EAST MONTPELIER – To tell you the truth, I wasn’t looking forward to spending Saturday morning freezing my bippy on a frozen lake in Vermont. Friday had been really windy: windy enough to make Kiki think somebody was coming up the driveway in a large truck. The thought of standing still in a snow-blowing williwaw while coolly (no pun intended) interviewing the recreation director of a resort was none too pleasant. Still, it’s what I do if the occasion demands. So I donned my ultimate defense: woolen Malone pants over long johns, one layer of wool shirt and two of fleece, and a down jacket. Fleece mittens and a wool tuque. I dressed Kiki in her warmest jacket and we ventured out.
Erik, my uncomplaining hybrid SUV, zoomed up and over the St. Lawrence-Connecticut watershed divide, down the east side, and south along the Connecticut River to the Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee. The crew, all the way from Durham, was already there. Our interviewee, Paige Radney, was ready to go, too. She’s listed as the “Resort Experience Manager.” My blue collar roots flared with distaste.
But Paige couldn’t have been nicer. A former teacher from Buffalo, she migrated here with her husband when she got this “dream job.” Kiki and I were just getting used to looking out at the swirling, frozen lake through the picture windows of the warm dining room when she said, “Okay, let’s go over to the rink.” Oh, boy!
A few skaters had preceded us, put on their skates at the low wooden benches sitting in the snow beside the swept circle of the rink, and just as with rinks everywhere, were navigating the ice with varying degrees of confidence.
But the rink wasn’t what we were there for. We were looking farther off, toward a broad track swept free of snow that disappeared in the distance. Lake Morey is currently famous for its long-distance oval track, which varies from 3.5 to 4.5 miles in length. The resort began clearing it a few years ago. My late buddy Dudley, an avid speed-skater, loved it, and I tried it once (it was a day of a brisk north wind, and I couldn’t help but notice how much more fun it was going with the wind than against it). This coincided with the invention of the so-called Nordic skate, a long racing blade that fastens securely to the soles of cross-country ski boots.
As Paige chatted with us, guests from the resort inn began showing up, all cheerful after a hot breakfast, snapping on their blades, and setting off on the oval. It’s been closed for two years by warm winter weather that made it unsafe for the tractor, but this winter’s been quite the opposite, and some pent-up demand was being expressed.
Lake Morey itself is an interesting pond. It likely originated in post-glacial times as a kettlehole, formed when a large chunk of glacial ice, buried in drift, melted and left this water-filled hole. It’s bordered completely on two sides by summer homes clinging very creatively to its steep banks. At the weedy shallow end lies the Hulbert Outdoor Center; at the other, the Lake Morey Resort. One of our daughters had her wedding reception here, and I’ve come here often to tell stories to visiting firemen.
There’s also a mystery surrounding the pond (as an aspiring Yankee, I can’t call anything smaller than Champlain or Winnipesaukee a lake). It’s named for Samuel Morey, an inventor and businessman who lived rather grandly just across the river in Orford, N.H. Morey had secured several patents already when he turned his attention to steam power and the internal combustion engine, for which he received a patent in 1826. But he’s best known in these parts for his steamboat, which he ran on the Connecticut River at the blistering pace of four miles an hour. He was working on a way to speed it up. I’m abbreviating here; but Morey rode on Robert Fulton’s Clermont, noting afterward that much of Fulton’s machinery seemed a copy of his own. When Fulton won the contract to provide steamboat service from New York to Albany, Morey could see the futility of further competition, and returned to his mansion in Orford and his experiments with internal combustion.
But what became of the Aunt Sally, Samuel Morey’s steamboat? If she was gathering dust in a barn somewhere, she’s still gathering it. She’s never been found. Legend says that Samuel, in a fit of pique, sank her; but again, no one knows where. If it was in the river, bits of her are in Long Island Sound; if in Fairlee Pond (now Lake Morey), she’s still down there, waiting to be found. But not today. Too cold.
