Town manager takes to the woods

“I’ve got my deer cams our there now, but I’m tagged out for this year,” he said Monday. “It’s the first time I’ve ever gotten three in a season.”

Safford shot his quota of doe about as early as possible, bringing down the two lady deer in the first two days of archery season back in October. His first arrow found its mark only 20 minutes after archery season started on Oct. 4. He got the second doe the next day and spent the rest of the three-week archery season going after a buck, but nothing.

Safford is a spectacled and mustachioed man of about 5 foot 8 inches; he’s a few weeks shy of turning 50. He wears a variety of colors of collared dress shirts and ties at the office, and traditional black and red checkered wool out in the woods. He also usually wears a smile; after all, anyone who’s ever chatted with the guy for a bit probably has heard Safford say, “Keep smiling.”

The log is the key

On a recent Monday, he smiles as he tells the story of bagging this year’s buck, a little modest about being interviewed but eager to talk about being in the woods.

“I’m out there,” he says, walking around the woods near his home in Elmore, tracking a buck, like he’s been doing all fall during his days off. It’s now the second weekend of rifle season, and even though he prefers the bow and arrow, he also wants to get a buck. But they’ve been stubbornly avoiding him.

So he sits down on a log and rests. He has a deer bleat (a homemade apparatus that approximates the sound of a doe) and sets up a mock scrape (think of a male animal marking his territory). He’s patient. He’s been known to take a snooze in the woods.

And then he hears a rustling from behind a nearby thicket. And this is hunting, folks: Get the big buck — 180 pounds, eight points — to come to you.

“Geez Louise, I couldn’t make out what it was, so I gave a little bleat, and drew it out toward my mock scrape, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Hunting history

These days, Safford enjoys hunting so much that he usually puts in a hundred hours before the season even starts. He’s also an avid ice fisherman.

But when he was growing up, he only kind of went hunting: “I poked around the woods a little in high school because everyone else did, but I didn’t have much luck.”

After a hiatus, he decided he wanted to get back into it, and a buddy took him to Rutland. He shot a pie tin with his new muzzleloader, and the next day he shot his first deer with it.

If you think that’s luck, consider the first time he got a deer with a bow and arrow.

Safford was working as the town manager in Essex and writing his master’s thesis on how the state lottery is a regressive tax, even as all his town hall colleague were shelling out every week for lotto tickets. He shook his head at their folly.

Then he shot a big buck, and he thought, “What the heck, it’s my lucky day,” and went into the Jericho Center Country Store and bought a Powerball ticket.

That ticket netted him $10,000, “which was about $6,000 after taxes that went, I think, into a nice new couch.”

That couch was his wife, Jen’s, idea. Jen was also the one responsible for introducing Safford to her father, Jerry Bates, the man who more than any other instilled in Safford the love of the woods. The two would go every year to Bates’ deer camp on the shoulder of Camel’s Hump and go hunting, becoming close, even though the father might have once had a skeptical eye on the young man courting his daughter.

“Then I put a ring on his daughter’s finger, and he gave me a rifle and a vest and said, ‘Welcome to the family,’” Safford said of his father-in-law, who has since died. “He really gave me a love and appreciation for hunting. He gave that gift to me and I’ll always be indebted to him for it.”

Democracy and the hunt

In a typical work week, Safford has to read and respond to hundreds of emails, phone calls and drop-in visits. Though the gown government has heads of its various departments, at least a little bit of all the town’s business — roads and bridges, law and order, ice skating rates, water, sewer, electricity, parking and all manner of permits — has to come through him. And everyone wants it done yesterday.

Hunting season offers a perfect time to get away; it’s when all the departments begin submitting their budgets for the next year. And a bunch of Stowe town employees take to the woods in the fall, the preferred vacation time for many a Vermonter. The Parks and Recreation staff goes hunting, and so do some of the electrical line workers, some road crew members, a few of the cops and firefighters and rescue squad volunteers.

It’s even more prevalent in some towns. When he was town manager in Hardwick in the 1990s, he recalled, “practically the whole town would shut down” during hunting season.

He’s the kind of guy who emails a picture of his buck in the same message in which he comments on a particular municipal matter, a very Vermont kind of government transparency.

He said hunting and fishing and just being outside allow him to reflect on the natural order of things. There’s often no cellphone service, certainly no email access.

And anyone who has met Safford the manager might understand how becoming Safford the outdoorsman on the weekends helps him maintain that aw-shucks level of cool.

“Democracy is meant to go slow,” he said. “I think there’s a lost art of patience, of letting something unfold. In today’s society, it takes a lot to sit on a log for two hours.”