But lately, and all of a sudden, I've been commuting across Vermont. Well, halfway across. We're living temporarily in Orford, New Hampshire, and beginning to build a house over near Montpelier, so I've been wearing a groove in the route from here to there. It's not an unpleasant commute at all: less than 45 miles over good roads all the way. If I drive it during normal commuting hours, I'm sharing the road with Vermonters in a hurry; if I go during off hours, I'm sharing the road with almost nobody. And every time, I see something new that I haven't before.

The first time, of course, I was concentrating on route numbers and villages passed; the second time, I couldn't help but notice the rivers beside the road; and by the third, I was considering the geology that so affects this (and almost all) the routes across Vermont.

If you look at a map of Vermont, you can see right away that the straightest and most traveled old roads go north and south – Routes 7, 100, and 5 – and the more difficult ones go east and west, except for US Route 2, which runs from Burlington east along rivers until it loses its way around Marshfield and corkscrews over to New Hampshire beyond Lunenburg. There are three obvious reasons for this. First, the early settlers' markets and manufactured goods came from south of their holdings; second, Vermont was the geologic crumple zone in a massive continental collision from the east, which corrugated its terrain accordingly; and third, the continental ice sheets flowed pretty much straight south through Vermont. So if you want to go east or west, you've got to go up and over – although in a modern vehicle on current highways, you can easily miss that fact.

The road from Orford to East Montpelier is a classic, if gentle, example of that. It follows a millennia-old trade route – the Connecticut River – upstream to Bradford, then swings northwest up the Waits River. The Waits has to be one of the most beautiful rivers in Vermont. Rapid, rocky, and accessible for almost its entire length, it's a favorite of whitewater canoeists and fly fishermen. W.D. Wetherell, a fly fisherman, wrote a whole book about it. It's got all the features of a classic Atlantic salmon river, except for one thing: no more salmon. Cut off from its natural exit, to the sea, it still flows beautifully, waiting, like Penelope, to be reunited and made complete.

The name kept ringing a bell...Waits, Waits. I knew that name, Wait. He was most likely a millwright, searching upstream during the 18th century for a perfect mill site. But why would I know the name of an ancient millwright? So I stopped at the logical place to ask: the Waits River General Store. Bill MacDonald, the owner, heard me asking the clerk at the counter and brought out a well-thumbed volume of local history.

And there it was! I knew I knew it! Joseph Wait was a Captain in Major Robert Rogers' British Rangers at the time of their 1759 attack on the native village of Odanak on the St. Francis River in Quebec. During the terrible retreat, the main party of Rangers split up to hunt and try to evade capture by their pursuers. Wait's party, hunting down this little river, shot a deer. Pausing only for a quick meal of green venison, they left the rest of the carcass hanging in a tree for their fellow rangers behind. The story goes that Wait carved his name into the tree, and his men commemorated the event by naming the river after him. I bought a cup of Vermont Blend coffee (I'm becoming quite the aficionado of coffee stops), thanked Bill, and drove on.

Past West Topsham the route leaves the Waits and follows one of its tributaries west to an open basin filled by a shallow beaver pond. The connoisseur of mountain passes will recognize this as a symptom of change; beavers like the highest headwaters best because there are no floods there. Sure enough, about a mile beyond the pond there's a sharp summit, and I was looking out over part of the great St. Lawrence watershed. Zooming downhill toward Orange, I decided that I would not attend the Orange Alliance Church without an engineer's report. If that steeple isn't leaning backwards over the nave, then my visual plumb line is out of whack.

I turned north again onto a back road that took me up Orange Brook to its source at the Barre waterworks; thence over still another height of land and down another brook valley to the Winooski River at Plainfield. To my right, like ominous sentinels, rose the 3000-foot peaks of Spruce Mountain and Signal Mountain, their tops frosted with fresh snow – what in Anchorage they call "termination dust": When the snow reaches down to the base of the mountains, fall is terminated It looked as though my pleasant commute would soon be getting a little slippery.

I crossed my fingers and hoped: hoped the excavator would get the road to the power pole graveled so the coop could hook us up; hoped the power guys were ready to roll; hoped the well driller would show as soon as we got the back yard graded; hoped it would be dry for a few days so we could put in the septic system. Robert Frost, as usual, says it best: Miles to go before I sleet...