The Moose Distribution System Finally Came Through: A Wild Vermont Encounter
If you spend enough time in New England, you start to feel personally owed a moose sighting. You drive the back roads of New Hampshire and Vermont, you keep your eyes on the tree lines, and you slow down around every marshy pond. And then months go by, and you start to wonder if the moose are just a rumor.
And then one day, you are driving a road you have traveled hundreds of times, and something moves at the tree line, and your brain takes a second to catch up with what your eyes are already telling you.
We pulled over. Possibly a little recklessly, if we are being honest. It was a rural Vermont road, and we were not exactly executing a textbook lane change. Two cars stopped behind us almost immediately. I watched in the rearview mirror as two couples climbed out, probably assuming something was wrong. A woman walked toward us with that careful are-you-okay “ energy that strangers on roadsides have when they are not sure what they are dealing with.
And then she saw me pointing at the tree line.
She looked. She stopped. A moose. Standing just off the road, on the creek below, enormous and completely unbothered by the small audience it had accumulated. The woman turned to us and said it was the first time she had ever seen one in real life. She had lived in Vermont her whole life.
We stood there together for a moment, six strangers on the side of a Vermont road, watching. Nobody said much. Some moments do not need narration. The moose moved slowly along the tree line, paused, looked in our direction with the particular calm of an animal that knows it is the largest thing for miles, and kept going.
I got photos. Not my best technically — I was moving fast, and my hands were not entirely steady because these animals are enormous up close in a way that photographs do not fully communicate. But I am proud of them anyway because they are proof that it happened, that the road I had driven a hundred times finally gave me something I had been waiting for without knowing exactly when it would come.
New England keeps its promises eventually. Sometimes you just have to keep driving the same roads until it decides you are ready.
Worth every mile. Worth the reckless pull-over. Worth standing on the side of a Vermont road with four strangers who all needed to see the same thing at the same time.
The moose distribution system came through. Finally.
