Town Meeting Day: 5/12 Winter

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.

Making Lemonade on the Lemon Fair

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.”

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