“Vern has gone up to the attic to hunt for a fish pole and  I trailed along after him. The attic was just like that of any other North Country farmhouse – cobwebby corn, and old clothes; corners piled full of haircloth trunks, boxes, and dead furniture. I saw a homemade cradle, an ancient spinning wheel, a flax-carder, piles of books and magazines and then, suspended from a nail, two pairs of rivermen’s boots….Vern took them in one huge hand and held them almost tenderly. ‘These boots, young feller,’ he said to me, ‘may be said to mark the passing of an era.’’’

From Spiked Boots: From New England’s North Country, True Stories of Yesteryear, When Men Were Rugged and Rivers Wild, by Robert Pike (1905-1997), a scholar and writer who grew up in Waterford, Vt., on the Connecticut River.