Thank you.
I have miles and miles ahead of me
Tales to listen to, time to spin
Up ahead the road is bendy
Wonder what's around the bend
I don't think I could ever grow tired of watching America go by outside that window.
It's never the same.
It's always different, depending not only on where you are, but also on what time of year you're there.
One of the joys of the road is feeling the seasons change.
This is a song of the seasons.
I want to see what's on the other side
Of the mountaintop rainbows in
I can see the road is bendy
Wonder what's around the bend
It happens every year, as surely as the sun climbs in the April sky.
The snow will melt, the streams will start to flow, the sap will rise in the sugar maple trees.
And there begins the old ritual of the New England spring.
It's maple sugaring time again.
George and June Butler work together on their farm here in Jacksonville, Vermont,
collecting the sap that has dipped into the bucket since sunup.
Nobody planted the maples here. They grew wild.
This annual harvest is all the sweeter for being a gift from the trees.
When you think that it takes at least 40 years for a tree to get 10 inches,
which is the minimum diameter at the butt to tap,
a tree like this has to be at least 200, maybe 250, or even 300 years old.
I suppose it's sweetened a lot of people's pancakes down the years.
Well, I guess so. I don't know whether it sweetened any of the Indians or not.
But some of the trees that have been cut down actually show up on the trees.
But some of the trees that have been cut down actually show the Tommy Hawk cuts
where Indians tapped them before the white man came.
You know, hard as this work is, you give me the impression of a man who's enjoying it.
I certainly do. I wouldn't do it for money. It's the fun of it.
The real joy of being in the woods.
Because after being cooped up all winter to be able to come down
and take part in this great festival of nature, spring,
it's a great experience.
You get in the sugar house and the steam comes,
and you boil the sap crackle, bubbles in the wood crackles.
It's a great thing.
I mix in the slabs along with the hardwood
because the hardwood gives it a little staying power,
and the resin and the slabwood, the softwood, gives it the very hot heat.
Smells good.
That's the one thing you can't get on your equipment.
You can get color and you can get sound, but you can't get smell.
And the aroma is one thing.
Maybe it's the osmosis of the sap getting in your system,
but there is just something about it that makes old timers who want a sugar.
The lightest color is fancy. This is A and this is B.
And our syrup is fancy syrup.
This is unusual to be so late in the season to be fancy.
It's the best.
It has the most delicate bouquet. Light color, light flavor.
And I think that you'll agree that it's pretty good syrup.
It's really wonderful.
Good.
But it's fun. It's essentially fun, and it's healthy.
There's a romance about it.
It's part of the romance of America, and it's part of Vanishing America.
And each year there are fewer and fewer taps set.
I like to do it because I enjoy it and I enjoy the hard work.
It's healthy. Work is good for you.
It is spring in Vermont, and here's how you can tell the birds are back.
Every animal, wild and domestic, is released from the grip of winter.
And the ping of the sap of sugar maple trees is heard in tin buckets on every hillside.
By the time the snow begins to melt in Vermont, the azaleas begin to bloom away to the south.
And summer's bumblebees are already thick on the wisteria vines.
Many a year we have traveled north with the spring taking notes.
Here are the certain signs that winter is in retreat.
The gaudy windup of a kid from Canton, Mississippi.
And the happy spring sight of a high school boy running out from under his cap.
Just up the road a passel of piglets who were not even here two weeks ago are already growing fast.
A calf, even younger, walks away from a sight she's never seen before.
Strangers stopping at the fence.
A newborn colt, unsteady on his pins, canters across a barnyard for his supper.
Spring is the season of the young, and every spring we feel younger.
More than once we've paid a visit to the family of Granville Hall in Gloucester County, Virginia.
Gloucester County sends daffodils north as far as New York in this season,
arching daffodils like mortar shells over the front lines of winter.
When Granville Hall speaks of daffodils, you can hear in his accent the poetry and hope of the season.
It may sound kind of silly, but I can come out here on a nice day and march when this field is just beginning to bloom.
And for a few moments I can feel just about as wealthy as anybody in the state of Virginia.
These fields make you feel young as well as wealthy.
One spring in Gloucester County, the youngest gardener at work among the daffodils was Granville and Betty Hall's granddaughter, Amy.
The daffodils she gathered so carefully are the legacy of bulb planters long retired.
Most of these flowers have been here about 35 years, have never been dug.
We only fertilize them once a year if they're lucky, and God does the rest.
There isn't much profit in this, not in money, I mean.
What there is in it is a chance to walk in the spring sun with young Amy and wrap rubber bands around beauty.
If in March or April you see daffodils in the flower stalls of northern cities and wonder where they came from, here is the answer.
They came from the arms of Amy.
And after the daffodils, in a blaze of white petals, come the dogwoods.
The white dogwood is the natural tree, the pink dogwood, a lovely mutant.
Most pink dogwoods come from a single pink branch, which happened to grow on a Pennsylvania hillside a hundred years ago.
White and pink dogwoods turn a lot of little towns, which are entirely ordinary the rest of the year, into exquisite places in May.
One spring we found the grass littered with dogwood petals after a gentle rain at Appomattox Courthouse.
Many springs ago, General Lee surrendered the remnants of his army here just before the dogwood bloomed.
Flowering dogwoods still guard the graves nearby.
This is the most American of trees, native to 40 of our states and native nowhere else on earth.
And the dogwoods' roots go deep into our past. Washington planted dogwoods at Mount Vernon.
Jefferson planted them at Monticello.
And here at Valley Forge, 50,000 dogwoods flower every spring, all of them dedicated to those ragged heroes who spent a winter here,
waiting for dogwood time so they could go out and try to save us a country.
This is a tree which combines virtues much admired in human beings.
It is compact and handsome, minds its own business, and is very hardy and hard to kill.
Plant a dogwood to commemorate the birth of a child, and the tree will outlive the person almost every time.
It is a modest tree, but it dresses itself up once a year as bridesmaids to the spring.
One spring day in 1972 on Route 10 in Surry County, Virginia, we rolled into what we thought was one of those little roadside rest stops.
But there were flowers on the picnic tables. That was the first surprise.
And beyond the tables we found a paradise, a beautiful garden of 13 acres, bright with azaleas, thousands of them,
and bordered by dogwoods in bloom and laced by a mile of paths in the shade of tall pines.
In all our travels, it was the loveliest garden I've ever seen.
It made me wonder how large a battalion of state-employed gardeners it took to keep the place up.
The answer was it took one old man, and he was nobody's employee.
Walter Meisenheimer, a retired nurseryman, created all this in the woods next to his house,
created it alone after he retired at the age of 70.
He was 83 when I met him and spending every day tending his garden for the pleasure of strangers who happened to stop.
I like people, and this is my way of following out some of the teaching of my parents when I was a youngster.
One of the things they said, if you don't try to make the world just a little bit nicer when you leave here,
what is the reason for a man's existence in the first place?
What's going to happen to this place after you're gone?
Well, I imagine that within a very few years, the undergrowth or nature will take it over again.
You mean it's not going to survive?
Well, I doubt it.
Well, that's a terribly discouraging thing, isn't it?
Well, that's the way I see it now.
We watched for a while as people enjoyed the beauty of Walter Meisenheimer's garden, and we left.
And a few years later, somebody sent me a clipping from the Surry County paper.
It said Walter Meisenheimer had died.
I wondered what would happen to his garden.
I wondered whether the Virginia sun still lights the branches of the dogwood which he planted there.
Well, it does. Some stories have happy endings.
Walter Meisenheimer's garden does survive, and so does his spirit in Heijonam-kun.
It seems that she stopped by the garden just a few months after we did.
We slowed down and saw a sign of picnic tables and a lot of flowers blooming.
And sort of curious what this place was all about.
And finally we saw the old man sort of a-wobbling around and coming across the lawn, saying,
hello, hello, just waving to us as the staff.
I guess he was afraid that we were going to leave.
To please the old man and herself, Heijonam-kun stayed the afternoon with him, walking in his garden.
When the sun went down that day, the young woman said goodbye to the old man and headed home to Boston.
But the roadside Eden called her back. That is, Walter Meisenheimer did.
He phoned her long distance and asked her to come for a little while and help in the garden.
He was sort of pleading with me, please come and just help me just for a couple of weeks.
A couple of weeks only. And then a few more. And then it was Christmas.
Heijonam-kun was 26. She had no family. Neither did Walter Meisenheimer and his wife.
From wild flowers to the man-grown strawberries, he taught me.
And I was interested in learning the whole things.
So I was out here almost every day with him.
They became his father and daughter working in the garden.
And in time, Heijonam-kun was married in the garden.
He was very proud to give me away.
I guess he never thought, you know, since he didn't have any child of his own.
He never thought he would give somebody away.
Brown earth coaxed by a gentle old man into green growth and flowering red and pink and white.
The earth rewards every loving attention it is paid.
People repay such love, too, in memory.
So knowing him, how much this garden meant to him, I want to keep it up and carry on.
The gentlest change of seasons in America is the one from spring to summer.
The breezes become a little lighter, the green of the trees a little deeper, the sun a little warmer.
And next thing you know, you find yourself floating on an inner tube.
This may not look like much to you, but to people around here, it looks like money in the bank.
This is the biggest industry of Somerset, Wisconsin.
What is? This is. Tubin on the Apple River.
People have gone inner tubing on the Apple for more than 50 years, or as long as there have been inner tubes.
But in the last 10 years, like everything else in America, tubing has gone big time.
And now, Somerset, which has only 729 people, has 15,000 inner tubes.
And some summer weekends, they're all rented out.
What you do is you go out to a place called River's Edge, four miles up the Apple, get yourself a tube and head for town.
You head for town by sitting down and letting the Apple River do the rest.
Youths make a vort along the way.
Aging correspondents mostly cool it, enjoying the cow and corn country scenery and the company of veteran tuber Bob Raleigh.
Hey, I think I hear white water behind us. Is this dangerous anywhere along the line?
Well, it can be if you have an extraordinary large bottom.
Well, you don't have a big enough inner tube.
Floating down this river, it's possible to feel sorry for presidents and kings who've always had to content themselves with yachting on the Potomac or hunting on the Thames.
Poor fellows, they never had a chance to go tubing on the Apple.
Fourth of July at Salina, Kansas.
Have a piece of watermelon.
Since everybody else at CBS is busy covering the country's wars and scandals and Senate hearings, they leave the greased pig contests pretty much up to us.
This may come as a surprise to you, but there are more greased pig contests than there are Senate hearings, so the job keeps us busy 52 weeks a year.
Thomas Hobbes observed 300 years ago that leisure is the mother of philosophy, but he couldn't have foreseen the philosophical purposes to which Americans would put their leisure.
There's not a summer weekend when some pretty girl is not dunked in a cattle tank full of water for the benefit of the PTA.
Here they come now, the Sauk County Extension Homemakers Chorus. Seven women in gowns they made themselves. Well, where can you buy gowns like that? Marching down the main street, the only street, of Whitwin, Wisconsin, Fourth of July in a small town.
You have no idea how much preparation goes into the Fourth of July in a small town.
For hours this week, the Sauk County Extension Homemakers Chorus practiced in Norma Clavadacher's side yard, worrying about staying in step, worrying about whether their stripes were straight.
This may seem corny to you, but in dairy farm country where everybody grows up beside a corn field, nobody is much embarrassed by corn.
Don't look for Whitwin on the map, by the way. It's not on the map. Only 51 people live here when everybody is home. On the Fourth of July, everybody is sure to be home.
The Fourth has been the biggest day of the summer for a hundred summers, a day full of memories, like the memory of the cannon that Newt Whitwin used to shoot off at dawn every Fourth of July.
There's a hill right up here where the school used to be, and her husband used to put the cannon up there and he'd shoot it off. That was always the first thing that happened on the Fourth of July.
Woke everybody up. Woke everybody up, including the cows.
One year, they say, when Newt's cannon went off, Della Sprecher was milking her cow. The cow jumped up and fell on Della, and she had to miss the parade while the doctor taped up her broken ribs.
There are so many memories in a really small town where no social detail is ever forgotten.
The 4-H kids will always remember being in the pageant down at the campgrounds.
And just raising the grand old flag in midsummer every year brings back memories of the Model T races and calf chases and tugs of war and ice cream socials of all the Fourths of July gone by.
And the crowds, the crowds which come from Blackhawk and Denzer and clear from Sauk City.
This one day, when the flags all fly, Whitwin is on the map.
Let Whitwin, Wisconsin, population 51, stand for every place where the bands played today.
Where the men of the town turned the barbecued chicken to feed a multitude.
Where pretty girls rode on floats, each one hoping she'd be the one named Miss Sauk Prairie.
The Sauk County Homemakers Extension Chorus stayed right on key and kept their stripes straight.
Glory, glory, hallelujah. And happy birthday to us all.
Huck Finn did this on a raft. For us it was easier.
One minute we were in Illinois, the next we were high above the river, not just any river.
And crossing the state line, not just any state line.
And seeing before us a small town, not just any town.
The place a great man from here called a half-forgotten paradise.
After all these years, he wrote, I can picture that old time to myself now just as it was then.
The great Mississippi rolling its mile-wide tide along.
The white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning.
The streets empty, or pretty nearly so.
One or two clerks sitting in front of the stores on Water Street.
Presently a drayman lifts up the cry, steamboat a-coming.
And the scene changes. All in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving.
Of course the man who remembered all this was Mark Twain.
Of course the town is Hannibal, Missouri, which now delights during the steamy Tom Sawyer days of summer
to honor its most famous son by whitewashing for the thousandth time that immortal fence.
And first to the boys, it looks like number ten, Ronnie Rickman of Madison, Wisconsin.
And he is really a speedster. Second in command right now.
Our delight was to watch Stan Earhart, who is eight years old, about the age of Tom Sawyer's brother, Sid,
pulling for his brother Steve, who is about the age of Tom Sawyer.
It's a competition now, and neatness counts, but not much.
Steve Earhart of Hannibal, Missouri.
Right now the judges are judging the neatness of the work performed.
In truth, boyhood in Hannibal has not so much changed.
Steve and Stan Earhart still attempt that most impossible of youthful achievements,
to catch a tadpole in a creek without a bucket.
Young Steve Earhart carries papers in the afternoon as young Sam Clemens did.
And the paper he carries is the very one on which Mark Twain started out in life as a printer's devil.
The summer air still is charged with dreams.
And if Steve Earhart dreams not of becoming a pirate, but rather of becoming a cardinal,
that is only a measure of a recent substitution of heroes.
Lou Brock in for Blackbeard.
Hannibal childhood has always been full of adventure.
Get set, go!
And first to the boards is Steve Earhart.
Childhood in Hannibal has changed only by the ambitions of the times.
Steve Earhart races to paint the fence Tom Sawyer schemed to avoid painting.
But for kids then and now the Missouri summer is warm, pastime's innocent, and victory sweet.
And your winner from Hannibal, Steve Earhart.
Mark Twain's house still stands in Hannibal, its old windows shining in the sun.
The house will never fall down unless it is by weight of all the plaques affixed to it.
And Tom and Huck will always walk together at the head of Main Street.
Their Missouri town is neither northern nor southern, not an eastern town surely, not western either.
Hannibal is suspended in space and time.
A place to be young in and never grow old.
A place to splash through endless creeks in and never fall down.
A place to run away from and to come back home to.
If the snow geese are flying south, this must be fall.
We take the American autumn where we find it.
We are on the move and so it seems is every other living creature.
This is autumn in California, the western flyway for geese.
And for hummingbirds.
And for the delicate monarch butterflies which flock back to Pacific Grove, California in this season.
They fly hundreds of miles back to where they've never been.
Their parents came last fall.
How these fragile offspring know the way to the same place is one of the enduring mysteries of nature.
Autumn is the season of migration, of bright foliage and rich harvest.
Pumpkin season.
Pumpkins are mostly for kids.
We forget about the delights of jack-o-lanterns and Halloween as we grow older.
This is about a couple of old timers who never forgot.
Nick and Tony Venetucci have grown rich farming outside Colorado Springs, but they weren't always rich.
I come up the hard rugged way and I'm glad I did.
I'm glad I have.
It's made a man out of me.
And not just a man, but a good and generous man.
And anything you can say of Tony Venetucci goes also for his brother Nick.
But who are all these kids running through the Venetucci pumpkin patch?
They are the school children.
Nick and Tony Venetucci invite out to the farm every fall to pick the pumpkin of their hearts desire.
Whoa!
What a big pumpkin!
We watched LaDonna Bearden, six years old, dance across the furrows toward the one out of so many thousands
that she had identified from afar as the perfect pumpkin.
We watched Andy Salazar, six years old, pumpkin-less, among those who had already found their pumpkins,
bump along, studying the ground, until he too found bright orange fulfillment.
We saw pumpkins rejected, not once, but twice.
And pumpkins chosen, sometimes very big pumpkins chosen by very little kids.
The fields have many lessons to teach to city kids fresh off the school bus,
and one is that pride sometimes goeth before a fall.
Another is, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
We watched a certain amount of pumpkin envy.
It seemed that with the discovery of a nice pumpkin comes the gnawing fear that your classmate has found a nicer pumpkin.
We watched all this and then asked Tony Venetucci why he and Nick do it.
We love it. We love to have these junks. And a lot of these junks, what you see out here now,
they'll never forget this all the rest of their lives.
Well, look at the thrill they're getting out here. Look at them, they're going wild!
There are thousands of school children around Colorado Springs.
Last year, Nick Venetucci, who does the growing, grew 30 tons of pumpkins just to give away to them.
Well, there's certainly no shortage of kids out here.
No, and the population's growing, kind of looks like I'm going to have to plant more pumpkins next year, don't it?
And so this goes on from year to year, this harvest of joy in the fields of two old men who never let the joy of childhood escape them.
And every year, the teachers line up the kids in the field for photographs of the big day,
which Tony Venetucci hopes they will always remember.
Click. Some of them will keep this picture until they are old.
Happy Halloween.
I'll tell you, I like molasses, good old country sorghum, and thereby hangs a tune.
I like molasses, good old country sorghum, and I eat them in the summer and the fall.
At Gold Rush Junction in the Smokies, Jim Ball sings a song of sorghum for the tourists.
It is the anthem of the season.
For all through these mountains, they're cutting the sorghum cane for a sweet purpose.
I like molasses, good old country sorghum, eat them in the summer and the fall.
When they get so full of flies, they look like a raisin bar, that's the way I like them best of all.
Down on Webbs Creek in Pittman Center, Tennessee, we found Bud Allen's mule pacing round and round the ancient cane mill,
Joseph Ramsey feeding the grinder, and the sweet juice of autumn rapidly filling a washtub.
I like molasses, good old country sorghum, I eat them every morning and night.
When they get between my toes, I never know that's the way I like them best of all.
And there, standing in the steam of the evaporator, there with half the community, including his own wife, offering advice,
there we met the master sorghum maker of this hollow, Klon Owenby.
They've got sulfur and iron in them.
They're good for you if you can eat them without them bothering your stomach.
Well, now, you just don't eat them plain.
No, I wouldn't recommend that at all.
How do you do it?
Well, the best way to do it is to get you some good, white, puffy butter.
Good cow butter.
White, puffy cow butter.
And mix your molasses with the butter and stir it all up good in your plate, and you've got a real good...
Eat them with hot biscuits.
You see those fine bubbles in there now?
Yeah.
As long as those fine bubbles are in there, there's still water.
There's too much water in there.
They're going to keep.
So you've got to get rid of those bubbles.
You've got to get rid of those bubbles.
And this is the finished product.
That's the finished product.
Well, that's thick.
That's a little thick.
This is the great moment of the Tennessee fall, which makes tolerable the thought of the winter ahead.
I like molasses, good old country solvents.
I eat them in the summer and the fall.
When they twinkle down my chin, I just lick them off again.
That's the way I like them best of all.
And now it's fall again in New England.
So beautiful that memory can't support such beauty from one year to the next.
So every October, this splash of color comes as a shock.
Like a splash of water in your face from a cold New England stream.
Fall is just magnificent.
And in the fall, New Hampshire's best of all.
The tang in the air, the tang of October is like the taste of a good fresh Macintosh apple.
They say what is so rare is a day in June, a day in October is even rarer, I think.
It's just elegant.
The New Hampshire accent of Ralph Morse summed up the season in his part of the country.
But words have never been enough to describe the New England fall.
To drive along a country road in this season is to be dazzled by the shower of lemon and scarlet and gold that washes across your windshield.
You can't remember such beauty from one year to the next.
So every October, it comes as a delicious shock.
On our very first on-the-road trip to New England in the fall,
we came across Billy Mary and Jeannie Barkley and their friend Elaine Merritt, who knew the proper use of fallen leaves.
They're not just to look at, they're to roll in and laugh about and to cushion a leap from an oak limb.
Those laughing children are old enough now to have children of their own laughing in the leaves of water.
On these country roads in October, you can close your eyes and know what month it is by the sound, this sound.
And this one, and this one.
Wood being cut and split and wood piles built.
In New England, wood is not often just piled up, wood piles are built.
The way Rex Jennings of Dorchester, New Hampshire builds his with care, making sure of the fit.
And why so deliberately?
I guess like anybody else, it's nice to have all your heat where you can see it.
Well, yes, but there must be more to it than that or else Lucia Stark of Bernardston, Massachusetts wouldn't also be stacking his wood so precisely, each log finding its perfect place.
Of course, if you live in a house that's been heated by wood fires for a couple of centuries,
by now you know what kind of wood it will take and how much.
Well, the first place this wood is, of course, the gray birch.
We stack them up this way and four feet high.
So every eight feet of the pile makes the cord.
This is five cords of oak and birch and maple.
There's a lot of sweat in the five cords of oak and birch and maple.
And a good deal of pride because in New England, a wood pile isn't just a chore to be finished before the snow flies.
It's a work of art to be proud of when it's done.
And so the sweat and the pride mingle in the sound of the New England autumn.
She's one of those tough jobs.
It's not easy, but the reward is beautiful to look at. Oak piled shaker style in the yard of Rudolph and Patricia Young in Petersham, Massachusetts.
Perfectly round below, perfectly mounded above.
Or maple stacked vertically the old fashioned way outside Townsend, Vermont.
Or locust logs exactly graduated as to size near Millers Falls, Massachusetts.
For a final few days now, the work goes on, the work that Don Edwards of Grafton, Vermont is doing.
That does look like hard work.
I suppose it is, but it's good for the body.
And they tell me it's good for the soul.
Wasn't it Robert Frost or somebody said that?
But all that still has to be split.
Yeah, it'll take a couple of hours, but in December I'll appreciate it.
Don Edwards knows October is nearly over and December is coming.
And so now the sound of the axe and the chainsaw fade away and the countryside falls silent.
Arched under windows and piled round doors, stacked between trees and under eaves, the perfect wood piles are finished.
And then one day the last leaf falls and the first snow falls.
And it's winter.
Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh, over the fields we go, laughing all the way.
Well, it turns out to be true.
You can't go for a sleigh ride without laughing.
And least of all, if you're Carol Matthews, who loves it so.
Carol Matthews first hitched a horse to a sleigh when he was five years old and he's never missed a winter since, which adds up to 60 winters, laughing all the way.
Bells on bobtail ring, making spirits bright.
It's all true. Carol Matthews, with reins in his hand, must be the brightest spirit in New England.
Steady, steady. Right there. This is the way they used to do it in the old days.
Cover ground and enjoy it every further way.
Bells ringing and head up.
Good girl. Easy does it now. Easy does it on your turn. Easy does it.
Now go. Right there. That's the way it was done.
Good girl. Good, good, good. Walk. That's fine. Good girl.
I notice you take the curves kind of slow.
A sleigh tips over very easily. If it's slowing just a little bit and it strikes something solid, a sleigh will flip right over just like an egg shell. Nothing to it.
In fact, the sleigh that you're in has been tipped over. Oh, it has, hasn't it? Right. Go, babe.
Babe is a beautiful Morgan mare named Broadwall Daphne. The sleigh is an 1890 acorn cutter, a gentleman's courting sleigh which Carol Matthews found covered with dust and chicken wire in the hayloft of an old barn.
If you come along with the three of them, Broadwall Daphne and Carol Matthews and the acorn cutter, over the snowy hills of Middlebury, Connecticut, you find that you can't help laughing a little yourself.
Well, this is the way to see the winter woods. You bet it is. Hang on.
Carol Matthews is almost but not quite one of a kind. There are several people left, almost all of them in Connecticut and Massachusetts, to whom dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh is more than a song.
The sleighs have been found and restored or handed down in the family, and on winter weekends in the snow-covered meadows of places like Hampton, Massachusetts, you find yourself looking over your shoulder for Mr. Courier and Mr. Ives to capture the moment.
Carol Matthews is always there, often with his daughter Sally by his side, and because he can't help it, always laughing.
Jingle bells have survived into the snowmobile age because a few people are left who know their secret. Bells on bobtail ringing really do make spirits bright.
The next day, when we dropped in to say goodbye to Carol Matthews, we found him out slaying with his family, laughing all the way.
In Miller's Mills, New York, the horses that are hitched to the sleighs in winter are draft horses with work to do.
For two centuries in the winter, the people of Miller's Mills have been coming down to the town pond with long saws and heavy tongs.
They cut the pond ice in February and store it for use at the Ice Cream Social in July. They used to do this to keep food fresh in summer.
Now, they do it to keep precious memories fresh.
Well, it isn't as thick as it has been other years. Last year it was about 24 to 26 inches thick, but it is good ice.
It's nice. Most of it's, see, most of it's pretty good and clear. Some of it's a little honeycomb, but it's not bad.
And so the ice has been judged for 200 years, and so the draft horses have done their work for 200 years, hauling the ice up to the ice house on the hill where it will wait half a year for the Ice Cream Socials of summer.
And for all those years, very likely, the children of Miller's Mills have climbed aboard the empty sleighs for the trip back down to the pond.
This used to be considered the necessary cold work of winter. It warms people now. It warmed Henry Huxtable just to remember.
Well, sir, I'll tell you, it makes me think about years ago when I was a young fellow like those people over there.
We'd pay two cents a cake for it, and we'd come down and get it, load up our sleighs, and take it up to our ice house on our farm.
The ice house belongs to the community now. Community is what this is all about.
Well, a community is a group of people that have a good outlook on life, enjoy working together, enjoy doing things together, raising your children, and trying to leave it as good a place as you found it when you were young and possibly a little better.
Henry's wife, Doris, knows as much about community as anybody in these parts. She also knows that the secret of the ice harvest is as much in the packing as in the cutting.
You have to learn how to pack the ice. If you can't pack the ice properly, reserve it. Then there's no use cutting the ice.
So our young children are learning how to pack the ice in the old ice house so that we can have our Old Time Fillers contest and our Ice Cream Socials in July.
The Huxtable's son, Henry Jr., and his son, Rick, saw to it that last winter's ice was laid away as carefully as all the long-gone ice always was.
How much sawdust you putting around the edge? Six inches, baby.
You gonna have enough sawdust? Yeah, should have enough for about a foot on top.
With many a family of Miller's Mills, the Huxtables, for instance, this goes way back.
This is my father, who cut the ice in Miller's Mills, and my grandfather, who cut the ice in Miller's Mills, and my great-grandfather, who cut the ice in Miller's Mills.
There were summer socials then, too, the midwinter ice made into something more than ice cream, something grainy and delicious and sweet with the taste not just of vanilla, but of life and time passing.
And this one ritual that a town has decided never to change.
The interstate highway system speeds traffic along in this country, but not always in winter.
For generations, people heading east to west in Wyoming went through Rock River, Medicine Bow, and on to Rawlins.
Now you can save 14 miles by taking Interstate 80 over the mountains. We have a piece of advice for you. Don't try it.
It's I-80, but people around here call it the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
We did try it on a balmy, sunny day, as nice a day as you ever get in the Wyoming winter.
We headed west from Laramie without a care in the world. There was that sign, but we didn't pay much attention to it.
Pretty soon we began to pay attention to it as we encountered a motorist from California whose car had been blown off the road.
Still, there was a passerby to help him back on the pavement, and we figured that was as bad as it would get.
But farther up the interstate, it got worse. Winds began to buffet the bus, visibility dropped, huge trailer trucks roared by, slinging slush back at us, and snowplows fell in behind, fighting a losing battle with the swirling snow.
Then it got a lot worse. The wind rose to what we later learned was 50 miles an hour, visibility dropped to zero at times.
It was hard to remember that just a few miles down the mountain on the old Highway 30, the sun was shining.
We pulled off the interstate to take these pictures and then had an exhausting battle just to make it back to the bus.
Soon afterwards, we had to stop filming because there was a 13-car accident right behind us and we had to rush one of the victims to the hospital in Laramie.
The next day was much the same. At an interstate exit called Arlington, a one-time stagecoach stop on the Overland Trail, we consulted rancher Kim Kruger, who knows these mountains, about this wretched highway which now passes through them.
Well, this seems like pretty bad weather to me. Does it ever get worse up here?
Oh, really, yes, it does get worse than it today is bad, but it's not as bad as it can get.
Of course, the highway is running today and when it gets a lot worse, they'll close the highway.
The next day, finally, the snowdrifts got too high and the Ho Chi Minh Trail was closed.
So we took Old Highway 30 through towns which the interstate bypassed and which, therefore, are dying.
Bosler, Rock River, and to a lesser extent, Medicine Bow, present a sad parade of boarded-up cafes, abandoned gas stations, businesses gone broke.
The tourists who kept them going now struggle through the blizzards on the interstate to save 14 miles.
Folks like Mrs. Gladys White, who runs the Rock River Garage, are still shaking their heads over that.
Well, why in the world did they build it up there?
That is the question. Everybody asks that. Everybody says, why did they put it up there?
Wyoming people say, why did they put it up there? California people say, why did they put it up there?
New Yorkers, everybody says, why did they put it up there?
But they did.
But they say the route is still the shortest and thus the best. And besides, they have new snow fences in mind.
Well, the signs up there say, Interstate 80, your taxes at work.
At a million dollars a mile, we thought you'd like to know how your taxes are working.
Trees just do not grow up here on the high plateaus of the Rockies. Everybody knows that.
Trees need good soil and good weather, and up here there's no soil and terrible weather.
People do not live here. Nothing can live up here, and certainly not trees.
That's why the tree is a kind of miracle.
The tree is a juniper, and it grows here beside U.S. 50 utterly alone, not another tree for miles.
Nobody remembers who put the first Christmas ornament on it, some whimsical motorist of years ago.
From that day to this, the tree has been redecorated each year. Nobody knows who does it.
But each year, by Christmas Day, the tree has become a Christmas tree.
The tree, which has no business growing here at all, has survived against all the odds.
The summer droughts somehow haven't killed it, or the winter storms.
When the highway builders came out to widen the road, they could have taken the tree with one pass of their bulldozer.
But some impulse led them to start widening the road just a few feet past the tree.
The trucks passed so close that they rattled the tree's branches. The tree has also survived the trucks.
The tree violates the laws of man and nature. It is too close to the highway for man, and not far enough away for nature.
The tree pays no attention. It is where it is. It survives.
People who live in Grand Junction, 30 miles back that way, and in Delta, Colorado, 15 miles that way, all know about and love the tree.
They have Christmas trees of their own, of course, the kind of trees that are brought to town in trucks and sold in vacant lots and put up in living rooms.
This one tree belongs to nobody, and to everybody.
Just looking at it makes you think about how unexpected life on the earth can be.
The tree is so lonely and so brave that it seems to offer courage to those who pass it, and a message.
It is the Christmas message that there is life and hope, even in a rough world.
All these years I've been wondering
Just when I think I'm near the end
I always see the road is bending
And I wonder what's around the bend