New England Mud Season Slips, Slides In : Thaw: Residents face mire that comes between winter and spring.

Across the northern half of New England, from Vermont’s Lake Champlain to Maine’s potato country, it’s just about time for the next season of the year--the one called Mud Season.

After the fabled foliage of fall, after all the snow and ice of winter, after months and months of long nights and short days, after all the boots, hats, mittens and long johns and the frozen water pipes, after what turned out this year to be record colds and record snows--after all that, just when the rest of the world is snipping forsythia and planting tomatoes, along comes Mud.

Up here, that doesn’t mean just a little bit of soggy topsoil. Mud Season means real mud--the kind of boot-sucking, ax-grabbing, carpet-wrecking, super-saturated muck that just gobbles up two-wheel-drive imports driven by flatlanders from Boston or New York.

“Mud Season is a notation of Nature, not of the calendar,” wrote farmer and essayist Richard M. Ketchum in his book “Second Cuttings: Letters from the Country,” “and describes an interval of indeterminate duration between winter and spring. It has none of spring’s fripperies or fall’s harlot colors, none of winter’s white mantle or summer’s lushness. The going is sloppy and slow, the ground underfoot soggy and treacherous.”

Mud Season seems to hold its tightest grip on Vermont, which is a world of steep hills and dirt roads where traction is next to godliness this month. In early April, just getting the mail can be an adventure.

The science of mud is pretty straightforward. The ground freezes during the cold New England winter anywhere from two to four or more feet down. The depth of the freeze depends largely on the lateness of the winter’s first snow, since snow insulates the soil. The later the first snow, the deeper the freeze.

When warmer weather finally returns, the ground slowly thaws out from the top down. The bottom layer of frozen soil acts like a giant saucer, trapping any moisture above it.

Up on the surface, meanwhile, three to six feet of snow is melting and spring rains are pounding down. Combined, they produce a tremendous amount of water with nowhere to go. When it mixes with New England’s fine-grained soil, the result is serious mud.

Of the five seasons of the year, Mud must be the ugliest. In addition to all the muck and stains, the melting snow of Mud Season reveals all of the winter’s animal droppings (now rapidly warming) and whatever other detritus has lain buried and frozen in snow all winter.

So far at least, Mud has proven immune to cute. There are no “Mud Festivals,” no Mud queens or mud-slinging contests or even mud-pies. Mud is earnest, dark and deep.

It does have its own not-so-dry humor. Dick Sweterlitsch, a folklorist at the University of Vermont, collects mud jokes like this one:

“Two farmers are sitting on a front porch looking out at a muddy road. All of a sudden they see a hat belonging to another neighbor, Frank, come sliding down the road. They go to investigate and lift the hat from the road.

“Sure enough, there’s Frank underneath, moving steadily through the mud.

“ ‘No problem,’ said Frank, ‘I’m on my horse!’ ”

One Vermonter who knows his mud is Frank Bryan. A political scientist at the University of Vermont in Burlington, resident of a dirt road and co-author of “Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats,” Bryan said the biggest danger is “bottoming out.”

That is the term for what happens when a motor vehicle--usually a rear-wheel-drive sedan--meets more mud than it can handle. Bottoming out can be a big problem in a state that is mostly uphill and down and mostly dirt roads.

“You get in so much mud that you are sitting on the axles. There is no bottom. You are just floating,” Bryan explained.

“To drive through mud, the key is you’ve got to battle your instincts. You’ve got to drive like hell. You’ve got to stay in low gear and just floor the son-of-a-bitch. It’s just the opposite of driving in snow. A lot of flatlanders don’t have the guts for it,” Bryan said in a recent interview in which he unsuccessfully tried to stifle a chortle.

“It’s a bit like driving on train tracks. There’s a rut where somebody else has gone through the mud. You try to stay in the ruts. Sometimes, the rear wheels get in one rut and the front get in another and you kind of go sideways.”

Not surprisingly, a lot of things besides cars come a halt during Mud. Many towns forbid hauling logs by truck because the weight wrecks roads when they are muddy. Loggers often have to stop cutting trees, because mills will not accept mud-covered timber; it gums up their saws.

But it can be a busy time of year nonetheless.

Not by accident, this is the time of year when New England villages hold their annual “town meetings.” Long ago, the old-time Yankees decided to jam all their government and politics into one day-long binge, timed to take place just before the roads became impassable with mud.

It is also maple sugar time. When the nights are cold and the days are warm, sap rises in the giant maple trees, and New Englanders tap the trees to gather the sap. The sap is collected and boiled to make the maple syrup for a hungry nation’s pancakes.

And it’s the time of year when sheep drop their new lambs.

Bryan described what happened one night when he and his wife tried to make it home up Big Hollow Road in Starksboro:

“We bottomed out. So what I did was get out and put the jack under the back bumper. Instead of the car going up, the jack disappears, down into the mud. If you’re lucky enough to hit something hard, you jack it up a few inches, then run around to the other side and push the car off the jack.

“Remember, it’s cold . . . and you’ve got your good shoes on. Your wife holds the flashlight, and you fish around underneath the bumper for the jack. Then you run around to the front and repeat the process. You are literally trying to walk the car across the road, looking for a rut you can use.”

Greg Winchester, who works the tow truck at Rod’s Mobil in Putney, says he gets as many as four calls a day at the height of mud season, especially on weekends when tourists are likely to be on the roads. But natives bottom out too.

“It’s more guys that get stuck, because they think they can make it,” he notes. Once, even his wrecker got stuck and needed a tow.

Sometimes, the old ways are best. Bryan says that when all else fails, he hitches up the oxen. Nothing has stopped them yet.

“It’s a hopeful time of year,” Bryan adds. “Because if Mud Season comes, can spring be far behind? Vermonters can sense spring the way mariners can sense land.”