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