A green but dry Vermont

“Rock Bottom” cabin

Low water

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

I spent much of the week before last mostly alone in a cabin (called “Rock Bottom”) by a trout stream in Vermont. It was sometimes a bit lonely but I did a lot of reading for pleasure, with delightfully little of  it any use in work.

The owners of the cabin lived in a house in the woods up the rocky hill from the cabin. They are Mormons and so, as usually the case (at least in my experience) were very nice – available to chat  but otherwise busying themselves with grass cutting and other chores on their spread, mostly out of my sight lines. I’d sometimes spot them in the distance  reading on a bench by the little river, a scene that reminded me of an Impressionist painting.

The founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), Joseph Smith, was born and spent some of his boyhood in nearby Sharon, Vt., where his parents were farmers. Many of the first Mormons hailed from rural New England before heading west.

Sadly, there were no trout in the stream, at least so far as I could see. While Vermont (as befits the French origin of its name – Green Mountain) looked verdant, the rivers and lakes were  very low, as they are in most of northern New England now, and locals fear a bad forest-fire season. Climate change or natural variability (i.e., “weather’’)?