How To Survive Stick Season

            Stick season is one good windstorm away.  When it comes, when the leaves are all down and the grass finally dead, the forests closed to anyone not wearing a bright orange hat, the firewood either stacked or it’s too late, the clocks fallen back into that incredible gloam, it is time to hunker down.

            Dinner at 5:30?  Sure.  It’s dark.  Why not.  Crank the woodstove until it’s ninety degrees in the kitchen, roll the chairs up close to the flat screen and pour a tall glass of old whiskey.  This winter maybe we’ll work through all of the Bond films again – starting with George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  Yes, it was made in 1969 but it’s the first book.  Pulling back from Lazenby to launch into Sean Connery in Dr. No (1962) makes me almost long for mid-November.  There are twenty-two Bond films.  If we watch one a week it’ll be sugaring time before we are out of Bond.

            The Big Table.  In addition to eating early, drinking and watching movies, it is time to start throwing lots of food onto the table each night.  We will soon be roasting large pieces of meat bathed in oil and wine along with every winter vegetable Pete’s Greens can think to throw at us.  We will boil potatoes and slather them with butter and cream, throw perfectly good pasta into the oven covered in buckets of cheese and let the concoction bubble away for hours.  Maybe even try our hands again at baking bread (the efforts last year created flour-based bricks as strong as some polyurethane products). 

            With friends out duck hunting I’m hoping to experiment this year.  Seventeen years cooking on the wood fire in the back yard but never tried to roast a duck.  It’ll either be an outstanding late fall adventure, with grown men standing around in the cold, holding beers in numb fingers, watching a succulent mallard calmly roasting over an open fire, or it’ll be full on ‘call the fire department because the fat off that bird is generating some serious flames.’

            Raking.  There will be lots of raking this November.  That is, unless I can stall it just long enough for the first snow to fall.  If that happens soon enough hey!  It’s not my fault the lawn is gone until May!  In addition to raking of course there is pruning, beating back the dead perennials and laying compost onto the garden beds.  All good work to do in the failing light at 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

            In addition to raking there is the late-fall sport of buying gear.  From avalanche shovels to Voile bindings it is definitely gear season.  The mind cannot hold all of the varied and critical items needed for the winter season.  It takes hours of browsing and research, followed by on-line surfing and Back Country Magazine study, followed by deep dives at the OutdoorGear Exchange before coming home with that awesome avalanche beacon the wife always wanted for Christmas (and hey, if you get to use it more than she does that’s okay too!).

            Before too long, once the gardens are put to bed for the winter, after all the ducks have been charred and the raking is either done or hidden under a carpet of snow, it will be time for the most important season of the year.  Holiday Party Season.

            Whatever our religious beliefs, or even if we believe we live in a post-religion era (which is insane to believe given the state of the world and the conflict caused by religious disputes, but that’s a different column), we all believe enough to throw some lights around the front porch and maybe light some candles in the windows, maybe stuff a spruce tree into the house, possibly make rugelach cookies, at least roast a massive turkey along the way and likely think of a dozen other ways to support filling the house with festively dressed and heavily inebriated neighbors, friends and relatives.  I can’t wait.

            The darkness is descending.  At one point in the history of the world, this time of year led even humans to hide in their hovels, sleeping if not hibernating most of the time away and living off stored and rotting vegetables and grains stuffed into cold cellars.  Well, the vegetables are now in the refrigerator and we pick them up at Laughing Moon once a week.  Beyond that I think overeating, buying gear, bonding with Bond, going to festive parties and otherwise sleeping up to twenty hours a day is all underrated.  Stick season?  I am ready.  Bring it on.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio