FROST, CONT.

It was in an old farmhouse and cabin near here that Robert Frost spent 24 summers conjuring the landscape and reading his works to students at the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College.
When not engaged in the writing life, he traveled these mountain roads, revisiting the New England scenes he made famous in "The Road Not Taken" and other poems.

The unchanged scenery of Route 125 provides, in full-blown autumn, one of the most rewarding fall foliage trips in New England. Go back 50 years to when the poet hung out on warm days at the soda fountain in Rochester. You can still buy an ice cream soda at the Rochester Cafe, same as he did when the old marble fountain was just in an adjacent room next door at Lyon’s Drugstore.

Or go to the Bread Loaf, where a dozen clapboard houses with wrap-around porches are widely spread over lawns flecked with falling leaves. The buildings are still painted an alarmingly bright yellow. Aspiring writers still attend those summer classes.

They hear Frost now only in his words. But nothing else has changed accept the improvement to Route 125 from dirt to asphalt. Start your foliage tour at the Rochester Cafe on State Route 100, in itself a scenic country road. The cafe seats about 20 inside and another dozen on the front porch.

Less than two miles north of Rochester is the Ranger Station of the U.S. Forest Service. Stop here to pick up maps and brochures of hiking trails and picnic areas along your route.

At Hancock, another two miles north, Route 125 butts in and begins its westward climb. The Old Hancock Hotel, which has exquisitely prepared lunches and dinners available, a good place to pick up a picnic lunch, landmarks the corner.

The cluster of houses you pass in Hancock will be the last for many miles. Up the mountain, the trees tower overhead, painted hardwoods mixed with pines. Running east to west for 20 miles like a girdle over the Green Mountain National Forest, the morning sunlight intensifies the brightness of the red and yellow maples, the blinding scarlet sumac and copper-colored oaks.

When visitors travel these winding Vermont byways, it takes a while to realize that the state’s special beauty comes magically alive because of the absence of billboards. The state Legislature phased out the big, polluting highway signs in the early 1970s. Tourism shot up immediately. In Vermont, nothing separates the eye from what the hawk sees.

Three miles from the hotel, be prepared to turn right, travel a half-mile to visit Texas Falls, a mini-gorge of antedeluvium delight.

No deeper than 20 feet and no wider in spots than four or five feet, the icy cold clear water of Texas Brook plunges from pool to pool. A state park with hiking trails and primitive camping, this is the first of many picnic sites you will encounter.

Returning to 125, turn right (west) and continue 2.5 miles to Middlebury Gap, the road’s high point at 2,144 feet where the Long Trail crosses. The trail is the historic forerunner of the famed Appalachian Trail and is a favorite of hikers seeking to walk to Canada 80 miles farther. The trail looks up at Burnt Hill to the north at 3,040 feet and Worth Mountain 3,234 feet to the south. The hikers among you won’t want to miss a short (less than a mile) climb south to Lake Pleiad and then to the Robert Frost lookout, where views to the northeast are spectacular. The trail traverses the Middlebury Snow Bowl Ski Area, whose base lodge is picked up next to a pine grove once you’re back in the car again.

From the gap, it is only 2.5 miles to the Bread Loaf campus. Immediately to its west on the right side of the road, is the Robert Frost Wayside, a shady pine grove with picnic tables, grilles for cooking, porta-potties, historical markers and a chronology of Robert Frost events listed on a bulletin board. Immediately east of the wayside is the 1/4 mile lane to the Homer Noble Farm and Frost’s cabin. The road is unmarked at its entrance.

Though the cabin, which is designated a National Historic Landmark, is less than 200 yards past the farmhouse, it is so secluded that it is sometimes difficult to see. When approached, it reveals itself among the stout maples and oaks in such repose as to suggest that the cabin and trees were all planted at the same time, a leafy haven where the poet sat, and wrote, sometimes outside and often by the fire, with a writing board propped upon his knees.

Cross-country ski and hiking trails criss-cross the farm and cabin area, and just across Route 125 from the Wayside and down the road apiece on the left is the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, an easy hike of less than a mile, but one that asks a lot of reflection, with markers bearing the poet’s verse posted along the route, which is half in meadow and half in the woods. On a summer day, my wife and I took our fill of blueberries there.

Continuing a little more than two miles down the road you enter Ripton, scarcely a dozen 19th Century homes, a church, town office and community hall, and, of course, the store and post office.
It’s easy to say that the Ripton store is a throwback to an earlier time. But even though the present-day Vermont seems recklessly on the cutting edge of political change, with its newly passed civil unions law and the maverick transposition of Sen. Jim Jeffords, Vermont is still happily, ever-so quaintly, mired in its charming past.

Old general stores, besides combining as the village post office, still sell oil lamps, quilts, candles, pickles and preserves, canned goods, udder balm, needles and thread, sleds and toboggans, flannel shirts and heavy snow boots. And videos.

After all, this is a state which counts big-time industries as the making of wooden bowls, granite tombstones, canoes and kayaks, snow shoes, snow boards, cast iron wood stoves, post-and-beam barns and houses, marble statues, teddy bears, wooden furniture, clothes pins, maple syrup, milk, cheese and Ben & Jerry’s famous ice cream.

You could factor in that Vermont sells higher education too, with Middlebury College at the western end of Route 125 being one of those beautiful laid-back campuses conducive to learning. Like many college towns, Middlebury has an abundance of cozy shops, fine restaurants, a handsome village green and well-stocked book stores. If you can’t find a Robert Frost Collection here, call the local newspaper to report the scandal.

A true Vermont foliage trip is not complete until you travel some dirt roads with rolling hills and dairy farms, through woods where the big trees form a tunnel. The Ripton-Lincoln road, beginning at the Ripton store and going north, suits this purpose.

Whose woods these are I have no clue, getting lost is what I do. That’s what happened on our most recent dirt-road trip to the area. So we plunged deeper into the Bread Loaf wilderness, past far too many roads not taken. They scattered along the forest floor, going this way and that, perhaps to a bog and the elusive moose we seek. An hour of wanderlust brought us full circle, within a half-mile of the Frost Wayside rest. Relieved to be on my familiar road again, I sighed as I passed the lane leading back to Frost’s cabin, from where I heard a faint voice:

“You should have asked me in the first place!”