Mud Season
Dr. Wilkins covers New Hampshire's mud season, the two weeks when the frost goes out, the turnpike turns to porridge, and smugglers and revenue men are stuck alike. He explains the night-crust trick and the spring freshet rafts, and tells a grisly tale of a half-starved Barnaby waking from his den to meet a mired assistant assessor. Junior Vance trades new stories about North Carolina red-clay mud, including a Baptist preacher's mule team and a revenue man he hauled out of a ditch. Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and debunks the blue-flame myth between strikes of his coin punch.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle down, you mud-plastered sack of sin. I know the snow has gone off your den and you've woken up hungry enough to eat a Methodist camp meeting, tents, hymnals, and all. But you'll wait for your supper like a Christian, or at least like a Congregationalist, which is close enough for a bear.
♦ Chain clinks, then a long, wet, sucking slap of mud
Wilkins: He has sat down. In the mud. On purpose. He looks like a bishop who fell in a hog wallow and decided to make it his cathedral.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and any deputy who's got a pencil out. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. The fire is low, the copper is bright, and outside my window the whole of Merrimack County is melting into a pudding. Tonight's subject is the worst two weeks of the year, the season every Yankee curses and no almanac can cure. Tonight we talk about Mud Season.
♪ Theme swells, then fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Want the craft of the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths on your own kitchen table? The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still is spun from pure copper and riveted by hand, and it's waiting for you at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
♪ Slow fiddle bridge, minor key
Wilkins: Segment the first. Let me explain mud season to any of you who were born somewhere sensible.
Wilkins: All winter the ground in this valley freezes hard as a banker's heart, four feet down some years. Then March comes, the sun gets ambitious, and the frost begins to go out. Here is the devilry of it: it goes out from the top down. The top foot of the road thaws to muck, but underneath is still a floor of solid ice. Snowmelt and spring rain come down, can't drain through that frozen floor, and just sit there in the road, stewing. The bottom drops out. You've got a soup with a toll gate.
Wilkins: The Almanac says the frost goes out in April. The Almanac has never tried to cross Pittsfield with a loaded wagon and a hangover.
Wilkins: I've seen the turnpike between here and Barnstead so deep that a team of oxen went in to the dewlaps, and the teamster climbed out over their backs like a man crossing a creek on stepping stones. Every step the mud grabs your boot and sucks at it like a calf on a teat, and when it finally lets go it makes a noise I won't describe in mixed company, except to say the ladies of Pittsfield blush and the men check behind them.
Wilkins: Our grandfathers tried to beat it. Over the boggy stretches they laid corduroy roads, logs crosswise like the ribs of a washboard. Ride over one in a wagon and you'll feel every one of your teeth, and as a dentist I'll tell you it loosens them better than my forceps. Then twenty years ago came the plank road craze, every town fool sure that sawn boards would save civilization. The frost heaved them, the mud swallowed them, and the planks rotted out from under. Now half the plank roads in New England are firewood, and the other half are lawsuits.
Wilkins: Even the finest coach ever built, the Concord coach, made right down the road by Abbot, Downing and Company, can't beat it. Those coaches hang on leather thoroughbraces instead of steel springs, so they swing like a cradle. A Concord coach on a corduroy road rocks like a cradle, and every passenger arrives feeling like a baby: wet, crying, and in need of a drink. Come mud time, though, the coach lines cut their runs to nothing. The mail comes when it comes. The newspapers arrive with news so stale that a man can read about a battle and the treaty in the same week.
Wilkins: The one mercy of mud season is sugaring. Sap runs best on freezing nights and thawing days, and that's exactly the weather that ruins the roads. So while the turnpike drowns, every farm in the Suncook Valley has a kettle steaming in the sugar bush. Sweet in the woods, misery on the road. That's New Hampshire in a sentence.
Wilkins: It ain't only us Yankees, either. Two Januarys ago, in eighteen and sixty-three, General Burnside tried to swing the whole Army of the Potomac around Fredericksburg, Virginia. The rain came, and Virginia turned to porridge. Cannon sank to the hubs. Wagons sank to the beds. Mules sank to the ears, and the soldiers said some of them sank out of sight altogether. Some of our Merrimack County boys were in that mess, and they came home swearing the Virginia mud was Rebel. They call it the Mud March. General Burnside marched an army into the mud and marched it back out again, which I believe is the only campaign in history the mud won outright.
Wilkins: Now to what you tuned in for: what does mud season do to the free trade in spirits?
Wilkins: It stops it dead, and it stops the law dead too. Since Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862 the government has had its assessors and assistant assessors out counting barrels, and its collectors and deputy collectors out collecting the money. Every one of those gentlemen rides the same roads as the rest of us. Mud season is the two weeks a year when the sheriff and I are both prisoners of Merrimack County, and neither of us can afford the bail.
Wilkins: So a smart man plans for it. First, you move your goods before the frost goes out. The last good sledding snow of March carries more jugs in this valley than the whole month of June. Barrels go under the hay and under the sugar tubs, and nobody asks a sugar sled what's under the sugar.
Wilkins: Second, you learn the crust. In mud time the ground freezes again at night and thaws again by ten in the morning. A man who has to move goods hitches up at three in the morning and drives on the frozen ruts by starlight, cracking along like a man walking on peanut brittle. By sunup he's home, the road's turned back to soup behind him, and no deputy alive is fool enough to follow his tracks into it.
Wilkins: Third, the freshet. When the ice goes out on the Suncook the river runs high and brown and angry. I've known men to lash a few kegs onto a log raft and ride the spring flood down toward the mills while the roads were closed. That's a fine way to deliver a load and a finer way to drown. The Suncook in flood doesn't care about your profit margin.
Wilkins: And now the story the old men tell at the store. Years back a tin peddler set out on the turnpike in April, a sour old cheat who sold watered vinegar and called it cider. His horse stepped off the crown of the road into a soft spot and went straight down, slow as a sermon. First to the knees, then the belly, then the withers, screaming the whole way, a noise like a rusty pump handle. The peddler cut the traces and ran. By morning there was nothing but a pair of ears. And when the road dried out in July, the road crew dug down and found that horse still standing straight up, four feet under, hide tanned dark as a boot, perfectly preserved. The peddler's horse went down in the mud standing up and came out in July standing up, pickled better than anything the peddler ever sold. The selectmen wanted to charge him for road damage, and the peddler wanted to charge them for the horse. Both sides lost, which is the only fair verdict this county ever delivered.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain drags through mud
Wilkins: Barnaby says that story's a lie. Barnaby says no horse in this county ever went to waste.
♪ Banjo roll, jaunty
Wilkins: Segment the second: legends, outlaws, and runners, and I'll start with the outlaw closest to the microphone, which is me.
Wilkins: Barnaby comes out of his den in March thin as a Shaker's sermon and twice as cross. He has slept off a third of his weight, his coat hangs off him like a widow's mourning dress three sizes too big, and his breath could peel the varnish off a church pew. A freshly woke bear in mud season will eat anything: skunk cabbage, last year's acorns, a dead woodchuck, a living woodchuck, and the leather off a saddle if you leave him near one.
Wilkins: So, one April morning, an assistant assessor came up the turnpike on foot. His horse had quit him a mile back and was standing in the road sulking. He came wading toward my still-house window with his ledger under his arm, mud to the knees, already madder than a wet cat, determined to count my barrels or die trying. He nearly managed both.
Wilkins: About twenty feet from my window the mud took his left boot clean off. He stood there on one leg like a heron, cursing like a Portsmouth sailor. He hopped, slipped, and sat down hard in the slop, right inside the circle of Barnaby's chain.
♦ Low bear growl, chain snapping taut
Wilkins: Now, Barnaby had not had a proper meal since Thanksgiving. He came out of that muck like the wrath of Jehovah, all wet fur and yellow teeth, and he took hold of that assessor by the seat of his breeches. You could hear the wool give way, a long wet tearing like a sailcloth ripping in a gale. Wool was not all he took. He came away with the breeches, the drawers, and a strip of hide off the man's hindquarter about the size of a Testament cover. The assessor screamed in a key I have only ever heard from a stuck pig and a Methodist choir.
Wilkins: Then Barnaby sat down in the mud and ate that ledger, page by page, like a gentleman reading the Sunday paper. Two years of the federal government's careful arithmetic went down that bear's gullet with a little gravy of the gentleman's own blood. The assessor left behind one boot, one ledger, and enough of his backside that I could have counterstamped it.
Wilkins: I'm not a monster. I hauled the fellow inside, poured a dose of spirits on the wound, which made him pray to saints he didn't know he believed in, and stitched his hindquarters up with my finest silk from the tooth kit. Eleven stitches. I charged him the full rate, and he paid without a word, since he was in no position to sit down and argue. He never came back, and the government never sent a new ledger. As far as Washington is concerned, Fort Wilkins does not exist between March and May.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly
Wilkins: Now, mud is not a Yankee invention, and I have a guest tonight who knows other kinds of it. He comes from the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, where I'm told the mud is red as a boiled lobster and twice as slippery. He ran liquor in a horseless machine that would make a Concord coach weep with envy. Please welcome Junior Vance. Junior, pull your chair up to the stove and mind the bear.
Junior: Doc, I've been chased by dogs, deputies, and one mean goose, but I ain't never been asked to mind a bear in the same breath as howdy. Thank you for having me.
Wilkins: Tell me about Carolina mud, Junior. Is it as bad as ours?
Junior: Doc, y'all's mud is brown and honest. It just swallows you. Ours is red clay, and red clay is a liar. It looks like hard road right up till your wheels touch it, and then it turns to grease. And when it dries on you, it sets up like a brick oven. In March you could drive a mountain road at midnight and by morning your whole machine's wearing a clay suit heavy as a coffin.
Wilkins: Did it ever bury you?
Junior: Lord, yes. One spring night down near Moravian Falls I was loaded heavy and took a back road the rain had got to first. Sank to the axles. The back wheels just spun and slung red clay up on the pines like a hog butchering. No shovel, no plank, nothing. So I reached back, pulled the burlap feed sacks off my jars, and stuffed 'em under the wheels. That burlap bit, and I come out of there like a scalded cat. I left those sacks laying in the road, though. Next day the revenue boys found 'em, all clay and smelling of corn, and they got real excited. Gonna trace 'em to the feed mill. Trouble was, every feed mill in that county stamped the same kind of sack. They spent a week tracing feed sacks to half the farmers in Wilkes County and the Baptist orphanage.
Wilkins: The orphanage! Ha! The government suspected orphans before it suspected you. That's the kind of detective work that loses wars.
Junior: Another time I wasn't so lucky. Two in the morning, Yadkin County, sunk so deep the clay was running in over the door sills. I'm setting there figuring how to carry forty jars out on foot when I see a lantern coming down the hill. It's a preacher. Big old fellow in a nightshirt and a hat, leading two mules. Says the Lord woke him to help a soul in distress. I said, Preacher, the Lord's got good timing. He chains my bumper to them mules, and they pull me out of that hole like a cork out of a jug. I tried to pay him and he wouldn't take a nickel. Said he'd take one jar, though, for the sick and shut-in. I said, Preacher, who's sick? He looked at me real solemn and said, Son, I am, and my wife has shut me in the woodshed.
Wilkins: That preacher was the sick and shut-in himself, and I respect a man who tends his own flock first. Junior, in this valley we'd have made that man a bishop.
Junior: Now here's one that still galls me. Back road outside Elkin, spring rain, and there's a car stuck dead in the only mud hole on the only road I could take. I walk up and it's a federal agent. Suit, hat, mud to his garters, about to cry. And I can't get by him. So what do I do? I hook a log chain from my bumper to his and pull the United States Government out of the ditch. He shakes my hand, calls me a credit to the state of North Carolina, and never once looks in my trunk, where I had sixty gallons riding.
Wilkins: Then it ended happily.
Junior: No sir. The next week that same agent arrested my cousin Dwayne. Said he recognized the family resemblance.
Wilkins: Junior hauled a revenue man out of a mud hole, and the revenue man repaid him by arresting his cousin. That is federal gratitude in a nutshell. They hang their bread on the line and then complain when it gets wet.
Junior: Mud was a friend sometimes, though. I learned to leave the red clay on the machine. Clean shiny car on a mountain road at night, everybody knows what you're about. Car caked in clay to the windows looks like some poor fella hauling feed. One night a deputy got after me anyway, and I took a hard left on a switchback. A clod of clay big as a smoked ham broke off my fender, sailed back, and hit him square in the windshield. Smack! Painted the whole glass red. He couldn't see a thing. Last I saw his headlights, they were pointed at the sky in a cow pasture, and the cows were not pleased.
Wilkins: Junior's red clay blinded a deputy on a curve. Here in Merrimack County our mud is too dignified to be thrown. It just eats you slowly, like a Concord lawyer.
Junior: One more and I'll hush. Spring of the year, I had to bail out on foot in a creek bottom, and the bog grabbed my right boot and kept it. I'd hid a pint down in that boot. Walked home one-footed in the dark, cussing every rock in Wilkes County. Well, that July a fisherman comes by the house holding my boot. Found it washed up on a gravel bar. He handed it to me polite as a deacon. Pint was gone. There was a note folded inside that said, thank you kindly for the boot.
Wilkins: A fisherman found Junior's boot with the pint gone and a thank-you note. That's the most honest transaction ever made between a Carolina creek and a moonshiner. Junior Vance, you're a credit to the profession and a menace to the fenders of the South. Stay by the stove a while.
Junior: I'll stay as long as that bear stays on his side of the window, Doc.
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: He makes no promises.
♪ Brassy medicine-show fanfare, tambourine shake
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! Step right up and lend me your ears! The roads may be mud, the coach may be late, and the sheriff may be stuck in a ditch, but your craft need never wait another day! Do you admire the precision of the Fort Wilkins coppersmiths but haven't got room for a full still-house? Then behold the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, a compact pure copper tabletop alembic! It's built from heavy-gauge, pure electrolytic copper, twenty-ounce spun copper shaped smooth and true on the lathe. It has handles riveted by hand, handsome as a church bell, and quick-connect cooling lines that hook up quicker than a Pittsfield courtship! It's the premier choice for distilling botanical waters and essential floral oils, the scent of rose and lavender and the spring woods, and for countertop demonstrations that'll draw a crowd. The price is only two hundred and eighty-nine dollars! Come see it gleam in person at our showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or send for it this very day at moonshinestill.com/products/tabletop-alembic. Explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com! Once more, friends, so it sticks like Carolina clay: explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com! Available today!
♪ Fanfare button
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, gentle hiss of a low fire
♪ Quiet fiddle under
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. For the benefit of the record and any federal ear in the room: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is for history and education. Now pay attention, because mud season affects the still-house too.
Wilkins: Start with the water. In April every brook in this valley runs the color of weak coffee, thick with silt off the fields. If you put that in your mash or your pot, the silt settles to the bottom of the copper, and when the fire's under it, it scorches. Silt in your still pot scorches worse than a sermon on Easter Sunday, and it smells about the same to a sinner. So draw your water and let it stand overnight in a clean barrel. Then dip off the clear water from the top and leave the mud behind. Better yet, use a clear spring, and there are good ones on these hills.
Wilkins: Now the mash, step by step, the way it was made in my father's day. Take about eight pounds of cracked corn to five gallons of water. Bring it up and cook it to a porridge, stirring the whole time so it doesn't stick and burn. Let it cool until you can just hold your finger in it, a hundred and fifty or so on the Fahrenheit glass. Stir in two pounds of malted barley. The malt turns the starch of the corn into sugar. Let it rest a few hours covered, and it'll sweeten. Cool it further, down to about blood warm or a shade below, and add your yeast. Keep the fermenter in a warm corner, because mud season nights still freeze. Cover it loose, never tight, and let the room breathe, since a working mash gives off a gas that will smother a man in a closed cellar. In four or five days to a week the bubbling quiets and the cap falls, and you have a wash. Strain it well, through a clean cloth, so no grain goes into your pot to scorch.
Wilkins: Fill your still no more than three parts full, and leave room for the foam to climb. Seal the joints with rye flour paste and watch them. If the paste bubbles or weeps, you've got a leak, and vapor leaking near a firebox is how still-houses become bonfires. Keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket by the door. Never walk off and leave a running still, not to piss, not to court, not to feed the bear.
Wilkins: Then you run slow. Low fire. The cuts are the whole religion. The first spirit to come is the foreshots, and it goes on the ground, never in a cup. Next come the heads, which smell sharp and solventy, like varnish or green apples, and they get set aside as well. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, and those are what the craft is for. Last come the tails, oily and dull, smelling of wet dog. Set them aside to run again. Catch your run in a row of small jars, not one big crock, so you can smell and judge each one and make your cut where your nose tells you, not where your greed tells you.
Wilkins: Here's where the copper earns its keep. A spring mash is often a gassy, sulfurous thing, especially if the fermentation struggled in the cold. That sulfur comes up with the vapor, and the bright copper grabs it and holds it, and you'll see the inside of your pot go dark as the copper takes the stink onto itself. That's alchemy you can trust. So after every run, rinse and scrub. A wash of vinegar and salt brings the copper back bright, and then you rinse it thoroughly with clean water before the next charge. A dirty pot is a lazy alchemist's confession.
Wilkins: One last thing in mud season, and it's free: spring creek water is the coldest you'll get all year for your worm tub. Snowmelt off the hills keeps your condenser running cold, your spirit coming out cool and steady, and not a drop of vapor escaping to find your lantern.
♪ Banjo bridge, playful
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang, and the mail. First, the slang of mud time. When the road gives way under you, the bottom's out. A road that heaves up in humps from the frost is frost-heaved, and a heaved road will throw a jug off your wagon like a bucking colt. The whole season we call mud time, and the old men say April in New Hampshire has three weathers: mud, more mud, and the mud you brought inside.
Wilkins: Now the myth. Every barroom has a fool with a spoon. He takes a spoonful of spirit, puts a match to it, and says, Blue flame, boys, she's safe to drink. Yellow flame, she's poison.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash. Good grain spirit burns blue. The bad stuff, the wood spirit that blinds men, also burns pale blue, near invisible in daylight. The flame proves only one thing: that the spirit burns, and you knew that already, or you wouldn't be drinking it. A blue flame proves the spirit burns, and so does the Widow Batchelder's temper. Neither one proves it is safe to put in your mouth. The only safety is honest cuts, made by a man who threw the front of the run on the ground where it belongs.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. One more large cent wearing my name. Now, we got a call-in tape, a talking cylinder that came by post from North Carolina, so it's a weekend for Carolinians. Let's give it a crank.
♦ Cylinder hiss, faint wind, a telephone-style crackle
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a neighbor of our guest. Junior, you know this man?
Junior: I know his uncle, Doc. I'd say a prayer for that thump keg.
Wilkins: Well, Rabbit, let's take your uncle's medicine one ingredient at a time.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Ash soaked in water makes lye. That's potash. New England grew rich on it. Before the factories, every town in this state had an ashery, boiling down wood ash into potash and pearlash and shipping it off to Boston for soap and glass. So ash in your thump keg doesn't clean your spirit. It makes the beginnings of soap. Hickory ash in a thump keg will not cure your heads, Rabbit, but it'll make enough lye to soap your uncle's mouth out for saying it does.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, what are bad heads? In a corn spirit, the harsh stuff at the front is mostly what chemists call the light ethers and aldehydes. It's the green-apple, varnish, nail-polish stink. Fruit mashes bring along more of the poisonous wood spirit, because that comes mostly out of the pectin in the fruit. But either way, those things boil lower than good spirit, so they come off first. No ash and no shaving can catch them. You catch them in a jar and you throw them out. That is the whole cure, and it costs nothing but discipline.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. Rabbit, ask any cooper in Merrimack County why he makes his whiskey barrels of white oak, never red. Red oak is full of open pores, like a sponge with a reputation. Fill a red oak barrel with whiskey and it seeps through the staves and puddles on the floor. Red oak holds whiskey about as well as a Concord politician holds a promise: it leaks out through every pore and calls it character. And even with good white oak, the flavor and color come from months and years in the barrel. A handful of shavings in a boiling thump keg for an afternoon gives you a little tan color and a mouthful of splinter tea, not a cure.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So, is there any truth to it? A crumb. Charcoal made from hardwood will polish a finished spirit somewhat if you pour it through, slowly, cold, the way some old hands do. But that's after the run, not ash in the thump keg, and it's no substitute for the cuts. Tell your uncle he's not a liar, just a man with a fine-sounding ritual. Half the churches in New England run on the same principle.
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller, thank you for writing in from Wilkesboro. Here's a coin with my mark on it to remember us by, struck fresh in your honor.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: It'll go out to you as soon as the mail coach can get through the mud, so sometime around the Fourth of July.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
♪ Theme reprises softly
Announcer: One more quick word! When the roads are mud and you're stuck at home, put that time to good use. The Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still is pure copper and hand-riveted, and it's ready for your countertop. See it at moonshinestill.com! That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Banjo and fiddle, warm, slowing
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the stove is low, Junior has been eyeing the bear for an hour, and the bear has been eyeing him right back. Junior, thank you for coming all this way through the mud.
Junior: Doc, it's been an honor. Next time I'll bring you some of our red clay so you can see what real mud looks like.
Wilkins: Bring it in a jar. We'll counterstamp it.
Wilkins: If tonight's talk of mash and cuts and copper has you hungry to learn the craft right, the honest way, from the history to the metallurgy, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn the cuts, the copper, the fire, and the safety, everything a sensible person ought to know before they ever touch a still. You'll find it alongside the copper at moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: Mud season ends the same way every year. The frost goes out, the roads dry up, the deputies come back, and Barnaby gains forty pounds of somebody. Until then, stay off the soft shoulder, drive on the crust, and don't sit down inside the bear's circle.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme fades out under wax cylinder crackle