Introduction: For some reason this just flowed out one day while writing an email to someone. I was trying to explain the peculiar sensibility I encountered as a young musician learning about what audiences were and how to please them. And, being a native New Englander, I had to read Hawthorne in school…somehow it all came together.

The Furry Underbelly Of Rural New England Exposed

In Connecticut, the land of steady habits, any sort of behavior that stands out is discouraged, and scandal is distasteful. For this reason, the moose problem is a facet of rural Connecticut life that has for the most part escaped public scrutiny. You don’t hear much about the moose. But they are real. Very real. It’s a situation that no one wants to discuss.

In the larger cities, like Hartford and Bridgeport, the moose problem is nonexistent. Urban living and the moose are not compatible. It is in the rural backwaters like West Barkhamstead, Granby, Tariffville, and Hebron where the moose have become an issue. There aren’t a lot of them, but they are hard to ignore.

For example, try regarding with equanimity the moose tailgating you in his battered Ford van, joyously honking his horn and bellowing well-lubricated moose calls into the chilly New England night. He’s consumed fifteen Red Bull & vodkas before starting his chaotic journey along the narrow two-lane roads that wind through the hills of Northwestern Connecticut. But he’s just getting started; the night is young!

Lynryd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Back My Bullets” is cranked up to air-raid siren levels on his van’s grotesquely overpowered stereo system. (Moose are big Southern rock fans, for reasons unknown to science.) His antlers rattle against the roof as he weaves in and out of traffic. Several fat roaches smolder in the ashtray as he lays rubber at every turn on the way to his local nightspot, a one-story fake log cabin called “The Stone Anvil” in a clearing along the side of Route 322, near the brook.

Here he is meeting four of his compadres for an evening of shot drinking, antler waving at the local band, putting divots in the pool table, and chick ogling. Moose have needs for companionship and intimacy, just as we do.

Fortunately, moose usually are too impaired to engage in effective pursuit or seduction. However, there are whispers that some of the beehives and deer hats sported by the locals cover nascent bumps on their skulls…and conceal scarlet “M”s on their foreheads. The next time you are in a bar on a Connecticut state road with a three-digit route number, you will see them, if you look carefully in the shadows. These tragic creatures, the inevitable result of moosily rocking out and looking for love in all the wrong places, are as yet unexamined by eugenicists.

How do I know about this terrifying underclass? Am I an anthropologist? No, I have simply observed these lost creatures huddled in dark corners in Connecticut taverns for over thirty years in the course of my career as a journeyman musician.

I knew nothing of moose as a child. As far as I was concerned, they were creatures in story books, or animals in cages at the zoo. I first encountered them shortly after I started working professionally as a musician. Around that time the drinking age in Connecticut went down to eighteen from twenty-one. Correspondingly, there was an increased demand for mediocre bar bands capable of further numbing the already limited sensibilities of local drinkers. Eager to experience the thrills these gilded palaces of sin offered, and big for my age, I was sixteen or seventeen when I started playing in bars.

It was then that I started noticing the moose, who frequented the roadhouses I played along with bikers, farmers, and factory workers. Hanging out by the pool table, the moose would discuss the best places to buy used auto parts for their customized pickup trucks and Ford vans, in between digging chunks out of the table felt with their hooves as they shanked the cue ball, or denting the pinball machines while trying to tilt them.

Arriving early in the evening, the moose mostly did shots of bar vodka, Seagram’s, or Four Roses. Then they chased them with bottles of Narragansett beer, arguably the worst beer ever made in the continental United States. (Or Miller ponies, the second worst beer ever made in the continental United States.)

Fortunately for all of us, Narragansett beer is no longer available. It was made in Rhode Island, along with Carling Black label, which I think you can still find, but should avoid. This was back in the early seventies, when there were still large regional breweries and brands. Most of them were bought out in the late seventies by the megabrands like Annheuser-Busch. Then the microbrewery fad arose as a response to the homogenization of the market in the late eighties. There were also great regional brands like Genesee, which you can still get in upstate New York.

Rolling Rock beer is also a survivor of that era. Some of the more intellectually evolved moose would drink it. But of course the luxe beer for moose is…Molson!!! Jack Daniels or Heineken was not in their budget. Moose are far more interested in results than process.

After ten or fifteen shots, the normally reticent moose can become quite loquacious. Having spent quite a bit of time on gigs over the years talking to them while trying to get around their antlers to reach the bathroom, I have learned quite a bit about the moose and their world.

Moose do speak English, but their vocabulary is limited, and mixed with words of their own dialect. This makes them difficult to understand, which generally suits them. Through long practice, however, they can clearly pronounce the names of the brands of liquor they can afford.

Early on, I learned that moose do have a sense of humor, but it’s very different than ours. As best I could tell, they think it’s hysterically funny for moose to be seen drinking Miller or Bud ponies. Moose also favor those yellow John Deere caps turned backwards. They seem to think that the sight of a moose wearing a cap that says “Deere” on it is the height of comedic sophistication. For some reason, they are also partial to “Eight Is Enough” reruns, and have a deep respect for the Fonz, whom they revere as inexplicably as the French revere Jerry Lewis. (I think they like his brown jacket and suave approach.)

Although they can be quite frightening in groups, the social situation of moose in rural Connecticut is actually rather sad. The moose (and the moomans, as they themselves call the largely silent, bumpy-headed hybrids; any hint of moose in one’s ancestry classifies you as a mooman) live a tenuous existence on the fringes of rural Connecticut society.

The difficulties for moose begin early, in elementary school. Although they excel at outdoor sports, moose have trouble with grammar and algebra. They are also not much on bathing, especially during the winter, which leads to taunting from their schoolmates.

Moose are proud, stubborn creatures. When they get frustrated, they act out. Most of them spend the majority of their school careers in detention, scuffing their hooves on the waxed floor as the hapless teacher looks at his watch, counting the hours to dismissal.

For all their size, the moose usually slip through the public schools in the smaller towns without much fuss. The schools are as eager to see them leave as they are to get out, so both sides try to make the transition as painless as possible. It is after the age of sixteen, when the moose can leave school legally, that they start causing trouble.

Moose start going to bars very young, as early as eighth grade. They are too big to card. The bouncers are not equipped to handle them, so they come into the bars even if they are underage. And those antlers are really lethal in a bar fight, of which I have seen too many.

Moose don’t get into fights that often, but when they do, there’s a special garage behind the station where the police shoot them with horse tranquilizers and leave them there to sober up. Even in western Connecticut, people don’t get swacked enough to pick fights with moose very often.

Not having social security numbers, the moose are not subject to either taxation or the draft. They earn the cash to maintain their vans, buy drinks and other mind-contracting substances, and replace their Lynryd Skynyrd eight-tracks by doing odd jobs in the summer and working on snow removal crews during the winter months. The moose have a tribal council that enforces a modicum of internal discipline (and acts as their liaison to local government), but they present a unified front (known as the Furry Brown Wall) to the outside world.

The local police and the moose have an understanding. If one of them is pulled over and the cop sees antlers, he writes the ticket and hands it into the window without checking the registration. The moose brings it to the tribal council, the treasurer (a mooman with access to a bank account) cuts a check payable to the town, and everybody’s happy. Fortunately, despite their appalling graduation rate and poor literacy skills, moose are very good drivers. That, coupled with their high tolerance for nefarious substances, means they crash their vans much less often than you would expect.

The moose and the locals have a peculiar symbiotic relationship. The moose (and moomans) perform unwelcome and tedious jobs that the community needs done, often at less than minimum wage. They work long hours without complaining, and largely stay out of sight apart from their sojourns in the local taverns. Anti-bureaucratic to the core, the moose fiercely resist any attempts to assimilate them any further into local society.

Moose, of course, don’t vote, but they do attend the town meetings religiously, gathering en masse in the back. They scratch their hooves, toss their antlers, and snort ominously if the discussion veers in a direction they find threatening. This is usually sufficient to change the subject.

For their part, the locals respect the work ethic of the moose and appreciate their convenience, but are deeply embarrassed by their presence, particularly the existence of moomans. If you bring up the subject of moose, they will deny any knowledge of the phenomenon. Or, if you point out evidence of their existence (such as hoofprints near the town snowplow), they will claim that the moose don’t actually live there, but really are from the next town over and are just passing through.

Both groups have their own reasons for not publicizing the situation. This conspiracy of silence has prevented any serious academic examination of the phenomenon. And what rumors have reached the larger cities of Hartford and Springfield, Massachusetts are usually dismissed as the drunken ravings of stir-crazy farmers.

So the moose have persisted over decades, a slightly whiffy, shadowy group clinging stubbornly to the fringes of rural Connecticut life. If they ever figure out that they are a minority and learn to manipulate EEO, or start making hip-hop records, we are all in for it. However, fortunately for all of us, their interests tend toward the immediately sensual rather than the careerist.

But if you find yourself in a small town in northwestern Connecticut and drive by a bar that has vans parked outside with antler-sized dents in the roofs, you’ll know that you’re on their turf. And if you hear a ragged chorus of “Gimme Three Steps” echoing through the parking lot around closing time, you are well advised to keep driving.