Middlebury, Vt.

Human Folly? There’s an ICD-10 Code for That

2011-09-22T13:45:00.001-05:00

A key premise of Vermont's admirable attempt to institute single-payer healthcare is that it will rationalize an often irrational system. With smart people like Gov. Peter Shumlin and local House Rep. Mike Fisher leading the charge, maybe it will.

But healthcare is a world where it’s illegal to acquire a legal drug, and where there will soon be hundreds of insurance codes for how people get hurt by animals.

One look at recent headlines is enough to suggest that federal bureaucracy and legal ambiguities – not to mention the pure irrationality of human behavior -- will continue to complicate a healthcare system that makes Alice’s Wonderland seem simple.

To start with, the federal courts can’t decide whether Pres. Obama's healthcare reform act -- the law upon which rests our state's single-payer efforts -- is even constitutional. Courts in different jurisdictions have issued sharply differing decisions.

Clearly, it's going to be up to the highly partisan (read: Republican) US Supreme Court to decide once and for all if healthcare reform can be fully implemented.

Even here in Vermont, we have our share of legal ambiguities. Take, for example, the case of Glenn Myer.

Myer, a 52-year-old former pharmacist, has a little company called Green Herbalist. A recent report in Seven Days outlines Meyer's effort to add to Vermont's agricultural diversity.

Except Myer isn't growing heirloom tomatoes or a new kind of string bean. He's growing marijuana.

At two facilities in Lamoille and Caledonia counties, he cultivates marijuana for Vermonters who have a doctor's permission to partake of the weed because of their medical conditions.

I’ve said before in this space that I think marijuana should be legal for adults, so long as it’s regulated similarly to alcohol. For now, though, Myer's entrepreneurial herbalism occupies a gray area of the law, one that intermingles a largely illegal drug with legitimate healthcare concerns.

His business is another example of a long-standing contradiction in state law. While it's legal to use marijuana in Vermont if you have a doctor's permission, until recently the law established no clear way for Vermont patients to legally acquire the marijuana they are allowed to use.

A new law authorizes the existence of up to four not for-profit medical marijuana dispensaries in the state. But they won’t begin operating until the middle of next year.

In the meantime, the legal marijuana users who are Myers’ customers will have to hope his operation doesn’t get railroaded out of existence by police and prosecutors.

Even if Vermont manages to straighten out the confusion in its own healthcare system, Uncle Sam seems determined to make the whole thing way more complicated.

Nothing demonstrates that better than the pending implementation of new billing codes for medical services.

Under the rubric of ICD-10, the new system will in two years replace 18,000 billing codes with 140,000 of them.

The idea is to make billing much more precise. That way, payers such as Medicare and Cigna will have a better idea what they're paying for, and health authorities can much more accurately track the specifics of injuries and disease.

On the face of it, it seems like a good idea.

But somewhere along the line, things got out of hand.

For example, there are nine different codes for an injury incurred by a macaw. There are separate codes for injuries related to the ducks, geese, turkeys, and chickens -- 312 animal codes in all.

The international system of the World Health Organization manages to get by with only nine codes for animal-related injuries. But they don't have ICD-10's penchant for detail -- which has also led to separate codes distinguishing between whether or not a patient was bitten by a turtle or struck by a turtle.

One aspect of the new system seems specifically reserved for alcoholics: There's an indication for "walked into lamppost, initial encounter" -- and a separate one for "walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter."

Other parts of the system just seem arbitrary.

When ICD-10 is implemented, for example, clinicians and billing codes will be able to indicate whether the patient evidence has a "bizarre personal appearance" or simply a "very low level of personal hygiene."

My personal favorite in the new system is the code for "burn due to water skis on fire."

I am not making that up.

Rhonda Buchholtz, an expert coder who trains others, told the Wall Street Journal she wondered where that code would be used. How did it happen that the skis caught on fire and burned the patient?

"Is it work-related?" she wants to know. "Is it a trick skier jumping through hoops of fire?"

No word yet on whether there will be a code for Vermont herbalists who are classified as "too stoned to grow."

In Paris, the City of Pigeons

2011-07-29T11:05:00.000-05:00

Paris is a famous city in France. It is well known for its old churches, chic shops, cafes and museums, and world-class piles of pigeon droppings.

While there are now very few actual Parisians who live in the city – the entire metropolis having been overrun by tourists -- those who remain are no longer as irredeemably arrogant as they once were.

Apparently the city’s habitués got the memo that unless they actually showed the occasional willingness to give street directions to someone who did not attend the Sorbonne, the rest of the world would accord Parisians the status of sheer irrelevance that they have long deserved.

France itself is famous not only for croissants but also for freedom fries and losing every war it has ever fought.

In a bid to erase both France's irrelevance and its long military losing streak, President Nicolas Sarkozy recently talked the Western powers into attacking Libya.

This was perhaps the best thing that has ever happened to Col. Muammar Gaddafi. His continued hold on power is now assured, thanks to the combined ineptitude of Libyan rebels, the European military and half-hearted American air power -- not to mention the French distaste for victory.

But I digress.

We were in Paris recently for a week, in a largely successful effort to empty our American bank accounts by changing dollars for euros.

The alleged purpose of the trip, as it is for so many such trips to Paris, was to savor the open-air markets and cafes, and to see famous sites such as the Left Bank of the Seine.

I refer to the “alleged purpose” of the trip, in regard to outdoor sites, because in actuality we spent large parts of each day beneath the city and safely removed from any sunshine or oxygen, riding the Paris Metro to and from the sites.

One day, however, we were able to emerge from the metro long enough to see the famous Left Bank .

The Left Bank,of course, was a favorite hangout of Jean Paul Sartre and his sometime Main Squeeze, Simone de Beauvoir -- who together became famous for inventing an indefinable philosophy and providing the early raw material for Rush Limbaugh's rants against feminism. There, too, they smoked and drank themselves to an existentially superb, albeit cancer-ridden, death.

While on the Left Bank I made a point of having a (pricey) glass of wine at the cafe where Simone and Jean Paul hung out. It's called Les Deux Magots -- a name that has led many an American tourist to ponder why anyone would name a cafe after a couple of maggots.

But again, I digress. Blame it on the French wine, which I have to say is decidely inferior -- at least at a price I can afford -- to the Italian wine we drank later in the trip.

Among the other sites we saw in Paris was Montmartre. I'm told the famous French habit of smoking oneself to death originated in this neighborhood among starving, tubercular artists such as Modigliani.

These days Montmartre is overrun with tourists who have paid thousands of dollars to come to Paris for a whiff of the bohemian life. But they could have stayed home and gotten a whiff of the same thing, from their neighbor who struggles to sell her paintings while making ends meet as a massage therapist.

Another neighborhood we visited is called the Marais. While it is famous for its gay residents, you will see more same-sex couples holding hands on a five-minute walk across the Middlebury College campus than you will in the Marais in all of July.

We also visited Notre Dame, a very large church.

I was told -- but wasn't able to verify because I don't speak French -- that this church is used as a sort of home-away-from home for students and alumni of the Fighting Irish.

Indeed, the church is large enough to provide practice space for the Notre Dame football team, should it need indoor facilities the next time it's in town.

The Legacy of Middlebury College Professors

2011-07-05T12:49:00.001-05:00

(First published in May 2011)

Ten days from now, several hundred Middlebury College students will take those fateful steps across the commencement stage to receive their degrees, and then bound off into the world.

For many of us Middlebury College alums who have taken that same walk, this is a nostalgic time of year. We can't help but recall our own college experience, and the poignant days as it came to a close.

At an institution where the list price of a degree exceeds $200,000, personal relationships with professors are one of the college's strongest selling points. That was true when the cost of a Middlebury education was $24,000 (the figure when I graduated in 1974), and it's even more true now.

As English Prof. Jay Parini wrote, the end of the school year brings "the many losses that inevitably attend that event, marked so vividly by the graduation ceremony, when half a dozen kids I had really come to like, even love, wave to me from the platform as they proceed into their adult life, diplomas in hand." He knows he will never see some of those students again.

But, he added, "Each year a number of them will return on alumni weekends and look me up … I'm aware that one or two from each class will remain friends forever.
Professors make indelible marks. And this time of year has me thinking of the marks that three professors made on my contemporaries and me.

One of my professor “friends forever” is David Rosenberg. As a young Middlebury teacher he introduced us to a new way of learning, setting aside the lectern and having us do role-playing. Playing out our roles as the representatives of different nations, I got a feel for the diversity of international relations that no lecture could convey.

When I stayed in Middlebury after graduation and helped launch a newspaper, David and his wife Jean took an encouragingly proprietary interest in the shaky beginnings of my journalism career. After I moved away and often returned on vacation, having dinner at their lovely old brick house was always a highlight of the trip. Over 35 years of conversation, David’s perspective on international relations has reminded me that it’s a big world out there, and it doesn’t necessarily revolve around America.

The classes taught by David, Russ Leng and others brought a badly needed relevance to the college's political science curriculum in the early 1970s. By contrast, professors Murray Dry and Paul Nelson, both products of the University of Chicago, staked out more philosophical territory.

"Poli sci with Murray P. Dry” – PS 101 and 102 -- was in those days a rite of passage for a huge percentage of my class.

Given the tumult of that time, these apparently archaic introductory classes were a form of exquisite torture. The nation was engaged in a massive, immoral land war in Asia; every male in our class was looking at the prospect of being drafted after college; and the Nixon Administration was increasingly understood to be conducting its nefarious business in secret and illegal fashion.

So in the face of these events, how did the college have us embark upon our study of politics? With a compulsory semester of material devoted to the 2300-year-old works of Aristotle and Plato.

We chafed against this seeming irrelevance. But Murray Dry and discussion-section leaders like Paul Nelson were committed to showing us the bigger and deeper picture. And damned if they didn’t succeed.

We came away from the semester knowing little more about what was going on in the contemporary world. But we had been given an analytical and philosophical framework with which to understand it, which lasts to this day.

It must be said that it wasn't always an easy process to endure. The reading load was intimidating. Murray called on anyone at any time in class, so you had to be sure you had done the reading, and I mean all of the reading.

My brother, who was two years behind me at the college and is today the most successful lawyer I know, was one of many who took one course from Murray -- and spent the rest of his college career avoiding him in fear.

Murray’s second-semester course was also largely consumed by the centuries-old writing of political philosophers, among them Hobbes, Locke and Rouseau. We finally arrived in the 20th century during the last two weeks of the semester, concluding with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s powerful justification for civil disobedience, "Letter from Birmingham City Jail."

At the end of my final-exam essay on King's letter, I uncharacteristically added a personal note to Mr. Dry.

Two weeks before the exam, I told him, I had journeyed to Washington DC to take part in a massive peace demonstration and participate in an act of civil disobedience challenging the Vietnam War. (I'd been arrested in front of the White House with a couple hundred others, in an arrest that was later challenged in court and found to be illegal.)

Machiavelli and Hobbes and all the other we’d been studying didn't really speak to the passion and action of our own times, I assured Mr. Dry in my arrogantly freshman fashion. Nor did they speak to the moral questions that the war raised, I said. Even Dr. King hadn't touched on the full depth of it.

I'm sure I would cringe with embarrassment if I read that note today. Yet Murray took what I had to say quite seriously. I don't recall the details of his thoughtful reply.

But I do remember that he took the time to write one.

In the rest of my student years I was most drawn to Paul Nelson’s classes. I couldn't get enough of them. He even made Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy seem compelling.
His passionate love for the material was contagious. I've never encountered someone so warmly devoted to his studies and so good at conveying a sense that some seemingly random section -- this paragraph, this little parenthetical remark from John Locke, J.S. Mill or Leo Strauss -- was worth our attention.

Though Paul will continue in his longtime role as director of the college’s prestigious Performing Arts Series, the coming fall semester will mark the end of his teaching career. He’ll go out in a blaze of glory, teaching one course titled “Politics and the Study of Politics” and a seminar on – what else? – the works of Aristotle, Plato, and his beloved 20th century political philosophers, Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott.

Forty years later, I've pretty much forgotten what all those political philosophers had to say. But almost every day, I draw inspiration from three teachers who, for decades of Middlebury College students, have enobled the study of politics.

Email Confidential

2011-06-30T14:25:00.002-05:00

Hey Sam –

What’s up?

-- Bob

WARNING: This message is intended only for the designated recipient(s). And for anyone else bored enough to actually read it. It may contain confidential or proprietary information and may also be subject to the coach-player privilege. Your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device.

--

Bob –

Not much. You?

-- Sam

This message is intended only for native speakers of Portugese. It may contain confidential or proprietary words in languages other than Portugese. Nontheless, that should not be interpreted to mean that you have any business reading it.

--

I’m thinking about taking an early lunch. Got any plans with that new secretary of yours? Assuming you don’t, you loser, want to join me for a burger?

If you are not a designated recipient, you may not review, copy or distribute this message. If you choose to review, copy or distribute this message, we will hunt you down and kill you.

--

I fired my secretary a week ago. Pay attention, will you?

Burger where?

IRS CIRCULAR 230 DISCLOSURE: To ensure compliance with requirements imposed by the IRS, we inform you that any U.S. tax advice contained in this communication is probably worth a lot less than you’re paying for it. Check under your desk for further details.

--

I’m thinking about that new place around the corner, the one with the dweebie waiter and the foxy hostess.

NOTICE: If you have received this communication in error, what the hell are you doing in my email, anyway? Please advise the sender by reply email and immediately say 10 Hail Mary’s. You should seriously consider deleting this message and any attachments without copying or disclosing the contents. If you do choose to disclose the contents, email them to 10 people without breaking the chain. George W. Bush broke the chain, and look what happened to him.

--

Yeah, she is a fox, isn’t she?

This broadcast is the property of Major League Baseball and is intended solely for its audience. And for you folks who were so bored that you started reading at the top and haven’t yet had the good sense to stop. Any rebroadcast, redistribution or other use of this telecast without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is strictly prohibited, but be my guest.

--

Anyway, burger about 11:30?

To ensure compliance with IRS requirements, we inform you that any U.S. tax advice in this communication cannot be used for the purpose of (i) avoiding penalties under the rules of Quidditch; (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending any transaction involving two teams of seven players riding flying broomsticks, using four balls and six elevated ring-shaped goals. Your mileage may vary.

--

Got a couple things to do first. Noon?

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the respective authors and not necessarily those of this publication or its associated corporate entities. Of which there are many. Don’t even think of trying to mess with us.

Sure, noon. Meet me in the lobby.

Use of this Website signifies your agreement to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (updated 03.22.05, though who really cares). Trademarks may be used only with permission of your first-grade teacher. You knew you should have been nicer to her, didn’t you? Now it’s coming back to haunt you. Yellow lights lead to green lights which lead to exits. If you receive this in error, please notify the sender and delete this message. Thank you.

(Copyright by Gregory Dennis, 2008; GregDennisVt [at sign ] yahoo.com)

-30-

Taking a Hard Look at Single-Payer Health

2011-06-27T08:47:00.001-05:00

There are plenty of reasons to be worried about Vermont’s march toward single-payer healthcare.

Federal healthcare reform may allow states to cover virtually all healthcare costs within their borders. But of course there’s no guarantee such a system would work. It’s never been tried in the U.S.

Proponents of single-payer can rightfully point to single-payer successes in many other countries. But those are nation states. Places like Canada aren’t part of countries that cling to the present-day amalgamation of health coverage from government, businesses and individuals.

A massive transformation will be required for single-payer to work in Vermont. We would save the costs of private health insurance, but single payer would entail new taxes on businesses and individuals. The Legislature would have to substantially expand its role in apportioning healthcare dollars. It would take years to make the dream a reality, including a waiver from the federal government.

At best it will take at least six years to make Green Mountain Care (GMC) a full reality – affordable, universal healthcare for all Vermonters. It’s hoped that would include prescriptions drugs, medical supplies, hospital coverage, and primary, specialty and mental-health care. (Vision and dental, too? Well, as with so much of this process, no one knows for sure.)

Single-payer proponents are correct in pointing out that we could reapportion how
healthcare dollars are collected – perhaps streamlining the confusing mix of federal programs, employers who cover their workers, individuals who pay (partly or completely) out of pocket, and unreimbursed care.

Everyone is counting on potentially huge cost savings through the efficiencies of electronic medical records and other digital wonders.

But in healthcare as in so many other human endeavors, rational efficiency does not always prevail.

In North Carolina, for example, a plan to improve the processing of Medicaid claims is now more than $200 million over budget. But even though the company assisting the state has also been implicated in egregious cost overruns in the British system, the state isn’t blaming the company.

The culprit, according to North Carolina? The federal government, which has changed Medicaid specifications several times and thereby required the state to rejigger its own program.

Another potential hurdle: If Obamacare is significantly altered by Republican legislation or court defeats, the process to achieve Green Mountain Care becomes even more torturous.
Of course it won’t be smooth sailing politically for Gov. Peter Shumlin and the Democratic leadership, either.

Last week’s pro-single-payer gathering in Middlebury featured the admirably dedicated Shumlin, House Speaker Shap Smith and Lincoln Rep. Michael Fisher, among others. There, two Addison County doctors served notice that while some Vermont physicians favor single-payer, even they are watching with a suspect eye as the state tries to pull off a medical miracle.

MDs aren’t the only one ready to pounce. The health of Vermont’s community hospitals, so vital to the quality of life in this rural state, could be at stake, too.
Medical device companies, which have already been hit with a new tax under federal reform, might oppose new reforms here in Vermont. (Disclosure: I consult for device companies.)

Even more significantly, insurance companies would be among the big losers under single payer. And the insurance industry is not exactly known for its political timidity or lack of spending power to bend government to its will.

And yet.

And yet we all have a huge stake in seeing Green Mountain Care succeed.
I support it, and I think you should, too. Universal healthcare is possible for Vermont, and it’s the right thing to do.

Our present system is grossly inequitable, and it poses a threat to a strong America. One in three Americans under age 65 went without health insurance at some point in 2007-08, according to a Lewin Group study from Families USA.

Even the conservative estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show that more than 15% of us have no health coverage. That means at least 46 million Americans are one serious illness, one accident, away from overwhelming debt and potential bankruptcy.

We expect our businesses to pay an enormous share of the healthcare burden -- through direct taxes (e.g. Social Security) and through the expensive coverage they provide employees. Businesses also bear the cost of sorting through the confounding insurance maze.

Individuals who are self-employed or unemployed have to dig into their bank accounts to afford measly coverage. Or worse yet, they just go without. They hope for good health, and when they are sick, they fall back on our overwhelmed emergency rooms for cheap or unreimbused care.

In short, our expensive, convoluted, sometimes corrupt healthcare system puts a tremendous strain on individuals, families, and businesses.

We have the resources to provide affordable care to everyone. And yet, hamstrung by history, ideology and corporate greed, we endure an increasingly inefficient and unfair system.

Worse yet – and this may be the most ironically un-American thing about the whole mess – we don’t even get good value for what we pay. American healthcare may lead the world in spectacular, lifesaving new technology. But we lag behind many other nations in critical measures such as infant mortality and the average cost of common care and medications.

Yes, there are many reasons to worry about single-payer care in Vermont. But there are even more reasons to be worried if we fail to achieve universal care.

Vermont has many advantages in working toward that goal – a committed, intelligent political leadership in the Legislature and governor’s seat; a state small enough to be a laboratory of democracy without attracting the soul-crushing power of greedy insurance companies; civically minded physicians; and a resilient populace.

Few states have those advantages, and these pluses are largely absent at the federal level.

Vermont has already led the way on democratically establishing marriage equality. It’s time we did the same with affordable healthcare for all.

To point the way forward– and to do the right thing by better providing for the common good -- we should all hope that Vermont can achieve universal, affordable and equitable care.

- 30 –

Newspaper Survival in the Digital Age

2011-06-13T18:46:00.002-05:00

Newspapers are dinosaurs.

Those of us who were brought up on print still love our newspapers. We will probably continue reading them in varying degrees until the day we die. Indeed, it’s been said that the best hope for the newspaper industry is Americans over 50.

Which means the industry in its present form has got maybe another 30 years before it’s the stuff of legend.

We’ll remember newspapers in print the same way we pine for the fresh milk that used to be delivered to our family's doorstep every winter morning. We’ll recall the scrunch of a morning paper being read at the breakfast table as we do the sound of eggs frying and the smell of Pop Tarts fresh from the toaster.

But none of the kids born today will grow up to say that their first job was having a newspaper route.

With the possible exception of a couple national dailies and a scattering of excellent local papers such as this one, print versions of newspapers will by mid-century be like old leather bellows. Cracked and creaky, good conversation pieces, and excellent for starting fires.

Anyone who thinks otherwise obviously does not have an iPad.

I will spare you a litany of the many wonderful things about the leading tablet computer. Let’s just say the iPad represents the kind of transformation that occurred when television went from three channels in black and white, to 50 channels in color.

Like cable TV, the iPad makes available lots of new, highly disposable junk. But it also opens up a bright and engrossing new world of knowledge and entertainment.

Already the possibilities of the tablet form -- the ability to go well beyond the inherent restrictions of print -- are being realized by pioneers such as Al Gore. He has authored/compiled/directed “Our Choice” for the iPad. This multimedia sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth" is a deeply involving documentary/book/movie. Call it a “docubookie” or “boovietary.”

The iPad also delivers a pretty satisfying version of newspapers. For example, it pulls in the New York Times at one-third the price of the print version, with the convenience of home delivery you can't get in
Addison County for the print version.

The online Times (about $20 a month for iPad access) affords access to an array of video, blogs, way more photos than can make it into print, mashups of sound and data visualizations about radio programs, and ingeniously interactive maps.

It’s enough to make this old newspaper guy wish he could sit down at a computer with a case of Red Bull and write code for the next 48 hours.

Even before the availability of the iPad, many of us had been reading newspapers on our computers for more than a decade. We’ve been guiltily guzzling the news for free from the websites of the Burlington Free Press, Rutland Herald or the New York Times, when we used to pay 75 cents or more a day to read them in print form.

The result for some newspapers has been an explosion in readership – the Times has never been so influential or so widely read – and a frightening decline in paid subscriptions and the ad revenues tied to print.

Many historians and PhD candidates will spend the next few decades debating where newspapers went wrong in the digital age.

Newspaper companies felt they had no choice but to offer their content for free online, in a race for "eyeballs" that would supposedly bring with them a fresh, mountainously large source of ad revenue. But it turns out to be impossible to charge the same amount for advertising online as for print ads. And online, newspapers are seem by many Internet users as just one of a gazillion choices.

The Wall Street Journal has for years been successfully charging its readers for online content. Recently the Times put up a "paywall" that sharply limits how many articles readers can see for free online. The failure or success of this strategy will likely determine the paper's fate, and perhaps that of newspapers as a medium.

In the meantime, regional daily papers such as the Burlington Free Press and Rutland Herald face an uncertain fate. In Vermont and everywhere else, readers increasingly turn to other sources for news and entertainment, and longtime subscribers are getting older.

Cities such as Detroit now lack a daily paper, and once great papers such as the Los Angeles Times are sad shadows of their former selves.

The happy exceptions to this startling decline, I hasten to add, are some weekly and twice-weekly papers.

That’s partly due to the lack of digital alternatives. If you want to know what’s going on in the world, you can get your news from print, broadcast media, and online sources. If you want to know what's going on in Addison County, you simply need to read the Addison Independent.

It's true that it is possible to read that newspaper online, if you pay just a little extra. The paper has, quite wisely I think, decided not to give away its content online for free. But except among snowbirds who keep track of Addison County news from their winter perches in Florida, the overwhelming majority of readers get the local paper in print form.

Vermonters have a knack for embracing the best of things new and old. In the former category is Gov. Peter Shumlin’s initiative to bring high-speed Internet service to every Vermont household. We hold on to the old pleasures of print because it still fit this state's identity. Even in the age of the iPad, the Independent and other Vermont newspapers like it remain a deeply embedded part of the regional culture.

- 30 -

Getting Real about Vermont Real Estate

2011-05-05T07:42:00.002-05:00

We began the Great Real Estate Adventure-Dilemma (GREAD) back in February.

For me, our new home would be the sixth place I've occupied in the past seven years. African herdsman move less often than I do.

Like all naïvely optimistic would-be homeowners, we were sure that we would find several great places to choose from.

The three of us, eighth-grader included, were doing everything right. We’d done our Internet research and made our list of “must-have” and “no-way-Jose” features. We had a real-estate agent who was both a friend and a highly capable professional.

We were starting out early in the buying season. Surely we would get first look at all the hot new properties.

Or so we thought. Turns out that most of the properties on the market were neither hot nor new. Some of them had been sitting out there for more than a year, growing more frigid by the day.

OK, then. Primed by historically low interest rates and an allegedly depressed housing market, we figured there were bargains to be had.

Then we looked a little harder, and gulped.

If there were real estate bargains close to Middlebury, they were well hidden. Or just perfect for people less picky than we were.

Most of the new and ready-to-be-built homes seemed to be at 2006 prices: As if there had been no Great Recession, no collapse in prices, no disaster that turned collateralized debt obligations into horse manure.

As for older homes on the market, their sellers also appeared to believe we were still living in Boom City. Everyone was waiting for that rich New Yorker to show up with an open checkbook.

Prices were so unrealistically high that I came to think people didn't really want to sell their homes. They just wanted to list them.

I guess everyone thinks her home is the special one, the one gem that will generate demand from multiple buyers.

Probably these people also think they will win the Vermont lottery and immediately retire.

It's anybody's guess what things are actually worth these days. Listing prices are so high as to seem concocted over cocktails, so ridiculously out of whack as to invite hilariously lowball offers.

As in any real estate market, certain Addison County towns are perceived to have more cachet than others. Would-be sellers in Cornwall, for example, seem to feel their address automatically adds $150,000 to the price of the place.

We are all, in the words of the Paul Simon song, mistaking value for the price.

Our real estate search became an obsession. This winter when we weren’t sleeping, working or snowboarding, we were tracking new listings on line, talking to our Realtor, and out looking at houses.

Old houses. New houses. Model homes. 19th-century farmhouses. Places you could drive a truck through -- located on a highway where it sounded like someone actually was driving a truck through them at that very moment.

Planned residential developments. Haphazardly located country homes. Single-story ranch houses with sunken living rooms. Ultra-modern, architect-designed mini-palaces. Everything but mobile homes and hotels.

We became experts on local real estate websites. I can readily tell you who has the best blog; the finest photos; and the most profusely misleading property descriptions.

Comparing the online photos to the actual house interiors reminded me of what happens on web dating services. The hard-body gym rat turns out to be 50 pounds overweight. The charming, well lit dining room is in fact darker than Plato's cave.

But it wouldn't be fair to put all the blame on unrealistic sellers. We were certainly unrealistic buyers, too.

We dreamed of finding the underpriced place that with TLC and an extra $100,000 could become a showplace. But all those houses have already been turned into showplaces.

We were sure there was raw land with Adirondack views but without huge costs for septic, road, well, and utilities. We were going to be, alone among all would-be buyers in Vermont, the only ones to figure out how to build a Yankee Magazine prizewinner for $120 a square foot.

And then there were our contrasting tastes. I thought a nicely styled ranch house would be perfect for aging in place. She, on the other hand, dreamed of the real estate equivalent of the neutron bomb -- one that would spare the occupants but destroy all ranch houses now in existence.

I wanted to live 60 seconds from the co-op. She seemed ready to move to Port Henry for the right house.

So what did we learn about the state of the local real estate market?

Even though demand for new homes is way down, builders are (unrealistically, in my view) still quoting $200 a square foot for new construction. That means a 1,500-square-foot house costs $300,000 to build. Typical costs for getting a driveway, utilities and water to the site add another $100,000-plus – meaning even a glorified ranch house is going to run at least $400,000 and likely more.

While it’s possible to get an older house for less, buyers who can afford to be a bit discriminating will typically need to pay $350,000 and up if they want to live anywhere near Middlebury, in something that’s not tiny or a tract home.

After three months of looking, we decided that despite our real estate agent's admirable efforts, the right place wasn't out there -- at least not in a price we could afford without signing away the eighth-grader into a lifetime of indentured servitude.

We'll be moving into our new rental house in early June.

- 30 -

More Hard Times for Liberals

2011-04-15T10:29:00.002-05:00

With the limited exception of those of us lucky enough to live in Vermont, this is a lousy time to be a liberal. And it's not going to get any better.

After years of battling Republican Gov. Jim Douglas, Democrats and Progressives in the Legislature have the luxury of working with new Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin. While Shumlin has put the kibosh on increasing taxes for the super-rich -- he knows that would be political poison in his first term – he has otherwise set a remarkably progressive tone.

In addition to his persistent opposition to renewing the license for Vermont Yankee and his support of marriage equality, Shumlin is making all the right liberal noises about diversifying agriculture beyond the overemphasis on dairy farms. He's pushing ahead on the long campaign for single-payer healthcare and greater broadband Internet access.

Outside the cozy confines of the Green Mountains, however, the picture is a much darker one.

Pres. Obama’s one liberal accomplishment may prove to be the expansion of affordable healthcare for millions of Americans. Beyond that, his record on hot-button liberal issues, such as "card check" legislation making it easier for unions to organize, is disappointingly thin. The record includes some outright reversals, such as the chickenhearted decision to deny fair and constitutionally mandated trials to many terrorism suspects.

When it comes to foreign policy, the best that can be said about Obama is that he looks like Bush Lite. He seems to feel it's OK to spend $1 billion on a bombing campaign to support a rebel Libyan force that is largely unknown to the U.S. And his weary supporters seem willing to go along, even as Obama further expands executive power at the expense of the constitutional mandate that reserves to Congress the right to make war.

Worse yet, last week's collapse in the face of Republican demands for recovery-crippling cuts in federal spending is probably just another step in a long retreat led by Obama.

While Gov. Shumlin is proving nearly as liberal as he appeared during the campaign, it’s obvious by now that Obama never really was a liberal. He is a charismatic and canny politician, and one of his great political strengths is that he can be many things to many different kinds of people.

That's not lying, by the way. It's called electability in a center-right country.

With conservatives chipping away at healthcare reform, it will be a generation or more before any president is brave or stupid enough to take on healthcare once again. That
means the long-held liberal dream of single-payer healthcare is essentially dead for Baby Boomers.

The Republican assault on government and the Great Society now includes a frontal attack not just on Social Security, but also on Medicare and Medicaid. If it succeeds, the elderly of tomorrow will have to pay for much more of their own healthcare. And let’s not even talk about the fate of the poor who have to rely on Medicaid, where minimal healthcare services are diminishing and even disappearing.

The middle class will also take it on the chin. Do you appreciate knowing your commercial plane won’t crash in flight? The Federal Aviation Authority is facing millions in cutbacks that will affect its ability to help ensure flight safety.

Got a kid who might need financial aid to get through college? Education Pell grants are on the chopping block, too.

The persistent cry from conservatives is that we can't afford these kinds of services anymore. Yet emerging unscathed from all of the budget-cutting discussions is the "defense" budget.

With Obama’s recent decision to bomb Libya, the US is now involved in three wars. As satirist Andy Borowitz noted, even if the government were to shut down in a budget dispute, the US would continue to provide government services to Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neither party seems willing to ask if the bloated military budget, which grew by more than 7 percent last year, could be cut as we try to bring down federal spending. Yet U.S. military spending has nearly doubled in the last decade and is six times greater than that of China, which ranks second. (Source: the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

Even most Democrats have given up on questioning the continuing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now the old social issues are back on the table, too.

One of the debates that nearly shut down the government last weekend was the GOP's push to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. That was allegedly done to curb Planned Parenthood's ability to provide abortions. But the organization receives no federal funding for abortions and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, taxpayer-financed support for family planning prevented nearly 2 million unwanted pregnancies in 2006.

Cutting funding to Planned Parenthood would only increase the number of women who choose to terminate their pregnancies.

The Republican majority, heavily financed by the US Chamber of Commerce and other conservative special interests, has bought into the myth that global warming isn't real.
The GOP threatened to shut down the government in part over the party’s insistence that the EPA stop regulating the carbon emissions that are a primary cause of climate change.

I wish I could find a silver lining in all these dark clouds. The reality, though, is that liberalism and activist government continue their long sunset in America.

If that’s ever to change, we’ll have to endure the failure of drastic budget cuts and the human and environmental toll that will follow. Maybe it will take a couple more environmental disasters like Hurricane Katrina. A Supreme Court majority that decides to outlaw abortion would wake up a lot of women to what's been going on.

In the meantime, I'm holing up in the Green Mountains.

Confessions of a Green Mountain addict

2011-04-06T06:53:00.001-05:00

My name is Greg and I am a Vermontaholic. This is my story.

As with so many other Vermontaholics, my addiction started in childhood.

They say that parents should keep their kids away from the hard stuff, and that was certainly true in my case. I'm one of many for whom, at a tragically young age, the gateway drug was skiing.

I could handle it OK when my parents took me skiing near home in central New York State.

Even in the Adirondacks at Whiteface and Big Tupper, I didn't get addicted.

But when they turned me on to hard-core skiing at Sugarbush and Mad River, well, that's when my lifelong habit began.

Given how addicted I had become to Vermont, it's astounding that my otherwise intelligent parents would have, when the time came, let me come to college here.

And what were they thinking, sending me to a college that had its own ski area?

Once I got here, of course, I became completely hooked. I spent my weekends mainlining on the Allen and Ross trails. I conned my friends into borrowing their family's car so we could ditch classes in May and go to Glen Ellen.

Like any addict, I denied the toll that my Vermontaholism was taking on my relationships. I neglected my studies and my girlfriend. I lied about my plans so I could sneak away and spend even more time on the slopes.

One point I want to get across here is that people who haven't been through it don't realize how, once you get addicted to Vermont, it just takes over your entire life.

Soon it wasn't enough that I could ski 40 days a winter. I started hiking whenever there wasn't snow. After work I would get on my bicycle and ride down to the Whiting quarry -- not to look at the naked women sunbathing there, but to immerse myself in the sweet soothing waters of my adopted state.

Sometimes, sitting outdoors with friends and looking at the Green Mountains, I would just stop in midsentence and admire the jaw-dropping beauty around me.

I didn't care what that did to my friendships. It didn't bother me if everyone thought I was a space case who smoked too much Vermont green, or that I cared more for Mother Nature more than my own mother.

By the time I was 25, though, even I had to admit I had a problem. My love of Vermont was so great, the compulsion to be here so overwhelming, that I had to acknowledge a sad fact:
If I didn't try to break the addiction and do something else with my life, I would end up forever hooked on the Green Mountain State.

In the face of this realization I took the most drastic step I could think of: I moved to Southern California.

There, in the land of endless summer and surfer babes, I began to break the hold Vermont had on my life.

I found new friends who surfed and had never been on skis. Some of them had never even seen snow. I got a newspaper job where, in that semidesert by the beach, I could go an entire year without writing an article that had the words "Vermont" or "green" in them. I exchanged mountain gaps and dirt roads for beach paths and freeways.

I told myself I was cured.

The thing about being a Vermontaholic, though, is that it never really leaves you. Once the craving is in your blood -- once you've experienced the cold prick of winter's needle or felt the soothing coolness of an organic Wolaver’s Stovepipe Porter at the end of a double-gap bike ride -- you know you’ll always be jonesing for Vermont.

Powerless in the face of my addiction, I finally moved back here some years ago.

But I think I finally have things under control.

It's not as if I can't get through the day without doing something quintessentially Vermont. Sometimes whole weeks go by where all I do is work in my office, barely even looking out the window.

I’ve learned not to let my habit control me, and I can go without it when I have to. Last weekend, for example, I didn’t go snowboarding even though the peaks were smothered in white. This weekend I’m abandoning the state altogether to go to Utah.

Now and then, I’ll admit, I do pour a little too much fancy maple syrup on my French toast, which is made with Gleason-grain bread and the eggs of cage-free local hens. I'm been known to consume massive quantities of Champlain Orchards apple cider and Misty Knoll chicken.

But I don’t crumble anymore at the thought of going to Boston, or even California. I know I can always come back here.

I guess you could call me a functioning Vermontaholic.

-30-

Bernie Sanders' Recession Tales

2011-03-18T08:23:00.002-05:00

Barbara and Shawn Thompson-Snow used to think they could live out the American Dream.

With good jobs and college educations, in their early 50’s they seemed set for a happy ending. Ahead of them stretched a few more years of full-time work -- then the chance to cut back to part-time, to travel and enjoy life.

Five college loans later and with a second kid still in college, that now seems like a laughable fantasy. They might as well try flapping their arms and flying from their Lincoln home to the top of Mt. Abe.

Together they work two jobs out of five different locations between Salisbury and Burlington. They’re digging into their retirement savings to pay for college. Retirement seems as remote as the Arctic Circle.

While Shawn and Barbara struggle to meet the promises they made to their kids, they know they’re in better shape than many Vermonters. And that they’re far better off than those in other parts of the country, where the jobs have been shipped overseas or booted by the banks.

The deferred dreams of people like the Thompson-Snows are much on the minds of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Almost alone among senators, Sanders worries that America is leaving the poor and middle class behind.

Always a champion of working people, he has recently collected the stories of scores of Vermonters. They tell of a time when the lives of many have grown worse in the wake of two wars, a Great Recession, widespread corporate malfeasance, and an economy where the rich get richer and the rest of see our real-dollar incomes drop.

“For the first time ever, my husband and I are finding ourselves having to apply for food stamps, fuel assistance, and even lunch money for our son,” the wife of an Addison County building contractor wrote Sanders. “Without [my husband’s] work, we just can’t make ends meet. I am not sure what we are going to do.”

A 35-year-old man from Middlebury wrote that he’s had to move back in with his parents to make ends meet, while working at a chain retailer an hour away: “The price of housing is too expensive for low-income people like myself to afford even if I want to buy a house. I even want to get married, but right now I cannot afford marriage.”

These stories are collected in a booklet titled “Struggling through the Recession: Letters from Vermont,” available at http://1.usa.gov/gmAlOZ.

These folks are hardly alone. Rutgers University researchers reported last year that nearly three-quarters of American were themselves out of work or knew a relative or close friend who was unemployed.

That’s not just a recession. That’s the sound of America falling apart. The other shoe dropping. It’s the land of James McMurtry’s song, “We Can’t Make it Here Anymore”:

Just try it yourself, Mr. CEO
See how far 5.50 an hour will go
Take a part-time job at one of your stores
Bet you can't make it here anymore …

I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now,
They haunt my dreams
All lily-white and squeaky-clean

They've never known want
They'll never know need
Their [stuff] don't stink and
Their kids won't bleed
Their kids won't bleed
In the dirty little war
And we can't make it here anymore

So what is the response of the two political parties to this impending wasteland, to the floor caving in under the middle class?

Better unemployment benefits so people can get back on their feet? Jumpstarting green jobs to benefit the economy and environment?

Even the thought seems like a cruel joke.

Having announced plans to downsize Social Security and Medicare, the Republicans want to reduce government to the size where they “can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” in the immortal words of Grover Norquist.

You only need to look at Wisconsin to see that unions – so vital to many in the middle class -- are also being targeted for extinction.

And the Democrats? Bought-off and gutless, they’ve once again gone back to playing Republican-Lite.

The debate in Congress isn’t about whether to cut, but how deeply: Into the tendons? Or all the way to bone?

They’re just arguing about how much to stick it to those of us who aren’t rich.

As Sanders pointed out in a press conference this week, “The House-passed (Republican) budget bill would throw 336 Vermont children off of Head Start and cut or eliminate Pell (college) grants for 13,000 Vermont college students … Some 37,000 Vermonters would lose access to primary health care because of a $1.3 billion cut to community health centers.”

To begin to level the playing field, Sanders is calling for a surtax on incomes of more than $1 million a year and the elimination of tax loopholes for Big Oil.

His bill will pass the Congress right after Sarah Palin says she supports healthcare reform. But give Bernie credit for articulating the plight of the poor and middle class, and for continuing to champion a greater measure of economic equality.

In the meantime, many Vermonters look around them in despair.

"I am financially ruined,” a 46-year old teacher from Charlotte told the senator. Unable to get full-time work, she said, “I find myself depressed and demoralized, and my confidence is shattered. Worst of all, as I hear more and more talk about deficit reduction and further layoffs, I have the agonizing feeling that the worst may not be behind us."

--

For more on unemployment see Paul Krugman's NY Times column of March 18, 2011, at http://nyti.ms/i4Fq1U.

Town Meeting Day: 5/12 Winter

2011-03-02T11:04:00.007-05:00

Mother Nature threw pretty much everything she had at us on Monday during Town Meeting Day -- snow, rain, sleet, hail, graupel, black ice, and minor flooding. The only thing missing was a tornado. But maybe there was one and I just missed it.

Town Meeting Day is of course the one solemn day each year when people all over the great state of Vermont gather together and pretend they can understand a municipal budget.

In Middlebury's case alone, the budget ran to nearly 1,000 lines. (Line 55: Sales/Accident Reports; Line 812, Operating Supplies for Flag Football.)

I dutifully attended Town Meeting in Middlebury, where I was disappointed to find that the cozy confines of the Town Hall Theater were not in use this year for the meeting. Instead we were stuck with the cavernous, badly lit, generally pall-inducing municipal gym.

Apparently the town officials wanted us to leave early.

Sitting in that gym always reminds me of taking finals exams at my high school, which was built using the same kind of Depression Chic architecture. Just being in the gym, useful though the space may be, evokes a sense of exam-time déjà vu, guaranteed to make me wish I was home watching reruns of Family Guy.

This year's meeting saw the return of Town Moderator Jim Douglas (né Governor Douglas) after an absence of at least a couple years.

Say what you want about Douglas’s politics as governor, but he does run a smooth meeting.
And with his radio-trained voice, he can make even the dullest of subjects sound as if they should be interesting, mellifluously reading a budget item about "a single-axle, medium-duty plow truck" as if it were the latest news from the Middle East.

The former governor's characteristically dry wit was unfortunately little in evidence. It was only after the end of discussion and voting that he got a chance to crack wise.

Rising from the audience, former select board member Peg Martin asked Douglas, "Mr. Moderator, is it illegal for me to offer a perhaps germane comment?"

"Well," he replied, barely suppressing a smile, "we won't know until we hear it."

Then noting that the meeting had in fact moved on to "Other Business," Douglas allowed that “virtually anything is germane at this point."

Even with a 2.6% tax increase at a time when we are barely digging ourselves out of the Great Recession, the town budget was approved by an overwhelming majority. Just a couple of scattered "no" votes arose from the gathering of happy campers.

The voters are just fine with expenditures totaling $6.8 million. But ask them to allocate another $5,000 for the local Humane Society, and things get lively. Suddenly the question under discussion is the moral equivalent of war, with heartfelt opinions voiced on both sides of the question.

In comparison to last year when the Humane Society came out on the losing end of two votes, the organization was better prepared for this year's meeting and indeed fared better -- coming away with its requested appropriation from the town.

As more than one speaker noted, the appropriation of $5,000 was greater than the town grants to some of the worthy agencies that serve humans, among them Women in Crisis and the John Graham shelter for homeless people.

On other topics, one could pick up all kinds of momentarily interesting though ultimately useless information at Town Meeting.

We learned, for example, that Middlebury has 64 miles of town roads and an astonishing 15 miles of sidewalk. (Imagine what it would take to shovel the snow off all that sidewalk if it were done by hand.)

We were informed that the approximately $47,000 in annual debt on the new police headquarters is less money than it costs to heat the municipal building each year. (Another reason to hate that gym.) The town is facing an eye-popping 17% increase in the annual cost for employee health insurance. The newer diesel engines in town trucks now use urea – which according to Stan Warner, the town director of operations, sometimes makes the exhaust smell like French fries and at other times like hotdogs. A product called Ice B’Gone now supplements the 24 tons of salt the town throws on its roads each winter and, because it is less corrosive, is extending the life of our vehicles.

It was also a revelation to find that winter consists of five-twelfths of the year. For budgeting purposes, anyway, the town’s yearly budget for highway maintenance is divided up into “summer” consisting of seven-twelfths of the year, and “winter” for the other five-twelfths of the year.

Remember that old joke about how winter in Vermont is 10 months long, followed by two months of bad sledding? Not anymore. Now winter accounts for only half that much of the year, five-twelfths in all.

Apparently global warming truly has taken its toll.

All Hail the Mighty Zamboni

2011-02-21T17:57:00.002-05:00

I’m going to write my next column about the Zamboni, I said to her.

She looked up from her Garnet Hill catalog and peered over the top of her glasses. She put down the catalog, its cover bright with spring fashions: “Why on earth would you want to write a column about the Zamboni, of all things?”

Everybody loves the Zamboni. It’s got a funny name and goes round and round turning distilled water into ice as smooth as glass. What could be cooler than that?

“These slacks right here. They’re a lot cooler than a Zamboni will ever be.”

I went over to the ice rink at the college today and interviewed Butch Atkins. He’s the co-manager of the rink. Did you know that he and Stan Pratt, from Happy Valley Orchards, have been running the Zamboni for the past 30 years, since 1981? Just the two of them for 30 years?

“How could I possibly be expected to know that?”

It was a rhetorical question. I’ll bet you didn’t know, either, that the college Zamboni runs on batteries. It’s like a gigantic electric car. Generically they’re called ice resurfacers but everybody calls them Zambonis. They cost something like $55,000 each.

I remember when the “Peanuts” comic strip did a whole thing on the Zamboni. In fact Charles Schultz, who drew the strip, liked the Zamboni so much that he had his own ice rink.

“And did he drive the Zamboni?”

I hope he did. If I had my own rink, I would make damn sure I got to drive the Zamboni.

Of course I knew I wouldn’t get to drive the thing when I interviewed Butch -- but I was kinda hoping he’d at least let me ride along for a couple minutes. Turns out, though, the college doesn’t like for them to have passengers even though its top speed is only 9 mph. I heard they need volunteer Zamboni drivers at the rec rink. Maybe I’ll check that out.

I had Butch take a picture of me sitting up there in the driver’s seat. When I got back in my car after doing the interview, the first thing I did was to post the picture to my Facebook page.

“You put a picture of yourself on Facebook sitting on a Zamboni?” She gave me that over-the-glasses look again. “I’m going to go back to reading my catalog now.”
The guy who invented it really was named Zamboni. He’s dead now but the company has a trademark on the name, and even the rock band called The Zambonis has to pay a license fee to use the name. So far as I know, however, the band doesn’t play hockey or anything like that.

“Hey, pencil skirts are coming back. And it looks like pink and green are coming going to be the colors of the season.”

I’ll bet there are plenty of green Zambonis. And speaking of colors, at the college rink and probably lots of other ones, they actually go out each fall and paint the ice.

“They paint the ice?”

Yep. Every fall they fill the rink with less than a half-inch of ice. They let it freeze, spraypaint it white, then they go out and handpaint the red and blue sections.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

Speaking of ridiculous, Butch says Norwich University doesn’t have just one Zamboni like Middlebury does. They actually have two! And did you know that the rec rink in Middlebury has the college’s old Zamboni?

“Of course I knew that, dear. I’ve just been keeping it a secret from you all this time.”

When the college decided to donate the old Zamboni to the town, they had to figure out a way to get it over to the rec rink. So at 4:30 one morning, Butch fired up the old Zamboni and drove it across town. It wasn’t licensed to be on the road, but he figured no one would be awake at that hour so he wouldn’t get arrested.

Sure enough, though, the Middlebury cop on duty spotted Butch and wanted to know what in the hell he was up to. He didn’t give Butch a ticket or anything. I guess they had a pretty good laugh about it.

“What do you think of this top? Would this color look good on me?”

Everything looks good on you, dear. And speaking of looking good on something, did you ever notice that two Middlebury College alums have their names on the side of the Zamboni? Check it out the next time you’re at a hockey game, or at this weekend’s Winter Carnival Ice Show (Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon). In blue script on the Zamboni, it says Jim Lake, Class of 1950, and Ralph Lovey’s, Class of ’51. Meg Storey Groves over at the college says they established a fund in 199 to support Zamboni maintenance at Kenyon.

I wonder how much money they had to give to get their names there. It’s way cooler than having your name on a library. If the college ever buys a new Zamboni, I want my name on it. I think I’ll call the alumni office and see how much that would cost me.

“It would cost way more than you have, darling. But I’m sure you could afford to buy me this lovely sweater on page 51.”

I like that sweater. I think you’d look really hot in it. And speaking of hot, some of the water the Zamboni spreads on the ice is 120 degrees. Water that hot melts the very top layer of the ice so it can freeze back and be smooth.

Plus a blade at the bottom of the Zamboni shaves off a bit of ice. Butch says that’s why they talk about “getting a nice cut.”

There are three things in life that people like to stare at, Charlie Brown said. One is a rippling stream, another is a fire in a fireplace, and the other is the Zamboni going around and around and around.

Sometimes when the Zamboni comes out onto the ice at an NHL game, the fans actually cheer.

Imagine that: They cheer for a machine.

Shaking off the Winter Blues

2011-01-31T21:41:00.001-05:00

It's right about this time of year that some of us begin to wonder why we ever thought it was a good idea to live in Vermont in the first place: Three more months of wintry weather to come.

Couldn't God have just skipped January and February (and maybe November) and given us only the shocking green of spring, the lazy warmth of summer, and the gold of autumn?

Sure, we’ll take a few weeks of late winter thrown in there for good measure, complete with longer days and fresh maple syrup.

But as for January? A lot of us would just as soon hit the fast-forward button.

Do not despair. There are plenty of fun and rewarding things to do in January.

Just ask your friends. I did -- and here's what they suggested.

Eric Warren, science teacher at the North Branch School, says January is his favorite month and offers these ideas:
• Make a snow sculpture/building/igloo.
• If the snow (and ice) go away but the ground is still frozen, it makes for great biking. If you dress right, being out on a mountain bike on frozen ground is really fun.
• Make a fire. We recently made the observation in my house that it is really hard to get motivated to go outside and make a bonfire on a cold evening when the TV and computer seem so compelling. But staring into the hard-won fire that we are all huddled around is better than anything on YouTube! I think that deep down in our DNA, there is something that makes fire so intriguing to play with, to look at and to sit by.
• Cook over a fire. A woodstove, a fireplace and a barbecue all work great. It's a challenge, but food never tasted better that the half-blackened thing you succeed in making.
• Snow shovel paths. When my kids were little, I think I got as much out of the mazes of paths we would make as they did.
• Follow critter tracks. I love trying to figure out what creatures have come by in the snow and seeing where they've been or where they are going.
• Ice skating on a pond by torchlight.
• Snowball fights.

Fran Putnam suggests volunteer activities: "Check out the Volunteer Connection at the United Way. Or volunteer at the Community Lunch or Community Supper programs. Area schools like to have mentors who can read with children.”

She adds: “I also recommend getting onto the Middlebury College website and looking for interesting, often free lectures and concerts. There is always a lot more to do in this community than we have time to do!”

Author and climate change activist Bill McKibben reminds us how good it can be to be outside and skiing under our own power: "Get out to Breadloaf or Blueberry Hill. Cross-country skiing is by every measure the best exercise there is, easy on the joints and good for the heart. And by its very nature it takes you deep out into the woods, where you're reminded what a gorgeous season this is.

“If you want some company, check out the Frost Mountain Nordic club (frostmountainnordic.org), which has groups at every level from beginner to racer. Winter is the season when friction disappears--make the most of it!" (For more from McKibben on cross-country skiing, see his recently reissued book, “Long Distance.”)

Win Colwell puts in a plug for a return to the storytelling traditions of old: "Make it a mission that in January you will learn a new story to tell aloud. Start by reading lots of short pieces to find one that you love. It can be modern or of an old tradition, but one that really talks to you. Then read it several times, and practice speaking it well aloud -- so you are ready for the winter night, or the summer campfire, or the long car trip, when it's wonderful to share a good story, well told.”

If you're looking for quieter times than you might experience in a countryside that sometimes has roaring machines going by, one friend suggests that January is "a good time to stick pins in your voodoo snowmobile, right around the transmission."

Leslie Ellen Ray, a longtime friend of mine who lives in France and blogs about cooking at http://lafourchette.blogspot.com, reports “I make a lot of soups in January. In part to warm up in the frosty temps here, but also to clear out the foie gras and wine feasting that goes on in these parts, in the month preceding January.”

Susan Hong, an editor and writer who lives in Charlotte, has this to say: “In January I sleep deeply, stretch luxuriously, and wake up again to the lengthening light. The dark has been beaten back once more. I've finally made the commitment to layers of clothing and flannel sheets, and put up no more fight against the cold. Flip-flops are at the back of the closet and the Bean boots are dusted off.

“My husband tells me that being cold is merely a state of mind, and I start to believe him. The sun even comes out on occasion, and the snow is bright and squeaky. My giant dogs are magnificent as they play in the drifts, crashing their chests together like elk, rolling to make their own brand of snow angels.

“I even have time to take a little stock — to think about how I'd best spend those brand- spanking-new hours of 2011 that stretch out before me. New projects seem possible. I'm done spending money for awhile, and there's room for new habits, new thoughts, better ways of being. January is a welcome sigh: For me, it's all about the light.”

Middlebury College Prof. Pieter Broucke suggests we brighten this month by changing our routines: "Don't eat meat for two days in a row. Park in the farthest spot in the parking lot instead of in the nearest. Make it a point to use the ACTR bus, even if only once in a while. See all the exhibitions at the college museum and the Sheldon Museum. Go to a concert at the college’s Mahaney Center and take a youngster. Read a poem every week.”

Nancy Nagel, a Boston-area therapist who used to work at the Counseling Service of Addison County, has other ideas about how to make January newly involving:

• Maintain a bird and animal log for the month of Jan.
• Have a homemade pizza-making party.
• Start learning a new language; research where your next trip will be to use the language.
• Write a letter to a friend with whom you've lost touch.
• Spend a snowy day making homemade bread (no bread machines; the kneading is the best part!).
• Pick a political issue you don't know enough about and learn more.

Hugh Miner, my favorite high school teacher, views January as "forever a month when just maybe I will get organized. I see a new year stretching out before me and it becomes a time to consider how I might fine tune the family schedule, or at least mine. First, of course, I need to finish sending my Christmas cards and hopefully get that done before I work on income tax … I guess the bottom line is that, along with the Christmas tree, our season lasts well into January.”

Lauren Waite reminds us there are treasures to be found in the long dark. She urges us to one night “wake up at 2 a.m. (I’m too old to say ‘stay up’ until 2 a.m.) and look at the night sky -- amazing in January.”

Christine Fraioli sees this month as a time for clearing out the past and ushering in the future. Among her favorite things to do in January is to “totally clean every inch of my house and throw away all accumulated detritus. It helps clear and organize my brain so I can plan weekend trips to break up the winter months ahead, before the calendar fills up with work-related activities. This year I would like to drive to Boston and Philadelphia in March and April to see the flower shows in both those cities.”

Laura Asermily reminds everyone that the local Acorn Energy Co-op (www.acornenergycoop.com) can always use new members, to support its mission of helping transition the county from our near total dependence on fossil fuels to a greater reliance on affordable, renewable energy.

And last, this bit of advice from Dana Yeaton, a theater professor at Middlebury College:

“I say eat by candlelight. Even alone, with a bowl of ramen, a candle can raise the spirits. Plus it hides the wrinkles.”

***

Correcting a portion of my previous column on the Snow Bowl and “lost” ski areas, I need to note here that the reports of Ragged Mountain’s demise are greatly exaggerated. The resort in fact remains in operation.

On a related note, a couple of readers wrote me to report other “lost” slopes. The website www.nelsap.org says there was one in Lincoln, and Jay West adds: “Blueberry Hill had a ski area just above the Inn (powered by a jacked-up old Ford truck, which is still there rusting), and on Goat’s Knoll in Goshen you can see the traces of old ski trails above Goshen Four Corners. “

The Tracks of John Boehner's Tears

2011-01-31T21:24:00.001-05:00

Pity the poor liberals. They spent decades convincing Americans that it was a good thing for women to be strong, high-profile leaders. So who comes along and grabs the mantle of the high-profile political woman? Not a liberal, but the dreaded Sarah Palin.

Then after years of creating space for men to be more in touch with their feelings, liberals have to watch the new Speaker of the House John Boehner -- he of the tough-guy politics and country club demeanor -- become the most emotive man in public life.

It's enough to make progressives want to go out and burn a bra.

In the meantime, the rest of the country is trying to figure out what it thinks about the new Weeper of the House.

Do Speaker Boehner’s tears – which flow with sentimental regularity -- reflect instability, or just someone who's not afraid to show his strong feelings about country and family?

Many Democrats are profoundly skeptical about his lachrymose behavior. They recall when the slightest suggestion of a tear in Ed Muskie’s eye sunk his 1972 presidential campaign.

They remember when a genuinely choked-up Hillary Clinton was accused during the 2008 primaries of crying crocodile tears for political advantage.

For former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, tears are pretty much off-limits.

“If I cry, it’s about the personal loss of a friend or something like that,” she said. “But when it comes to politics—no—I don’t cry.”

And imagine if Pelosi did shed public tears over a political matter. She’d be instantly derided by the Right.

We give our male sports heroes a break when they choke up over the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.

Moreover, we’re an era when bromances and male hugs are part of the culture. We’ve had a two-term Democratic president who felt our pain and regularly bit his lower lip to keep from crying.

But we remain ambivalent about how and when our political leaders shed their tears in public.

Elements of the mainstream media and political Left have been unable to resist taking a shot a Boehner, in spite of their own calls for a more humane politics.

"This guy has an emotional problem," Barbara Walters commented. "Every time he talks about anything that's not 'raise taxes,' he cries."

Samantha Bee went further on “The Daily Show,” saying Boehner was someone “who can go from zero to snot in 6.4 seconds.”

“The Republicans,” she intoned, “are in the hands of Captain Blubberpants.”

Beyond this mean-spirited humor, though, lies the genuinely important question of how OK it is for men to cry, in public or private.

“Telling a man not to cry is like telling someone not to go to the bathroom,” says author Warren Farrell. “Both serve the purpose of cleansing the system.”

We pay a huge price for this emotional constipation, Farrell adds: “Men's weakness is their facade of strength.”

Middlebury psychotherapist Thomas Jackson asserts that we teach boys at age 6 or 7 not to cry or show sadness – “one reason there’s a large amount of unacknowledged depression among American men.”

A symptom of that depression, Jackson says, is captured in the title of Terence Real’s seminal volume on male upbringing, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It.” (And, it goes without saying, men certainly don’t want to cry about it.)

Boehner’s tears are disconcerting for some people because it’s the first time they’ve studied him closely. We give more latitude to political figures we already know, such as both Presidents Bush, who were known to tear up from time to time.

As Warren Farrell notes, “If a man has proven his power already and then occasionally cries at a funeral or over his wife or children being sick or criticized, that can be a positive.”

No one would doubt, however, that when it comes to shedding a public tear, we’ve come a long way.

Even one of our most masculine public figures, Gulf War Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, has put in a good word for the benefits of male tears. “I don’t trust a man who doesn’t cry,” he once said.

Everyone will have a different opinion about Boehner's tears. As for myself, I believe that while his tears may be oddly frequent, they humanize the man and the public debate.

And yet.

I look at the politics of the speaker and his party, and I see them headed in a less-humanizing direction – away from equality and toward tax cuts for the rich; away from healthcare reform and back to a system that denies health insurance to the needy.

Deeply felt emotions – the tears that come from compassion, for example – are intrinsically a part of being human. And if our politics lack compassion, sometimes our tears come out in other ways.

Middlebury Snow Bowl Is Alive and Well

2010-12-23T18:09:00.003-05:00

For skiers, no website is as bittersweet as the one dedicated to the New England Lost Ski Areas Project.

NELSAP chronicles the history of the scores of New England ski areas that have closed their doors over the past 70 years.

There was a ski area in Bristol, for example. The website quotes a 1939 source, ‘Ski Trails in the East and How to Get There’:

"The resort has two trails and several open slopes for practicing. The skiing area is in town and the trails are reached by automobile. A tow located on a hill with two slopes has excellent terrain for novice and intermediate skiers.

“Mountain Top Run, for experts, is 1-1/2 miles long. The area also has two intermediate runs, and facilities for skating and toboganning. A first aid station and a skiing instruction school are nearby.”

Hinesburg, too, had a slope now lost to time, the site says: “The area had a 400-foot rope tow and operated from sometime in the 1960's to around 1972. According to J. Wilson at the Hinesburg Town Hall, the rope tow was run by a 1948 or 1949 car engine and was located on land owned by five families.”

I mention this history not so much for the ski areas that Addison County has lost -- but rather for the one we haven't: the Middlebury College Snow Bowl.
The Bowl is as steeped in history as any lost ski area. Trails were first cut there in 1934, for example, and the fieldstone fireplace in the base lodge was built even before the Neil Starr Shelter itself.

But unlike virtually any other ski area in the world, the Snow Bowl has the support of a well endowed college. The place gives new meaning to the phrase “higher learning” – 2,650 feet higher than sea level, to exact, where the Worth Mountain Chairlift reaches its apex.
Despite a recent brush with extinction – or at least with significant downsizing – the Bowl remains a vital center of community life.

Generations of local skiers have called the place their winter home away from home.

Parents and grandparents know that once the kids have reached a certain ability, they can be safely let loose on the mountain while their elders read a book in the base lodge or chat with friends. And the kids know they easily catch up to their buddies at the Bowl without being too specific about where and when.

This easily found camaraderie is a big reason why adult skiers keep coming back, too. They return even though they can easily get to bigger, better slopes at Mad River and Sugarbush.

But those resorts are also full of people from New Jersey, not New Haven.
The Bowl’s characteristic community feeling is becoming more rare with each passing year.

Over the decades, many New England towns have lost their local ski areas. This season, for examples, has seen the apparent demise of one more, Vermont’s Ascutney Mountain Resort.

The Bowl itself may have narrowly averted this same fate.

When the Great Recession hit a couple of years ago -- at the same time that the old Worth Mountain Chairlift was so old it couldn't pass a safety inspection -- Middlebury College leaders might have wondered if it would fall to them to be the ones to close the Bowl.

How could they possibly justify spending $1.7 million on something as comparatively frivolous as a new chairlift – at the same time they were being forced to close a new dining hall, offer staff and faculty buyouts, and pull out all the stops to avoid devastating layoffs?

Perhaps only a few college administrators and trustees know how they did the juggling.

They certainly made a lot of noise about donors. But I suspect it was the college itself that came up with the cash to reinvigorate Vermont’s third-oldest ski area. They decided to buy a new triple chairlift and keep the Bowl’s central lift -- and perhaps the ski area itself -- in operation.

Our communities are the richer for the college’s efforts. With the opening of the new chair and the 2003 renovation of Starr Shelter, the Bowl has undergone a facelift that will keep the place fresh for years to come.

Amid these improvements, its history still shines through at the place “where college champions compete.”

Four plaques honor national championships won by the college’s women's ski teams, which were coached by such familiar names as Charlie Brush, Terry Aldrich and former Olympian Gordie Eaton. A photo montage shows other college champions and coaches including John Bower, a ski jumper and cross-country racer who, like Eaton, was an Olympian and Middlebury College alumnus.

It's been years now since college champions competed in ski jumping at the Snow Bowl. But if you look hard into the woods, you can still ¬see the outline of where the old ski jump was.

Two-thirds of the way up the sleek new Worth Mountain chair is an overnight shelter for the historic Long Trail. It rises up on the right, just at the end of the spooky section where the chairlift passes beside granite cliffs, largely out of view of any of the ski trails.

Looking east as you creep past the cliffs and imagine making fresh tracks in the untouched snow below, it's easy to believe that you are in fact exploring one of New England's closed, lost ski areas.

But as any holiday-week visitor to our much loved little mountain can assure you, the Bowl is very much alive.

-- 30 --

Saying Thanks for Life's Small Heroes

2010-11-29T10:24:00.001-05:00

(Posted for Thanksgiving, 2010)

There are plenty of reasons to see through the glass darkly in late November. You don't need me to remind you what they are.

But there are also good reasons why it's become an American tradition to say thanks amid the gathering darkness.

On this holiday, I'm grateful for a few small-time heroes.

I call them "small time" not because their heroism is petty or unworthy. It’s just that their kind of everyday valor goes largely unnoticed.

I got to thinking about that when I attended a wedding at the Waybury Inn this past summer.

Not just any wedding, but one between two women in their 60s. They united in matrimony under a big white tent before a gathering of more than a hundred of their friends.
Weddings are almost always touching affairs. But this one transformed pretty much every one of us into a puddle.

These two female beloveds, who could have chosen to live together quietly, put it all on the line in a very public way.

That made the event more than just a celebration of their love for and commitment to one another.

It also made it a day to be glad we lived in Vermont. Where people can join in full and legal partnership with whomever they choose. Even if that person happens to be of the same gender.

The simple heroism of that act of marriage helped me see some of the other heroes around me.

I know another married couple, for example, who were childless and child-free and well into midlife. Then they decided to adopt two boys from Ethiopia. They didn't have to do this, to take on all the expense and complexities and potential heartbreaks. But they did, bringing the boys to Vermont while also maintaining ties to the boys’ family members back in Africa.

Another example: Almost no one will notice the heroism of my dearest friend K. She's way too introverted for that. But even in the face of family difficulties, physical illness and divorce, she has deepened her commitment to the inner journey. The depths to which she is willing to go, exploring all that lies within the psyche, inspire those of us who know her to go deeper in our own lives.

I know another married couple, approaching the age of 50 with a son already in middle school, who took the leap and adopted a baby girl from China.
The story goes that in China after the girl’s birth, she had been left abandoned in an open field.

It took my friends more than five years, thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours of effort just to get the right to bring a child from an orphanage in China to a cozy brick house in Vermont.

They persisted through all those years and dollars and hours. And now when you see their bright-eyed daughter held in her father's arms, she reaches out her left index finger to tap you. As if to confirm that she really is here, held by heroes.

Yet another local couple with a biological child decided to adopt into their family an infant African-American girl from the Bronx. I don't know why people would add such great uncertainty to their lives. But I know that they and the girl will be happier, and the world a better place, because of their decision.

One couple of my acquaintance has been facing her cancer for more than four years now. She's bravely dealt with it on her own terms. Her husband stands beside her to this day, helping to share the burden in every way he can.

If I had faced the same circumstances, I could not have acted as nobly. But someday when a great difficulty comes, I will think of this couple and try to find some of the same strength that has sustained them.

Sometimes we take on great challenges all by ourselves. Because we have to, or we deeply want to.

For example, a friend of mine decided in the mid-1990s that if she was ever going to have a child, it was time. Even if she was past 40 and it meant raising that child on her own.

And so she has done that for more than 13 years now.

These days I share many hours with her and her daughter, grateful for her heroism and her daughter's shining presence.

The three of us are spending the Thanksgiving holiday together. As I near age 60, my days are sunnier thanks to them. And I am a late, grateful enrollee in the School of Hanging out with Young People.

These are some of my not-so-small-time heroes.

Look around you. No doubt you have a few such heroes in your own life.

In the brightness of this holiday weekend, I encourage you to find a way to thank one of them.

-- 30 --

The (Tom) Rush of Time

2010-11-15T18:39:00.003-05:00

To hear what it was like to play professional football in the early days of the NFL, you'd want to talk to a guy like Y.A. Tittle. Interested in the history of the feminist movement? Go hear a Gloria Steinem talk. George McGovern could tell you all you needed to know about trying to change a political party.

And if you wanted to learn about folk music -- which reaches back several centuries yet still shapes the music we hear today -- you couldn't do much better than going to a Tom Rush concert.

With stylishly shaggy silver hair and his trademark mustache, Rush is pushing 70 and has had a musical career of nearly 50 years. Yet as amply demonstrated by his show last Saturday night at the Vergennes Opera House, he remains one of the most important links in the chain.

No other folk singer has been so closely tied to New England. A New Hampshire native who went to St Paul’s School (which meant, he said, “I grew up in 18th century England”), he now lives in Norwich, Vt., after some years living out west. With a sound developed and polished in the folk clubs of the early 1960s, his songs transport an audience back through the decades, to when he and his listeners were young.

Rush was there when the great Delta blues men were being rediscovered by white college kids back in the early 1960s. Coming down from Merrimack County, he was a Harvard undergraduate when he began playing the clubs during what Tom Paxton calls "the folk scare."

Like Bob Dylan, Paxton and a number of other youngsters who revivified the blues, Rush helped bring the music and personalities of Southern black America into the mainstream. Those young folksingers met the old bluesman at gigs, invited them back to their Cambridge apartments for late-night jams, learned their songs, copied their idiosyncratic picking, and reinterpreted a lost, distant music from the Mississippi Delta for a white audience of millions.

Saturday night, Rush closed the first set of his show with "Panama Limited. " He made his old Epiphone acoustic guitar sing like the wheels, brakes and bells of a freight train, channeling a century of the blues through the licks he learned from Bukka White.

But as Rush wryly observed, he just can't do some of the old blues songs anymore because they are so politically incorrect. Take for example "Big Fat Woman," the old number by John Hurt, who sang of "the meat shakin’ on her bones." But as Rush added, Hurt’s song has the rare and beautiful rhyme, "Big Fat Woman great big legs/ Ev'ry time she moves, move like a soft boiled egg."

It's just not the same if a white guy tries to write in that genre, Rush said: "Imagine if a yuppie wrote a blues song. It would go, ‘Woke up this mornin’. Both cars were gone.’ "

Rush is right up there with the funniest of the singer-songwriters, among whom I would rank Richard Thompson, who played a Middlebury show back in August, and the late, great John Stewart. Rush has revived the old Fred Koller/John Prine song "Let Talk Dirty in Hawaiian." And he clearly relishes the telling of a corny joke. Like the one about the ex-girlfriend who became a street walker in Venice, and drowned.

But Rush has also built his career on moody, evocative songs delivered in a honey-tinged, smoky voice. He wrote a few of those himself, such as the classic "No Regrets," but most of them are covers. He’s famous as the first to record the songs of Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and James Taylor before they had their first records.

His delicate reading of classics such as Joni’s “Urge for Going” (the best song ever written about autumn) and Jackson Browne's "These Days" sparked many a memory.

Several of us spent the intermission regaling each other with memories of past shows he had performed in Vermont, including one during the Middlebury College 1969 homecoming weekend. I recall seeing him in Burlington in 1975 with his very loud folk band (featuring guitarist Trevor Veitch, "of no fixed address"), on a double bill with Linda Ronstadt.

Yes, the average age of the audience last Saturday night was well north of 50. But when Rush encored with “Child Song,” in which the young narrator explains why he’s collecting his things and leaving home -- "Goodbye Mama, goodbye to you too, Pa ... I love you but that hasn't helped at all" -- the 1970s were as new as that morning's sunrise.

It's one thing to hear those old songs on CD. It's quite another thing to see and hear them performed live, just one man and his guitar. Only a familiar old scent can so powerfully evoke the past. Tom Rush proves again that music is our one true Time Machine.

- 30 -

Middlebury Bridge on TV

2010-11-02T08:53:00.006-05:00

I got my 10 seconds of local fame on Channel 5 over the past few days, in their coverage of the opening of the nifty new downtown Middlebury bridge. View the brief video clip at:

http://www.wptz.com/news/25578809/detail.html

Honoring Murray Dry, Guessing on the Gov Race

2010-10-28T09:09:00.002-05:00

Who’s going to win this nail-biter of a governor’s race? It's anybody's guess.

The polls say Republican Lieut. Gov. Brian Dubie and state Senate President pro tempore Peter Shumlin are in a virtual dead heat. And so it seems they will remain until Election Day next Tuesday, Nov. 2.

Hopefully there will be no need for a recount, as there was after the Democratic primary. But with the electorate apparently split straight down the middle, there's no guarantee this one won't go to a recount, too.f

But Dubie can’t be encouraged by the decision of the usually conservative Burlington Free Press to endorse Shumlin. Dubie’s political base is in the relatively populous Chittenden County, which is the heart of FreepLand, and the Freep backed Gov. Jim Douglas in his 2008 re-election bid.

Along with the Free Press and others, I'm impressed by Shumlin’s leadership in getting the Legislature to deny a renewal license to the dangerous Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Shumlin also led the way in establishing the nation's first non-court-ordered law on marriage equality. He’s demonstrated the ability to get things done.

By comparison, Dubie's election would give us two more years of trench warfare between the governor and the Legislature. He’s sticking with the tired old story of running down Vermont because it's supposedly antibusiness, while advocating tax cuts for even the richest Vermonters. It says here it’s time to turn things over the Democrats and see what they can do.

You've got to wonder, though, why any sane person wants to be governor at this point. Much of the next governor's time will be consumed in trying to find the money to fund state programs -- and then overseeing severe budget cuts in most programs and perhaps the outright destruction of some.

The recession-caused tax shortfall -- and the difficulty of getting meaningful tax increases passed in a time when Americans seemed to have given up on investing in their future -- will give the next governor little choice.

In a classic "drop back 10 and punt" move, the 2010 Legislature did its best to avoid the worst of the budget crisis. But the state's budget crisis is serious enough that it can't be dodged again in 2011.

In fact, one might say that the winner of this year's election could end up being the loser. Whoever comes out on the short end will, after two years of budget cutting led by the new governor, have a ripe target for a repeat effort. Should he have the stomach for it.

* * *

Perhaps the most interesting local legislative races is in the New Haven-Weybridge-Bridport district, where Democrat Spence Putnam is squaring off against Republican Harvey Smith, who previously held the seat for eight years. Smith was knocked off in 2006 by Chris Bray. The seat is an open one in the wake of Bray’s unsuccessful, quixotic quest for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor.

Putnam is that somewhat unusual Democrat who can claim deep business experience -- among other things as one of the top executives at Vermont Teddy Bear and Danforth Pewterers, and as executive director of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. On that basis, as well as for his extensive experience with local governmental and nonprofit organizations, Putnam deserves the seat.

***

My vote for best campaign sign of the season goes to Mike Fisher of Lincoln, who’s seeking re-election. Some of his bright-red signs don't even say who the candidate is. They just show the outline of a red fish.

Too bad redfish aren't native to Vermont. But then, Fisher's choices for a sign color were limited to out-of-state piscatorians. Yellowtail, orange roughy and bluefish aren't native to Vermont, either.

***

More on this topic later, but last Friday and Saturday's symposium honoring the Middlebury College teaching of political science Prof. Murray Dry showed just how huge an effect one teacher can have.

Many of Dry's students over the decades gathered for two days of papers, panels and a culminating dinner to honor his teaching career and scholarship.

All this, and Murray isn't even retiring.

The composition of the dinner crowd indicated the reach of his legacy, consisting of both graying Baby Boomers who had been in Murray's first Middlebury class in 1968 -- he forgot his lecture notes and had to dash back to his office to get them – and students who take his classes today.

There are certainly other teachers at the college who deserve this kind of tribute. But few of them have inspired as much loyalty as Murray Dry.

One reason? As a speaker at Saturday night's dinner jokingly put it, "In Murray's world there are three things: students, former students, and nonstudents."

350.org and Social Media Activism

2010-10-12T13:12:00.002-05:00

Can Facebook, Twitter and YouTube truly subvert the old power paradigms? Perhaps, as the digital evangelists would have us believe, these digital platforms represent a new and powerful way to change the world.

The old Sixties phrase was that the revolution will not be televised. But will it be tweeted?

Or is social media just another form of entertainment – a diversion that gives us the illusion that we can be active for a cause, just by clicking a computer mouse?

When social media first emerged, many of us felt we could use online communications to move people to action, in ways we hadn't been able to do before.

International movements such as Free Tibet and the Save Darfur Coalition have garnered millions of supporters online.

Protests against the Iranian government were widely publicized on Twitter -- so much so that the US government asked Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance shutdown, because Washington wanted Iranian activists to continue using Twitter to undermine the fundamentalist government of Iran.

But more recent thinking, as summarized in a recent New Yorker magazine article by Malcolm Gladwell, suggests it's all just a bunch of cheap thrills.

Gladwell calculates, for example, that the nearly 1.3 million people who have signed up to be "members" of the Save Darfur Coalition on Facebook have donated a grand total of about 9 cents each to the cause.

Gladwell compares this paltry activism to the extreme sacrifices of the American Civil Rights movement. Using block-by block, church-by church organizing against segregation, civil rights activists built a strong, hierarchical network that changed the nation.

Contrast that with the nonhierarchical, lounge-chair “activism” of people who get an angry e-mail from MoveOn.org, fire off copies to their friends -- and think they've contributed to making this a better society.

The only thing that will really change the world, Gladwell argues, is old-fashioned organizing, whether the cause involves a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter or at a coal-fired power plant.

He may well be right. We don't really accomplish much by "liking" some political cause on Facebook.

Even though online activism has proved to be a powerful means of raising money for political organizations right and left, there's no substitute for door-to-door canvassing for votes, few tools more powerful than getting people to public rallies and polling places.

There is, however, one very powerful exception to the critique from Gladwell and other critics. And it started right here in Addison County, with the efforts of author Bill McKibben and a group of recent Middlebury College graduates who formed 350.org.

The organization's phenomenal global growth has largely been fueled by the Internet -- focusing on the fact that 350 ppm is the maximum allowable concentration of atmospheric carbon to sustain life on earth as we know it.

Last year, for example, 350.org organized more than 5,000 events all over the world to focus on the number 350 -- in McKibben's words "the most important number in the world" because it's tied so closely to our survival. (And once you focus on 350 ppm as the sustainable ceiling, it's especially frightening to know that we are already at 390 ppm and rising.)

A year later, 350.org asked supporters around the world this year to do more than just highlight a number. They wanted everybody to get to work, on projects in their communities that would help ease global warming.

It’s one thing to ask people to take a photo of a hand-lettered “350” at an exotic location. It’s quite another to ask them to pick up a shovel. Would anybody show up? Or was last year's event just another example of photo-op activism?

The world got the answer this past Sunday, October 10 – “10-10-10” -- and it was a heartening one. All over the planet, people organized work projects in virtually every country in the world. More than 7,000 of them, exceeding even last year's effort.

The results that culminated in Sunday's events can be witnessed at www.350.org.
Religious Australians organized a national “ride to worship week. In Harlem they painted over the black roof of a school with white paint to reduce the building’s energy usage.

From troubled lands like Iran and Palestine, people sent in pictures of their actions. In Bangladesh, where rising seawater threatens millions of people, they gathered on bikes and in small boats to spread the word about 350.

There were more than 2,000 events in the United States – which is especially encouraging since we generate so much of the world's district of carbon. In Cornwall, Vt., for example, they worked on an organic garden at the local elementary school.

In Afghanistan, a country being torn apart by an endless war, students organized tree plantings to green up the atmosphere.

At Middlebury College, by comparison, only a few hardworking students turned out for Sunday’s events. Those intrepid students gleaned leftover food from farmers’ fields and orchards to feed the hungry in Addison County. Then they went door-to-door registering voters.

But most of the college’s 2,300-plus students stayed away.

Think about it. Afghanistan is coming apart at the seams -- yet more students turned out there to stop climate change than at Middlebury College, the very birthplace of this global movement.

Nonetheless, in thousands of other places around the globe, people inspired by the movement that began in Middlebury were thinking really big.

Last Sunday was the inspiration for solar panel installations in Bangalore, India, the Namibian desert, the Maldives, and Las Cruces, N.M. An estimated 7,000 people marched in the streets of Istanbul. They held an event with endangered penguins on a beach in South Africa. In Isafjordur, they pledged to "keep the ice in Iceland."

So much for the idea that digital media can't be used to organize. In putting together the world's biggest-ever environmental work party, 350.org may have shown the way to a new global commitment to curbing climate change.

As the 350 organizers are fond of putting it, we’ve gotten to work – and now it's time for our political leaders to get to work, too.

-- 30 --

2010-10-07T17:31:00.001-05:00

Communal Boomer Retirement

2010-09-30T15:41:00.001-05:00

It doesn't seem all that long ago that we were college freshman.

On a Friday night in September of 1970, the four of us trooped down to Mister Up’s for a big dinner out. We were full of excitement about what our new college adventure would bring.

The restaurant had a salad bar -- the first one I’d ever seen -- and I felt very adult and politically aware when I ordered a bottle of Almaden wine. It was a time when 18-year-olds could legally drink, and we were boycotting Gallo in support of striking California grape pickers.

I remember being amazed that Mister Ups was charging the enormous sum of one dollar for a dessert. We all agreed that was way too much.

Forty years later almost to the day, the same four of us were sitting around the dinner table last Saturday night, at the Washington, D.C. residence of one of the four.

But this time instead of talking about the freshman year that had just begun, we were talking about our retirement plans.

When you're a young adult making your way in the world, older people tell you that it all goes by so fast.

You nod your head as if you know just what they mean. But really you don't.

Then one day you wake up, you're pushing 60, and you start thinking about where and how you will live when you get old and retire.

With the same four of us around the dinner table last weekend (plus a fifth in the form of a simpatico spouse), we counted ourselves as being very lucky -- both that we could gather together frequently and in good health, and that, we decided, we would like to live together when we retire.

There seems to be little consensus on what the next 30 or 40 years will look like for Baby Boomers in what the Social Security Administration has called "America's silver tsunami." But there is widespread agreement that as with so many other things, we Boomers will reshape retirement, both where and how we live.

Because our fivesome’s fantasy includes living in Vermont, I’ve begun to look around at the local options.

We are, for example, seeing the emergence of continuing-care retirement communities.

The Lodge at Otter Creek describes itself as “an all-inclusive adult community in a resort like setting. Every amenity awaits you, from the putting green to the swimming pool to the hair salon. There’s exquisite dining, the café, the fitness center, the library, the luxurious community rooms and concierge who will assist you with anything you desire.”

The vision for Eastview at Middlebury goes like this: "Here, in this cherished corner of New England, residents will enjoy a beautiful setting within a vibrant community. With 30 acres of lawns, gardens and woods, Eastview offers charming one-story cottages as well as independent and residential-care apartments within the handsome Inn at Eastview."

Extended Family, newly available in Addison County, offers a different model: "We help people age on their terms by offering premium services that promote independence, good health, and engagement in life."

But it’s not a community like Eastview or the Lodge at Otter Creek that the five of us contemplated as we sat around the dinner table last weekend.

Call us naïve, but our vision is a collection of houses in the country near a college town, with clustered homes balanced by a modicum of privacy. We might draw on a cohousing model with private living quarters and shared common areas. There would be room for visiting kids and grandkids and, as we aged, perhaps free housing for a caretaker and/or nurse to assist us in our dotage.

What we basically want to do is gather those to whom we are closest, and circle the wagons.

There might well be a need for something like the services that Extended Family offers. But there is no room in our vision for retiring to Florida to play golf and bridge with people we don't know.

Perhaps ours is just an unachievable dream. But having made it 40 years together as close friends, we figure we've got a good shot as anybody at achieving our communal vision for retirement and old age.

Besides, we just happen to know of a nice little college town.

And we'd like to think we could go back to Mister Up’s, 70 years after our first year at college, have a bottle of tasty Vermont wine, sample the localvore salad bar -- and shake our heads at the high price of dessert.

Because we remember back when it cost just a buck.

* * *

A couple corrections and a clarification.

Several weeks ago I described those round white rolls of plastic on dairy farms as containing manure. I’m told that in fact they hold silage, also known as balage or round bale silage. So much for my dairy expertise.

In my last column I said that it was the county Democratic Committee that chose Paul Ralston over Amy Sheldon as Middlebury’s new Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives. In fact, as Michael and Judy Olinick noted in a letter to the editor that appeared in last Thursday’s paper, it was the town committee.

To clarify another point: The Olinicks disputed my statement that some observers had suggested Sheldon did not get the nod because she had mounted a write-in campaign against incumbent Harold Giard. My sources for the “observers” comment were two prominent local Democrats. But neither of those knowledgeable observers was in the room when the town committee made its decision. I’m assured by a friend who is a member of the town committee that the committee had nothing but praise for Sheldon’s efforts.

The Naked Truth on Skinny-Dipping Candidates

2010-09-20T14:46:00.003-05:00

Vermonters will be asked to choose between two very different gubernatorial candidates this fall, and two different visions of Vermont.

But at least along the way, we can be assured of some laughs.

Republican Brian Dubie sees a stake imperiled by high taxes, anti-business sentiment and wasteful education spending. He's against reproductive choice and gay marriage.

Democrat Peter Shumlin sees a state that has made great progress on gay marriage while also defending reproductive choice, but that now needs single-payer healthcare.

Yet thanks to Monday's first debate of the general election campaign, we now know both candidates have been skinny-dipping.

That's because, along with the weighty matters kicked around by Dubie and Shumlin in their first debate, there was also a query about their swimming history. I guess it was the Vermont equivalent of the "boxers or briefs" question tossed at Bill Clinton during an earlier, presidential debate.

It'll be interesting to see if Brian Dubie can get elected by reading from the same script as his predecessor, Middlebury Republican Jim Douglas. The anti-tax, anti-regulation mantra worked well for Douglas. But it's an open question whether an increasingly liberal electorate will decide it's heard enough of that particular song.

Also worth watching: Can Shumlin keep his quick tongue and combative instincts under control between now and November? He's managed to stay polite in this campaign to date. But his reputation persists as being somewhat sharp-elbowed, at least by Vermont’s gentle standard.

Judging by the early indications from Monday's exchanges, Shumlin has an edge over Dubie in Debate 101. Shumlin has his talking points down, having endured more than a couple dozen number Democratic primary debates.

By comparison, the perhaps rusty Dubie opined in Monday's debate that "even housewives" were smart enough to do a better job with the state budget than the Democratic Legislature had done.

I can see it now, the new third wing of the GOP campaign: Stupid Housewives for Dubie.

But if he keeps going this way, the lieutenant governor might not get many votes from surrendered housewives, either. The state, he said in Monday's debate, should "do what families must do … shrink middle management.”

Family middle management? Um, would that be children?

Official Movie of the Dubie Campaign: "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

And then there was that deliciously Freudian slip in which Dubie said that to cut the cost of state government, Vermont should "target the most vulnerable."

A Dubie spokesman said later that he meant to say Vermont should "protect the most vulnerable."

But with the lieutenant governor suggesting he can cut state spending by $100 million next year, we shouldn’t be surprised if a few of Vermont’s most vulnerable are feeling even more vulnerable today.

***
Before it fades into obscurity, I can't help but note the folly of State Sen. Doug Racine's demand for a recount in the Democratic primary. After more than two weeks of waiting, the surprisingly speedy recount showed that not only had Racine truly lost to Shumlin in the Democratic primary: He actually got fewer votes than the initial tallies had shown.

If Shumlin loses this fall's election -- and it will surely be a close one -- Democrats will look back in anger at Racine's demand for a recount.

The recount delayed the true start of the Shumlin campaign at a critical time, forcing him to go into stall mode when he could have been out raising money and hiring staff.

The lengthy uncertainty engendered by the recount -- and the decision of Shumlin, Racine, and the third-place Deborah Markowitz to campaign together -- presented Vermonters with the specter of a three-headed, pre-recount zombie, Vermont’s version of the Politically Undead.

Democrats tried to put the best possible public face on the recount, though I suspect they were privately gnashing their teeth. I certainly felt that Racine's demand for a recount was unwarranted given the size of Shumlin's lead compared to the number of votes cast.
Shumlin, too, must have been privately seething. But he managed to bite his tongue and play along until the recount was finalized.

Racine indicated he felt pressured by his supporters to ask for a recount. But his never-say-die narcissism may cost the Democrats the governor’s seat, in a short general-election campaign against a very well funded Republican.

Headline of the primary season, by the way, was in the Burlington Free Press, above its front-page report of the recount results: "Shumlin wins... again."

***
Along with Racine, East Middlebury's Amy Sheldon was another unlucky hopeful who got a couple lessons in politics over the past month.

Sheldon waged a spirited write-in campaign in the local Democratic County primary against incumbent State Sen. Harold Giard, who himself was running as a write-in because he failed to file his re-election campaign papers in time. Sheldon narrowly lost but made a strong showing.

After that close defeat Sheldon again lost -- this time by a single vote -- when the town Democratic committee gathered to name a replacement for the unopposed-for-reelection Rep. Steve Maier, who puzzlingly decided at this late date against another term.

In the committee's vote, Sheldon lost by a 6-5 tally to Paul Ralston, he of the Vermont Coffee Company. Ralston will now join Rep. Betty Nuovo as Middlebury's contingent in the House. Some observers suggested that her challenge to the incumbent Giard cost her the committee’s support.

Ralston's business background will no doubt be the butt of a few good-natured jokes. Herbert Hoover ran for president promising "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." Will Ralston seek reelection in 2012 promising an Americano in every cup?

As for Sheldon and Racine, in their respective write-in campaign and recount request, they’ve had hard reminders of a reality that those in the political arena often face:

You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

- 30 -

College in the Age of Helicopter Parents

2010-09-02T13:13:00.002-05:00

Barbara Hofer is having more fun than the average college professor. With her new book featured on The Early Show and in USA Today, who can blame her?

Hofer, a psychology professor at Middlebury College, is co-author of "The iConnected Parent." The book explores the reasons behind the often-creepy connection that many of today's college students have with their parents -- and what Mom and Dad can do about it.

Anybody who's recently been on the Middlebury campus can't help but notice how much time students spend on their cell phones, even walking between classes. Turns out, Hofer says, they are often talking to their parents, to report on such earthshaking topics as what they'll be doing after class or what their roommate said last night.

Research by Hofer, her students, and co-author Abigail Sullivan Moore revealed that it’s not uncommon for college students to talk and e-mail with their parents four or five times a day. Indeed, they found, the average student is in touch with a parent, via “electronic tether,” more than 10 times a week.

Does this matter?

You bet it does. Says Hofer: “Those who are talking a lot with their parents are less autonomous,” at a time of life when their primary task is to develop autonomy.

How bad is it? Hofer's research revealed that 19% of college students are e-mailing papers and other assignments home – so their parents can check their work before it’s submitted.

Sometimes young people's dependency on their parents gets truly out of hand. For example, Hofer and Sullivan felt it necessary to caution parents of high school students, when they are applying to college, against talking about where "we" are applying (as in, "We really want to get into Amherst, but we'll settle for Middlebury if we have to.").

This is the Age of the Helicopter Parent, and of the college junior who can't make up his mind what course to take without consulting mommy.

All of this sounds especially bizarre to many Baby Boomers. When we were in college, we did our best to talk to our parents as little as we could.

I remember one tortured Sunday night phone call with my parents in which I had to explain, as Christmas break approached, why they hadn't heard from me since Labor Day.

My mother, whose college career culminated in a major in Martyrdom and a minor in Guilt Creation, was especially adept at raking me over the coals about this.

But she would have been even more freaked out, had I called or written her four times a day.

So why are today’s parents and college-age children so excessively connected?

The simple answer, Hofer and Sullivan say, is that they can be. Inexpensive and ubiquitous cell phones and e-mail -- not to mention texting and Skype -- make it seem quite natural to be regularly in touch.

It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that this long umbilical cord can be choking.

Rather than having to manage their own class schedule, study habits and friendships, students can and do habitually turn to their parents. Sometimes they rely on a parent to call and wake them up each morning. Faced with even a small crisis, Hofer reports, mommy is often the first person a student will talk to.

Compare that to a couple of generations ago. Back then, by the time young adults had reached age 20 they were often married, financially self-sustaining, and themselves parents of young children.

Perhaps even more disturbing than parents' overinvolvement in the lives of their college students is what happens when they graduate. Hofer found that the frequency of communication between 20-somethings and their parents actually increases after college.

That entanglement may be part of a larger trend. Clark University psychology Professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett calls it "emerging adulthood." Skeptics call it "failure to thrive."

A recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, for example, reports that 40% of people in their 20s move back in with their parents at least once.

Whether one sees the daily communications between college students and their parents as sweet and touching, or as disturbingly obsessive, it's clear that American society remains ambivalent about emerging adulthood.

My Baby Boomer peers and I sometimes look back with regret on the lack of communication between ourselves and our parents when we were younger.

As we became parents ourselves, many of us resolved to be closer with our kids that our parents had been with us. We knew the cost of lost connections. And if we knew our history, we knew that it was natural -- before jet travel and socioeconomic mobility -- for two or even three generations of a family to be in daily contact, sometimes under the same roof.

As one commentator put it on the website of the Early Show after Hofer's appearance there last month, "When did it become a negative thing to be connected to family members?

But another commentator on the website, who said she worked in an office with recent college graduates, described them this way: "They can text, IM, log into assbook, & have a spreadsheet up on the PC to show they are ‘doing work.’ But they don't even know how to use a copy machine & put a presentation together. Pathetic."

So what's a college student to do?

“It doesn’t mean divorcing your parents,” says Hofer. “It means having a relationship with them, in a way of owning your own behavior, governing your own emotions, and not needing to be reminded of everything.”

Forty Years Later, a Reunion

2010-08-22T14:58:00.003-05:00

I was a little nervous as I headed to the reunion dinner at the VFW, in the tiny western New York State town where I grew up.

My classmates and I were gathering from locations that ranged from an apartment down the street to a house in Thessaloniki, Greece.

I’m sure every one of us heading to the event felt a touch of the silly old fears that come with these gatherings. Then I spotted the big orange sign on the nearby bridge over the Erie Canal:

“WARNING: Emergency Scene Ahead.”

Logically, I knew the sign wasn’t put there as a caution against what lay ahead at my 40th high school reunion. But I worried that it might turn out to be an omen of some sort.
Would I say something stupid and hurt someone’s feelings? Would I still like these people? Would they still like me?

The cliché is that those who gather at reunions are, at least on some subtle level, trying to impress one another. But that doesn’t apply to most reunions in the small towns of places like Vermont and New York.

After all, my classmates and I had known each other from a very young age, in many cases since preschool. We’d attended Ms. Weidman’s summer program for kindergarteners and survived her overpowering perfume. We’d played Little League together, shared First Communion.

When you’ve known people that long, there’s no fooling them. Whatever polish your personality might have in midlife, they recall the little kid you used to be.

They remember what an idiot you were in junior high school. They have a vivid image in their minds of when you barfed up lunch in second grade. When you threw the interception that cost your JV football team an undefeated season.

They were there when you almost blew the entire Senior Play by drinking hard liquor in the girls’ locker room, minutes before you were to go onstage.

They haven’t forgotten the day when you tipped so far back in your desk chair, halfway through Mr. Jelomono’s 7th grade math class, that you fell over backwards in your chair and brought your desk thundering down upon you.

And the secret love notes that were in your desk? The ones that slid out for everyone to read as you lay there on the floor in stunned silence, trapped beneath the heavy desk and the onslaught of telltale papers?

They remember that, too.

Coming to an event like this, you don’t check your ego at the door. You had to check it years ago.

But that doesn’t mean nothing has changed.

For me the most heartening shift at this reunion was the matter-of-fact acceptance of a classmate’s gay sexual orientation. No one seemed to give it a second thought, even though the town remains somewhat insular and strongly Catholic.

Outside the doors of the cozy VFW, however, we could see that another, more disturbing change had occurred. Along with most of central and western New York State, the village has seen a slow decline in prosperity.

Some of the houses in which we grew up are in disrepair or boarded up. The once proud downtown -- where we shopped as kids and where, a century before that, Abraham Lincoln stopped on his trip from Illinois to assume the presidency -- is largely dormant. A few of its stately, mid-19th-century brick buildings are being sold to anyone willing to pay the back taxes.

Yet I take hope for the town’s future from several of my classmates and former high school teachers, who are helping to create a local renaissance through light manufacturing and Erie Canal tourism. Thanks to government stimulus money and a cadre of committed townspeople, the downtown looks noticeably better than it did just three years ago.

And anyway, the nostalgic human heart transcends it all.

Whatever traumas befell us as kids, however ragged the old homestead may look, most of us retain a strong affection for the small town where we came of age.

The place commands a tremendous loyalty from those of who learned in her schools, played on her fields, sipped a first underage beer in her back alleys.

I doubt people feel that way about the suburbs.

As a kid, I couldn’t go anywhere in town without being noticed. When I was 16 and learning to drive, I once illegally passed a parked school bus that had its lights flashing. Later that same afternoon, the bus driver paid a visit to my family’s house to tell me, sternly but without malice, never to do that again.

I could misbehave a mile from home and -- by the time I got back to the house -- my mother would know all about it. And when I occasionally did something well, I’m sure my parents heard about that, too.

Thanks to all those growing-up years, I have always found our Addison County towns – from Bristol to Vergennes to Middlebury -- to be both familiar and comforting.

And when I think of that phrase about how it takes a village to raise a child, I think of those towns.

And of a little place called Clyde, N.Y.

- 30 -

Keeping It Weird in Vermont

2010-08-11T14:49:00.001-05:00

Coming soon to a car near you, the latest in bumper stickers:

"Keep Vermont Weird."

It's a sign of how different Vermont really is -- and how disturbingly homogenized the rest of the country is getting -- that some of us have to proclaim the need to protect our uniqueness.

How weird is Vermont?

Some of the obvious differentiators are gay marriage, a socialist U.S. senator and locally, a spectacularly wrongheaded campaign to construct a monument in the middle of the new Middlebury roundabout. The two of these make Vermont delightfully different, and the third is just plain weird.

Beyond the obvious, though, sometimes you have to look a little harder to find true weirdness in the Green Mountain State.

Yet after a couple of weeks out of town on vacation, I can assure you that we are obviously quite different from our brethren and sister-en in other New England states.
My group’s travels late last month across northern New England began with an eight-hour trek to Mount Desert and the island country around Acadia National Park -- relieved only by a yuppie-style stop for overpriced premium food items at the Portland Whole Foods.

We arrived on Mount Desert the same day as the Obamas flew in for their brief weekend respite. Their casual drop-in at The Club was all the locals could talk about.
I confess I was a bit disappointed that neither POTUS nor the First Missus dropped by our place to say hello.

But perhaps it's just as well. Every time I have to deal with the Secret Service, they seem to dig up even more embarrassing information about my youthful indiscretions.
And because most of the Secret Service agents are a lot younger than I am, it takes a long time to explain to them that back then, sex, drugs and rock 'n roll were considered normal rather than aberrational.

Once the Obama's went back to World Domination and Saving the U.S. Congress for Democrats, we settled in for some serious relaxing.

Coastal Maine has to be one of the prettiest places on the planet. But it's vacation-spiffed exterior lacks any of Vermont's weird soulfulness. Everything but the lobster pounds is too squeaky clean. Top-Sider boat shoes and pink Bermuda shorts seem to be de rigueur even in the smallest towns.

Our group of 10 escaped the vacationing masses by sticking close to our waterfront abode, where the teenage girls in our party posed for photos and the sub-teenage boys played "War" by shooting plastic pellets at each other with disturbingly lifelike toy guns.
When those activities paled, we took to climbing some of the local mountains. We capped these trips by stopping for lobster rolls at dockside restaurants redolent with the smell of rotting crustaceans, punctuated by the buzz of flies and the roar of lobster boat motors.

The sun shone, the lobster was fresh. We were beer-buzzed and happy.

A truly gigantic bald eagle made several appearances in the little bay where our rental house was perched. One evening, two Windjammer schooners in the middle distance made their way toward Pretty Marsh Harbor.

But as Vermonters who are accustomed to a more off-kilter daily existence, we felt all too normal in Maine. Our house rental at an end, four of us exited for eastern Vermont, to spend a week house-sitting for a friend in her high mountain perch above the Connecticut River Valley.

The eastern edge of the state is one I've rarely seen, and it does contain some wonderful weirdness.

Perhaps the best part was the Tea Party activist farmer who has gone to a great deal of effort to spread his maniacal messages on the Route 25 exit of Interstate 91. The general import of his handpainted signs is that the Democrats in Washington are hogs and it’s time to get their snouts out of the trough.

The pièce de résistance were the 14 white plastic manure containers that he had spray-painted, each with an individual letter on it, to spell out, "Thank You Arizona."

Apparently illegal immigration on the Mexican border, 2,200 miles away, is a much greater threat to Vermont than most of us had realized.

Or one might simply conclude that this message of gratitude to Arizona was just an exterior reflection of what was inside the manure containers.

From our mountain vacation spot, our daytime excursions included spending way too much for blue jeans at a nifty dress shop in Montpelier, plus a foray into Live Free or Die Country, across the river in Hanover, N.H.

It says all you need to know about Hanover today, that the former home of the chabby-chic Peter Christian’s Tavern is now occupied by a burrito fast-food chain.

Descending those steps into the basement that once held that magnificently stylish dive bar – which in its time was second only to The Alibi in Middlebury -- I felt a pang of sadness at the passing of a Hanover institution.

But I was hungry, so I had a burrito anyway.

Hanover itself seems to have become the opposite of weird, such a bizarre facsimile of normal that it's become weird again.

You get the sense that Hanover residents who fail to cut their deeply green lawns at least once a week will be carted off to Preppie Jail, with their release contingent upon making a large donation to Dartmouth College.

At day’s end, I was relieved to make it back across the state line from Hanover into Vermont, to visit the general store in Fairlee where two black cats rule the roost of a creaky wooden porch.

The store’s used-book section has old Kurt Vonnegut novels for 50 cents, down the aisle from a slowly deteriorating stuffed bobcat and other replicas of dead creatures.

Just the kind of weird juxtaposition to make a Vermonter feel at home again.

Dubious Advice to New College Grads

2010-06-01T16:22:00.000-05:00

Because so many people have asked me for a copy of the remarks I made at Sunday’s Middlebury College commencement, I’ve decided to reprint them here.

In case you hadn’t seen the news reports, I was asked to step in at the last minute for Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn, the scheduled commencement speakers who were last-minute no-shows. Apparently they had a Third World country to save that day and decided, for some inexplicable reason, that this was more important than giving a commencement speech.

Little did I know, when I stepped to the stage last Sunday and cast my eyes upon the bewildered multitude, that my remarks would cause so much indigestion.

All I can say is that I would strongly encourage any other last-minute commencement stand-ins to sober up before they take the podium. I only wish I had followed my own advice.

Here’s what I (would have) said:

My Fellow Alumni – and you are in fact alumni, so please be sure to leave your forwarding address with the college fundraisers as you depart this event because
they will hunt you down and find you anyway – I come before you today extremely hungover.

I have no idea what they were pouring in the Harvey Wallbangers they were handing out like glasses of water at Mister Ups last night. But it was potent stuff.
Suffice it to say that I will never again do a swan dive off the deck at Ups. And that I am extremely grateful to whoever it was who jumped from the deck at Tully & Marie’s and pulled me from the raging waters of Otter Creek before I vaulted over the falls.

But I digress.

Because I’ve had very little time to prepare today, I will keep it brief. More importantly, I will steal liberally from the remarks of others.
They probably stole everything in their speeches from those who came before them, anyway. Which essentially means that every graduation speech you’ll ever hear is just another riff on the centuries-old mumblings of some cave-bound Neanderthal.

It’s a helluva messy world you grads will inherit.

But it is also a world filled with mystery. As Mark Twain said, “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on -- or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

As I contemplate the sorry state of the planet that you will be handed whether you want it or not, I’m put in mind of a conversation that once occurred between Prime Minister John Major of Britain and President Boris Yeltsin of Russia. The two world leaders were in the green room, preparing to walk on stage for a joint press conference.

“Boris,” said Prime Minister Major, “If you had to describe the state of Russia in one word, what would you say?”

Yeltsin gave it a moment’s thought and said, “Good.”

And, Major inquired, “What if you had two words to describe it?”

Said Yeltsin, “Not good.”

The state of the world – and here I must concur what that famous old sot Yeltsin – is good, and not good.

In the face of that -- as I learned to say over there in the Warner Hemicycle during Poli Sci with Murray P. Dry -- “What is to be done?”
To what noble cause should you dedicate your one precious, ever-shortening, probably meaningless but hopefully entertaining life?
Should you launch yourself upon a career on Wall Street?

Fuggedaboutit! Even as we gather here today and they prepare to tear apart Voter Hall behind me to squeeze more students through this august diploma mill, Wall Street is about to go under the jackhammer. Sure, you can make millions with other people’s money. But don’t waste your time living in New York. You can do it much more comfortably from the couch of your California beachside condo.

Perhaps you should consider a career in the law? But I gotta tell you, I’ve known a lotta lawyers in my time -- and they are one unhappy bunch of overworked,
stressed-out, glassy-eyed, self-loathing zombies.

So perhaps you should consider a career in medicine? Think again, my friends. For I have also known a good many MD’s in my life. And they too are one unhappy bunch of overworked, stressed-out, glassy-eyed zombies. At least they have managed, for the most part, to skip the self-loathing.

What else? Well, there aren’t any jobs left in teaching or nursing. Baby Boomer nurses and teachers will occupy those posts until they die several decades from now. Demonstrating once again that my fellow Boomers and I are indeed the center of the universe and have hogged pretty much all the good stuff for ourselves.

Sorry about that. We didn’t mean to be quite so selfish. But we had to do something to make a living and pay off the credit cards and home equity loans we used to accumulate all the crap that we’re now keeping in our self-storage units.

And while I’m on the subject of hogging the good stuff, let me say that I don’t care how much fun you had at Two Brothers during your college career. When I was
your age we had a ton more fun at The Alibi. Plus with the drinking age at 18, we didn’t have to wait until our senior year to get legally plastered and walk back up the hill through three feet of snow. We could do it as freshmen.

You might perhaps counter that in your four years, you have had more, shall we say, interesting encounters in the romance department. And you may have a point. When I was a student here, if you had a sudden need for contraception on a Saturday night, you were pretty much out of luck until Monday morning because Park Drug closed at 5 p.m. on Saturday and there wasn't another pharmacy department this side of Burlington.

To which I would say: Score one for your generation. But at least if we proved unlucky in love, we could go back to The Alibi and drown our sorrows.

To be honest, I have no idea what you should do for a living or how you should conduct yourselves as you are unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

But I’m happy to provide some free advice anyway. As Twain said: “To be good is noble, but to show others how to be good is nobler, and no trouble.”

So I leave you today with this guidance:

Wash your hands.

Get a good night’s sleep.

Eat your vegetables.

Don’t drive. Walk.

Print out and keep all those mushy emails your lover sends you.

And most of all, have fun.

- 30 –

Going to the Candidates’ Debate

2010-04-22T17:11:00.001-05:00

"The candidates in the governor’s race consist of five liberals and a Dubie. From my experience, that doesn’t usually turn out to be very productive.”

- Leicester resident Tony Bates, in last weekend’s “Vermont Sketches” at Town Hall Theater

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at it, you lose

You couldn’t blame them if the words to “Mrs. Robinson” were on the minds of the 200 Democrats who spent a lovely spring afternoon in the gloomy confines of Dana Auditorium last Sunday. Listening to the five Democratic gubernatorial candidates during their debate, the readily acknowledged question was, “Which one of these people can beat Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie?” the sole Republican in the race.

But the unspoken question among the party faithful was, “Are going to lose this one, too?”

Vermont Democrats have watched in anguish as one challenger after another has lost to Republican Gov. Jim Douglas of Middlebury. Now that Douglas is retiring, the Democrats think this just might be their year. Or not.

Will one of these five capable candidates emerge from the pack to give this very liberal state a Democratic governor?

Or will the five hopefuls simply tear each other apart between now and the August primary, while Dubie bides his time and hoards his campaign dollars for a fall tidal wave that will stem the Democratic tide?

The candidates have done these debates something like 18 times. But for Addison County residents, Sunday’s pow-wow was probably the only time we will see the Fantastic Five Road Show.

The hopefuls span the spectrum from the earnestly boring Susan Bartlett, a centrist and longtime Lamoille County state senator, to the occasionally snarky and unabashedly liberal Peter Shumlin, the president of the State Senate.

Between them Sunday, both physically on the dais and in their styles, were former Windsor County State Sen. Matt Dunne, Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, and Chittenden County State Sen. (and former Lt. Gov.) Doug Racine.

It’s hard to handicap this race in the relatively early days of the campaign. But a few things were obvious after Sunday’s debate.

First, it’s striking to see how ideas that are regarded as slightly dangerous by most Americans – gay marriage and reducing global warming, for example – are simply part of the Democratic orthodoxy in Vermont.

There are certainly nuances among the Fantastic Five. But nobody raises an eyebrow when a candidate calls for single-payer healthcare.

The two most interesting candidates are Dunne and Shumlin – Dunne for his background and a couple fresh ideas, and Shumlin for being the hottest head and most quotable personage in the room.

Shumlin led the charge in the Senate that resulted in the overwhelming rejection of Vermont Yankee’s application to continue operating its ominously aging, Entergy Louisiana-owned nuclear power plant in Vernon. He wears that as a badge of honor, boasting, “I’m the number-one enemy of Entergy Louisiana in America.”

Asked how to help dairy farmers, he replies that as governor he’ll go after “those crooks in Texas who are stealing our farmer’s milk.”

And Shumlin is not above taking a shot at his fellow candidates – taunting Racine, for example, because of his loss to Douglas in the 2002 governor’s race. Even Shumlin notes that one of his friends told him, “You look like one of those slick out-of-staters.” And indeed he does, though he is a native Vermonter.

Markowitz has earned the admiration of those who closely follow state politics, for her capable administration of the secretary of state’s office. But she failed to impress many of us on Sunday.

She might be a strong candidate in the general election, having won statewide election six times, yet she seems unlikely to get that far based on Sunday’s performance. Despite her current lead in fundraising, it’s hard to imagine that Markowtiz will spark the kind of fire in her followers that will be necessary to win an August primary. At that time of year, all but the most dedicated among the electorate will be politically snoozing through summer.

As for Racine, well, give him points for having a strong Chittenden County base and being right up there with Bartlett on the Earnest Meter. Plus he touched a chord when he portrayed the urgent need to close Vermont Yankee as a moral issue. We should not, he asserted, pass to future generations the responsibility for turning away from nuclear to cleaner and safer forms of energy.

It’s always refreshing to hear a Democrat who’s not afraid to talk about morality now and then.

The cipher in this race is Matt Dunne. Will he fade, or catch fire?

Dunne’s strongest suit is his intriguing professional experience which, in contrast to the other four, reaches well beyond the bubble of Vermont politics.

Having been elected to the Vermont House from his hometown of Hartland as a 22-year-old, Dunne served 11 years in the Legislature. He was then director of the national AmeriCorps VISTA program. These days Dunne runs community affairs for Google, working remotely from White River Junction.

In a time when Vermont truly does need 21-century answers to its many challenges, Dunne’s more varied experience will appeal to many, and rightly so. He’s especially passionate about the need to revamp healthcare. He also talks about “leveraging our extraordinary environmental brand” to promote Vermont’s businesses, and drawing on biomass for energy production to make things better “in the plant and in the woods.”

Whether Dunne can triumph over candidates with better name recognition is an open question. But he’s already begun to attract key supporters including Bill McKibben, the author and 350.org leader. McKibben’s letter supporting Dunne, which appeared last week in this newspaper, is now a prominent piece of Dunne’s campaign literature.

We’ll see what the future brings for Dunne and the others. The Democratic primary campaign could results in fireworks among the Fantastic Five, which will temper the winner into a formidable force November.

Or it could turn into a war of attrition – the Democrats’ nightmare -- that leaves the winner exhausted and broke and facing a tanned, rested and ready Brian Dubie in the general election.

-30 -

How It Sugars Off in Starksboro, with John Elder

2010-04-02T10:06:00.002-05:00

You’re in for a muddy ride this time of year, if you turn up onto Big Hollow Road off Route 116 in Starksboro.

There's a short stretch of pavement as the road climbs steeply out of the valley. But it's all dirt from there.

As on so many of Vermont's less travelled roads, a surprising number of people live back in the hollow.

Just about when you think the settlements will give way to untouched forests, you arrive at the optimistically named Hillsboro Manor mobile home park.

The children who live there know that however muddy things might be in the spring -- and however isolated they might feel up there in the big hollow -- this season is the time for a special visit to the sugar shack up the hill. There's a nice older couple doing the boiling on weekends. They can be counted on to give young visitors a warm welcome and the taste of a doughnut with fresh maple syrup drizzled over it.

The Maggie Brook Sugarworks is deep in the hills, but those kids from Hillsboro Manor aren't the only visitors. There is, for example, a man who lives in Huntington but spends most of his days walking through the woods on Sugar Hill, whatever the weather. He can be counted on every year to drop in and buy a couple quarts.

Many other adults make the trek, too -- drawn as much by the owners as by the sweet syrup itself.

Bristol residents John and Rita Elder, you see, aren't your usual sugar makers.
Rita taught for 25 years in Lincoln before retiring a couple years ago. John is approaching the end of a 37-year career of teaching at Middlebury College, the Bread Loaf School of English and Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

He's the author or editor of several volumes, including the especially fine Reading the Mountains of Home. The book explicates a Robert Frost poem, "Directive" and relates Elder's exploration of the wild mountain woods around Bristol.

Though John and Rita are originally from California, they sank their family roots even deeper in Vermont a decade ago when they decided to take up sugaring.

John and his sons Matthew and Caleb, adopting what John calls "a Thoureavian approach," invested plenty of sweat equity but only a few hundred dollars in building the structure that houses the sugar works. The original operation was similarly spartan -- strictly gravity-fed and built using what John calls “the jerry-rigged technology of sugaring,” with the sap boiled off by wood heat.

The sugar shack has grown from its original form over the past 10 years. The Elders have added a wood- storage area on one end and on the other, housing for the sap tanks.

These days, too, a generator hums in the background as the sap boils in the foreground.
The generator creates a vacuum that helps draw sap down through the tap lines strung on the steep hill above. With climate change making sap runs less predictable, the vacuum provides for sap on marginal days. The generator also powers a blower that makes the wood burn more efficiently.

For much of this season the Elders have been burning poplar -- not the best wood for converting 40 gallons of sap into a single gallon of syrup.

But when one of the Elders' sons built his house near the sugarworks, he had to take down two large poplars. So poplar it is, until that's gone and they can again turn to better-burning hardwoods such as red maple and oak, harvested from their 142-acre plot.

Though most of the snow was gone from Sugar Hill when I visited last Saturday, there was still some ice in the puddles. Down in the Banana Belt of Bristol and parts south, most sugar makers were done for the year. But the sap was still coursing in this cold hollow.

At my request, Caleb Elder picked up a distinguished-looking banjo that rested on a chair in the sugar house and played a few bars. It's a banjo he made from cherry wood, with an oak-leaf motif at the top.

I commented that he obviously knows his way around a banjo fretboard, given that the instrument was fretless and therefore provides few clues on where to place the fingers of the left hand.

"With the banjo," Caleb shrugged, “if you’re off by a little bit, you just keep wiggling your fingers."

It’s the kind of “good enough is best” approach that serves sugar makers everywhere. The only perfection is the end result.

Last Saturday was going be a long day and night for Caleb. With the last run of the season likely approaching, he and his brother -- the younger Elders -- were planning to spend all night sugaring.

Hundreds of Vermont sugar makers boil and toil in obscurity, but not the Elders.
John told the story of starting Maggie Brook Sugarworks in The Frog Run, an essay collection. A few years ago, the New York Times reported on efforts by Elder, joined by local writer and UVM faculty member Amy Trubek and others, to determine whether it could justifiably be claimed that Vermont maple syrup exhibits different characteristics depending on where it is created.

Could maple syrup, like fine French wine, claim to be influenced by terroir?

Elder says the jury is still out. We will, in the vernacular, have to see how that sugars off.

But he swears he can identify maple syrup made in Starksboro because it has a hint of vanilla.

"And of course," he adds with a smile, "Starksboro maple syrup is the best."

-- 30 –

Town Meeting? Let's Talk about Underwear

2010-03-03T14:06:00.001-05:00

You gotta love Town Meeting.

Even if 90% of the discussion is about budget numbers that are as dry as a speech by Gov. James Douglas, there's a certain Kabuki-like quality to the charmingly ornate process of gathering to discuss the town's business.

And speaking of Gov. Douglas, he was again absent from his role as moderator, out of Vermont on state business. He's now missed one-third of the town meetings going back to 2005, but Douglas ran again this year for the town moderator spot. It's apparently the one office to which he knows he can still get reelected.

But who worries much about the governor, when the Town Meeting discussion turns to long underwear?

My favorite comment Monday night was from a woman who noted that every time she walks into a town building in winter, it seems awfully warm in there. Couldn't the thermostats be turned down so people could comfortably wear their long underwear when they transact business in town buildings?

A reasonable suggestion, though the town staff members who labor in the drafty municipal building might see at a little differently.

The only item that required a counting of hands Monday was a request from the Addison County Humane Society for $5,000 "to support their mission to promote the ethical treatment of and the prevention of cruelty to all domestic animals and forms of wildlife." That well intended but vague wording -- and the rather large size of the request -- led Board Chairman John Tenney to pointedly indicate the board didn't support the request.

An amendment from the floor to reduce the town's contribution to $2,000 failed on a voice vote. Oddly enough, it was the subsequent vote on an even larger request for the full $5,000 that prompted the need to count the house. The measure went down to a narrow defeat.

Amid the stylized process of Town Meeting, it's always fun to hear a few idiosyncratic concerns. A review of the landscaping plans for the Cross Street Bridge, for example, led to a suggestion that trees be planted in such a way that they don't block the future use of solar panels. And had the planners thought about planting trees that could generate food?

I'll bet that was a new one to pretty much everybody in the room. And a good question, to boot.

It's a measure of how much interest there is in the new bridge that a lengthy presentation by the project engineers held the crowd's attention till nearly 11 p.m.

It will all be worth it in the end, but take note: Completion of the bridge project will turn much of the middle of Middlebury into a King Hell Mess this summer.

As one of the presenting engineers joked (paraphrasing here), "I hope you appreciated how much we didn't inconvenience you last summer with this project -- because that's all going to change."

But the end result, it appears almost certain, will be a nice new bridge with better traffic circulation, no loss of parking, and a downtown that is somewhat less choked by traffic.

Probably the most impressive thing about Town Meeting in Middlebury was the unanimous vote for the town budget. Nary a voice spoke in opposition.

Sure, there were some questions, and one sharp-penciled citizen spotted a mathematical error in the summary of the police budget. But the Select Board and town officials did a nice job of explaining how they got to the blessedly level-funded budget with no tax increase.

A round of applause, please, to the leadership of towns that manage not to raise the budget in tough economic times while continuing to provide the same level of service. Pretty impressive.

More applause for the dedicated corps of volunteers who make up the local ambulance and fire services. Every time I go to Town Meeting, in fact, I feel a swell of gratitude for living in a town where the local services are so well run.

You could see more than a little daylight, though, between the Select Board and their counterparts on the school board. In its annual report, the Select Board couldn't resist noting that while it managed to bring in a budget without tax increases, the UD3 Board -- which oversees the local middle and high schools -- put a big budget increase before the voters on Tuesday.

Here's how the Select Board put it:

"While the Board and Administration have concentrated on holding spending and the tax rate in check, we are chagrined by the prospect of a large school tax increase. Firmly committed to the need to hold taxes in check for struggling residents and businesses, the Board has taken an unprecedented stand to challenge and oppose the proposed UD3 school budget for the coming year. We hope you will join us in pressing for both local and state changes in school budgeting and funding to prevent huge tax increases."

I'm writing this before the will of the voters on the school budget is known. But certainly there will be more “no” votes on the school budget than we usually see. If the school budget goes down to defeat, it will be a sign that, while voters are happy the town didn't increase its tax rate, they are truly fed up with school tax increases.

- 30 -

Vermont Weirdness on the Bus

2010-02-26T12:24:00.001-05:00

From the Rutland Herald. File this under "you can't make this stuff up."

Man charged in bus joyride

By Brent Curtis Staff Writer - Published: February 25, 2010

MIDDLEBURY — An Addison man arrested Tuesday and charged with stealing a school bus told police he liked driving big rigs and had been taking unapproved joyrides with Betcha Transit buses for years, according to Vermont State Police.

Police arrested 27-year-old Jeremy P. Roberts five days after he allegedly commandeered a school bus from the company that serves the Addison Central School and drove it into a tree along Market Road in Bridport, causing more than $1,000 in damage.

Roberts, cited to appear in Middlebury District Court next month, was charged with one count of operation without an owner's consent and one count of aggravated operation without an owner's consent.

State Trooper Andrew Leise said Roberts is no stranger to school buses or Betcha Transit — Roberts drove a bus for the company for four months more than three years ago — but the company fired Roberts after learning he had convictions for negligent operation of a motor vehicle and attempting to elude police.

But Leise said Roberts told police during a taped confession on Tuesday that he has returned to his old job several times during the past two or three years to take the buses for a spin.

"He said he liked driving big vehicles so he would come by when they weren't open and take one of the buses," Leise said. "He said on one occasion he crossed the Champlain Bridge into New York and drove on I-90. On another occasion, he said he drove one of the buses to North Clarendon and stayed overnight in a motel without the owners ever finding out."

Roberts told police he didn't return the bus he took last Thursday because he lost control of the vehicle while driving east at about 60 mph on the country road. The bus went off the road, sideswiped a tree and became stuck in a field where, Leise said, police found it.

The trooper said he is hopeful that improved security at the bus company will help prevent future thefts. Leise said one of the reasons Roberts was able to make off with the buses was due to the lack of security at the bus lot, where the trooper said the bus keys were left in the vehicles between uses.

"I suggested to them strongly that they need to secure their vehicles better," Leise said.

Making Lemonade on the Lemon Fair

2010-02-16T12:14:00.008-05:00

When life gives you lemons, the saying goes, make lemonade.

So it is that on a Sunday afternoon, instead of returning from cross-country at Reichert or snowboarding at Sugarbush, we are heading west into the sunset – to go ice skating.

For those of us who spend the season playing outdoors, the torrential rain that washed away most of the early winter’s snow a couple of weeks ago had one huge benefit: It flooded hayfields all over Addison County. That, combined with two weeks of frigid temperatures, has created miles and miles of skating lanes where once there was only snow and grassy stubble.

We drive west on 125, headed for fields along the Lemon Fair River.

Walking north and carrying our skates, we come first to ice that cracks easily under our weight. But we’re not worried. We can see the grass underneath the ice, just a couple of inches down.

At last we are out far enough on the ice that, while we can still see the grass underneath, there has been enough of a flood to create a solid sheet of ice, which holds us steadily.

Placing our fleece-covered bottoms on the glassy surface, we tug on our hockey skates, then clamber to our feet.

Out ahead of us there are hundreds of yards of ice. Tentatively at first, then picking up speed, we go zooming across the surface, arms swinging.

Yes, it’s bumpy. No Zambonis here to smooth the surface, as at the municipal rink and the college fieldhouse. We’re skating on what Mother Nature gave us.

Not only are there bumps. In the process of icing over and thickening, the flooded fields have cracked, leaving long seams where the ice rises abruptly an inch or two on to the next gigantic plate. And in a process I don’t really understand, even the smooth stretches of ice rise in gentle rolls, creating differences of 6 inches or more in height.

Despite the vast skating distances out on the field, eventually we go looking for new frontiers.

At the edge of the field is a frozen ditch, three feet deep. On the other side of the ditch, waiting to be explored, is a flooded forest.

We test the icy banks of the ditch. They seem solid enough. We decide to try crossing the ditch, hoping there is not frigid water at the bottom. We’re glad to find it’s a solid down there.

From the bottom, it takes most of our upper-body strength to pull us up the slick other side of the ditch. Finally we clamber up the other side.

Again hoisting ourselves up on the uncertain runners of our skates, we take a few tentative strides -- and begin skating through the woods.

Soon we are slaloming through the trees – taking one to our left, one to our right, around a stump here, sprinting to the next opening.

“I’ve done a lot of tree skiing before,” I say to my skating partner. “But this is the first time I’ve ever been tree skating.”

The westering sun shoots gentle yellow beams through the tree limbs. We not just navigating through trees on the edge of a field. This is a Fairy Forest, and we are skate sprites exploring our domain.

I’m thinking of the times when I was a boy and my father would take my brother and me skating along an abandoned stretch of the year a canal, in the western New York town where we grew up.

Dad was a busy country doctor. But occasionally he could sneak out on a Wednesday afternoon for an outdoor skate with his sons. At home, my mother would have hot chocolate for us before dinner.

As I’m skating the Cornwall field and forest, all the time I’ve been eyeing the Lemon Fair.

In fact, I’ve had my inner eye on it much longer than just today. I’ve fantasized about skating on that river for years, and have never done it.

I’ve spent enough time on the ice out here to know it’s thick enough. “You only live once,” I remind myself.

I lie down on the ice, spread my limbs, and slide off onto the surface of the river.
Standing up and beginning to skate, I find that I’ve been missing the best ice of all.

Though covered with a bit of snow, the surface is almost smooth. I skate hundreds of yards in one distance upstream, then a good bit downstream. My states make little V-shapes in the snow, scratchings of where I’ve been.

Off to the west out there over the Adirondacks, the sun is sinking, a fat fireball.

As it recedes, it shoots a giant skyrocket over red light straight up over the river. If I died right now, it would be OK.

Finally back in the car as it grows dark, I head toward town, the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia” on the stereo: “Saw my baby down by the river.”

Pulling into the co-op parking lot, I spy a bumper sticker that just about says it all:
“Savor Every Second.”

-- 30 --

Lessons Learned at the Snow Bowl

2010-01-29T11:59:00.002-05:00

“You can observe a lot just by watching,” Yogi Berra said.

So, too, can you learn a lot just by getting off the chairlift.

You can learn, for example, that an athletic 12-year-old girl, who has just made her first run on a snowboard down the Snow Bowl’s Allen trail, is nonetheless susceptible to falling as she gets off the lift.

That when she falls, it’s likely to be on her back. And that she’s probably going to reach her arms behind her to break her fall.

Which vastly increases the odds that like so many boarders before her, she will sprain her wrist as she topples backwards.

Maybe, I learned, she’ll even break something.

* * *

S. and I were spending a fun afternoon last Sunday at the Snow Bowl, a day after she and her mom and I had been at Sugarbush.

Though S. had learned to board just last month, she nailed the Allen on Sunday, the first time we went down it.

We rode the lift back up and were nearing the top, accompanied by C., a boy from her seventh-grade class. We were planning to take our second run on one of the Bowls’ steepest trails, and maybe S. was still a little nervous.

“I suck at getting off the lift,” she warned C. as we neared the top of the smooth new triple chair. “I’ve caused a couple broken arms.”

We laughed at the thought of so unlikely an event. So when she took a tumble as we got off, we didn’t worry much about it. I figured she’d bounce back up, embarrassed and uninjured.

This time, though, she came up holding her left wrist.

“It hurts,” she said with a wince. I checked it for swelling but didn’t see any.

“You don’t have to do this run,” I told her. “We can ride down on the chairlift. People do that sometimes.”

I paused, trying to think how I could make that prospect more inviting. It was probably an embarrassing one for her to contemplate in front of her classmate.
“We’ll do it together,” I assured her. “It’ll be fun.”

“No, it’s OK, I’m fine,” she replied, almost literally shaking it off. I’d seen her do that before, on the skating rink, swimming last summer, at the top of other chairlifts. So I went along with her wishes, thinking this was a slight sprain like the others.

We cruised across the flat summit toward the point where the Allen plunges down to Route 125, a thousand vertical feet below.

S. is a trooper, and she completed another strong run. But she was in obvious pain when we got to the bottom. “How bad does it hurt?” I asked.

“It feels like the last time I broke my arm. Except I’m not nauseous.”

Which wasn’t exactly reassuring.

Another lesson: When you have to choose between embarrassment and safety, opt for the latter. It was becoming obvious that we should have taken the chairlift down.

“OK, kiddo,” I said. “We’re heading straight for the ski patrol room.”

It must have been a slow afternoon, and we presented the college student patrollers with a teachable moment. One of them took charge while two others watched, one of them asking us the standard injury-survey questions.

They first put her arm in a wire mesh splint. It appeared handmade, little more than chicken wire framed in black duct tape.

Somehow I doubt they do it that way at Sugarbush.

I expected the patrollers to prevent S.’s wrist from swelling by using a chemically activated icepack. But the patrollers said they would put snow in baggies and place it on the injured appendage.

But there weren’t even any baggies in the patrol room. There was a delay while someone ran over to the cafeteria to get something in which to put the snow.

“Has the college cut the budget so much that they don’t give you icepacks anymore?” I groused.

“Nope, it’s always been this way,” one of them cheerfully replied. “We figure we’ve got the snow right outside.”

Which is a perfectly fine solution, until you’re halfway down the mountain on the drive to the hospital and the snow is melting all over the injured party.
S.’s mother met us at the emergency room.

We were delighted to find that even on a busy weekend afternoon, the care at Porter Medical Center is first-rate. From the receptionist and nurse to the X-ray technician and physician’s attendant, S. was rapidly routed through an evaluation and splinting by cheerful, knowledgeable professionals.

We breathed a sigh of relief that as a Middlebury College employee, S.’s mother has good health insurance to cover the cost of the care.

Peering at the instantaneous X-ray, I learned it’s possible to incur something called a buckle fracture. The force of the injury doesn’t actually break the bone but compresses it.

I learned S. had been through something like this before – not just once or twice, but three times. At age 4 she incurred a slight fracture falling off a couch. Several years ago she broke her wrist playing in a hay mow. In the summer of 2008, she broke her arm playing soccer while on vacation in Italy.

Turns out she’s had more fractures than the San Andreas Fault.

* * *

But the biggest lesson I learned last Sunday was not about snowboarding slips or broken bones.

I’ve never had children, for reasons both environmental and personal. For much of my adult life, to be honest, I’d regarded myself as not only childless but also child-free.

Kids were great when they were someone else’s, and I certainly enjoyed playing with them. But they weren’t for me. At the end of the day I preferred my own company and that of other adults.

Nonetheless, that’s begun to change in the past year. As S. and I have spent more time together, I’ve learned – duh -- that when you begin to share ongoing experiences with a child, a deeper, instinctive caring takes root. That’s true even if the kid is a maturing tween who is beginning to find her own way in the world, in a process that inevitably means she will sometimes distance herself from adults.

When we left the Porter emergency room, S. and her mom drove to their house. The plan was for me to head back there after shopping for our dinner.

Driving from the hospital to the co-op, I started to tremble. I wondered what that water was in my eyes.

There wasn’t much I could have done to prevent S. from falling. But I felt responsible. She was in my care at the time.

“Things like this happen, even if you’re standing right there,” her mother reassured me afterward. “I’ve learned that sometimes, the best you can do with a child is just to be there. To walk with them as they grow.”

And I learned, for the first and again for the thousandth time, how good it feels to care.

- 30 -

Winging It at Christmas

2009-12-18T14:00:00.002-05:00

Here we are as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more

Does Christmas ever go that way these days, I wonder -- as it does in “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and all the old holiday standards?

Our world is so fractionated, our faithful friends so far away. If those golden days of yore ever did exist, it often seems they won’t come again.

I remember hearing that song as a teenager, as we decorated the huge tree we had gathered from a friend’s farm. I knew then that I would always recall, in the way you know you’ll never forget your first kiss, how our faithful friends had gathered near to us once more.

My family shared every Christmas with the family of Roz and Norman Avnet, my parents’ closest friends. As we Dennis and Avnet kids grew from rugrats to college students, we always knew that year’s end would bring another visit from the Avnets, another tree, and more olden days made new.

So it is that every Christmas, I pull out the old Frank Sinatra album with that song on it, to hear Frankie sing of those happy golden days.

These days, there’s a 12-year-old girl in my life. We’re on the same page about the brilliance of the Beatles, but it must be said that she doubts the power of this particular Christmas song to transform the darkest days of the year.

Last weekend on the drive out to cut a Christmas tree in the national forest above Ripton, I put Sinatra’s Christmas album on the car’s CD player.

It took less than 60 seconds for the 12-year-old’s voice to drift up from the back seat.

“Whoa,” she said. “This is a really corny album.”

Indeed it is. If you’re gonna go retro, I figure, go with the best.

But there are moments when the nostalgia of familiar carols seems just a sad echo of what we’ve lost.

Maybe there are people out there who know what every Christmas will be like – what they’ll bake, just who will visit when, what they’ll eat for Christmas dinner.
But that’s not how my holidays go these days, and I know I’m not alone. So many of us have too many options, too many uncertainties in our lives, to know ahead of time how the details of the holidays will unfold.

Maybe we could pretty much predict things when most of the kids were young and at home. But now they’re in college or unleashed upon the world as young adults. There’s no telling how it will all come together.

Last Christmas I relived some of those holidays of yore by visiting Judy Avnet, my oldest friend, and her family. But this year, Judy’s older son, Cory, leaves on Christmas Day for a month in South Africa. His brother, Greg, will be at home, but the holiday will be marked earlier than usual, exact day still to be determined. We’re invited but the dates remain unclear.

Another option, to visit my brother and his wife and kids near Boston, is similarly in flux as we try to coordinate eight individuals’ schedules.

The five of them will come in to their Boston-area home from all corners – there to join the two dogs who are the home’s only everyday residents: My brother from Palo Alto where he oversees his law firms’ invasion of Silicon Valley; his wife from a bicoastal existence that finds her in Boston one week, Palo Alto the next.

Their son Luke will arrive from Portland, Oregon, where he’s a professional musician. Older daughter Charlotte will bomb in from the University of Colorado, where she’s majoring in skiing and extroversion. Younger daughter Clara is departing from Sarah Lawrence, halfway through her sophomore year, to study and grow vegetables in Maine.

***

Americans used to navigate their way through Christmas as if performing a script. Now we wing it.

But I wouldn’t trade those old memories of scripted Christmases for all the PlayStations in China.

The Avnets’ station wagon would pull into our driveway after their long trip up from New York. We piled right back in to go cut the tree before it got dark.
As we brought the 12-foot pine in through the front door, my mother would say every year, “It’s too big! Take it back!”

On Christmas morning, we five kids would explode into the family room to open our presents -- only to be told we had to wait “until everyone gets up.” (Translation: Our parents had stayed up late and were now regretting that post-midnight eggnog.)

After a frenzy of opening presents, we’d adjourn to the dining room to inhale our traditional breakfast of scrambled eggs and venison.

***

But it’s tough to re-create those days. And there’s something to be said for winging it. You never know when something will turn into its own new tradition.

Perhaps this year, we’ll just stay put right here in Vermont. Haul out the Christmas ornaments, each with a happy little story attached to it, and hope the rain turns to snow. We’ll ask a few friends in for dinner and rent “White Christmas” (set in the fictional Pine Tree, Vt.) while wishing that Irving Berlin had written at least one more verse to the song.

We’ll play all the corny old carols, and hope even the 12-year-olds learn to appreciate them.

And I’ll contemplate the advice of a growing-older friend, whom I ran into at the co-op the other day.

My friend lost her husband this year and she’s still adjusting. She’s doing it slowly, by choice.

“What should I say in the column about Christmas?” I asked her.

“Everybody tries to do too much over the holidays,” she replied. We’re always thinking we have to rush into decisions about what to do next in life. We should all just use this time to slow down, she said. Let the future arrive in its own time.
I thought back to those boyhood Christmases -- when for a few days, maybe even a week, time just seemed to stop.

I decided right then to go as slowly as I could this Christmas, to just let it happen as it will.

Driving home from the co-op, I sang aloud the sweet old song.

"Through the years we all be together
If the fates allow
Hang a shining star
Upon the highest bough
And have yourself
A merry little Christmas now."

Merry Christmas, everyone.

350.org Middlebury Drum Circle 10-24-09

2009-10-26T09:49:00.003-05:00

Food for 350

2009-10-20T08:58:00.002-05:00

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.

- 30 -

The Excesses and Successes of Summer

2009-09-02T10:50:00.002-05:00

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

2009-08-10T14:34:00.000-05:00

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

2009-08-04T10:52:00.002-05:00

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

2009-07-13T15:38:00.002-05:00

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

2009-06-16T15:58:00.001-05:00

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

2009-06-03T11:18:00.001-05:00

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

2009-05-12T18:14:00.002-05:00

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

2009-05-05T07:49:00.005-05:00

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

2009-05-03T07:18:00.002-05:00

"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

2009-05-01T20:37:00.002-05:00

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

2009-04-30T12:40:00.001-05:00

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

2009-04-16T18:51:00.001-05:00

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

2009-04-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-19T09:55:00.002-05:00

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

- 30 -

The College’s Foray into Downtown Business

2009-03-05T09:22:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-18T09:40:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-21T10:17:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-04T21:17:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-02T10:28:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-03T11:25:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-03T11:22:00.002-05:00

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

2008-10-01T10:50:00.003-05:00

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

2008-09-23T20:16:00.001-05:00

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

2008-09-13T14:56:00.002-05:00

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

2008-09-13T13:02:00.002-05:00

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.

Greg's Business Blog

2008-07-30T09:46:00.005-05:00

Info on Greg's consulting business:

www.DowlingDennis.net

Thanksgiving Gratitude -- (scroll down)

2007-11-16T10:28:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-26T12:04:00.001-05:00

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.

- 30 -

The Page Turns at Vermont Book Shop

2007-10-02T09:04:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-02T09:01:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-04T10:35:00.000-05:00

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.

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Town Boy Moves to the Country

2007-07-03T10:55:00.000-05:00

You learn a lot when you leave the village and move to the country.

You stop worrying about when you'll cut the grass – and start worrying about how to get the haying done. You're no longer picking up sticks and leaves from a small patch of yard. Instead, you're chainsawing giant aspens that have come crashing into the meadow.

Several years ago, when my wife and I moved back to Vermont after too many years away, we bought a dream house in town. We weren't sure how quickly we'd readjust to cold gray days after living in a sunwashed, soul-free suburb. So we opted for the sleek newness of an architect's design and the skilled craftsmanship of young builders. Oakley Smith and Owen McClain had put their hearts into creating the place, and it showed in our splendid new home.

Compared to where we'd lived for so long, it was a palace. Radiant heat, vaulted ceilings, a bathtub big enough for two, bamboo floors, warm lighting and deep carpet.

The Middlebury green was a minute down the hill. There were ever-changing views to the majestic Adirondack peaks. We were all set.

And yet.

And yet the old Vermont called us.

Early last year, my wife started longing for something different. We'd come back to Vermont, she said, but the house didn't feel fully like Vermont to her.

When a friend mentioned that a house with some land on the northeastern edge of Middlebury was about to go on the market, she looked at it once and proceeded to persuade me that we had to have it.

Within three months we had taken on a second mortgage, and three months after that we had moved to the freshly refurbished, early-ranch-style house. It looked like it belonged in some other soul-free suburb -- except for the views and the openness and the almost scary amount of privacy and quiet.

We were just 3 miles from our former home. But now we were out where the road and the sly collide, where the Green Mountains rise like humpback whales from the green valley.

* * *
I once remarked to my dad that, having grown up in a small town in western New York, every time I hear a car horn honk, I still instinctively turn to see who's waving to me. In that small a place, you pretty much knew person everybody.

“You can take the boy out of the country,” my dad mused in reply. “But you can't take the country out of the boy.”

And so in some ways I was already a country boy at heart when we moved out of town. Nonetheless, living amid woods and meadows is an entirely different order of magnitude of country living, compared to living in a small town.

These days I am learning, as Robert Frost put it, “the need of being versed in country things.”
For example:

· Splitting and hauling wood is a lot more involved, and a lot harder on the back, than sitting back to enjoy the results.

· The same goes for tending a sprawling garden, compared to having fresh salad every night.

· Getting snowed in isn't nearly as cozy as it sounds – at least not when it means you're missing a day of powder skiing.

· A woodchuck may look from a distance like a cute piece of scampering carpet. But give him half a chance and he'll turn your garden into compost.

· The same goes for deer.

· Addison County clay is stronger than any shovel.

· Having a septic system is vastly different from having town sewer services. When the state decides
to stiffen its septic regulations, get out your wallet.

· When people tell you to watch out for the poison ivy, they mean it.
Sometimes it feels like we've been adopted by angels. Steve and Nicole from QES, who helped the previous owner look after the property, have taken us under their wings, mowing and plowing and prepping the garden.
When the pipes froze after we got a new woodstove and didn't turn on the furnace for 10 days, the guys from Macintyre spent hours getting the pipes unfrozen and filled with fresh antifreeze. They barely charged us for all their hard work. Maybe they felt sorry for us.

As we watch the seasons revolve around us – meadow to lush summer green, then to brown and white, a nesting woodcock along the drive, a fox's den 50 feet into the piney woods – we revel every day in this splendid semi-isolation.

It's a rural way of life. But only truly rural because this world we live in is so cultivated.
We're hardly hermits out here. A great comfort of contemporary country life, to be honest, is that town is so accessible.

With Carol's and the co-op and college just minutes away, we often, though temporarily, trade the country for the pleasures of town.

Even Thoreau regularly left his cabin for the village.

“When tired of trees,” Frost said, “I seek again mankind.”

Gov. Douglas: A Man for the Eisenhower Era

2007-07-03T10:49:00.000-05:00

Someday, Vermont will elect a governor for the 21st century.

Until then, though, we'll be saddled with a guy stuck in the mid-20th century Eisenhower era that shaped his early years. He'll continue to govern as if the outdated perspectives of the 1950s are what's best for Vermont.

Along the way, he's helping push the state down the long, perilous flight of climate change, and he may just take the Vermont economy with him.

It was bad enough to watch Gov. Jim Douglas veto healthcare reform and, last month, meaningful campaign-finance reform, which would have diminished the influence of big money on Vermont's grassroots election process.

But the real tragedy is his recent veto of comprehensive, carefully thought-out legislation to stem global warming and improve the state's energy efficiency. With that veto, Douglas has done more than just prove how stubborn a seemingly nice guy can be when his core political principles are offended. He's made the state more vulnerable to climate change, the key issue of our time and the biggest threat to the American way of life -- and indeed, to human life on the planet.

And the governor has essentially pointed a gun straight at the heart of several key Vermont industries.

The crown jewel of this year's legislative session was passage of the comprehensive bill on climate change and energy efficiency. Among other things, the bill would promote solar energy by restoring state tax credits for homeowners. It would jumpstart larger hydro, wind and solar projects by allowing "group net metering" -- meaning these projects could generate revenue by feeding energy back into the grid. It would enable businesses and homes to be heated at lower cost (a big reason advocates for low-income people support the bill). By encouraging efficiency, it would reduce Vermont's reliance on expensive, distant, and increasingly unstable sources of petroleum. It would reduce air pollution.

Closer to home for many Vermonters, the legislation would provide hope for the tourism, maple sugaring and ski industries that pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the state every year.

Why is that true? If global warming continues, maple trees soon won't grow here anymore in abundance. You'll be lucky to get good maple syrup north of the border. The brilliant fall displays of color will be a distant memory related by grandparents. There, too, leaf-peeper tourist dollars will flow northward.

And then there's the ski industry. When there are crocuses coming up in the garden in mid-January, you don't have to look any farther than your own backyard to know that, unless we stem the killing heat that is engulfing our planet, Vermont skiing will melt and die.

Should the legislature failed to overturn Douglas's veto -- the most likely scenario -- it will be interesting to see how all this plays out politically next year.

If truth in advertising prevailed in political slogans, Gov . Douglas would run for reelection in 2008 under a banner that read, "I Don't Really Care about Vermo andnt Tourism." Or maybe it could be, "I Put Corn Syrup on My Pancakes."

Better yet -- "Winter in Vermont: It's Way Overrated."

His toughest critics have started to wonder if the governor has just forgotten about representative government. Yes, he's one of the few people elected on a statewide ballot. But it's abundantly clear that at this point he doesn't share the political philosophy of most Vermonters, or their abundantly demonstrated interest in curbing climate change. The only surviving Republican governor in New England, Douglas "represents" a state that has the country's most progressive congressional delegation and has for years now sent solid majorities of Democrats to both houses of the legislature.

Yet taking a page from George W. Bush's playbook, he has in shown remarkably little flexibility in shifting his no-tax stance even when fresh government revenue can legitimately be part of the solution. He seems to have little interest in accommodating the majority opposition or innovating in the face of crisis.

Gov, Douglas thinks we shouldn't fiddle with the old "tried and true" approach to providing Vermont's energy needs. That's a recipe for fiddling while Vermont burns. Scientists are telling us we've got just a coup le decades to address climate change -- or face catastrophe on a global level.

The governor's key rationale for vetoing the energy bill was that it imposed a "new tax" on Vermont Yankee, the state's sole nuclear power plant and a facility under the ownership of the multi-billion-dollar Entergy company. He ignores the fact that the bill taxes wind power and nuclear power equally -- and would eliminate an unconscionable tax break that has long benefited Vermont Yankee.

Would Entergy in any way be threatened if a new tax free prevailed for Vermont Yankee? Would the company even really notice? Does an elephant care if a single gnat lands on its rear end?

And yet Governor Douglas has wielded his veto pen to defend out-of-state energy giant whileVermont grows hotter every year. For now, it appears we'll have to keep waiting for him to drop his Ronald Reagan imitation and get real about working with the legislature to craft ways of dealing with the day's most pressing challenges. Even Reagan raised taxes when it was obviously needed. Mr. Douglas apparently lacks that kind of political courage.

And so we wait for an alternative. Looking at the Democrats' bullpen, you have to conclude that Douglas will remain governor for a long time. And even if the Democrats do manage to come up with a strong gubernatorial candidate, there's always the danger that the Progressives will sabotage the election by running their own candidate and again hand the election to Douglas -- as they so stupidly did when Douglas was first elected governor in 2002.

In the meantime, Vermonters can look forward to warmer winters that more closely resemble November misery, dwindling revenues from tourism, sugaring and skiing, and higher costs for heating and transportation.

Unless the legislature miraculously finds a way to override Douglas's veto on a two-thirds vote, Vermont's majority -- and the climate along with it -- will continue to fume.

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