***
Kicking the engine to life, I shot out of the garage and held to the perimeter of the western field. Reaching the lower of the two stonewalls ringing its border, I downshifted and navigated a series of hay-infested muddy swales until reaching the dry land marking the start of the apple orchard. The bike displaced ample enough power on the firmer ground, quickly rocketing me to the top row of the plush trees where I leaned hard to the right and brought the rear tire around beneath me. The exhaust sputtered and smoked bluish-gray, as though daring me to provoke the bike to its maximum performance.
Parallel to the driveway below and overlooking the backyard and gardens of the Manor through the gaps in the apple trees, I ushered the Hodaka along the edge of the pathway dutifully mowed each week. Rising higher and farther away from the homestead below, I spied the entrance to the old logging road just beyond a rise on the left. Bringing the bike to full throttle in third gear I dropped lower in the saddle, ducked my head and disappeared into the woods.
Motocross riding requires supreme concentration if one is to ultimately dismount the bike unharmed. This was especially true in my case, considering the amateur operating skills I possessed were magnified by my love for speed. Yet nothing could compete with the thrill of split-second decision making, dodging branches that battered one's helmet and scraped one's denim jacket, raising the front tire to clear an unexpected washout or skidding without warning across a collection of fallen boughs. There was an indescribable freedom experienced when darting through warm streams of bright sunlight penetrating the forest and sensing the rush of a chill when passing into the wooded shadows beyond. In the absence of traffic laws, the woodsman rider was prone to obey his instincts and reflexes in order to survive.
I defy you, Death! And I defy you, again.
Higher I pushed into the mountains, up over spines of sharp inclines and across long stretches of ascending lanes. Passageways unused for decades by those who harvested the forest's pristine timber, filled with the swirling dawn fog, carried me deeper into the hinterland. A left at the first fork took me through a boulder-strewn gully replete with fallen hemlocks to each side. Wrestling the bike up a steep channel of sand, I upshifted when passing by a familiar stretch of hardhack surrounding a year-round mountain spring and knew I was close to my destination. Bearing right at the next stand of elms, treacherously obscured by a thick cropping of Douglas-firs, I slowed the Hodaka to a near idle before bringing it to a complete halt and killing the engine. What had taken me a half-hour to cover in distance would have in olden days consumed several days with a team of horses, if not an entire week.
Mere yards in front of me the abundant growth parted to expose a series of large flat rocks forming the top of a head wall known by locals as Rogers' Rangers Ravine. Should one dare to stand at its edge and look straight down, the sight of jagged outcroppings and razor-like shale extended nearly one hundred feet in a vertical decline, ending in a sprawling patch of errant alders and scrub brush at its distant base. It was not a view for the faint-hearted or those uncomfortable with nature's inherent capacity to inflict its brutal humility upon humankind. In short, here lay both a scenic and potentially deadly view.
One of the many legends of the mountains told of the ravine's namesakes -- a portion of men from the hearty group of frontier militia formed by British officer Robert Rogers -- using this very slide in which to hide the bounty from their early morning raid on the Abenaki village of St. Francis, Canada, then a French province. The intrigue occurred in October, 1759, smack in the middle of what is labeled the French and Indian War in the States, a small slice derived from what is better known as the Seven Years' War in the British commonwealth.
With angry French and Indian soldiers in pursuit of the Rangers as they retreated through the isolated and dangerous territory of what is now modern-day northern Vermont and New Hampshire, Rogers split his troops into small groups. One of these bands of Rangers was selected to carry and safeguard the treasure relieved from the Jesuit mission in St. Francis: A ten-pound solid silver icon of Our Lady of Chartres Madonna and Child; a pair of silver-plated copper candlesticks; a ruby ring; a small solid-gold statuette of a calf and other lesser-valuable artifacts. The plunder, considered priceless in its day, was never located afterward and has been sought for centuries by those desiring both fame and wealth.
I know this well. I was one of those fortune-hunters during my teen years, spending hundreds of hours in this remote section of the mountains searching for signs and clues of the two-hundred-fifty year old mystery. Given the ravine had entombed and preserved one fortune for all or parts of four centuries, I felt it deserved the opportunity -- and possessed the room -- for yet another.
Setting my helmet on the padded seat, I removed the throttle grip from the sparkling chrome handlebar and fished out the CerebStix flash drive from its hiding spot. A shiver shot down my spine as I walked purposefully to the edge of the largest boulder overlooking the open expanse, feeling as though I was standing on air itself.
"Uncle Wark said it best delivering the final line to Simpatico of the Circus," I spoke in a clear voice, loud and true. My words carried forth over the thousands of acres comprising the vista before me as I drew back my arm and launched the flash drive into the depths of the secluded abyss.
"'Life was, is and always will be, a barrel of monkeys!'"
THE END
Baril de Singes [Barrel of Monkeys] Page 60
