350.org Middlebury Drum Circle 10-24-09

Food for 350

Spurred by the recent harvest and the impending winter, a lot of us have been thinking harder about food this month.

This week we’re turning that thinking into a special effort to collect donations to the local food shelf (at the co-op in the donation box inside the entrance), and to share the season’s bounty during a giant potluck.

The Middlebury Farmer’s Market has been an ongoing inspiration for this focus on the scrumptious and nourishing. The market has been in its true glory since late August, but it has never been so glorious as this month. For example, last Saturday at the market you could buy -- in addition to the usual squashes, jams, meat and root vegetables of autumn -- green beans, watermelon and strawberries.

Imagine that: Local strawberries in mid-October, courtesy of the hard work of Scott Green and Suzanne Young, the Singing Cedars couple.

Things have reached the point where, in a couple of years I expect to be able to go the winter farmer’s market in the Town Hall Theater and buy fresh local lettuce.

It makes sense that we think a lot about food. Everybody has a tummy and we all get hungry several times a day. What could be more natural?

But it’s that very naturalness - -and the threats to nature in the form of environmental degradation and climate change – that have now also made food into a political and social concern.

This Saturday, Oct. 24, we’ll put some of the recent rethinking about food into action around climate change and feeding the hungry, as part of the International Day of Climate Action (www.350.org).

In Addison County, throughout the U.S. and in more than 100 other nations around the planet, hundreds of thousands of people will participate in activities that will create a global awareness of the number 350 -- the most important number in the world.

Most important because 350 parts per million carbon is, over time, the maximum sustainable level of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere.

We’re now at 387, and climbing.

Ahead of the coming December negotiations in Copenhagen to come up with an
international treaty of climate change, it’s fitting that the main events in Addison County this weekend will focus on food.

In addition to the “Food for 350” drive to collect 350 donations to the local food
shelf, on the Middlebury Green at noon on Saturday, hundreds of hearty and hungry souls will gather around what they hope will be 350 potluck dishes (www.350.org/middlebury).

It’s a fine way to celebrate the increasingly important role that local food production plays in Vermont culture. What better way to honor the bounty of earth’s autumnal fecundity – and to note how climate change would imperil that bounty – than to gather and eat?

Of course the world won’t change just because we have a good meal. As the core organizers of Saturday’s actions put it:

“Make no mistake—getting back to 350 means transforming our world. It means building solar arrays instead of coal plants, it means planting trees instead of clear-cutting rainforests, it means increasing efficiency and decreasing our waste.

“Getting to 350 means developing a thousand different solutions—all of which will become much easier if we have a global treaty grounded in the latest science and built around the principles of equity and justice. To get this kind of treaty, we need a movement of people who care enough about our shared global future to get involved and make their voices heard.”

Eating well, and locally, is a sly, fun way to get people involved.

The food movement, and the clever political uses to which food is now being put in service of admirable aims, have been an eye-opener for those us who cut our political teeth on the civil rights movement and ending the Vietnam War.

We came of age in a time when effecting change meant waging a kind of war – against racism, against the tragic arrogance of America’s wars in Southeast Asia. Combating those evils, we had reasons to be angry even when our primary weapons were nonviolent organizing.

To be sure, there’s plenty to be angry about when it comes to global warming and the changes in climate that threaten the very balance of nature. For starters, there’s mindless consumption (we can look in our closets and living rooms for evidence of that), corporate greed in the coal and oil industries, and enduring cowardice on the part of our elected leaders.

Organizing around food, though, changes the conversation.

When we talk about food we’re less likely to be pointing fingers at what the other guys are doing wrong. Instead, the conversation starts with our common interest in what tastes good. And what tastes best is often what’s been grown close to home.

From the standpoint of our increasingly unstable climate, it matters where the food we eat was grown. Transporting edibles from distant markets – peaches flown on 747’s from Chile to the U.S. in January, then trucked hundreds of miles to supermarkets – consumes a lot of fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel is a primary cause of climate change and the overheating that threatens life on earth.

All of this has a special resonance for Vermont, home of the original back-to-the-land movement. After all, that movement was first spurred by Scott and Helen Nearing and their compatriots, then by Sixties and Seventies refugees seeking a simpler life in the Green Mountains.

In this century, it was a group of Middlebury College students, inspired by Ripton writer Bill McKibben and Jon Isham, an economics professor, who created the model for Saturday’s International Day of Climate Action.

Their first big effort to get our political leaders to address climate change, back in 2006, was a week’s walk from Robert Frost’s old stomping grounds in Ripton, up to Burlington. Then it was the first national day of climate action, called Step It Up.

Now here we are on the verge of the first day of actions all over the planet.

It all started with a bunch of local dreamers. As Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Irreversible global warming will drastically alter where and how we can grow our food. It will displace millions of people and potentially cause widespread hunger on a global scale.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not too late to act, and to eat.

I hope this Saturday, you’ll come become a part of that (not so small) group of thoughtful, committed citizens. Bring a small dish to the Middlebury Green (RSVP at middpotluck@gmail.com). Drop a can in the “Food for 350” bin at the co-op.

And be glad for a full belly, and a day full of hope for the planet.

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The Excesses and Successes of Summer

It’s Labor Day weekend, and you know what that means, don’t you?

It’s time to tote up all the things you failed to do this summer.

But if your list starts with, “I failed to grow any tomatoes,” tear that one up and start over again. Nobody in the entire state of Vermont managed to grow tomatoes this summer --thanks to the same blight that turned the entire island of Ireland into one large launching pad for America, back when the blight was doing to Irish potatoes what the Yankees have lately been doing to the Red Sox.

Among the things I failed to do this summer were:

Go hiking in the High Peaks of the Adirondacks, which, though they are as close as Montpelier, might as well be in Kansas as far as my hiking habits are concerned. Gaze longingly at the peaks every day? Yep, I did that. Set foot in them? Negatory.

Go sailing on Lake Champlain. What can I say? The sailing stinks when it’s raining. Which, in case the recent weather has dried out your brain, is what it did for 80 days and 80 nights from Memorial Day through July.

Go hear Jackson Browne at Shelburne Farms. I bypassed this concert as a money-saving measure and have been regretting it ever since. I first saw Jackson perform in Vermont in Burlington on St. Patrick’s’ Day in 1975. David Lindley’s rousing fiddle reels, played in between songs from Jackson’s “Late for the Sky” LP, are still echoing out there somewhere in the Green Mountains. And the next time Jackson comes to Vermont, both of us will probably be in wheelchairs.

But I did manage to undertake several other activities this summer, thanks to the company of a couple of energetic friends with free time on their hands. Among those activities:

We camped at Maidstone, one of Vermont’s nice little state parks. Maidstone is known for it loons and is halfway to the Arctic Circle, so it take some getting to. But get there we did. Just in time to put up the tent, sleep fitfully on foam mats approximately the “thickness” of a sheet of paper, and take down the tents the next morning.

I swam in the Atlantic Ocean. Like every self-respecting Vermonter, I went to Maine this summer because it is a lovely state with a world-famous coastline -- and summer is the only conceivable season that anyone other than a lobster would actually want to go there.
My swimming experience confirmed that, compared to the coastal waters of Maine, the New Haven River is a hot tub.
I managed to eat out a few nights this summer, despite a household budget weighted down by the recession. Mary’s at Baldwin Creek continues to provide a stellar evening, especially when a close friend is in town to treat you to chef Doug Mack’s take on local venison, accompanied by a glass of Lincoln Peak red.

Other culinary highlights: Mussels on the deck at the Storm Café are always a treat on a sultry summer’s eve. The Park Squeeze in Vergennes should franchise its “Be the Bowl” formula, which someone on Chowhound.com aptly describes as “design-your-own-soup.” And just to make it a memorable summer for the gustatory arts, American Flatbread has decided to stay open not just Friday and Saturday nights, but every Tuesday through Saturday – my definition of pizza heaven.

On my to-do list before the official end of summer are sandwiches from Almost Home in Bristol; another trip to A Starry Night in Ferrisburg; and the Farmer’s Diner and the new tea shop in Middlebury’s Marble Works.

I moved, yet again. That makes it five houses in little more than four years. I’m so sick of moving that I’ve vowed to never do it again. They’re gonna have to carry me out of my current digs in a police car, or a hearse.

Memo to the Obama Administration: forget all those torture techniques the Bushies developed at Guantanamo. They’re so 2003. Just take those alleged terrorists, give them the average American’s 30 years of personal possessions, and make them move their household every week until they tell you where Osama bin Laden is hiding. We’ll know by Halloween.

I finally made it up to the Bread Loaf Campus, to see a play put on by the acting troupe that is in residence there every summer. The play was “The Changeling,” by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, written in about 1622.

From that evening’s experience I concluded it is in fact possible to combine good set design, skillful direction and decent acting and, if the play is as bizarre as this one, turn it all into a truly hideous night at the theater.

Let’s just say that the people sitting next to me left after Act One, and I spent Act Two envying them.

Like everybody else in Addison County, I had a steady stream of houseguests this summer. Tom and Susie and Eva arrived Memorial Day weekend, two days after my latest move, and joined 10 others and me for dinner at my new house the next night. We dined on barbequed local goat sausage, which we ate while sitting on moving boxes.

Ross and Barbara came up from D.C. so Ross could again demonstrate that he’s a far better fisherman than I. Dan got here twice from San Francisco, which was further evidence of his ability to maintain friendships across continents and decades, and helps explain why it takes 17 smart phones to hold the complete list of everyone he knows.

Even my ex-girlfriend -- who lives in Brooklyn and was visiting friends in Middlebury apparently for the express purpose of ignoring me while she was in town -- made it over for dinner one night in June.

I believe the chill is finally coming off the place on the couch where she sat. But it’s hard to tell, now that the nighttime temperatures are getting down into the 30s.

Along the Muddy but Fair Otter Creek

If it weren’t for Otter Creek, you wouldn’t be reading this.

In fact, Middlebury wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for Otter Creek.

Those of us who live here might well have found our way to another beautiful part of Vermont. But likely not Addison County, given how so much of the region’s human history and habitation are tied to the misnamed river – it’s not a creek -- that runs through it.

The First People, or Native Americans, called it Wanakake-Took (Otter Creek) or Pecouktook (Crooked River).

Fortunately for chambers of commerce to come, the original European invaders didn’t translate that as the less-poetic Crooked Creek.

Crooked it was. But it was also, in the absence of roads, for many years the only way into the interior from Lake Champlain. And for settlers coming up from Connecticut, it was the only way to the lake.

Where the Otter ends its 70-some-mile northward journey, draining more than 1,000 square miles and flowing into Lake Champlain, the British and American naval forces fought a crucial battle in 1814 that focused on Fort Cassin at the rivermouth.

It was a much quieter aftermath the followed the wars that had crossed Otter land until then. The violence faded as American dominance supplanted the natives, the English and the French.

Today, casual visitors and many longtime residents alike think of the creek primarily because of its picturesque waterfalls in Middlebury and Vergennes.

For most of the 19th century, the two towns and their water-driven mills vied for local pre-eminence.

Vergennes had water access to Lake Champlain, making it a key trading town supplemented by mills. Four of the first five steamboats to ply the lake were built in Vergennes, according to James E. Petersen’s 1990 book, Otter Creek: The Indian Road, from which I have drawn most of the historical notes here.

When the mountainous fields and grazing lands were played out in the 1830s and later, many a young Addison County man left his home territory on a packet boat out of Vergennes, headed five days west on the canals to Buffalo and even farther west from there, seeking a new life unbounded by green mountains.

Those young men left behind them a county whose signature waterway remained the one that had carried them away. The Otter proved to be enough, along with the farms and timberland around it, to sustain a good-enough life here.

Not so good that the place got overrun, though,

“Its waters are muddy. Its bottom is muddier and in places it is no more than 10 feet deep,” Petersen writes. “It’s sluggish and ready to spring its banks at the slightest provocation. And this is what has saved it from civilization.”

The irony is that for nearly all of the last century, civilization itself turned away from the Otter.

Because of the growth of the railroads, the decline of the mills and the growing availability of coal and oil, the Otter was no longer needed for travel or power.

In Vergennes, the center of town moved up the hill along what is now Route 22A. In Middlebury, Joseph Battell built a downtown block that seems, even today, to almost deliberately turn its back to the river, shunning the watercourse as if it weren’t worth a second thought.

This neglect continued through most of the 20th century. The mill buildings of Vergennes and Middlebury, once the very reason these places existed, fell into ruin.

Except for hydropower facilities – four of them in four miles below Middlebury’s downtown falls – the river had essentially lost all its once-vigorous utility.

It wasn’t until 1989, with the construction of the pedestrian bridge over Otter Creek connecting downtown with the Marbleworks, that the shire town began to reclaim its riverfront.

That reclamation continues. The park area of the Marbleworks hosts the twice-weekly farmers market that overlooks the creek, its view now enhanced by recent brushclearing.

Plans call for further development of that area to take better advantage of the view – which on a good day might include a fly fisherman casting for browns below the falls, or even a kayaker plunging over the falls themselves.

Most noticeably today, the creek is finally being bridged by a second span in downtown Middlebury. The booming of bridge construction resounds through town. It must make for some pretty interesting lunchtime conversations at the nearby Mr. Ups.

But I’d say that the real pleasures of Otter Creek, beyond its every-mesmerizing waterfalls, are quiet ones.

I’ve come to see this thanks to my recent move to the upstairs of a converted shop building in Middlebury right on the banks of Otter Creek.

To the north I can see the restored span of Pulp Mill Bridge, completed by the Waltham Turnpike Company in 1820 and restored in 1980. Beyond the covered bridge, the falls simmer in the breeze from the north.

Beavers and otters, Canada geese and Mallards ply the banks. Occasionally from across the way in the wonderful new Otter View Park, a wary deer will come down to the bank to drink.

In 1881, Henry Ripley Doerr read his poem at a celebration commemorating what was billed as a centennial celebration of Otter Creek. Most of the 28 stanzas have been lost, but this description remains:

O, valley of the Otter, fair
As eyes have ever seen
With clustered hamlets, mighty peaks
And hills of emerald green

In that valley, from the deck where I’m writing this overlooking the fair Otter, I can see upstream to the new viewing deck on the riverbank. Beyond there lies the top of the spire of Mead Chapel, at Middlebury College.

I first came to that campus in 1969. Looking upstream from my new home, I can measure how far I’ve come during the past four decades.

I calculate it in river terms, as the First People did: about a half-mile downstream along the Wanakake-took.

- 30 -

In This Rain, Even Herons Are Rusty

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer.

But five Addison County farmers just announced they’re selling their cows and going into rice farming.

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer, but local realtors have announced they’re now selling newly created waterfront property on the shores of Lake Champlain.

In Lincoln.

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer, but Kevin Costner just announced he’s chosen Vermont as the shooting location for Waterworld II.

I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot this summer, but:

* FEMA is preparing to evacuate Addison County residents to the ice hockey arena at Middelbury College.

* Climate activists have switched their focus from global warming to global wetting.

* As confirmed by countless sitings along the Lemon Fair, cows can in fact swim.

* I’ve been getting sympathy cards from my friends in Seattle.

* They’ve renamed the White River and are now calling it the Brown River.

* J.K. Rowling has announced that she’s writing another Harry Potter book. This one will feature a Vermont-based form of Quidditch. It’s underwater and requires not broomsticks, but submarines.

* I saw a blue heron yesterday that had rust on it.

* The Mt. Abe high school athletic department has announced it will be creating a surfing team.

* * *

It almost goes without saying that, for those of us who worry about global warming, this soggy summer is a sign of the apocalypse.

The computer models, after all, have long predicted that sudden, drenching cloudbursts would be one mark of climate change in New England. The kind of downpours we had last Sunday when it rained an inch an hour and the kind we had last summer, which turned Ripton roads into 10-foot-deep ditches.

As my friend Barbara, a college professor and Midwestern transplant, pointed out to me, you know things are changing when Vermont is being pelted with rain and it’s dry and 105 degrees in Seattle.

But maybe things aren’t changing as much as some of us relative latecomers might think.

As my other friend Barbara, who has lived here for 80 years, told me, “There’s nothing the weather in Vermont can throw at us that we haven’t already seen here before.”

* * *

So what’s a Vermonter to do in the face of all this rain?

Even as wet as things have been, it’s still worth getting out in the Vermont summer.
One bonus to all this rain, for example, is that the tubing is still terrific on the White River.

Several friends and I recently went tubing down the White and found it to be flowing quite nicely. We twirled our way down several miles of the river, stopping for a swim and a swing on ropes suspended from a riverside birch tree.

Last weekend, we trekked into far northern Vermont to camp at the state park along Maidstone Lake. It’s one of those places that make you glad your tax dollars are being put to a good use, to preserve a remote shoreline for lean-tos and tent sites.

The rain held off as we pitched our tents, and at dusk and again the next morning, we swam in the silky Maidstone waters.

As we made our way Sunday morning across the top of the state and past the blustery shores of Lake Willoughby, we dropped down into Glover.

There, of course, we had to make the requisite stop at the general store, to see the stuffed moose that occupies a place of honor inside the store.

“Second largest moose ever shot in Vermont,” a plaque informed us. Around the moose was a moldy menagerie of stuffed bears, foxes, raccoons, and minks. The kind of thing you’d see only in the Northeast Kingdom.

The real point of the trek, though, was to see Bread and Puppet.

Some four decades after its founding, this hearty theatrical troupe offers free performances at its Glover headquarters every Sunday. They’ve scaled way back from the annual circus that brought out 20,000 people, seemingly half of them stoned-out Phish heads.

But the pageantry goes on, combining broad humor with populist political messages that are again frightennly relevant, as the banks are bailed out and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rage on.

Bread and Puppet’s performances take place in a spacious outdoor amphitheater, weather permitting.

But it was little surprise last Sunday that the weather did not permit. The show was moved to a large indoor barn.

The band played “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey.” We booed the banker puppets and cheered when The Mountain puppet triumphed over the money men.
Outside, it poured.

And I’m not saying it’s been raining a lot lately, but instead of driving home from Bread and Puppet, we had to swim.

And when the electricity went out this week, instead of emailing this column in to the paper, I had to get in the kayak, paddle upriver, and deliver it by hand

Fly fishing for Frustration

As humans emerged from the mire of the Middle Ages in the Enlightenment, they began to feel rather sure of themselves. In response, God first invented golf to frustrate the upstart species.

Perhaps he was concerned that life was getting too easy as feudalism faded into memory. So he decided that trying to hit a little white ball over great distances, into a hole in the ground, would sufficiently confound any hubristic impulses that humans might have.

Apparently not fully satisfied with the result – those darn humans kept thinking they were God – he retaliated by inventing Izaak Walton and his infernal pursuit, the fine art of fly-fishing.

Everything about this masochistic endeavor is designed to humble humans, by make it impossible to actually catch a fish.

Just getting the fly attached to the line requires the knot-tying skills of a surgeon. Properly casting a fly takes the hand-eye coordination of a major league pitcher.

On the rare occasions when the fly is properly tied and the line is correctly cast, it’s inevitably floating in a spot where there are no fish.

Or in a spot where the fish look at the fly and say to themselves, “He thinks I’d want to eat that piece of garbage?”

The classic example of the philosophy behind fly-fishing is “matching the hatch.” You want to bop trout on the nose with whatever creepily emerging bugs they’re consuming at the moment.

Stoneflies are the current favorite. They look like miniature dinosaurs, and they leave behind exoskeletons that resemble bad tattoos. But trout love them, along with the mayflies, caddis and other creatures that make up piscatorial haute cuisine.

As a result, fly fishermen spend countless hours and dollars tying and buying flies that resemble larval, crawling and flying insects. Some flies are even tied to look like mice that have fallen into the water, and are meant to attract trout that are more than foot long.

The kind of trout, in other words, that no longer exist in Vermont. Except in the telling.

Normal, sensible fisherman – those who use a spincasting rig that doesn’t require a year of practice to learn how to cast -- solve the challenge of luring fish by using tasty worms. Better yet, they employ concoctions such as the almost-irresistible Powerbait, along with shiny, spinning lures that turn fish into attack machines, thinking they are biting into a tasty minnow and not a deadly piece of barbed steel.

As for the barbs themselves, of course, truly dedicated fly fishermen debarb their hooks.

This practice is designed to remove the last likelihood that a deluded fishermen will ever actually land a fish -- should a fish be so stupid as to try to ingest a fly tied with deer’s hair, chicken feathers, or the fur from a rabbit’s face.

As if these normal humiliations were not sufficient to remind me that I have no place on a river, once a year my friend Ross comes up from Washington, D.C. and hauls me out onto our local streams.

Ross is one of those rare fly fishermen who actually know how to catch trout on a fly. God, you see, looses a few skilled fishermen upon the world to drive the rest of us poor suckers crazy.

Just to make the point again and again, Ross has hauled me out into waters in or near Gettysburg, Pa., Camp David, Md., and the Dordogne region of France.

But his specialty is proving to his doubting friend Greg, year after year, that there are actually fish in the Middlebury and New Haven rivers.

As is our custom, this year’s foolishness began on the New Haven. I’ve been watching Ross catch fish out there since well before the Dog Team turned from restaurant into ruin.

The Dog Team is a convenient spot for both of us. Fishing there means Ross can arrive at dawn’s early light and I can sleep in, meeting him there after breakfast and a hearty cup of tea.

By the time I get out on the water, he’s invariably caught a couple trout and nearly caught several more. He describes them in great detail: how he cast to them, how they took the fly, and the hour-long battle that ensued until he finally overcame the mighty struggles of his prey and pulled in a 42-inch rainbow. As I said, it’s all in the telling.

The culmination of last week’s flagellation occurred on the Middlebury River.
Ross had already landed seven rainbows there a couple of days earlier. He’d left me behind in the office to try to make a living, so I could afford to pay for all the flies I was about to lose under rocks and hanging from tree branches.

We had arranged that I would catch up to him at a spot along the Middlebury that he’d never seen before.

But when I came down the road last Thursday morning an hour after Ross had first begun fishing, I found his car parked at a turnoff where we’d fished four years ago.

I was astonished to see he had the courage to park there. Last time we’d fished the spot, we were airlifted out by several million mosquitoes. They finally grew tired of flying us around and dropped us somewhere near Swamp Road, so the blackflies and vultures could finish off our carcasses.

We soon decided to drive to a spot upstream. Entering the water, we found a raspberry bush whose fruit had just come into its July sweetness. We fortified ourselves like bears and headed out on the water to rip some lips.

I proceeded to spend most of the morning wrapping my fly around the delicate tippet to which it was tied, then snarling the whole thing around the rod itself.

In between these Chaplinesque screw-ups, I managed to get a fly or two to actually land in the water. Then the trout proceeded to do their usual laughing thing.

Ross, of course, was hauling in one fish after another. He had the exact fly they wanted, the one I came to think of as the Magic Bug. I tried several similar bugs but lacked both that exact pattern and his facility at presenting it to the fish, just so. (Remember, God was on Ross’s side, not mine.)

I consoled myself by listening to the river’s gurgle and watching the play of light on its roily surface. As the saying goes, for me the fishing was great even if the catching wasn’t.
- 30 -

At Reunion, the Comfort of Old Friends

At reunion, the comfort of old friends

By Gregory Dennis

We Baby Boomers were born in the wake of World War II, out of our parents’ desire for abundant normalcy.

Our parents’ world had been torn apart by depression and then war. In the wake of those traumas, their kids were going to be safe from harm – riding their bicycles down the sidewalks of perpetually tranquil neighborhoods.

And when it was time for their kids to go off to college, if they were lucky enough they were going to matriculate at places like Middlebury College.

We reveled in the abundance our parents created, the opportunities for summer camp and travel and good schools. And when we began to mature and our parents’ "normal" got dumb, murderous or boring, we changed the paradigm. No one was going to tell us what couldn’t be done.

But in the subsequent decades, we have learned, the world isn’t always a kind place.

Life doesn’t work out as we’d hoped. Friendships fade. We aren’t the heroes we’d planned to be. Careers go south or stall out. Our parents and children and spouses disappoint us.

The world, we now know, can be a lonely place.

So it was oddly comforting last weekend, at my 35th Middlebury College reunion, for my classmates and I to be reminded that we’d gone to college with an especially nice bunch of people.

It seems that each subsequent reunion – and I’ve been to all seven of them since our 1974 graduation – brings forth more of my classmates’ gentler side.

We spent the first two or three reunions trying to impress each other. Then we bragged at the next few gatherings about our kids and adventures.

These days we just have a good time in the company of friends and equals. We know enough about the world’s unkindness that the company of old friends is that much sweeter.

Inevitably, having a good time at reunion means retelling tales of our ignorant youth.
Launching off the 30-meter ski jump at the Snow Bowl on jumping skis during a Winter Carnival competition, without ever having been off a jump before.

Stoned, narrow-miss encounters with Campus Security, who came to tell a classmate that the car he’d reported as stolen was in fact down by the dining hall, right where he’d parked it the night before.

Drunken dares that prompted two beer-fueled classmates to ride naked, in February, atop a car that was crossing the bridge on the way home from a booze trip to Plattsburgh.

Geez, we were stupid.

It’s amazing we ever made it to graduation.

Beyond these stories of oft-wasted youth, though, lie more interesting tales of life since we left college.

Pretty much everyone there had been successful on his or her own terms. After all, people who feel like losers don’t go to college reunions.

To explore some of what our experiences have taught us, we pulled together a panel of five classmates, under the rubric of ”It’s All About the Journey” -- unofficially titled “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been” (launch Frisbee and cue the Jerry Garcia guitar solo).

On the panel were survivors of divorce, cancer, Wall Street, parenting, and heterosexuality.

One classmate talked about being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He described his tortuous odyssey through the medical industrial complex to get the treatment that was best for him, as doctors bid for his insurance dollars with confusing, competing claims and treatments.

Another man, attending with his boyfriend and “out” for the first time at a reunion, described how ignorant he, and all of us, were about homosexuality as students. How he’d come to learn of his own homosexuality after college, and how important the battle for true equality remains.

If someone you love comes out to you as gay, he told us, the only right answer is “I love you.” And if you can’t give that answer, take a long hard look within yourself and find out why.

A couple of parents told of watching their children struggle with cancer and mental illness. Having experienced things no parent should have to, they told us that love and connection were what had pulled them through, and what still matter most to them.

One panelist talked of his greatly satisfying conversion from investment banker to organic beef farmer. Another observed that she was good at many things but had never excelled at the one pursuit that would make her a true achiever, someone worth an article in the paper.

She volunteers in the court system as part of what she calls the “liberal arts life.” She dances, does yoga, reads, and hangs out with her children. Even when you were schooled among a bunch of Middlebury College overachievers, she reminded us, you don’t have to be a star to live a worthwhile life.

But she added that she had lived for a long time with the tension that many women our age have felt, to be both Super Mom and a worldly success. “We still don’t have the balance right,” she said.

Was there a common theme there among the panelists? Something we could sum up as “our” identity, “our” experience?

Definitely not. Among a group of privileged, almost exclusively white people, the perspectives and experiences were about as diverse as they could be.

In truth, my class and any college class – and especially any generation, Baby Boomer or other – can’t be categorized by a few words or even by the era in which we came of age. To some of us, for example, Vietnam and the first Earth Day were the defining events of the day. For others, they were just distant headlines.

I spoke to several classmates after the reunion who said they’d had long and meaningful conversations with classmates to whom they’d hardly ever spoken when we were college students. Today, they have a lot to say to each other.

Their present-day connection was born largely out of what we shared at that campus on the hill, and how those four years have shaped the 35 years since then.

We’ve all made it through the same crucible. We’ve survived and mostly thrived. We’ve shared the experiences of coming to the same college in exactly the same year, entering the work world at the same moment, raising children in the same decades, making our lives out of much of the same raw material.

It’s the bond of a common journey we share with our classmates, the kind of ties one doesn’t share even with a sibling or spouse.

And when we gather every five years to tell the same old stories and reflect again on what it’s all meant, it makes the world seem a lot less lonely.

- 30 –

Staples Comes Unglued

The end of plans to place a Staples store in Middlebury is yet another marker of how things have changed in Vermont.

Once upon a time maybe 30 years ago, any economic activity that wasn’t obviously polluting was welcomed by virtually all elements of Addison County.

Now, though, even community-oriented projects like Eastview can be delayed for years by a neighbor or two worried about the view out their windows. And woe be onto anyone who proposes to bring a nationally recognized brand such as Staples into town.

Much of the opposition to the Staples store proposed for The Centre, near the Hannaford supermarket, revolved around loyalty to Middlebury’s downtown stationery store. That store, like the independent bookstore next to it, is a much loved and endangered species. The organized opposition, calling itself Middlebury Area Residents for Sustainability (a curious acronym of MARS, which I guess makes them Martians), also voiced concerns about the visual appearance of the store, parking, traffic and a degradation of the ever-elusive community character.

The minisucule opposition to Eastview is just bizarre. But in the case of Staples, all the concerns voiced by the opponents made sense. We’re much the better place for the efforts of community watchdogs like these folks.

But I confess to watching the demise of the Staples plans with some misgivings. Little of the merchandise it would have sold would actually compete with any downtown stores. Moreoever, many of us will still be left driving to Williston or Rutland for major purchases such as computers, office furniture and other bigger-ticket items.

Yes, there are local alternatives to that long car trip and yes, you can order door-to-door delivery from a distant Staples. But the continuing absence of a local Staples-like store provides yet another excuse to expand our carbon footprint by racing off to another county for our many of our office supplies and equipment.

And the cynic in me can’t help but wonder if the Martians who opposed the local Staples -- and Starbucks before it -- really mean it when they say their opposition is to chain stores.

Will Olympia Sports, TJ Maxx, Hannaford and Shaw’s be next on their hit list??
Rite Aid, Aubuchon Hardware and Kinney Drugs? What about the Marbleworks Pharmacy, which has demonstrated dangerous chain-like tendencies by having two stores, one in Middlebury and another in Vergennes?

If you’d like to discuss this topic in person, you can find me having a mass-produced burger at McDonald’s.

* * *

We may be in a major recession, but you’d never know it from what gets left behind by affluent students who are anxious to blow this joint.

For those of us who grew up believing that one’s person’s trash is another’s treasure, the annual May departure of a couple thousand Middlebury College students is true cause for celebration.

The college of course organizes and sells off most of the treasure dumped by students at the end of the academic year. But for those able to escape the eagle eyes of campus security, the drop zones themselves are bonanzas. So, too, are the piles of barely used items that are left at various spots around town, on the curb outside student rental housing.

Over the past holiday weekend, several friends and I rescued silk pillows, rugs, a futon, hockey skates and a Schwinn cruising bike, courtesy of the newly departed students.

* * *

I got my own personal taste of the students’ dilemma last week, when I moved my home and home office to another location across town.

Moving is in theory a good excuse to divest oneself of unused worldly goods. But I’m one of those people who looks at a shirt I haven’t touched in three years and says, “Well, you never know, I might want to wear that someday.”

Which is part of the reason that I have so many jackets. They range in style from an enormous sheepskin coat and truly hideous matching hood, which I acquired at a used-clothing store in Rochester, to several ski parkas and light-weight windbreaker. Apparently I have a jacket for every five-degree shift in temperature, ranging from 20-below to 70-above.

Butpackrat tendencies do pay off eventually.

For example, it began to rain rather steadily last Sunday morning as the hour approach for the college’s graduation ceremonies. I was attending the first graduation ceremony since my brother’s commencement in 1976 (speaker: Anne Morrow Lindbergh). Among this week’s Midd grads unleashed upon the world was my delightful young friend Abel Fillion, whose parents were college classmates of mine.

Over my last four household relocations, Packrat Greg has held onto a pair of rain pants that I’d never worn. But they sure did come in handy during the graduation deluge.

* * *

Green is cool, in case you missed that memo, and one company that’s riding the green wave is Vergennes-based Country Home Products. The company’s Neuton electric mower was highlighted, and favorably reviewed, last week in the Wall Street Journal..

* * *

Favorite bumperstickers seen around town:

“Gun control means using two hands.”
“Quit wishing. Go fishing.”
And this from a Buddhist among us:
“Honk if you don’t exist.”

* * *

Lastly, I want to correct an error I made in a previous column. In a discussion of the college’s cost-cutting plans, I stated that the “Atwood” dining hall would be closed to everyday use. I meant to say Atwater, which is its correct name.
For the record, the Atwood’s are my brother’s neighbors in Dedham, Mass.
And of course I always refer to them, in my neverending confusion, as the Atwater’s.

- 30 –

Getting to 350 Amid All the Carbon

With the beginning of the end in sight for this most recent economic crisis, Big Thinkers are turning their focus back to even bigger problems – climate change chief among them.

Again here, Vermonters can lead the way to a better life, as we have done historically on independence and abolition, and more recently on child healthcare and marriage equality.

This time around the stakes will be a lot higher than they were in one Vermont Republican senatorial primary, when the key question was how many teats there are on a cow.

In the U.S., Congress is struggling with a “cap and trade” bill that might slightly cut carbon emissions, which come primarily from burning oil and coal. Yet few leaders are ready to vote for what is truly needed: a tax on carbon to drastically cut emissions, with a corresponding dividend regularly paid back to every American.

Internationally, the focus is on a meeting of the “G20” leaders in July. After that, everyone is gearing up for the December meeting in Copenhagen that will supplant the Kyoto goals on global warming.

And in places as far flung as Lebanon, India and South Africa, an intrepid band of activists, who have their roots in Addison County, is organizing a planetary effort to place in every thinking person’s mind the number 350 – that is, 350 parts per million of carbon.

Scientists have concluded that 350 ppm is the maximum amount of carbon the atmosphere can hold and still support human life as we know it.

Here’s the bad news: We’re already above 380 ppm and rising. There is so much carbon already loaded into the atmosphere that many levelheaded experts think we can’t avoid at least some of the drastic impacts.

Left unchecked, climate change will melt the icecaps, flood our coastlines, imperil our food supply, bring us Katrina-level hurricanes on a regular basis, and drive many species into extinction. Nature’s rich beauty will fade to deserts, dead seas and autumnal maples that are a drab brown.

Against that backdrop, a tribe of climate-change activists gathered earlier this month at Middlebury College to contemplate “getting to 350,” achieving a better life organized around sustainable communities rather than unsustainable consumption.

(For more on the basics and to see what you can do, see www.350.org.)

Organized by the steadfast professor Jon Isham, the conference drew native Vermonters, a few hangers-on like myself, and Midd grad activists who, like our president, are proud to call themselves organizers. They spend their days and nights lobbying Congress and the G20 nations, impressive young adults who earned their climate stripes as students here.

We heard top NASA climatologist James Hansen lay out the irrefutable evidence that unless we act now, catastrophe awaits us. We contemplated the frightening gap between the destruction that the science says is approaching, and the public’s heedlessness of this threat.

One recent national survey on the top issues found Americans don’t even rank “the environment” in the top 20. Indeed, many conference participants confessed in private that they feel humanity will only take meaningful action to curb climate change once the inevitable catastrophes and “die off” begin to occur.

Looking battle-hardened and prophetic, Ripton resident Bill McKibben was Skyped into the conference from New Zealand. He’s been there and in many other nations as part of the 350 campaign, organizing surfers and scuba divers, mountain climbers and ordinary citizens, to gather in hundreds of events on Oct. 24.

On that day six weeks before the Copenhagen conference, we’ll convene in iconic natural settings and simple parks and squares around the glob, in hopes of impressing those three simple digits –3-5-0 -- upon the world’s consciousness.

Surprisingly, the mood at the conference was a hopeful one though we contemplated the most dire of fates.

The younger activists reminded us that climate change is both peril and opportunity, because it is forcing us to rethink how we organize our communities and our economy. And in this movement as in so many past ones, the youth have a lot to teach their elders.

Gatherings like this one inevitably focus on Big Ideas and Big Projects. Lew Milford from Clean Energy Group pointed to the need for “distributed innovation” around the globe to developing carbon-free energy. Charles Baron from Google, a Middlebury College grad, mapped out the search giant’s commitments to help meet its energy needs by developing massive geothermal energy production.

But in this inevitable focus on Big Ideas, a couple of them were overlooked.
Along with Native American climate activist Kandi Mosset of the Indigenous Environmental Network, I gently reminded the conference that the local food movement is already making a difference well beyond the conference rooms. (For more on how this is happening in Vermont, see “On the Importance of the Local” by Suzanne Richman, at www.vtcommons.org).

Another idea that was overlooked, as it usually is, was the ever-unpopular topic of population control.

Hansen for example, proudly showed us photos of his young grandchildren, as he called for a moratorium on new coal-fired plants and outlined the carbon-reducing virtues of “fourth generation” nuclear power.

Yet that kind of nuclear won’t come online for decades. And during that time the human population is exploding toward 10 billion – a number that itself portends unending climate change.

There was nary a word from Hansen or anybody else about taking the pressure off the planet in the coming decades by reducing our numbers.

As urgently as we need to get to 350, in my view we also need a “getting to 4 billion” conference. The goal: Figure out how we can, by reducing our numbers from the present 6 billion-plus, take full advantage of the challenging opportunities that climate change presents us.

More from activists on the meaning of climate change

This is the third of three *short* videos on what some of the nation's top climate activists have to say about what climate change means to them. *Scroll down for the other two videos.* I recorded these clips at the recent "Getting to 350" conference at Middlebury College. www.350.org.

350 parts per million is the maximum amount of carbon our atmosphere can hold and still support life as we know it. We're already at 380-something -- and rising.

Turn up your speakers to hear this. Young Faith Isham appears twice in this clip (my goof), but there are a couple more clips after hers and she's worth listening to twice anyway.

Climate Conference Day 2

"Getting to 350" conference participants answer the question, "what does climate change mean to you?"

More info: http://blogs.middlebury.edu/350workshop/

www.350.org

What Does Climate Change Mean to You ? -- Part 1

I shot this video at the first event of the "Getting to 350" conference at Middlebury College, May 1-3, 2009. (See www.350.og.) The comments are from conference participants at a talk by NASA climate scientist James Hansen.

These folks are responding to the question: "What does climate change mean to you?"

Making friends online and off

I knew things were getting out of control when I got a Facebook friend request from Patricia Lopez of San Francisco..

I’ve never known anyone by that name in San Francisco or elsewhere, so at first I thought she must be a grade-school classmate using her married name. Yet it was clear from her photo on Facebook that she was at least 20 years younger than I am. I couldn’t see a single thing in her background that might have connected us.

If you haven’t yet discovered the gigantic time suck that is Facebook, first of all count your blessings that you still have a smidgen of free time. Second, suffice it to say that this online site does an uncannily good job of liking old friends, by cross-referencing demographics such as hometown, high school and college experiences.

Along with Twitter – a “microblogging” site that allows people to “follow” each other electronically through messages and Internet links limited to 140 characters – Facebook has almost instantly become one of the Web’s must-see sites. Along with Second Life, a site I have so far resisted, it’s become a kind of second life.

Sometimes it seems that we don’t talk to our friends anymore, we Facebook them. We don’t discuss a topic with a colleague, we Google it or we youtube it.

Addison County hasn’t escaped this phenomenon, rurally bucoloic though it may seem on the surface. In fact, our distance from the rest of the world seems to encourage these disembodied ties to the rest of the ether-world.

In a scene eerily reminiscent of the movie “Wall-E” where interaction with machines has supplanted human interplay, Carols’ Hungry Mind Café in Middlebury is populated every morning with people such as myself who are staring into our laptop computers.

Our interactions seem to be almost exclusively focused not upon our physical environment – the few actual conversations around us, the friendly folks behind the counter and the humans sitting next to us -- but on the pixels on our screen, transmitted through distant web servers, transoceanic cables and the invisible electrons of the wireless connections that beam to our eyeballs someone else’s electronic, online simulacrum of reality.

(And for the record, I just went online – where else? -- to be sure that I was using the word “simulacrum”correctly.)

Anyway, it’s all got me to wondering: Are we rocketing down the slippery slope to a sort of netherworld in which we will have replaced our normative, usually comforting physical reality with a cold, disembodied and wireless reality?

So hooked are we on our gadgets that we might even be losing touch with what’s right in front of us. As Greg Brown says in one of his songs, everyone else is walking around, “talking on cellphones and walking into doors.”

When I stand waiting in line at the co-op or Greg’s Market, I don’t stare off into space anymore or look around me to see if there’s anybody whom I might know. I pull out my Blackberry to see if I have any new e-mail.

They don’t call it a “Crackberry” for nothing.

If this is where we’re headed – into a world where we find our new friends on Facebook living on the other side of the continent while ignoring the person next to us – that would be a very sad outcome for Vermont.

Why Vermont in particular? Because we’ve built our life here on the social and economic connections that hold us so satisfyingly together in physical community.

We shop locally. We eat food that’s grown here. We know our neighbors and our neighbors’ kids and what team they play on at the high school or the rec league. We know who used to own that farm down the road, who lives there now and maybe even how many cows they’re milking.

We watch the weather together and relish it as a topic of conversation. We have an identity that’s deeply drawn from the sense that we’re all in it together, here in this lovely little mix of idiosyncratic bioregions and webs of human connection.. Not a worldwide web. The web of Vergennes and Ripton and Leicester, Otter Valley and MUHS and Mt. Abe, the Farm Bureau and Ducks Unlimited.

But is that irrevocably changing?

Because of my personal and professional interests and the way Twitter.com has insinuated itself into my life, I now know more about certain people who live in Australia and San Diego, and who “tweet” (post messages on Twitter) about healthcare and climate change, than I know about the nice couple that lives next door.

Indeed, Twitter is in the process of becoming so ubiquitous – exploding in two years from a few thousand users to several million – that for its aficianados, life seems to occur in bursts of 140 characters.
It used to be said back in the 1960’s that the revolution will not be televised.

Maybe not. But it might well be tweeted.

Yet when you dive into the new media – smartphone in one hand, laptop in the other, a wireless headset stuck in an ear as you navigate the neighborhood using a portable GPS – you begin to learn something strange.

Rather than cutting ourselves off from others, much of this technology is about the old tried and true human instinct to connect more widely and, better yet, more deeply.

Many of us have had the experience of finding a lost old friend by tracking his online presence through Yahoo or Google. I’ve shared secrets in email that I might never have revealed in face-to-face conversations, and those shared secrets have often brought me closer to others.

My business partner and I run a 10-person firm together, connected by the umbilical cords of cheap phone service and broadband connections, though we live on opposite sides of America. The process has enriched our nearly 20-year partnership, and I swear we get along better – and are no less creative -- than when we lived just a couple miles apart and saw a lot more of each other.

There’s a reason that Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and dozens of other new forms of communication are called social media. The juice is not in the isolation of a keyboard and computer screen. It’s in the heartfelt connections they bring.

And if it’s love you want, the old-fashioned touching and looking deeply into one another’s eyes, well, the number of happy marriages traceable to online dating sites must by now be in the hundreds of thousands.

I don’t mean to say, however, that there’s any substitute for face-to-face communication and the pleasure of others’ company.

Even in the café where the row of us spends hours staring into our laptops, the web of friendship blooms. I’ve become friends with several people because we like to write and do our email at tables near one another. At some point you look up you’re your screen and the deeper instincts reassert themselves.

“Only connect,” wrote the British novelist E.M. Forster. “That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will bee seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…”

And as for Patricia Lopez, the woman who contacted me and wanted to be my friend on Facebook?

I was right to think that she and I have never met. She contacted me because she saw on my Facebook profile that I’m interested in environmental issues.

We’re friends now.

Sort of.

Gregory Dennis’ column appears here every other Thursday. Connect with him through email at GregDennisVt@yahoo.com, or in person at the nearest café with a wireless connection. He blogs at http://middleburyvt.blogspot.com.

Come Back, Howard Dean

With his stinging defeat at the hands of the Vermont Legislature, which last week overrode his veto of gay marriage, Gov. Jim Douglas has got to be wondering if this is just a temporary setback -- or the beginning of the end of his political career.

Douglas squeaked into office in 2002 thanks to the stubbornness of the Progressive Party, which ran its own gubernatorial candidate and split the liberal vote – giving Douglas the governor’s seat even though he fell short of a majority.

The regressive Progressives, proving they’d learned nothing about the folly of being a third party in statewide elections, pulled the same move in last year’s election.

But by then Douglas had become such a steady vote-getter that Democrat Gaye Symington and Progressive Anthony Pollina couldn’t even get 45% of the vote between them.

Douglas has faced increasingly large Democratic majorities in the Legislature. In the Senate, Republicans are nearly as hard to find as the Lake Champlain Monster.

But the governor has used his veto pen to great effect. He’s cut down legislation approved by the Legislature that would have improved energy conservation, widened access to healthcare, forced the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant to plan adequately for its decommissioning, and placed stricter donation limits on political fundraising.

As recently as last summer Douglas could brag, to his Republican cohorts at the national convention that gave us Sarah Palin, that while he was New England’s only Republican governor, Democrats had never overridden one of his vetoes.

He can’t make that claim anymore.

With this precedent, as the Legislature grows increasingly Democratic and increasingly liberal, the governor has got to feel just a little more vulnerable.

It remains to be seen whether Democrats can field a gubernatorial candidate with enough name recognition, personal popularity and fundraising ability to defeat Douglas. Vermont may be among the most liberal of states, but the voters still like Douglas. And until his veto of marriage equality, the canny governor had rarely put himself in a position to be steamrollered by an angry opposition.

In that sense, the Legislature did him a favor.

If the House and Senate had not been able to overcome his veto of marriage equality, there would have been a small army of gay-marriage supporters ready to defeat him next year. But the anger that marriage-equality supporters now rightly feel toward Douglas will have dissipated by next year’s election season.

So even if the Progressives finally wise up and stay out of the governor’s race, is there any chance the Democrats can muster a candidate with a snowball’s chance in hell of defeating Douglas?

Secretary of State Deb Markowitz seems likely to run, and State Sen. Doug Racine – who would have been governor but for the Progressives’ intervention in 2002 – has already said he’s running.

But what if the Dems could find a candidate who’s not just popular and well known in Vermont, but who’s also known on the national stage? Someone who has enormous name recognition, leadership experience at the national party level, and the political savvy to rally Democrats and independents of all stripes?

Better yet, what if that candidate had already been a successful Vermont governor?

Enter, stage left, the Hon. Howard Dean.

Dean capped his successful run as Vermont’s governor with a groundbreaking presidential campaign that gave the national Democratic Party some backbone on Iraq, the environment and other core issues. His campaign pioneered electronic, online campaigning that proved critical to Barack Obama’s ascendancy eight years later.

As the surprise chairman of the national Democratic Party, Dean staked his reputation on remaking the party into a 50-state force. That brave effort was rewarded with a Democratic president and senatorial victories in states as unlikely as Montana and Alaska, as well as domination of the statehouses.

But the never-bashful Dean ran afoul of several powerful Democrats, most notably Rahm Emmanuel, who tangled repeatedly with Dean over issues of strategic and personality.

So when it came time to find someone to lead the charge on healthcare reform as Secretary of health & Human Services – especially after nominee Tom Daschle was buried by his unpaid income tax -- Dean seemed a logical choice.

But with Emmanuel now White House chief of staff, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sibelius got the nod instead. (After which it was quickly revealed she had her own tax problems. Apparently some Democratic nominees believe paying your full share is for suckers. But I digress.)

The irrepressible Dean is now a part-time commentator for CNBC. He spends the rest of his time barnstorming the country for healthcare reform.

Fun stuff, I’m sure, for a guy who is accustomed to the adrenaline of hearing thousands of admirers scream his name.

But -- and indulge me in this, I realize it’s just a dream – what if HoJo decided he wanted to come home again?

A seemingly silly idea at first blush. I’ll grant you that. That’s certainly what I thought when Middlebury’s Victor Nuovo suggested it to me.

But then I mused, well – why not?

The state has made an international reputation for its progressive politics. Maybe we’re just getting started.

First on civil unions and now on gay marriage, Vermont has led the way on 21st-century civil rights. Why stop now?

Throughout American history the states have been the laboratories of democracy. From welfare reform to clean-air legislation, they’ve led the way to innovative solutions in recent years.

Perhaps the time is ripe for tiny Vermont to continue to show the way.
I’d set out the agenda for Dean Redux with exactly the legislation that was murdered by Douglas’s veto pen.

The financial set-asides to close Vermont Yankee – collapsing cooling tower and all – are woefully underfunded. We’ll need every cent of it and more to shut down this aging dinosaur. Douglas won’t hear of it. Dean could make it happen and lead the way to making Vermont a leader in wind power.

Climate change isn’t just a threat to Vermont’s maple syrup and ski industries. It’s a looming global catastrophe. One good place to start addressing the issue is in providing support for better energy conservation.

And wouldn’t you know it, conservation efforts were at the heart of legislation Douglas tossed in the dumper a couple years ago.

And then there is healthcare.

Dean was way ahead of the curve on this one as governor. He expanded healthcare for children to make it nearly universal in Vermont. And before he ran for president, you got the feeling he was just getting started on an issue that he knows so well, both as a physician and a politician.

Why would a man who’s been living so large “waste” his time in little ol’ Vermont?
“Small P” progressives have a lot of ideas about how to address the multiple crises that face Americans. And heaven knows the Republicans have pretty much run out of ideas beyond waving teabags and calling Obama a socialist.

But in even the most liberal of the large states, progressives face big obstacles in turning their agenda into reality.

Not so in Vermont. Save for one man and his veto pen, the doors are wide open to the kind of groundbreaking programs that brought America Social Security, Medicare and MediCal, workplace safety, the 40-hour work week, and a cleaner, more diverse environment.

This time around, Vermont could show the way to an abundant life after peak oil; true regeneration of our communities through local food production; sustainable healthcare for all; and the best adaptations to deal with our rapidly heating climate and all that portends.

Jerry Brown went from being governor of California and Linda Ronstadt’s consort in her prime to being the mayor of lowly Oakland.

So will Howard Dean give up the talking-head gig, the endless plane rides from one speech to the next, and decide to come home, roll up his shirtsleeves and show the world what can be done?

Probably not. But he’s surprised us all before. And we can always dream.

- 30 -

Marriage Equality Knocking at the Door

Watching Gov. Jim Douglas during the leadup to the Legislature’s votes on gay marriage, you could almost get the feeling that -- for once in his political life -- the governor would Do the Right Thing. Perhaps despite his personal misgivings, Douglas would step aside and let freedom to marry reign in Vermont.

That naïve optimism was dashed last week, when Douglas announced that he will veto marriage equality for gay people when the bill reaches his desk.

And so in the history books, Gov. Douglas will join Gov. George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, trying vainly to turn back the tide to a time of separate and unequal.

Thankfully, Douglas and many of Vermont’s gay marriage opponents lack the bigotry that marked Wallace’s effort to block African-Americans from equal education. But Douglas’s stance is equally benighted, unfair, and out of step with the evolving ethos of our time.

History surely will judge it that way, just as it judged opposition to the first civil rights movement. That movement has in turn inspired the drive to achieve full civil rights regardless of sexual orientation.

But history’s judgment will probably come too late to achieve justice for gay people in Vermont this year.

Despite the rousing super-majority for gay marriage in the Senate – where only four of 30 senators opposed it – it will be tough to for the House to overcome Douglas’s veto this year.

I won’t recite here all the arguments for marriage equality. But a couple observations about why this has become such an important issue for America, even as we’re being told we should all be thinking about the bad economy all the time:

First, life ain’t always just about the money.

Second, as being gay becomes more acceptable in mainstream society, we’re coming to see that equal rights and status for gays affect far more of us than we ever thought.

Third, allowing gay marriage has the potential to be transformative for America. Ultimately we only benefit when equal opportunity prevails. When we embrace diverse ways of being in the world – black and white, right and left, straight and gay -- we are enriched as a society.

As I’ve said here before, I came to fervently believe in the urgency of allowing gay people to marry – and not just civilly unite over there in some kind of open-air closet – when my close friend Dan and my teenage niece Clara came out as gay.

I might have previously thought, along with Gov. Douglas, that marriage should be “just between a man and a woman.” But having once been happily married for many years, who am I to deny that same opportunity to some of the friends and family I love -- and by extension to other people who happen to be gay?

Obviusly I’m not alone in this view.

Seemingly overnight last Sunday, a crowd of more than 300 people mobilized to gather at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on the Middlebury Green in support of marriage equality.

The governor’s announcement also earned him a spirited crowd on his doorstep in Montpelier the morning after he launched his veto rocket.

Douglas’s pronouncements on gay marriage have been especially interesting. He’s recently proclaimed himself a fervent supporter of civil unions, though he hardly led the charge on that issue. For months he kept quiet on whether he would veto gay marriage. Then he declared he would in fact nix the bill, declaring it to be “a distraction” from the real issue of the economy.

You can look up that last statement in the dictionary under “disingenuous.” After saying for months that he never issued veto warnings in advance, the governor’s veto-warning-in-advance set off a political firestorm. It’s become the distraction of the day, as surely he knew it would.

When you’re governor and you can’t do anything about an economy that now has rocketed Vermont’s unemployment rate to 7 percent and rising, ignite a distraction on gay marriage. While insisting all along, of course, that the Legislature should focus on the economy, stupid -- and forget all this foolishness about equal rights.

* * *

Much of the opposition to gay marriage comes from people with religious concerns, of course.

But for decades in America, we’ve wisely carved out a huge space for marriages that are not conducted or sanctioned by a church. Should you happen to want to marry someone of the opposite sex without involving religion, you can easily get a piece of paper from the City Hall that will keep you tied and true.

Yet America has a funny view of marriage, wrapped in religiosity and the ridiculous. Which is a damn shame for an institution that so many of us hold sacred.

Americans sanction unions between straight people that are conducted by “ministers” who bought their holy credentials through an ad in the back of Rolling Stone. We honor ceremonies for male-female couples that are conducted by Elvis impersonators inside chapels in Las Vegas and, for all I know, Barre, Vt.

But heaven help you if you would prefer to marry someone of your own gender, inside a church or down at the town clerk’s office.

Fortunately, the misplaced religious barriers to gay marriage are eroding, and this is thanks in part to the satirists. As comedian Jon Stewart pointed out during a raucous show at UVM last weekend, the Bible has passages against homosexuality, and the Bible also says you shouldn’t eat shellfish. Forget gay marriage, Stewart advised. What religious conservatives should do is try to close down Red Lobster restaurants.

You know things have begun to change in Vermont when even the Burlington Free Press has done an astounding and courageous turnabout to support gay marriage, less than a decade after it opposed even civil unions.

We see transitions like that because debate about marriage equality is in part a debate about what we are as a society, and how compassionately we can live on this planet.

Why not just settle for civil unions? As writer Steve Silberman muses in the current issue of Shambhala Sun about the decision he and his longtime partner Keith made to get married:

“Certain words have alchemical power. A humble noun or verb can become a transformative mantra. Embracing the word ‘marriage’ had a subtle but profound effect on our relationship, like unlocking a door to a secret garden that only other married people know about.”

It’s time we unlocked that door for everybody.

Whether it’s this year or at some point in the future, Americans will sweep aside the governors blocking that door. We will unlock that door.

Love will find a way.

Climate Change: Solutions from 19th & 21st Centuries

NASA climate expert James Hansen recently told The Observer that the Obama administration offers the world a last chance to stop global climate change. If it fails, the London newspaper said, global disaster — melted sea caps, flooded cities, species extinctions and spreading deserts — awaits mankind.

“We cannot now afford to put off change any longer,” Hansen said. “We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world.”

Let’s assume Hansen, who is one of the world authorities on climate change, is only half-right. Or rather, let’s assume the timetable is twice as long.

In that case we’ve got eight years to change our lives and pull the planet back from the brink of disaster.

If you’re like me, these kinds of scenarios are just too abstract. They engender a certain sense of befuddlement.

It’s like trying to imagine how many a trillion is. How Native Americans survived in this climate before the advent of wool. How the Cubs are ever going to win a World Series.

So let’s break it down a little bit. Figure out what we can do closer to home.

And let’s also let ourselves off the hook for a moment. Assume that, like me, you’re not going to trade in your gas guzzler for a Honda hybrid. And we’re not going to begin running our cars on french-fry grease and become one of those people with a bumper sticker that says, “Car and driver powered by vegetables.”

Instead, let’s talk about what we can do as a community.

While I might not like every move made by Middlebury College, let’s be honest — it is on balance an enormous asset to Addison County.

Without the internationally recognized excellence that the college brings us – not to mention a huge influx of dollars at $50,000 per student – without that, Middlebury is some version of an outlet-mall shopping town like Manchester, or an undistinguished college town like Poultney.

So what does this have to do with being on the Eve of Destruction?

With its new biomass plant producing heat and electricity, the college has cut its carbon footprint by a massive 40 percent. Few other institutions, anywhere, can make that claim.

The college community is also teaching us -- and Step It Up and 350.org are teaching the world -- that climate change will take down our civilization if we don’t meet the challenge.

Closer to home, there’s a role for the college in helping our county be a demonstration project in how to adapt, survive and even prosper in this potentially cataclysmic age.

But of course the college can’t do this alone.

And maybe the stars are lining up so that several other elements of our community are positioned to be essential parts of this not-so-little demonstration project.

Who are these elements?

Roughly speaking, they shake out like this:

* Middlebury and the county’s business community, especially the Addison County Chamber of Commerce, the Economic Development Corporation, and the Better Middlebury Partnership (formerly the business association).

* Town governments.

* The increasingly maturing coalition of those aligned with the land. By which I mean farmers looking for a livelihood not tied to the price of milk; localvores; vendors at farmers markets; and those of us willing to pay a fair price directly to local producers.

Whatever the past grudges among town government, business people and the college, this is a county full of very smart, community-oriented people. We know these times require us to do more than just make a living and raise our kids right.

We’re at a turning point. And it’s up to the adults in town to do the right thing.

So what’s the right thing?

I say we need to declare ourselves a Green County, and every one of our towns a Green Town. Then we need to follow through with actions that make these declarations a reality.

The obvious: Any steps we take need to be both environmentally and economically sustainable.

It’s not enough to say we need better jobs for high school grads and faculty spouses. Nor is it enough to say we need to turn off our idling engines and buy local vegetables and dairy products.

In my perfect world I see a compact of town (government), gown (college), business organizations and localvore environmentalists that focuses on a few local solutions. These solutions should look back to the 19th century, and ahead to the 21st. All of them are achievable within five years.

Energy production: We need hydro from Otter Creek, majestic wind turbines on our hilltops and farms, solar, geothermal, good insulation, and a workable funding mechanism to make these a reality. A good place to start could be to fund “alternative” energy through property taxes, just like we pay for town water and sewer. They’re doing it Palm Desert, Calif, which is as conservative a town as you can find. We can do it here.

Food: Vermont used to grow its own food and sell the surplus to the cities. Today, farmers markets are becoming profitable enough to be an income supplement for a growing number of county residents.

But to succeed here and stop relying on 747’s to ship us winter fruits and vegetables from Chile, we need to create the capacity to process our food. We need canneries and slaughterhouses, organic or at least more sustainable dairy operations, mills and milk processing and more – everything possible to turn our potential bounty into a functioning, more broadly based, local agricultural economy built on necessity and our love of local food.

Because when the price of gas hits $10 – and you can bet the farm it’ll happen in the next decade – local food may be the only sustainable solution we’ll have.

Broad band: The time for manufacturing in Addison County is passing. We need knowledge workers who can live anywhere but choose to live here. We need companies that rely on high-speed Internet infrastructure and the low-impact businesses that will employ local workers and enrich our cultural life.

But none of this will happen if we don’t do it together.

Without the town, the college, the land-aligned and the business community working together, the clock wil just keep on ticking for four more years and a planet that much closer to disaster.

That’s my list for local solutions.

What’s on yours?

Gregory Dennis’s column appears here every other Thursday. Email him at gregdennisvt@yahoo.com

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The College’s Foray into Downtown Business

We’re in the midst of a recession that has made life tougher for virtually every downtown Middlebury business. Now Middlebury College has decided to double-down on its bet that it can turn 51 Main Street, a pivotal downtown business space, into a magical confluence of town and gown.

An anonymous donor gave the college a grant that reportedly requires the money to be used in the form of a space designed for intermingling of students and townies. That space was established last year in the form of nice bar and sort-of restaurant at 51 Main.

Now there’s growing resentment from downtown eateries. And 51 Main is proving to be a money pit for an institution that has already lost 20 percent of the value of its endowment. That loss has already led the college to close or plan to curtail hours at Rehearsals Café and the stylish, recently completed Atwood dining hall. Yet the downtown adventure continues.

With a PR disaster brewing over 51 Main, I’ve got to think that the college may be wishing the donor had instead required the college to go bury the money in a pile of manure, where at least it would have been usable compost.

The latest chapter in this year-long saga has the college announcing that it’s high time 51 Main generated a little cash flow. To that end, the creekside location in the west end of the Battell Building will expand its hours and offerings to offer hot drinks, pastries and other food during the daytime.

That puts it in direct competition with several existing businesses.

Since it opened in the first half of last year, 51 Main has been a late-afternoon and evening spot that offers drinks, bistro-type food, and the occasional jazz group. Little that competed directly with privately run downtown businesses, in other words.

But the college’s new plan for profitability means it will be vying for customers by offering the kinds of food and hot drinks that are already offered at least three nearby cafes: Sama’s, Otter Creek Bakery and Carol’s Hungry Mind.

It’s worth noting that all three of these places, and others, have already been doing a good job of providing a place where students and community can hang out together.

51 Main’s new offerings and hours exhibit a certain tone deafness on the part of the college, toward the town and its businesses. It suggests a kind of “We know better than you” attitude that the college generally does an admirable job of avoiding.

John Melanson, the intrepid owner of the distinctive Carol’s Hungry Mind Café, has managed to provide one of the gathering spots that the college desires and downtown Middlebury needs. But it hasn’t been easy to keep the doors open – it’s a tough business – and now Melanson is one of those facing direct competition from 51 Main. Here’s how he put it to the college paper:

“"Business downtown is so difficult, and to see somebody (the college) come in with deep pockets and set up this beautiful place, spend all this lavish amount of money and not open for months, hurts. I'm working 12-hour days, struggling to get by, not getting a paycheck and now I find out that they are going to take a part of my clientele."

Who knows, maybe soon we’ll be seeing this kind of news report:

[NOTE TO EDS: You may want to put the rest of this in itals rather than the lead quotation marks I’ve used at the top of each graf.]

“Middlebury College announced today that in its ongoing efforts to provide a place for those affiliated with the college to mix with the larger community, the college will be immediately annexing all of downtown Middlebury.

“We are now able to take dominion over the heart of Addison County,’ college administrators said in a statement. ‘Downtown Middlebury has placed a long and historic role in this region. But all things must end at some time, and we believe the time for downtown is now.”

“Old Chapel said that it has, thanks to an anonymous donor, purchased all of downtown Middlebury. ‘We figured we were already paying for a new bridge, got the police station moved to the other side of town, and were footing part of the bill for the town’s ongoing operations,” one college dean stated. ‘With all that investment, it was time to start getting our money’s worth.’

“The college announced immediate plans to replace all local cafes, restaurants and bars with Grille Annexes, in 14 locations ranging from Sama’s to Rosie’s and Fire & Ice. Greg’s Market will henceforth be called Ron’s Market, with the Shaw’s and Hannaford supermarkets being renamed Starr and Hadley.

“The college book store will now occupy the old Vermont Book Shop, with the Alpine Shop being renamed the Alpine Ski Team Shop. Middlebury Mountaineer will become new headquarters for the college’s Mountain Club, while the Marquis movie theater will regain its old moniker as The Campus.

“Financing for the purchase of downtown will be provided by the National Bank of Middlebury College.

“Administrators added that while the falls of Otter Creek initially formed the basis for the town itself, they are taking a close look at the role and location of the creek and falls.

“ ‘We are examining the feasibility of replacing Otter Creek with a more student-friendly waterway,’ one dean said. ‘Some students and their extremely rich parents have complained that the current creek and falls are too unruly for the near-perfection that is Club Midd.”

“To examine its options, the college has signed a $1 million contract with consultants from Disney World. They will begin work immediately on designing a less imposing waterfall under the Battell Bridge.

“As part of its new role, the college will move to close several businesses deemed to be undesirable. First on the list is Wild Mountain Thyme, where the smell of patchoulie and sandlewood incense emanating onto Main Street has been a sore point to the sensitive nostrils of college administers for years.”

GregDennisVt@yahoo.com

- End -

Gay Marriage and Matters of the Heart

When he was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill liked to say that all politics is local. But some of it, he might have added, is also relational.

As in to whom you’re related, by blood or love.

I try to be a tolerant guy. But I used to be against gay marriage.

Civil unions were sufficient to guarantee effective equality for gay men and women, as I saw it. Having been married for a long time, I wanted to see something reserved for that special bond for men and women.

Then Dan and Clara fell in love.

Not without each other, though. With their same-sex partners.

Clara is my niece. Dan is one of my closest friends. She’s an 18-year-old college freshman in New York. He’s a 56-year-old executive at a nonprofit in San Francisco. While they are separated by decades and a continent, for me their stories –and what they say about gay marriage – come down to the same thing.

Clara announced that she was gay three years ago, less than halfway through high school. Her parents didn’t make much of a fuss about it, wondering if this was a phase that she’d grow out of, or if she was just intimidated by boys. And if she was in fact gay by nature, that was OK, too.
Rather than growing out of it, Clara comfortably assumed the role. Her family and friends embraced it, too.

Not that it matters much, but you’d never know Clara was gay if you met her. Artsy, yes, but otherwise a typical female college freshman. Headed in six directions at once, full of the enthusiasms that are so refreshing in someone whose world is widening by the day.

Dan’s story is different in the details. He had girlfriends in high school and college, where we became friends when we met at a draft-counseling session. He married in his late 20s and had two beautiful girls.

After nearly 20 years, that marriage ended in a divorce initiated by his wife. Shocked by her desire to break up a marriage and family that he so deeply valued, Dan eventually found his bearings and went on with his life.

And then he came to realize something about himself. Traversing the sexual spectrum that can span broadly even within one man’s life, he reached the point where he wanted to start dating men.

Dan comes from a large Irish Catholic family. The men are jocks and achievers, sometimes hard drinkers but always ambitious. And until Dan came along, so far as he knew they were always straight.

Watching him come out of the closet, first to close friends such as myself and then to other friends and to his disapproving family, was to follow the most courageous journey I’ve ever personally observed.

A few friends shunned him. His family was disbelieving. More than a decade later, some family members still make it clear to him that they disapprove of his “lifestyle.”

Those of us who’ve known Dan since college, who attended his wedding or knew how happy he was as a married man, were surprised by his coming out. But we knew we loved the guy. And we figured it was his business whom he slept with. If it made him happy to live life as a gay man, more power to him.

Besides, it brought out in him an inner strength, an integrity, a belief in personal growth, that were contagious. Spending time with Dan, you can’t help but be touched by his insight and inner comfort with who he knows he is, in his heart of hearts.

Even so, it’s only recently that I’ve come to support gay marriage. As with so much else, love brought me around.

Not just loving Clara and Dan, but seeing what loving their gay partners did for them.
Last fall shortly after she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence -- which must be the gayest college on the planet -- Clara announced she had a girlfriend.

I’ve yet to meet that young lady. But when Clara talks about her, she has the same goofy, dreamy, I-can’t-believe-I’m-so-lucky look on her face that I had, nearly 40 years ago, when I talked about my college girlfriend.

Last year, after years of looking, Dan met his new mate. Like Dan, his boyfriend has worked in the business world, had a wife and kids, and came out only in his 40s. There’s a photo in my office that I took of the two of them, sitting close on the couch in Dan’s San Francisco apartment.

Even on the hardest of days, it always warms my heart to look at that photo.
I’m certainly not alone in knowing and loving friends and family who happen to be gay. The world is changing, as more gay men and lesbians have the courage to come out of the closet. Their courage is in turn awakening the rest of us to the fact that we know many gays in our daily lives, and that they’re not that different from straight people.

In the long run, legalizing gay marriage – and not having it be that big a deal – seems inevitable. One day soon, the nearly universal ban that makes second-class citizens of gays who want to marry will come to seem as cruel and outdated as Indian castes and American racism.

In 2000, Vermont became the first state to legalize civil unions. The battle split the state between opponents who wanted to take back Vermont and those who wanted to take Vermont forward. In the battle’s wake, Democrats who had supported civil unions lost control of the Legislature.

But none of the dire warnings from opponents came to pass – that Vermont was “redefining marriage” to make it meaningless, or that we would experience the wrath of God, a decline in the state’s moral fiber, and thousands of gay people overrunning the state when they came here to be civilly united.

Now Vermont’s Democrats are back in power in the Legislature, stronger than ever. Fifty-nine legislators – but no Republicans -- have signed on as sponsors of the bill by Reps. Mark Larson and David Zuckerman to legalize gay marriage in Vermont. If the bill survives to become law, Vermont will become the first state to legalize gay marriage not by virtue of a court action, but through legislation.

Even Patti Komline, the House Republican leader, has said she’ll vote for the bill.

But as with so much else in this state, Gov. Jim Douglas may stand in the way. Douglas, a Middlebury resident, has said he opposes the bill. And of course he has the power to veto it.

Here in Addison County, Rep. Bill Lippert of Hinesburg, the state’s first openly gay legislator, helped shape the civil union bill. Middlebury attorney Beth Robinson heads the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task force and blogs regularly on the subject at www.vtfreetomarry.org. Among the recent contributors to this newspaper’s letters to the editor section was Rebecca Kneale Gould, a Monkton resident and Middlebury College faculty member who wrote in support of the legislation.

In New Haven recently, one of the town’s well established churches went through the experience of hiring a lesbian pastor. A few members objected. But so far as is known, God’s grace continues to shine on the church.

There are many good reasons, having to do with public policy and history, to support gay marriage. We are, after all, a nation founded on equal rights and “under God.”

The latter’s Christian followers have a saying about doing unto others as you would have others do unto you. How would opponents of gay marriage like it if, for instance, someone tried to pass a law banning them from getting married?

As TV commentator Keith Olbermann reminds us, there has already been plenty of “redefining marriage” in our history. If that hadn’t happened, black people still couldn’t marry white people.
As recently as 1967, the marriage of President Obama’s parents would have been illegal in 16 states.

The onging battle for gay marriage is in part a political and moral one. But it’s also one of the heart. It comes down to love.

My niece and my dear friend should be able to love and marry the people they choose, whatever their gender.

In his “live and let live” entreaty to the opponents of gay marriage, Olbermann had this to say:
“You are asked now, by your country and perhaps your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand on a question of love. All you need to do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don’t have to help it, you don’t have to applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it. Just don’t put it out.”

- 30 -

We've All Inherited Dr. King's Legacy

Aging into midlife robs you of some things, such as the unthinking optimism of youth. But in a week as momentous as this one, it also brings you a deeply satisfying sense of perspective and even a tempered, tentative optimism.

This is your brain on hope.

The inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th president is of course a source of triumphantly joyful pride for black Americans. So it is, too, for many white Americans, especially those of us of a certain age.

We remember, as children, seeing on television the firehoses and police dogs turned on the brave black people who marched the streets of southern cities in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They sought the simple right to dine at a lunch counter, drink from a fountain, sit at the front of the bus.

We saw Peter, Paul and Mary, the whitest of folksingers, standing side-by-side with Martin Luther King and a host of black leaders as Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech.

We watched our cities be torn apart by race riots.

We woke up one sad April morning in 1968 to the news that Dr. King had not in fact made it to the mountaintop, that he had been gunned down in Memphis.

In response to that event, I took the American flag that hung outside our house, in the upstate New York town where I grew up, and placed it at half-mast. The white folks in our predominantly white town talked about that for weeks. A few of them made snide remarks. A few more thanked me for the gesture.

By that June, Bobby Kennedy, whose presidential campaign was for peace in Vietnam and racial comity at home, was gone, too.

I had been sensitized early on to the complexities of race because my parents and many generations before them were southerners. My great-great grandfather fought for the Confederacy. My grandfather, a Georgia dairy farmer, once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. (He quit in disgust as it grew ever more aggressively racist.)

When I reached my teens, my father made a point of taking me to local meetings of blacks and whites. There, a black minister and a white worker from the Office of Economic Opportunity were trying to bridge the gap that separated the European-Americans of town from the African-Americans.

Several decades later, America’s small towns and the United States as a whole have yet to achive a perfect union.

But at least we’ve grown past some of our prejudices. We’ve elected not just an African-American president, but one whose name sounds like those of the decade’s most wanted men.

We’ve gone from Saddam Hussein to Barack Hussein Obama. From Osama bin Laden to Obama Biden.

When Obama spoke at the Lincoln Memorial this week, in front of Lincoln’s statue and in honor of Dr. King, he made just one passing reference to the civil rights leader. Barack didn’t have to say much about Martin. The president-elect’s very presence said it all.

“What gives me hope is what I see when I look out across this mall,” Obama said. “Directly in front of us is a pool that still reflects the dream of a King, and the glory of a people who marched and bled so that their children might be judged by their character’s content. And behind me, watching over the union he saved, sits the man who in so many ways made this day possible.

“And yet, as I stand here, what gives me the greatest hope of all is not the stone and marble that surrounds us today, but what fills the spaces in between. It is you -- Americans of every race and region and station who came here because you believe in what this country can be and because you want to help us get there.”

I’ve lived through a few decades of trying to do my small part to help us get there, too. And I can’t help but think of how much white activists -- along with Obama and a couple generations of black activists, too -- have learned from Dr. King and his successors.

At a peace rally not long after King’s assassination, in Washington up by the U.S. Capitol, I was wandering around behind the stage. I looked up one moment and there, marching resolutely past me in black boots, jeans and denim jackets, was Ralph Abernathy-- who had taken over the leadership after Dr. King’s death – plus Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young.

Impulsively, I clapped Rev. Abernathy on the shoulder and thanked him for all he was doing. To him, I was just a longhaired white college kid, who had startled him as he and his colleagues walked toward the podium. But we were all on the same side.

The next day, I joined a Quaker protest at the gates of the White House to challenge President Nixon’s claim that he acted out of Quaker principles. As we knew they would, the police came to cart us away. We sang “We Shall Overcome” as they escorted us to the paddy wagons and the D.C. jail. (The police action in removing us from a public sidewalk was later ruled illegal.)

This week in Middlebury, when town and gown gathered at the college’s Mead Chapel to honor Dr. King’s memory and movement, again the song was “We Shall Overcome.”

When climate activists from Middlebury College organized the recent Step It Up and Project 350 campaigns against global warming, they consciously took the civil rights movement as a model.

It’s the best playbook we have for how to broadly and peacefully organize to effect widespread
change --not just in policy, but in people’s consciousness, too.

Some of these climate activists camped out on my land a couple years ago, during their trek from Ripton up to Burlington. I took out a guitar and sang them an old civil rights song. It’s called “Thirsty Boots.” Eric Andersen wrote it for a friend who had been campaigning for integration in the South of the early Sixties:

Tell me of the ones you saw
As far as you could see
Across the plain from field to town
A-marching to be free
And of the rusted prison gates
That tumbled by decree
Like laughing children one by one
They looked like you and me

In the week when we’ve inaugurated our first black president -- 41 years after Dr. King’s death, when the dream seemed to die but didn’t -- that’s what I see when I look at Barack Obama’s America.

It looks like a rainbow coalition of colors.

It looks like you and me.


- 30 -

The Sins of Liberal Fundamentalism

Right about now in even-numbered years, I tend to get tired of talking politics with my liberal friends.

Lacking any other race to focus their fervor, Vermont’s ardent liberals seem to have decided that everything Sen. John McCain says, every move he makes, is evil, mendacious, and politically motivated.

And as for Gov. Sarah Palin, my friends seem to say, she should learn not to say “nucular” -- then crawl back into the cave where McCain found her.

These days, most every conversation with my friends turns into a discussion of the opposition’s idiocy, accompanied by a litany of McPalin’s latest outrage.

The new cellphone towers at McCain’s Sedona retreat that were supposedly placed there as a political favor (but turned out to be required by the Secret Service).

The number of times McCain rolled his eyes during the last debate. (No mention of Sen. Obama’s fake smiles when he disagreed with McCain, the kind of “I’ll suffer this fool gladly” attitude he must have learned at Harvard.)

And then there’s the delight that liberals have taken at Joe the Plumber’s failure to get a plumber’s license or belong to the union – not to mention the back taxes that Joe owes. As an MSNBC pundit said of Joe’s experience: People who are about to get their 15 minutes of fame
don’t realize that 10 minutes of it is a rectal exam.

Perhaps liberals were just taking their clue from Sen. Obama’s attack on Joe, delivered last week in New Hampshire, in which Obama derisively asked, “How many plumbers do you know who make $250,000 a year?

Secure in their ardent partisanship, my friends have conveniently ignored Obama’s call to widen the war in Afghanistan, which is a violent quagmire if there ever was one. Or his reneging on his pledge to take public campaign money. Or his sudden and scary conversion to favor offshore oil drilling – not to mention his longstanding love of nuclear power and “clean” coal.

Ultimately in these discussions with liberals – and here’s where fundamentalism enters the picture – it comes down to one question:

“Whose side are you on?”

You’re either with us or a-gin’ us. (Didn’t George W. Bush say something like that?)
We liberals have been so outraged by the Bush presidency — and so spooked by Willie Horton, impeachment, and the sheer immorality of the Iraq war – that we’ve vowed we won’t get fooled again.
But we’ve overdone it. We’re off the deep end in the land of true and unquestioning believers.
After last week’s debate, I suggested to a couple of liberal friends (pretty much the only kind I have these days) that McCain had scored several good points during the debate.
I thought, for example, that McCain made a lot of sense when he attacked Obama for his reflexive instinct to solve every problem with a solution from the federal government. That instinct is one of liberals’ greatest weaknesses, and it hurts us politically.
My friends reacted as if I’d said Obama was a child molester.
As for the obviously unqualified Sarah Palin, the left’s critique of her is rife with putdowns that wouldn’t be out of place in a freshman dorm. Sneers at how many colleges she went to or about her sportscasting abilities. Doubts about her intelligence or the validity of her religious beliefs because she happens to believe that abortion is immoral.
Even more troubling than the snooty superiority of Vermont’s liberals, though, is the black-and-white tunnel thinking that has become so pervasive – and so similar to the opposition’s.
The right has Rush and his Dittoheads, along with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs.
On the left, we’ve all been living in the echo chamber of the New York Times op-ed page, “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” the Huffington Post and Salon.com. The red states that support McCain are Jesusland and only we blue states are the real USA. We sport bumper stickers about villages in Texas that are missing an idiot, and we buy our dogs little shirts that say, “McCain is Bush’s poodle.”
And then we shake our heads at how devalued and mean the political process has become.
The fundamentalism practiced by many American liberals has become almost as dangerous as Christian fundamentalism.
Both groups think they’ve got the right and true word. They both think that people who see the world in another way need to be saved, stripped of their deep and unfortunate delusions and made to see the light.
Perhaps I come by my skepticism of today’s liberals as a matter of professional habit. I spent more than 20 years as a journalist. If you don’t give both political parties a fair shake as a journalist, you’re not doing your job.
One of the things young reporters learn is that a lot of people lie to them. Liberals, it must be said, lie just as much as conservatives. You learn to be suspicious of everybody’s claims.
Nonetheless, whatever gripes I have with Sen. Obama on environmental issues and Afghanistan, I still believe he represents a brighter future for America. We haven’t seen this promise in a presidential candidate since Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy.
When I go into the booth on Nov. 4, I’ll vote for Barack Obama with a swelling of gratitude in my heart for how he and the Democrats have fought back over the last four years -- and for this better moment in American history and race relations.
The mere opportunity to vote in a presidential election for a major-party candidate who is as inspiring as Sen. Obama – especially at such a dark time for the country I love -- brings tears to my eyes.
So why do I worry so much about liberal fundamentalism?
Because I don’t want the newly invigorated, 21st Century version of liberalism – which is so finely represented by Sen. Obama– to cement itself into uncritical orthodoxy.
I believe Obama and the Democrats will soon win a great victory, precisely because they’re adapted liberalism to meet today’s challenges. They’ve shaken off the worst of the old shibboleths, and they continue to refine an ideology that again, at last, speaks to the majority of Americans.
To replace that with a new orthodoxy -- a self-righteous sense that we’re right and everybody to our political right is wrong -- is the best way I know to lose all we’ve gained, and all we’ve learned over the past eight, very dark years.

- 30 -

Resolutions: Dreaming the Impossible Dream

In 2009, I hereby resolve:

I will see an otter along Otter Creek.

To go over the falls of Otter Creek in Vergennes, in a barrel. Twice -- once for each side of the falls. (Extra points if I spot an otter on the way down.)

To solve the mystery of the sign, placed over a urinal in a men’s room at the Middlebury College field house, which reads, “Thanks, from the Class of 1965. You were always here for us.” I mean, where did this sign come from, and who put it there? Why did they put it in the men’s room? And by “always here,” did they mean actually standing there at the urinal?

To give President Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. (“President Barack Obama.” I love the sound of that.)

Not to complain about the economy. Being part of the gripefest is fun only when you’re in the elite, alienated and insightful minority.

To remember that many other people have it much worse off than I do, and therefore have ample reason to complain about the economy. Especially if they are unfortunate enough to be unemployed.

I will go at least a month without making a catty remark about Gov. Jim Douglas. At least not in print.

To tell the truth more often. Except if I get caught for speeding, because the offending officer and I both know that whatever comes out of my mouth is at best a half-truth: “Um, no, officer. I don’t know why you stopped me. Was it because of that ‘Legalize It’ bumper sticker on the back of my car? Was it that beautiful woman over there? –You know, the one on the left whom I was looking at while making a right-hand turn? Is she your sister? Your wife? Or are you a Yankees fan and I was playing the celebration on my car radio too loud after that Dustin Pedroia home run? Oh – you say I was doing 65 in a 40? I didn’t see the sign at all. Honest!”

To determine what mysterious force it is that compels flatlanders to try to drive over Lincoln Gap in the winter, past the “Lincoln Gap Closed” signs, over the gigantic snow berm, and along the snowmobile tracks that end up in the woods.

To solve the mystery of buried treasure up on Bristol Cliffs.

Not to buy another jacket. The 10 in my closet should serve me just fine. Unless, of course, I find that I’ve got absolutely nothing to wear outside between April 7 and May 10, when it’s raining and the temperature is between 52 and 61 degrees. In which case…

To throw out at least one T-shirt from a collection that spans back to my high school years.

To buy no more than four or five new T-shirts. At least not until summertime.

I will get to the Daily Chocolate and Fat Hen market in Vergennes at least once a month. Man does not live by bread alone. Or by T-shirts and jackets alone, for that matter.

I will not die of overdose by chocolate. Unless of course I stroke out, have a devastating heart attack, or contract a fatal case of cancer. In which case, bring on the chocolate.

I will keep my wine consumption below one bottle. On alternate Mondays.

To make an in-depth exploration of the Whiting-Leicester line. Just because it’s there.

To mention every town in Addison County at least once in this column. Sudbury, this one’s for you!

To ski Stein’s Run, that steep monster at Sugarbush, without stopping. Just once before I die. And given the slow deterioration that comes with age, appetite, inadequate workouts and a strong preference for Otter creek Stovepipe Porter, it’s gotta happen this year, or it never will.

I will not grind my teeth more than absolutely necessary when the potentially great state of Vermont, thanks to obstinacy, ignorance and a misguided sense of “what’s good for business,” fails again this year to take meaningful steps to curb climate change.

Never to exceed 60 mph when driving over Middlebury Gap. Unless, of course, it’s to pass some Masshole who’s driving a Hummer.

To have a western omelette at the Halfway House, and find out if the waitresses really do go about their rounds without a stitch of clothing.

I will, however, decline all offers to pose myself for the next calendar of nude locals. Unless it’s to raise money for a good cause such as a manure spreader for the Salisbury Select Board. Or a new lens for the spy camera on Holley Hall in Bristol.

I will catch a fish in the New Haven after July 1. Even if I have to shoot the damn thing.

To make my annual contribution to Middlebury College. Because, after all, the trustees’ meeting room hasn’t been renovated in at least five years, and the Astroturf on the playing fields needs to be replaced ever so badly.

Never to write another mock Christmas letter. The last time I did that, several people ended up believing that I have a wife who is an alcoholic and two children who’ve been to prison. In actual fact, only one of my kids has been in prison. The other two have gotten off with just probation. So far.

And lastly: I will never write another column with a pen in one hand, and a bottle of whisky in the other.

- 30 -

Online Dating: Sites for Lonelyhearts

OurKindofPeople.us

Darling --- you really must understand this isn’t just ANY website for online dating. You need to accept that it’s intended for a certain kind and style of person – our kind of person.

Ivy League, if you must know. Well, actually just Harvard and Yale, not the entire Ivy League. I mean, those common types from Penn and Cornell – who let them in, anyway?

Well, as I was saying, just Yalies and Hasty Pudding wannabes on this site, please. And please note that through the end of this extremely dreadful fourth quarter only, we are offering a free month’s membership. But only to those of you who can produce a convincing geneology tracing your family back to the Mayflower and/or American Revolution.

Those of you who went to Princeton and had one of those unfortunate marriages where it just didn’t work out? Please be patient. We’ll let you know if we’re able to open up the waiting list for a special few.

As for those of you who went to second-rate schools like Middlebury, we’re terribly sorry.

But really now, you Midd Kids made your choice back in high school, didn’t you? We’re just not able to accept people who concluded -- however rashly and at a very young age -- that it’s more important to have a full and satisfying life than it is to summer on the Vineyard and know the right people. What were you thinking?

And as for those of you who live in integrated neighborhoods, we have a very nice little link for you. Click here and go to www.NotOurType.them.

* * *

He’sJustNotIntoYou.org

Honey, I know you’ve tried all your best recipes and that hot little thing you do when you kiss him.

But face it. He’s moved on. He’s already in Massachusetts somewhere. You’ve been defriended. Elvis has left the building. You’ve got nothing more to do than go back to your pathetic little life.

That’s why He’sJustNotThatIntoYou is what you need to be into now. This is the place to find exactly the right rebound guy. Here at HJNTIY, we’ve pooled our resources with the biggest and best of sites on the other side of that equation.

What does this mean for you? It means you’re sure to meet the right (rejected) guy who knows just how you feel. You’ll bond together -- temporarily, but it least it will get you through the winter. You can share your most heartfelt nasty remarks over that last significant-other who just couldn’t appreciate all you had to offer. You’ll show them!

We’ve aggregated the hottest rejects from sites like IfOnlyShe’dForgiveMe.com and IShouldn’tHaveSaidThat.org. Combined with our exclusive database from ConfirmedBachelors.picky, you’ll be sure to find just the man you’ve been looking for.

You know. The guy who’s exactly wrong for you.

Sign up now to punish your old boyfriend with all that pent-up rage you’ve got for the entire male species. Which BTW and just between you and me, richly deserves it.

* * *

FitSingles.ugh

Welcome to the site where every body is a tight body. Where your age, intelligence, educational background and personality type just don’t matter. The only thing we care about here is your Lake Dunmore triathlon record and body mass index.

Are you one of those people who can’t converse for more than five minutes without talking about your latest workout at Vermont Sun? Anxious to share your new free-weight routine? Got a tip on a hot nutritional supplement that is, like, totally legal, natural, holistic, and adds astonishing definition to your triceps in only three days?

This is the place for you.

We’ll turn you on to the hardest bodies in your neighborhood. The most anorexic women in Addison County. Those terminally self-absorbed guys you can’t meet at the gym because they’re too busy doing sit-ups.

Please note that your profile must be approved by our Body Surveillance Team before it can appear on our site. Try not to tuck your tummy in when you have the photo taken. And don’t forget to include that all-important letter from your personal trainer.

* * *

BackwoodsVTRendezvous.now

Ayuh. Can’t get theah from heah? Then sure as the sap’s gonna run in the spring, mebbe you’ll find a fella or some not-so-bad-lookin’ girl on this site.

(Profound silence.)

Not too sure. We’ll have to see how it sugars off.

This is a site for Vermonters who mark their calendars by hunting season. For ice fishermen and people who use worms, not that fancy fly fishing gear. If you shoot your fish, all the better. We’re all about matching up folks who know that a wood-cutting permit is a lot more important than a haircut.

Now about that profile. If you’ve got a photo of yourself next to some large dead animal that you’ve just exterminated, be sure to include it. Photos of your truck, your dogs and your cows are also encouraged.

For you gals, you might want to include your favorite recipe for bean suppers. Guys, please note that we do not allow any photos in which you are not wearing a gimme cap or bright orange hat with ear flaps.

* * *

FakeVermonters.net

It’s not your fault that you were born in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Or, God forbid, New Jersey.

Isn’t it enough that your family came skiing here when you were a kid? That you once went to summer camp in Vermont? I mean, how many years do you have to live in this godforsaken state, anyway, before you can be considered a Vermonter?

Maybe what’s missing is a relationship with someone who shares that same scarring. Someone who knows the history of American Flatbread and the best route to Boston, but who’s a little unclear on where exactly Lyndonville is.

A tip for women on this site:

If you went to a college no one has ever heard of, best just to note that you’re “college educated.” But if you went to UVM in the 1980s because you couldn’t get into Amherst and didn’t want to stoop to going to UConn, be sure to mention your deep affection for Vermont’s university. Guys dig the UVM thing. They think it means you were a party girl.

For you guys:

It will increase your chances if you relate how you came to love nature by hiking the entire length of the Long Trail and nearly being eaten by bear. Best not to mention it if your family used to ski at Stratton or Killington. But if you’ve been carving turns for 20 years at Mad River or Jay Peak, be sure to highlight that. It will make you seem more genuinely inauthentic.

And remember: We created FakeVermonter.net out of the recognition that there are thousands of wannabe Vermonters out there – longtime residents of the Green Mountain State who, in their heart of hearts, are just more comfortable with people who weren’t born here.

- 30 -

Taking New Roads with Robert Frost

Until I was in my 50s, Robert Frost’s poetry didn’t mean much to me, beyond roads not taken and sleighs stopping by snowy woods.

I blame a high school English teacher, who spent a tedious week pounding into us -- a roomful of bored, horomonally possessed adolescents -- “The Death of the Hired Man.” It took me decades to recover. Who really knew what Frost was up to, anyway? His true intentions, the “real” Frost like the real Bob Dylan, have always been hard to fathom.

Indeed, Frost disliked the line-by-line explication of his poetry, the endless muttering over what it all meant.

Middlebury English Professor Jay Parini, speaking last weekend at a Vermont Humanities Council conference, recounted a story told to him by a woman who had heard Frost read from his poetry one evening in 1954 at the college’s Bread Load campus.

The elderly yet still vigorous poet closed the event by reading his famous poem “Fire and Ice,” which begins, “Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice.” The recitation of this final poem of the evening was greeted with thunderous applause, and Frost swept himself out into the darkness of the nearby meadow, lit occasionally by summer lightning.

This young woman, eager to truly understand what she had just heard, intrepidly followed Frost out into the darkness.

“Mr. Frost?” she said timidly.

“Yes?!?” boomed the old bard.

“Could you please tell me what that last poem meant?”

“You want to know what it meant?” he replied. “Well, I’ll tell you what it meant:
‘Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…’”

He proceeded to recite the entire poem again. There was her answer.

Other noted speakers at the conference at the college included Prof. John Elder, author of the wonderful book “Reading the Mountains of Home” which discusses Frost’s poem “Directive.”

Elder gave a talk at the Frost Cabin, on the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton. The bard lived there for many summers when he taught at the Bread Load campus, just up the road from the residence of Ted and Kay Morrison (the latter his secretary and perhaps more).

But it was the prospect of hearing Jay Parini’s talk that brought me to the event. Jay and I share a love of yoga, Carol’s Hungry Mind Café, and Frost himself -- though as the author of the definitive biography, Jay has forgotten more about Frost than I’ll ever know.

Parini’s probing talk found me feeling woefully unprepared to understand the nuances, but invigorated by the intellectual challenge.

I suspect as I wasn’t alone in this sentiment. There seemed to be many people in the crowded auditorium who had come with no special claim of expertise, just a love of the poet.

So much of adult life is consumed in getting and having, acquisition and maintenance and doing the laundry. How refreshing it was to be asked to think on the roots and branches of Frost’s work – and what they drew from the deep-running brooks and mended stone walls of Vermont and New Hampshire.

A couple of years ago I recited the poem “Birches” to the many people who had assembled in the Ripton Community House, for the 50th birthday party of my friend Win. The poem, which evoked a youthful exuberance that I still saw in my friend at the half-century mark, begins like this:

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

The poem, after contemplating other birches felled by ice storms -- and a boy’s temporary escape from earthly woes by playing high in a tree’s branches -- ends with this simple sentiment:
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

But reading recently in Parini’s life of Frost, I learned that I had it all wrong. The poem isn’t at all about birch trees and a young boy’s outdoor pursuits.

It is, Parini wrote, “as much as anything, about an onanistic fantasy.” It “recreates the curve of desire found in the sexual act, from anticipation, exhilaration and fulfillment to the letting down at the end.”

Silly me. To think that all this time I thought it was about a boy, “too far from town to learn baseball,” who liked to amuse himself by swinging on birch trees.

Having bumbled through “Birches,” I won’t even attempt here to summarize Parini’s talk of last weekend.

But I will say that I was touched by a little story he told about his son and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” -- a Frost poem that is short enough to quote here. Memorize it and you’ll amaze your friends, and win bar bets that you can recite an entire poem by Frost:

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In these words I hear my own father’s voice. Though he was a country doctor, he loved poetry in general and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” in particular.

When I visited my father last December, sitting by his nursing home bed, I read him that poem and several others from Frost.

Dad asked me to read “Nothing Gold Can Stay” to him twice. It was the last time I saw him before his death.

In the educational fashion of his schoolboy days, my father had been made to learn great gobs of poetry by heart. He never forgot the lines he’d learned.

Of a weekend, we’d be driving out to the lake or crunching through an autumnal wood, when suddenly Dad would start spouting poetry, Yeats or Wordsworth or Frost.

It was virtually incomprehensible to my brother and me (what the heck was he talking about, anyway?) and – this barely needs saying –deeply embarrassing. Why couldn’t he talk about sports like a normal guy?

In Parini’s talk this past weekend, he fondly recalled that he would often recite “Nothing Gold Can Stay” to his young son when the boy, age four or five, would be getting ready to go to sleep. Whether it mattered to his son or whether the boy could understand the poem at that age, a father never really knows.

Then one day in early spring when Jay’s boy had reached the age of six, father and son were outside observing the early buds on the trees. Jay’s son pointed to a branch that was just bursting with yellow and exclaimed, “Look, Dad! Nature’s first green is gold!”

And so it is with golden children. Fathers and sons, scholars and ordinary Vermonters, united by poetry.

- 30 -

Free money for your favorite charity

Until mid-October, Squidoo will give $2 to the charity of your choice (from a list of groups Squidoo supports). All you have to do is vote online, at www.squidoo.com/squidoo-charity-giveaway.

I voted to give two bucks to Earthjustice (http://earthjustice.org, "because the earth needs a good lawyer").

Election advice: Don't worry, be happy

Every Vermont liberal I know currently spends most of the day holding his or her breath. The cause of the breath-holding? What once seemed like a steady march to victory for Sen. Barack Obama has turned into a cliffhanger. They’re waiting out an election cycle that is the most gripping in 40 years.

For all of these breathless liberals, I have devised a nearly surefire preventative, to keep them from turning election-map blue and keeling over dead between now and Nov. 4.

But first, a few random thoughts on the politics of the day.

* * *

Blame Anthony Pollina all you want for having the temerity to mess up the Democrats’ clean shot at ousting Republican Gov. Jim Douglas (and I do blame him). But also give Pollina credit for keeping his eye on the debilitating effects of America’s continued occupation of Iraq.

At a time when even the admirably anti-war Obama has taken to barely mentioning the multi-billion-dollar cost of the war, Pollina still places it front and center. As Pollina put it in a flier recently distributed by a few die-hard dreamers backing his candidacy, “I will take on, not avoid, the biggest issue of our time. I will engage Vermonters in a discussion about the impact of the Iraq War on every decision we make here in Vermont … The war must be a part of every conversation we have about out economy.”

Bringing that point home, the National Priorities Project estimates that taxpayers in Middlebury alone will eventually pay $11.8 million to cover our share of the war’s cost.

That immoral expense -- $341 million per day overall – is especially staggering in view of the impending bailout of the nation’s shot-itself-in-the-head financial industry. Exactly how does the Administration propose to pay for both the bailout and the war?

To clarify, I’m not opposed to some sort of bailout. Solutions to these kinds of problems are way above my pay grade. And Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders makes a lot of sense when he calls for more protections for taxpayers in the bailout, and for higher taxes on the super-wealthy ($1 million annual income per couple) to help pay for it.

So will Pollina’s insistence on the centrality of the Iraq War get him anywhere? Not a chance.
Like virtually every other third-party candidate in the past century, he’s doomed to play the spoiler’s role. The result will be yet another term for Gov. Douglas.

Yet the governor remains the biggest obstacle to the kind of progress on healthcare and the environment that’s supported by Pollina and the state’s huge Democratic majority. As occurred with Douglas’s initial ascension to the governor’s seat, the presence of a Progressive/independent candidate just ensures that Douglas will one day collect an even bigger government pension. And in the meantime, he’ll stick around to pay several of his aides a reported $100,000 or more per year – at a time when more and more Vermonters are underemployed or out of work all together.

The one thin reed on which the hopes of Vermont’s liberals rest, in this race, is the possibility that no gubernatorial candidate will get a majority – and that the Legislature will miraculously turn into a collection of Machiavellians.

Recall that when Douglas initially became governor, he pulled the most votes in the election but didn’t get a majority. By virtue of Vermont’s constitution, that outcome throws the final decision to the Legislature. When that last happened, legislators politely gave the governor’s seat to Douglas as the highest vote-getter.

Would the now more partisan and much more Democrat-dominated Legislature do the same thing again? Probably.

But the possibility remains that, given the lack of a majority winner, legislators could pick their own Gaye Symington. After all, she was willing to step into the lion’s den as the Democratic candidate for governor when no one else was willing to take on the popular Douglas, after the spoiler Pollina had already entered the race.

* * *

In truth, though, the attention of our state’s many political junkies remains focused on the presidential race.

Or at least it was until the crafty old G.I. John McCain changed the subject by naming Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential pick.

With Palin the center of attention, few people seem to have noticed that McCain still owns seven or eight houses but will have to get back to us on exactly how many; that he’s recently refused to affirm that he’ll meet with the prime minister of Spain, a strong NATO ally; and that he’s looking increasingly old and robotic.

Yes, I feel sorry for the senator when he tries to raise his arms and can’t get them above shoulder-high. And like most Americans, I admire his courage in surviving and triumphing over five years of torture as a prisoner of war.

Still, I’ve got to worry, at age 72 with all he’s been through including multiple melanomas – is he literally fit enough for the toughest job in the world?

But I do give the guy credit for diverting an entire planet from discussing those kinds of questions, and getting us to focus instead on the Wasilla woman from the wilds of
Alaska.

* * *

OK, as promised, here’s how to stay sane between now and Nov. 4. This is for you folks who are losing sleep over how many colleges Palin attended and over McCain’s insistence that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, even as he vows to clean out the corruption on Wall Street caused by all those guys from whom he’s taken millions of campaign dollars.

The solution lies in becoming what Jackson Browne called “a happy idiot.”

If you lie awake at night fretting about the Supreme Court, then it’s time to do some magical thinking. The road to sanity lies in simply convincing yourself that Sen. Obama will in fact win, and adopting a what-me-worry grin.

Yes, it may seem naïve to believe that it will all work out just fine. It usually doesn’t.
But just fussing over every wrinkle in the news cycle gets you stone-dead nowhere. I promise you that optimism is a lot more effective than gnashing your teeth every time John McCain says “my friends.”

If all you’re doing is worrying, it’s way worse than indifference. You might as well worry about when the leaves will turn. The results of the presidential election in Vermont are already decided. The only drama remaining is whether Vermont or Massachusetts will give the highest percentage of votes to Obama.

But if you just can’t let it all go and trust that America is grand and wise enough to elect its first African-American president and such a remarkably talented leader, then please -- send in a donation, join a phone bank to call voters in battleground states, or make plans to walk precincts and do get-out-the-vote in New Hampshire.

And then stop whining. You’ll feel ever so much better.

- 30 -

With peak oil, farming needs to be cool again

Drive through Hinesburg and parts of Monkton these days and you’ll see one feature of Vermont’s new economy: suburban-style houses for people who work in greater Burlington.

Drive the opposite direction, through Orwell and Whiting and Leicester, and you’ll see the state’s old economy: ancient dairy farms, so long-abandoned that there’s not even a rotting barn in evidence. Fields so long neglected they’re transitioning to third-growth forest.

The paradox – and one of the great challenges of the next half-century – is that if Vermont is to prosper as we transition away from oil, the new must become old, and the old must again become new.

With gas at $4 a gallon and surely heading higher, the “new economy” -- based on long commutes from country to city -- simply won’t hold up. At some point, living in Monkton and driving every day to Colchester just becomes too expensive.

The same high prices for oil will be reflected in what we pay for food.

Instead of costing, say, $5 a quart, January strawberries that are shipped from Modesto, Calif. to Middlebury, Vt. will cost double that – and who’s going to pay a ten-spot for fresh strawberries when you can grab homegrown berries out of the freezer for free?

As for the “old” Vermont economy in those seemingly barren stretches of southern Addison County --- well, that’s where our food’s going to have to come from. We won’t be able to rely anymore on produce flown in on 747’s from Chile.

Which is where my niece Clara comes in.

Just out of high school and headed for college, Clara has been spending her summer volunteering at two local farms. Having been raised in the burbs of Boston, she’s an unlikely candidate to get up at 5 a.m. and feed the chickens, weed a long row of carrots, and harvest garlic.

But like a few Baby Boomers before them, Clara and some of her contemporaries have come to see that farming and living closer to the land can be cool.

And if there’s any hope that Vermont can again grow much of its own food once it’s too expensive to import it – well, then, farming is once again going to have to been seen as a cool thing to do.

Clara started out at Singing Cedars Farm in Orwell, the expanding enterprise run by Scott Greene TK and Suzanne Young. Like organic farmers in many countries, Scott and Suzanne rely in part of WWOOFers – young people volunteering through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF.

The organization began in Britain in 1971. Now, under the banner of “living, learning, sharing organic lifestyles,” WWOOF affiliates host volunteers at farms on six continents. (Similar programs are sponsored by the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, www.nofavt.org).

Earlier this month, Clara joined several WWOOFers at Singing Cedars, which lies near the end of several miles of dirt road in Orwell. The farm encompasses organic vegetables, chickens, turkeys, a few cows, and Scott and Suzanne’s two healthy young children.

This summer Scott and Suzanne had so much demand from WWOOFers that they were able to accommodate Clara as a volunteer for only 10 days.

She loved every minute. She even seemed to relish sleeping in the haymow, in a tent that protected her from the mosquitos, where she read herself to sleep each evening by the light of a headlamp.

From Singing Cedars she transitioned to Blue Ledge Farm, in Leicester along another lengthy stretch of dirt road. There she’s been learning to milk goats, feed pigs, and help make nine varieties of cheese.

The result of years of hard work by Hannah Sessions and Greg Barnhardt TK, Blue Ledge is a relatively small but impressive operation – especially the new “cave” where the cheese is made, in a cool, partly underground setting that is wired for the good rock music that reverberates from an iPod through its several rooms.

Both Blue Ledge and Singing Cedars say a lot about how to make the new economy of local agriculture work.

Except for a little bit of cow’s milk bought from another farm for one of their cheeses, Blue Ledge doesn’t rely on the dairy industry that is so rapidly dying in Vermont. (Organic milk holds great promise, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Instead, Blue Ledge has created especially tasty niche products that sell not just locally but also to urban outlets in southern New England. Moreoever, Blue Ledge helps preserve open space by grazing their goats while also respecting the nearby wetlands.

And as attested to by a unique beer and cheese tasting event that was held three years ago at Otter Creek Brewery, lots of other mom-and-pop operations are also making terrific Vermont cheeses.

Blue Ledge itself relies on mom and pop, too. Hannah’s mother, Abi, works the Rutland Farmers Market every Saturday and milks the goats on Sunday morning. Bill Sessions is a fixture at the Middlebury Farmers Market -- which surely makes him the only federal judge who sells cheese in his spare time.

Singing Cedars, too, uses grazing to preserve a bit of bucolic farmland. Like Blue Ledge, they’ve reclaimed old farmland and put it back to use in a part of the county where land is more affordable.

These operations rely heavily on farmers markets, community-supported agriculture arrangements, the organic and “slow” food trends, and the emerging localvore movement. (The outta-state media has taken to referring to them as “locavores,” but to me, that sounds too much like a bunch of crazy binge eaters.)

We eat as partial localvores because it tastes so good, of course.

But – and here’s the coolness factor again -- we also eat this way because of the romance of local food, its resonance of simpler times, an expression of honest values and hard work. Eating locally, we also savor the knowledge that our neighbors have labored through the overly warm, dry spring and an epically wet summer to bring these salad greens and garlic scapes, this venison stew meat and cheese and goat chops to our table.

Do we pay a premium for this food? You bet we do. It’s often cheaper to buy blueberries trucked in from North Carolina than those grown on Lower Notch Road.

But more and more of us are willing to pay that premium.

It’s a form of investing in a future of partial food independence, as Ripton’s Bill McKibben pointed out in his excellent article in the July 23 Seven Days.

Unless we support the new back-to-the-landers and their altruistic WWOOFers, we’ll never create a sustainable infrastructure of local and regional agriculture, for that inevitable day when the oil runs out.

And in the meantime -- as we contemplate how and what we will eat when it will have to be loca -- the process of buying and eating locally is also a wonderful way of that saying we love this place, along with the young people who have staked their farm future here and the bounty they produce.



a

Douglas shows his GOP colors with Palin

So, I was planning to make all nice-nice this week about how glorious it is to live in Vermont in September.

Last Saturday alone, there were enough interesting activities to keep you busy and happy for at least two weeks – from farmers markets to coffeehouse concerts to anniversary celebrations and a Paul Winter performance at the Center for While Communities in Waitsfield.

Then Gov. Jim Douglas started making all nice-nice about Sarah Palin, and I felt my blood pressure begin to spike.

No more Mr. Nice Guy for me.

You may have noticed Douglas prominently featured in news photos shown around the world -- standing all jut-jawed and resolute behind the Republican VP nominee, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Douglas is an astounding politician from a statistical standpoint. He’s had only one significant career loss that I can think of, to incumbent St. Patrick Leahy in a Senate race. He’s a Republican governor in the most Democratic state in the union, and the only GOP governor in all of New England.

Moreover, he still gives every appearance of truly liking the job. Ever the Happy Warrior, he remains affable and unflappable in person. Thousands of Vermonters who basically detest his politics vote for him every two years because “he’s such a nice guy.”

But every eight years or so, Douglas has to take a stand with or against his fellow Republicans in state less blue than Vermont. Then Jim’s true colors start to show.

Again this year, he’s fallen in line with the party faithful as they pull the country ever further to the right, somewhere in the direction of Rutherford B. Hayes.

Like a lot of GOP elected officials, Douglas had to immediately answer media questions about the GOP ticket-- a fate that Palin managed to avoid for two weeks.

No surprise that Douglas supports John McCain. That’s an easy one.

But our governor’s forthright support of the Palin pick has a lot of people just shaking their heads. What could he be thinking?

For the record, here’s what the governor said, in asserting that having the 22-month Alaska governor on the national ticket would help Republicans in traditionally Democratic states:
“For the first time in many years we have someone on the ticket that’s just like us, someone who has dealt with the challenges of raising a family, dealt with so many issues that confront small town America…someone who has provided leadership in rural parts of America.”
Well, some of the cashiers at the co-op are just like me, too. But I wouldn’t want them to be one heartbeat (or fatal melanoma cancer) away from the presidency.

No word from Our Gov about Palin’s stance against reproductive choice, her support for oil drilling in protected wilderness, and her doubting the reality of global warming even as parts of her state melt into the sea. And of course, no assessment of how effective Palin could be as a world leader while raising five children including an infant with Down syndrome. (Heaven forbid we talk about a candidate’s family values, right?)

“She’s going to bring a great deal of enthusiasm to the Republican team,” Douglas said of Palin, “and I am very optimistic about what the fall portends.”

Portends.

Doesn’t that sound like just the kind of word that an arugula-eating elitist would use? Somebody who’s actually had a passport for several years and who’s been to foreign countries other than Wasilla?

Maybe the Republicans should take a little closer look at Just-Us-Folks Jim. He might not really be their type, what with all that portending.

* * *

In boosting Sarah Barracuda, Douglas was of course in step with most of his GOP brethren. But not all. In a candid off-camera exchange, Wall Street Journal columnist (and ex-Reagan speechwriter) Peggy Noonan told GOP strategist Mike Murphy the choice of Palin was “political BS.” The pick was so bad, Murphy responded, that the election was “over” for McCain.
Predictably enough, Douglas’s mindlessly robotic parroting of the Palin party line drew howls of protest from the Vermont left.

Here’s J.D. Ryan on GreenMountain.com:
“I guess Douglas feels that Vermonters also have foreign policy experience because we live so close to Canada… Or perhaps the Vermonters he meant were the loons in Second Vermont Republic who can relate to her days in the Alaskan secessionist movement.”
Taking a more tongue-in-cheek approach, a Times-Argus editorial suggested Douglas himself for VP.

“McCain is playing a game of inordinate hypocrisy,” the paper wrote. “His campaign has decried what it called the media's preoccupation with the story of Palin's daughter's pregnancy, even as McCain held a photo-op at an airport, greeting the girl's boyfriend for all to see. Never before in American politics has a boy received such royal treatment for getting his girlfriend pregnant.
“Jim Douglas is not a moralistic right-winger; nor is he a colorful character who can divert attention from the substance of governance. That apparently counts him out as a vice president…

“But in the event that McCain needs a backup, we offer the name of Jim Douglas. He would not placate the religious right. But for the job of vice president, he and dozens of other Republicans would be better qualified than Sarah Palin.”

Even more biting, though, was late-night host Conan O’Brien: “Experts say that since Sarah Palin became the vice presidential nominee, there's been an actual spike in the sales of her style of eyeglasses. Yeah, with Palin's glasses, you'll be able to see everything, except what the hell your teenage daughter's up to."

So much for abstinence education and the vision thing.

It’s all quite amusing, if you set aside the frightening possibility that Palin might one day be called upon to replace the aging and serially cancerous McCain as president.

But does any of this matter for the election itself?

Maybe not. Palin is the flavor of the month, but there’s nearly two months until Election Day, and she will surely stumble or just fade from memory among all but the religious right. Anyway, these things get decided by the top of the ticket, not the VP nominee.

As for Jim Douglas, count on hearing from him for the next two years at least. Neither Democrat Gaye Symington nor the hapless “progressive, er, I mean independent” Anthony Pollina stand a buck’s chance in November of becoming governor this year.

And as for those benighted folks who have Pollina "We Can Do Better" signs in their yards -- they might as well replace them with Douglas signs.

Any slim chance the Democrats had of winning back the governorship were erased the day Pollina announced his candidacy. We can, indeed, do better than Douglas, or Pollina and the Progressive’s divisive sideshow.

OK, now I’m going to go take my blood pressure medication.

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Thanksgiving Gratitude -- (scroll down)

When I was a YMCA camp counselor across the Champlain Valley in the Adirondacks, we closed every two-week camping period with a campfire on the last evening. Entering the fire ring, everyone got three small woodchips. During the ceremonies and singing, the light faded and the campfire burned down until it was just a few glowing embers.



Then we invited each camper and counselor to line up, approach the dying fire, and toss his ...

PHOTO: Katie Isham and I at Frost Cabin for Step It Up.

... chips on the embers while voicing gratitude for two or three things about his camping experience.



As round after round of thanks echoed in the cool evening, the fire again sprang to life and brightened every boy’s face.



The thanks that most touched me were by scholarship campers from the inner city. They were thankful for “all these trees” or “seeing my first horse,” or “the peanut butter sandwiches in the mess hall.” Comments like that often drew a few sniggers -- until we realized that these kids truly meant it, and that regular peanut butter sandwiches were more than mom could afford to feed them at home.



Since those long sweet Adirondack summers, there have been times in my life when the flames again burned low. When it seemed like gratitude was the only thing that got me through.



Because when the blues come calling – and don’t kid yourself, they call on everybody – sometimes the blessings of life can seem pretty remote.



Luckily for me, I learned to recall the way that fading campfire was stoked into a blaze by chips of thanks. Even in the darkest hour before the dawn, I could force myself to come up with three things for which I was grateful.



And then I figured if I could come up with three things, there must be three more. And could I then add six more things for which I felt just the slightest bit of thanks and make it 10 total, and – well, you get the idea. Usually at least one of those 10 would bring the glimmer of a smile, and the fire would burn on.



So it is in this spirit that I offer a list of gratitude during November Stick Season. Perhaps it will inspire you to make your own mental list of the grace notes in your life.



This Thanksgiving I am grateful:



* That we’ve got a dedicated group of volunteers who make our fire, ambulance and other emergency services so responsive and effective. Their ability to handle and contain the damage from last month’s train derailment was truly impressive.



* For our farmers markets. Part cornucopia, part meeting place, part spectacle, they make weekends shine.



* For Middlebury College hockey. The college has somewhat mysteriously become a sports powerhouse, and it doesn’t get any better than the hockey teams. The men and women are perennial contenders for national titles. The balletic athleticism that fills every minute of these games is hockey at its very best. The hockey programs at the municipal rink are also a treat.



* That we have so many talented tradespeople. From plumbers and heating experts to carpenters and handymen, the long Vermont tradition of honest craftsmanship and good service lives on.



* That we can heat so easily with wood. No other form of heat comes close. When there’s a blaze in the wood stove and my wife and I are camped on the couch between the stove and the blazing fireplace – a cat on each of our laps – hey, it doesn’t get much better. (Added benefit: Wood heat is local and virtually carbon-neutral.)



* For coffee at Carol’s Hungry Mind Cafe. You may have your own favorite haunt. For me, some days call for the bustle and smiling staff at Middlebury Bagel. Other days when I just want the waitress to call me “Hon,” it’s Rosie’s or Steve’s Park Diner. But there’s no place quite like Carol’s. Community hot spot, purveyor of Ralston’s Roast and Bud’s Beans and Alta Gracia. Music on the weekend. Ample outlets for every laptop, two couches, a window seat from which to see and be seen, and a counter full of goodies.



* Sox win! After the stomach-turning late-night tumult that was Boston’s uncertain journey to the World Series crown in 2004, it was so satisfying this year to watch them stylishly banish Cleveland and Colorado.



* For the Vermont writers whose work articulates what is special about our world: John Elder’s sparkling evocation of Robert Frost and the Ripton-Bristol landscape in Reading the Mountains of Home; Jeffrey Lent’s monumental novel In the Fall; Chris Graff’s Dateline Vermont; Jay Parini’s absorbing biography of Frost; Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and Wandering Home; Howard Frank’s Mosher’s tall tales; Chris Bohjalian’s Before You Know Kindness. Read ‘em and smile.



* For the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op. How good is this place? Professional chefs come from other counties to buy the makings of their restaurants’ dinners at the co-op. In addition to first-rate organic food, good lighting, competent staff, a dedicated volunteer board of directors and a smorgasbord of natural products, the co-op is the most convivial shopping environment this side of Santa’s lap.



* For yoga with Joanna Colwell at her Marblework studio. In 25 years of doing yoga at many centers, I’ve rarely seen any better teacher, especially at offering instruction for all ages, body types and abilities.



* That even more than four years into this stupid blunder of a war in Iraq, there are people willing to show up every Saturday morning on the Middlebury Green and hold a space for peace at the weekly half-hour vigil.



* That as divergent as opinions are on the war, neither opponents nor the few remaining supporters of the war have forgotten the brave women and men who serve in the armed forces in Iraq and elsewhere. I had the opportunity to visit wounded veterans in Walter Reed hospital this year and see the terrible human consequences of this pointless war – such as dazed young men with bodies that just below their torsos. May we never forget their sacrifice. I wish that as voters, we had given them a better leadership and a noble mission.



* For living in a country that dedicates a holiday to the simple act of saying “thank you.” Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Keep your fire glowing.

- 30 –

Living Lighter, with Less Room for Error

A friend in California was recently telling me about his two big homes and his BMW, and it reminded me that the distance between Vermont and most of the rest of America is far more than geographic.

My friend is worrying about whether he should trade in his Beamer on a new one. And here in Vermont we’re worrying how close we are to environmental apocalypse.

In Vermont, we have begun to think seriously about how we can grow our own food and live well with fewer cars and smaller houses. In California and elsewhere, the future is always brighter and richer and has bigger things. The trucks will always arrive at Wal-Mart with their cheap goods from China, the supermarkets will overflow with organic produce from Chile, and Starbucks will always offer 20 kinds of coffee drinks.

Most Americans seem to believe that a life disconnected from nature is indefinitely sustainable -- at least judging by the number of SUVs still on our highways, or for that matter, the SUVs filling the student parking lot at Middlebury College. Most Americans have built their routines around cheap energy and what songwriter Nanci Griffith calls “unnecessary plastic objects,” and many have blithely added two, three or even four children to the planetary burden. Most of these kids are learning to be happy little consumers themselves.

At least in northern New England, we recognize what a shifting climate could do to farmers’ bottom lines. We recall when the oil supply was so uncertain in the mid-1970s that you could only buy gas every other day.

We’ve watched the winter temperatures inch upward 5 degrees on average. That turns a lot of snowy 30-degree days into the rainy drizzle of a very long November. And we’ve begun to see that disappearing ice caps and warmer winters portend a deeply uncertain future, climatologically and economically.

Writers Bill McKibben and James Howard Kunstler have given some serious thought to what this future might look like. They find an audience among Vermonters because we already have the advantage of living closer to natural reality -- but also because we are not as materially wealthy and therefore have less margin for error.

Kunstler, the author of scary book called The Long Emergency on the coming depletion of oil reserves, is particularly alarming:

“Get this. No combination of alternative fuels or systems for running them will allow us to have Walt Disney World, Wal-Mart and the interstate highway system. We’re not going to run those things on any combination of solar, wind, nuclear, biofuel, used French fried potato oil, dark matter, or all the other things that we’re wishing for … One of the implications of the ‘long emergency’ is that we’re going to have to downscale everything we do.”

If Kunstler is right, well-off Vermonters don’t have much longer to enjoy that unique combination of a rural lifestyle supplemented by car trips to the Ikea in Montreal and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Less wealthy Vermonters will be hit much harder, of course, as the jobs dry up in the warehouse stores and service industries, and as farming becomes all that much more challenging.

Many of us share McKibben’s belief, in his book Deep Economy, that a partial solution lies in “a shift to economies that are more local in scale. Local economies would demand fewer resources and cause less ecological disruption; would allow us to find a better balance between the individual and the community, and hence find extra satisfaction.” Instead of globalism fed by “free” trade, says Kunstler, we’re going to have to reconstruct local networks of economic interdependency” or “we will starve.”

* * *

Can we make this shift to a more satisfying but less materially abundant life – and do it before ecological catastrophes force a far more meager existence upon us? Can a planet careening toward 7 billion humans come to a sustainable balance -- or are we just a several hurricanes and a few more years of polar melting away from the brink?

These are among the great questions of the age, well beyond what happens in Iraq or how to resolve the inequalities of race or class or North vs. South.

Looking at how my own behavior stacks up next to my beliefs, I find cause for both tentative hope and deep pessimism.

As for the latter, I finally tired this fall of cramming my tall body into a Subaru Outback. Instead of doing the responsible thing and buying what my friend Jay West calls a “Toyota Pious,” I put the Subaru up for sale and bought a used Audi A4. I traded a partial-zero-emission car for one that gets about the same mileage and has the same carbon footprint.

What can I say? I have always lusted after an A4.

On the other side of the ledger, we heated the house last winter with three cords of wood and oil that was 20% biofuel. We’ve been talking to Paul Kenyon about siting a wind turbine on our land. Billy Romp will be out here next month to add another layer of insulation in the attic. We work at home and seldom drive more than 5 miles a day to town and back. A lot of meals came out of the garden this summer. We are lurching toward a lighter life.

Individual steps like these are very important. But it’s also imperative that we demand more of our leaders.

That’s why the local and nationwide Step It Up activities on Saturday, Nov. 3 will herald leaders of the past -- and will demand that today’s leaders take the steps only they can take to pull us back from the brink.

We shake our heads at the benighted ignorance of Iran’s President Ahmadenijad because he denies the Holocaust ever occurred. Yet our own president and a majority of our Congress have spent the last six years denying the reality of global warming.

I don’t mean to diminish the suffering of 6 million Holocaust victims. But if the world’s scientists are right, we may well be facing our own environmental holocaust. We can’t afford to play dice with the planet. Wherever we live, it’s time for every one of us to step it up.

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The Page Turns at Vermont Book Shop

For lovers of books and music, the Vermont Book Shop has always been a kind of temple. Entering it was like going to church – the high tin ceiling, the walls lined with books straight down to the floor, bursting record bins, the bleary northern light leaking through windows in the back.

And most of all, the creaking floor.

Take a single step inside the big front door and the old floor would give a reassuring squeak. God was in his heaven, there was order in the universe, and inside the four walls of this old emporium there were treasures to be discovered: a new book by a favorite author, a long-out-of-print jazz album, or a greeting from an friend you hadn't seen in weeks.

And so it was with great trepidation that many of us contemplated owner Becky Dayton's announcement, earlier this year, that she would be remodeling the temple.

Wasn't it enough, we aging worshippers moaned, that some of the shelves had already been rearranged? And where had all the vinyl albums gone?

That long row of nonfiction had been moved, too – the gauntlet that ran down the center of the store as you walked in. Why, some of the most turgid tomes in American history had sat collecting dust on those shelves for years. Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky had ruled that province for years. Wasn't that worth something?

You could spend a mere 10 minutes amid the nonfiction and catch up on all that was wrong with America, just by reading the dust jackets. And then you could wend your way to the back for a novel or an album and be reminded of all that was right with the world.

For many years of the VBS -- when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the compact disc had not yet been invented -- there was a clerk in the back whose every working day was devoted to tending the music section. The bins were full of LP's by obscure bluesmen -- Blind Lemon Jefferson seemed to be a particular favorite -- but you could also find the latest rock treasures. The Stones' original “Sticky Fingers” LP – the one with the pulldown zipper on the front cover that many stores refused to carry – was on especially prominent display.

* * *

Those of us who came of age in the Seventies, it turns out, had little idea what an innovation that old music section was.

Dike Blair, who with his wife started the store in in 1949, recalls that at the time they opened, “the record store in town sold only 78's, so we put in LP's.”

The shop first opened in the Deanery building at 5 College Street without enough books to fill the space – so “we partitioned off the back third and used it as a picture gallery for local artists.”

It wasn't long, though, before there were “many too many” books. The Blairs relocated to the old A&P store at 38 Main, where – along with Calvi's, the drugstore, the Lazarus department store, Farrell's and Ski Haus – they helped form a kind of Hall of Fame of post-war Middlebury commerce.

Heading toward the back of the store, one inevitably confronted the bullpen island where the cash register and sales staff resided. The cast of staff characters changed a bit over the years, but very slowly. (Grant Novak, in fact, has worked at the store for 30 years, most of them as buyer and manager.)

In front of the large sales cubicle, a shelf held the latest copy of The New York Review of Each Other's Books. And it often seemed as if Dike Blair was always there, even after his retirement and the store's sale to Laura and John Scott in 1993. One could still envision Mr. Blair, bespectacled in his inevitable bow tie and suspenders and pensively smoking his pipe, a monarch surveying his grand little kingdom.

* * *

Sentimentalist that I am, this spring as the days approached before the VBS would temporarily close for renovation, I made a point of taking photos of the old stacks and aisles. I wanted to be sure I could hold on to How It Used to Be.

Looking to the future, I was prepared for the worst. But I should have known better.

Yes, the creaky old floor is gone. Too worn to refinish, it's been replaced by an attractive carpet. For oldtimers, Becky Dayton points out that there's still a spot where you can step and hear the gratifying squeak of the old floor underneath.

The store is far less cluttered, promising fewer surprises but easier to navigate. There are places other than the dusty floor to sit and contemplate one's next purchase, or just read through a favorite Frost poem pulled from the Vermont section.

Becky paid her staff through the entire July renovation, and she kept the doors open herself when the last Harry Potter novel arrived. That fine old tin ceiling got a fresh coat of paint (“champagne purlescent gold-beige” for those of you keeping score at home). During the blessedly quick process of renovation, there emerged forgotten walls of brick and A&P green tile.
The windows at the back were opened to the sky, and multiple layers of paint were scraped off the old oaken moldings. The crew even discovered a long forgotten fourth window on the west wall, which had been buried for decades behind a bookshelf.

True, the music section and its excellent folk collection are much diminished – an even larger loss in view of John Vincent's decision this summer to close his In the Alley shop and its similarly strong collection. But fine albums by folkies like Richard Shindell and John Stewart had languished in the bins of both stores. There's little money selling CDs in the age of the iPod.

In fact, there's damn little money these days in bookstores, period. The owners of the Briggs Carriage Bookstore, in Brandon, and the former owners of the defunct Deerleap Book, in Bristol, would readily confirm that.

So why would someone like Becky Dayton commit so many of her waking hours to reviving a bookstore that has yet to generate its first dollar in profit since she bought it in 2005?

Along with the other smalltown heroes who keep downtown alive, she's on a bit of a mission.
“It's very important that a good small town have a bookstore,” she says. “It's the Third place, after home and work.

“For some people, the Third Place is a pub or a coffeeshop. For others, it's a bookstore.”

Savoring Sweet September

A doe in the meadow this misty morning, her twin fawns nudging insistently at her underside to draw milk. Then two more does, and another set of twins.

Already the leaves are thinning in the trees along our eastern windbreak, opening up views of the Green Mountains. Every day though, the mountains are less green, as islands of maples turn to orange amid the stands of pine.

In my ideal Vermont year, the calendar would have two Septembers -- both of them following along in the arc of this dry but grand summer.

I lost track of my mosquito repellent back in June. Now days of hazy heat are followed by fog and a sweet rain that sparkles asters and beet leaves alike. The nights -- ushered in by the clambering of geese and punctuated by baleful coyotes – have the coolness of the coming months.

Two Septembers? That's right. And no November at all.

We could shift Thanksgiving forward into October like those sensible Canadians do, and then forgo stick season altogether. From autumn leaves straight to silver bells.

The Red Sox would always be in first place headed for the Series, with the Yankees struggling to break .500. Americans would win tennis's U.S. Open, and all of our street paving would have long ago been completed for the year.

* * *

Last Saturday brought more than enough heat to make a swim essential. My niece Clara and her dad (my brother and only sibling) were visiting from Boston. By early evening of that day, we had experienced a good bit of what a September Saturday can offer.

Swimming holes were at the top of Clara's to-do list, but first spent some time in town. We began with the peace vigil on the Middlebury Green, on a day when the vigil marked TK straight years that people had gathered there on Saturday morning to call for peace after 9-11.

I'm usually in a weekly class at the Otter Creek Yoga studio during the vigil, so I was surprised and heartened by the overwhelmingly positive reception that passersby now give the call for an end to the Iraq War.

From there we cooled ourselves in the nicely renovated Vermont Book Shop, exploring the graphic novels that are among Clara's passions. The marquee event was the Farmers Market, which in this harvest season is an abundance of local meat and produce and smiling faces.

We had intended to buy just a chicken from Scott and Suzanne Young's Singing Cedars stand, but greed and hunger intervened. We ended up with salad greens, red potatoes, four kinds of apples, strawberry-rhubarb jam from Karen Leroy, a half-dozen ears of corn and a cantaloupe from farmer-legislator Will Stevens of Golden Russet, and a chat about the vigil with Rich Hennessy, who helps out his son at the excellent Maple Wind meat stand.

But it kept getting hotter. Being in the company of an adventurous 17-year-old, I decided to try something I've wanted to do for 38 years, since I first saw the falls beneath the Battell Bridge. We left the pedestrian bridge on the west side and scurried up to the base of the falls, feet protected by my Chaco sandals and her peach-red Converse.

Up close, the drought-pinched falls were as tame as they appeared from the bridge. We inched our way along the rocks and -- hooting away -- drenched ourselves by standing under a pummeling finger of the falls.

It's said that the son of Gamaliel Painter, one of the town's founders, drowned in Otter Creek. So people must have once congregated at these falls and the waters below. It's not the safest thing to do, I will admit, and I've never seen anyone other than crazy kayakers get fully wet down there. Perhaps there's a local ordinance against it, but who cares?

At any rate, I now rank it as one of the coolest things I've even done in downtown Middlebury, and there have been a number of them over the past four decades.

Our watery wanderings were not done for the day. After visiting the Vermont Soap Factory Outlet and getting a co-op lunch, we headed up to the New Haven River above Bristol.

I've always known these as Bristol Falls, though their proper name of Bartlett Falls seems to be the common parlance. We dipped in about a quarter-mile above the big falls. There, the unusually low water has turned once-treacherous flumes into gently cascading pools, connected by slides that just scream to be slid. (Again here, adult supervision is recommended, but make sure the adult has plenty of young kid on the inside.)

I can report that the 30-foot drop into the big pool below the falls is as thrilling as ever, and so is the slippery journey up under the falls themselves. The massive rock roof makes a dark, noisy chamber, before you push out under the pounding water and into the brightly lit pool.

We had dinner at home that evening on the porch. It was a feast of Farmers Market finds, produce from our own garden, and a French wine from the late, lamented Eat Good Food.
We had indeed been eating the very best food all day long -- sustenance for heart and mind.

As we drank the last of the wine, a solitary doe came out of the woods into the meadow. She looked cautiously around, and began to graze.

* * *
Note: In an earlier post, I failed to give sufficient credit to the South Village developers for their environmental efforts. The new bank is expected to be Middlebury's first commercial building that is LEED certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). And the project's homes are designed to be especially energy efficient.
- 30 -

Middlebury's Edifice Complex

The layman wanders with some trepidation into the minefield of architectural commentary – but I'll take a few steps anyway.
Anyone traveling traveling into Middlebury via Route 30 has no doubt taken notice of the new Axinn Center. That's the large complex rising on the Middlebury College campus on South Main Street near the college's new library.
Along Court Street/Route 7 stand the beginnings of South “Village,” a multi-use project that is suburban in all but name.
And the Marble Works Residences are at last being occupied, after a dramatic year of rock blasting, giant cranes and the ascendance of what must be downtown's tallest non-church structure.
So what's to be made of all this new building, and how will it reshape the county's shire town? Only time will tell for sure, but it's not too early to offer some preliminary conclusions:
* Middlebury really needs to rethink its guidelines for how far buildings must be set back from the road. In its proximity to Court Street, the bank building at South Village will block one of the town's finest views, of the Green Mountains as they sweep south of town. And the college's Axinn Center all but sits in the west lane of S. Main St. Didn't anyone look at a map when these things were sited?
* The college has the economic wherewithal to build “green” while other don't. The Axinn Center will have a much smaller environmental impact – at least on a square-foot basis -- than did the old library it supplants. The South Village and Marble Works buildings, by comparison, seem to be pretty standard construction where cost takes precedence over environmental concerns.
* We're still small enough that even one new project brings with it significant changes to the areas around it. Three projects coming into use at about the same time will alter how the town looks at its center and on its edges.
The Marble Works Residences first catch the eye because of their imposing size. That fourth, top story probably represents whatever profit there is in the project for the developers. But to the eyes of many, the building is at least one story too high.
Nonetheless, credit the developers with a design that's in keeping with the setting and the vernacular, echoing the long-gone mill buildings that stood along Otter Creek, as well as the existing Marble Works itself. The downtown location is the project's most eco-friendly aspect – and a welcome relief from the Route 7 sprawl that now reaches, with a few interruptions, from East Middlebury all the way to New Haven. The project is in exactly the right kind of location, one that encourages walking and community life.
The college's Axinn center takes the prize for Project with the Longest and Most Incomprehensible Name: "The Donald Everett Axinn '51 Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Starr Library." (The college website says it will be “informally known” as the Axinn Center at Starr Library. Presumably everyone who speaks this “informal” name must also pronounce it in a snooty British accent.)
Apparently wary of angry alumni who fondly recall falling asleep in the old Starr Library, the college is talking up the Axinn center as if it were a minor makeover of the library, which it refers to as “an historic campus icon.” In truth, though, Axinn remakes the entire area within several hundred yards, even adding a building at the southern end of the sainted Old Stone Row.
The college has proven to have quite an edifice complex, and this project is no exception. Though it is still under construction, it's safe to say Axinn will be stylish, massive, and very expensive. We can only hope it will prove more durable than the Ross Commons building repaired this summer due to the danger of falling stone or, say, the bizarre Center for the Arts building, where the southeastern exposure was patched up last summer because it was leaking.
And then take South Village – please.
I recognize that many people have worked hard to bring this project to reality and make it a credit to Middlebury. Again here, it's too soon to say what its final impact will be, yet the early signs are not good. Hopefully its commercial elements will generate stable new jobs for Vermonters. And the project has the singular merit of providing affordable housing in a new apartment building from Housing Vermont. But did the appearance of this building really have to be neo-East German?
The 31-acre site, once owned by the college and home to the Maple Manor Motel, will greatly compound the traffic problems on south Court Street. Worse, it will shift even more of Middlebury's population and economic activity from the historic, human-scale downtown to a car-based sprawl well away from the village.
I hope the 56 houses to be built at South Village prove me wrong, but for now, the best thing that can be said about the project is that at least they didn't build a Wal-Mart.



- 30 -