocent fun. Later it was bonfires, camping on Hanley Mountain, and parties in the woods at various spots around Rutland County that I don’t think I’ll name here.
Then, about fourteen years ago, a tick gave me babesiosis. I was sick for several years (yes, years), including most of my son Eli’s senior year. Ever since, any walk through tall grass or the woods comes with a low background hum of is that an itch? Is something crawling on me?
So signing up for a three-hour farm-and-woods photography walk at Merck Forest & Farmland Center was pure impulse. I do go for walks, but I try to steer clear of the woods. This walk went right into them.
I’ve taken photography classes before, so I wasn’t there to learn, necessarily, though I always pick up a pointer or two and take something home with me. I’ll admit I’m not a stickler for all the settings. I mostly wing it. Really, I went to be around other picture-takers, people who see things the way I do and spot a picture in their mind’s eye before the camera is even up.
I grew up in Vermont. Yet I had no idea Merck Forest existed until it showed up in my Instagram feed. It has a whole story, a whole legacy, and people who camp there and come back year after year. Vermont keeps surprising me like that.
Our guide, Eric Jenks, has photographed his way through three countries and twenty-seven states and walked across Scotland. That Sunday morning, he was walking eight of us across a hillside in Rupert.
Maybe the others talked. I honestly couldn’t tell you. I was in my own little world the whole time.
And the critters. Horses, goats, birds, bees, and the lambs. I’d missed Merck’s Meet the Lambs day a couple weeks earlier in the spring, so I met them on my own terms. There’s also a sweet cat who lives in the Merck visitor center, named Ellie.
Afterward I didn’t want to go straight home, so I drove over to West Rupert. I found a little post office, a library, a blue Methodist church, and an old cemetery. On the way back through Rupert I passed cows, and more horses and sheep. It’s a sleepy, quiet place that’s easy to drive right past, and I’m glad I didn’t.
I came home itchy and cold. But it was a good kind of cold, the kind you only get from being outside for hours, when getting home and getting cozy feels like the best thing in the world (and yes—after a quick check, zero ticks!).
251 from the 802: Rupert & West Rupert in the Spring
