New Hampshire Mud Season: How the Spring Thaw Stopped Smugglers and Revenue Men

When the Frost Goes Out

All winter the ground of the Suncook Valley freezes as hard as a banker's heart, four feet down in some years. Then March comes, the sun grows ambitious, and the frost begins to go out. Here lies the devilry of it: the thaw goes from the top down. The upper foot of the road turns to muck while beneath it lies a floor of solid ice. The snowmelt and the spring rain cannot drain through that frozen floor, so they sit in the road and stew. The bottom drops out, and the reader is left with a soup that has a toll gate on it.

The Almanac says the frost goes out in April. The Almanac has never tried to cross Pittsfield with a loaded wagon and a sore head. I have seen the turnpike between here and Barnstead so deep that a team of oxen went in to the dewlaps, and the teamster climbed out over their backs as a man crosses a creek on stepping stones. The mud grabs at every boot and sucks at it like a calf on a teat, and when it lets go it makes a noise I will not describe in mixed company.

Our grandfathers fought it. Over the boggy stretches they laid corduroy roads, logs set crosswise like the ribs of a washboard, which will loosen a man's teeth better than my dentist's forceps. Twenty years ago came the plank road craze. The frost heaved the planks, the mud swallowed them and they rotted out from under. Half the plank roads in New England are now firewood, and the other half are lawsuits. Not even the Concord coach of Abbot, Downing and Company can beat it. Slung on leather thoroughbraces, it rocks like a cradle, and every passenger arrives like a baby: wet, crying and in need of a drink. In mud time the coach lines cut their runs to nothing, and a man may read of a battle and of the treaty in the same week.

There is one mercy. Sap runs best on freezing nights and thawing days, and that is the very weather that ruins the roads. While the turnpike drowns, every farm in the valley has a kettle steaming in the sugar bush. It is sweet in the woods and misery on the road. That is New Hampshire in a sentence.

Nor is it only a Yankee trouble. In January of eighteen and sixty-three General Burnside tried to swing the Army of the Potomac around Fredericksburg, and Virginia turned to porridge. The cannon sank to the hubs and the mules sank to the ears. Our Merrimack County boys came home swearing the mud was Rebel. They call it the Mud March, and I believe it was the only campaign in history that the mud won outright.

The Sled, the Crust and the Freshet

Mud time stops the free trade in spirits dead, and it stops the law just as dead. Since Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 the assessors and assistant assessors have been out counting barrels, and the collectors and deputy collectors have been out collecting. They all ride the same roads we do. For those two weeks the sheriff and I are both prisoners of Merrimack County.

A wise man plans for it. First, he moves his goods before the frost goes out. The last good sledding snow of March carries more jugs in this valley than the whole month of June, with the barrels under the hay and under the sugar tubs, and nobody asks a sugar sled what is under the sugar. Second, he learns the crust. The ground freezes again at night and thaws by ten in the morning, so he hitches up at three and drives the frozen ruts by starlight, cracking along like a man walking on peanut brittle. By sunup the road has gone back to soup behind him, and no deputy alive will follow his tracks into it. Third comes the freshet. When the ice goes out on the Suncook, men have lashed kegs to a log raft and ridden the flood down toward the mills. That is a fine way to deliver a load and a finer way to drown.

The old men at the store tell of a tin peddler, a sour cheat who sold watered vinegar as cider, whose horse stepped off the crown of the road one April and went down slow as a sermon until nothing was left but a pair of ears. In July the road crew dug him out still standing upright, four feet under, his hide tanned dark as a boot. He was pickled better than anything the peddler ever sold. Barnaby says that story is a lie, because no horse in this county ever went to waste.

Barnaby and the Assistant Assessor

My bear Barnaby comes out of his den in March thin as a Shaker's sermon and twice as cross, his coat hanging off him like a widow's mourning dress three sizes too big. A bear freshly woken in mud time will eat anything at all.

One April morning an assistant assessor came wading up the turnpike on foot, ledger under his arm, his horse having quit him a mile back. Twenty feet from my window the mud took his left boot clean off, and he hopped, slipped and sat down hard right inside the circle of Barnaby's chain. Barnaby had not had a proper meal since Thanksgiving. He took the man by the seat of the breeches and came away with breeches, drawers and a strip of hide about the size of a Testament cover. Then he sat in the mud and ate the ledger page by page, like a gentleman reading the Sunday paper. I hauled the fellow inside, dosed the wound with spirits and closed it with eleven stitches of my finest silk from the tooth kit. I charged full rate, and he paid without argument, being in no position to sit down. As far as Washington is concerned, Fort Wilkins does not exist between March and May.

Red Clay of the Brushy Mountains

My guest Junior Vance of North Carolina knows another sort of mud. "Y'all's mud is brown and honest," he told me. "Ours is red clay, and red clay is a liar." It looks like hard road until a wheel touches it, then turns to grease and dries on a man like a brick oven. Near Moravian Falls he once sank to the axles and freed himself by stuffing the burlap from his jars under the wheels. The revenue men spent a week tracing those sacks to half the farmers of Wilkes County and the Baptist orphanage. In Yadkin County a preacher in a nightshirt pulled him out with two mules. The preacher would take no money, only one jar for the sick and shut-in, who turned out to be the preacher himself, shut in the woodshed by his wife. Near Elkin, Junior pulled a federal agent out of a ditch with sixty gallons riding behind him unexamined. The next week that same agent arrested his cousin Dwayne. Junior also learned to leave the clay on his machine for disguise, and one clod as big as a smoked ham flew off his fender and blinded a pursuing deputy, who finished in a cow pasture. Our Merrimack mud is too dignified to be thrown. It eats a man slowly, like a Concord lawyer.

Mud-Time Water and the Still-House

Let the record show that distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and these notes are offered for history and education. Mud season reaches into the still-house all the same. In April the brooks run the colour of weak coffee, and silt in the pot scorches worse than a sermon on Easter Sunday. Let your water stand overnight in a clean barrel and dip the clear water off the top, or better still, draw from a clear spring.

The mash of my father's day was about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of water, cooked to a porridge with constant stirring. Cool it until you can just hold your finger in it, a hundred and fifty or so on the Fahrenheit glass, and stir in two pounds of malted barley so the malt may turn the starch to sugar. Let it rest covered a few hours, cool it to blood warm or a shade below and add your yeast. Keep it in a warm corner, because mud-time nights still freeze, and cover it loosely, since a working mash gives off a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar. In four days to a week the cap falls. Strain the wash through clean cloth.

Fill the still no more than three parts full and seal the joints with rye flour paste. If the paste bubbles or weeps you have a leak, and leaking vapour near a firebox makes a bonfire of a still-house. Keep sand and a wet blanket by the door, and never leave a running still, not even to feed the bear. Run slow on a low fire, because the cuts are the whole religion. The foreshots go on the ground. The heads, sharp as varnish or green apples, are set aside, and the hearts, sweet and clean, are the reason for the work. The oily tails, smelling of wet dog, are kept to run again. Catch the run in a row of small jars and cut where your nose tells you, not where your greed does. A spring mash that struggled in the cold runs sulphurous, and the bright copper takes up that stink and darkens with it. Scrub it bright again with vinegar and salt and rinse it thoroughly. Snowmelt creek water, the coldest of the year, keeps the worm tub cold and the spirit running cool and steady.

Blue Flames, Hickory Ash and Red Oak

Every barroom has a fool with a spoon who sets a match to the spirit and declares a blue flame safe. That is hogwash. Good grain spirit burns blue, and so does the wood spirit that blinds men. The flame proves only that the spirit burns, as does the Widow Batchelder's temper. The only safety lies in cuts made by a man who threw the front of the run on the ground.

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro sent a talking cylinder by post to ask whether old-timers put hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Ash soaked in water makes lye, which is potash, the trade on which every New England ashery grew rich shipping to Boston for soap and glass. In a thump keg it makes only the beginnings of soap. Bad heads are the light ethers and aldehydes, with more wood spirit from the pectin in fruit mashes. They boil lower than good spirit and come off first, and no ash will catch them. A jar and the discipline to empty it are the only cure. Red oak is so open in the pore that coopers never use it for whiskey, because it leaks through the staves. Even good white oak needs months and years to give its colour, and an afternoon of shavings yields only splinter tea. There is a crumb of truth in it, for hardwood charcoal will polish a finished spirit somewhat when it is poured through slowly and cold after the run. It is still no substitute for the cuts.

Mud season ends the same way every year. The frost goes out, the roads dry, the deputies come back and Barnaby gains forty pounds of somebody. Until then, stay off the soft shoulder, drive on the crust, and keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.