Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town Read online

  Now I'm not proud of being the slowest driver in Vermont. It is a distinction without glory, a notoriety born of the aggravation I inflict on all who must drive behind me. Though perhaps not literally cruel and unusual punishment, the time I spend with this scarlet "A" (Acceleration) upon my license is proving to be a sentence of far more consequence than the simple monetary fines I paid for my transgressions.

  Burlington, for instance, is thirty-two miles from my home here in Lincoln. I must now drive each and every one of those miles at exactly five miles below the speed limit. Forty-five miles per hour in a fifty-mile zone, twenty-five miles per hour in the thirty-mile zones. I can no longer pass the dump trucks that emerge like dinosaurs from the Hinesburg gravel pits and lumber north toward Burlington at thirty miles an hour. I can no longer race through the yellow traffic lights in Williston, but instead must coast to a stop before them and wave politely at whoever has stopped behind me and honked.

  And although most of those thirty-two miles are on Vermont's Route 116, an extremely scenic little road dotted with dairy farms and villages, how many trips will it take before the wonder of the largest manure storage tank in the county wears thin?

  I estimate that my new pace has added somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes each way to the drive.

  Time, however (or lost time, more exactly), is the least horrific part of being the slowest driver in Vermont. There is an element to my punishment that is far worse.

  I have become an automotive pariah, a thing to be avoided, a car to be shunned by my peers on the road. I know this because I have seen it in the eyes and scowls of my fellow drivers as they pass by me, often glancing to their sides to view the source of their frustration.

  Certainly some drivers find me more aggravating than others, but it has now gotten to the point where I can tell almost instantly the degree of contempt I will see abruptly beside me by the way a driver warms up to pass.

  There are, essentially, two kinds of tailgaters. There are the passive-aggressors, and then there are the aggressive-passers. No small distinction, this.

  The passive-aggressors are those drivers who pull up directly behind me, but are--for whatever the reason--afraid to pass. Passive-aggressors tend to be hunched forward over their steering wheels, and often look as if they are trying to blow my car forward with their exasperated breaths. They believe that by driving as close as possible to my rear bumper, they can literally will me to drive faster. (Uh-uh. With nine points, not a chance.) Eventually they become desperate enough to pass, glaring at me as they whiz by with a look that would wither fruit.

  The aggressive-passers, on the other hand, usually appear out of nowhere. One moment there is nothing in my rearview mirror, and the next there is a monster pickup truck with tires as big as a house. And then--just as suddenly--it is pulling into the passing lane, it is beside me, and then it is gone. Aggressive-passers don't scowl at me the way the passive-aggressors do. Occasionally they will glance at me, register brief surprise at the fact that I'm nowhere near ninety years old, and shake their heads. But usually they just fly by.

  I tend to believe that the passive-aggressors hate me more than the aggressive-passers because they spend more time behind me. They stew.

  Now I don't think any of this would bother me quite so much if I could just explain to these people that I did not become the slowest driver in Vermont by choice, that I drive the way I do because I have to. One of these days I just may take my wife up on her suggestion to have a bumper sticker printed that reads, "Have mercy on me. I'm a nine-pointer."

  Chapter 5.

  VERMONT HAS CHANGED--BUT NOT ITS PEOPLE

  SIXTY YEARS AGO this month, Marjorie Vosburgh took a ride on one of the family workhorses in the high hills between Lincoln and Ripton. The ride lasted barely four hours and covered no more than a couple of miles, but it's an interesting barometer both of how much Vermont has been transformed in the past six decades and yet how little its people--when they are at their best--have changed.

  It was February 1943, and Vosburgh was fourteen. She lived with her family on what was then a common-sized dairy farm--twenty cows and a couple of horses--three miles south of Lincoln village. Their farm sat at the intersection of the roads that led west into Bristol Notch and south into Ripton, at an elevation of roughly 1,800 feet. In a winter snowstorm, they were the very end of the line, even for the postman, who most days was a study in fortitude and perseverance.

  On this particular day, however, the postman could drive no farther than her family's farm. The storm was one massive whiteout, and the snow was piling high on the roads back to Bristol. And so he delivered her family's mail, and left them as well with the correspondence for the farms farther down the road. Perhaps those other families could pick it up from them over the next couple of days.

  Among the letters Vosburgh spied was one from Sgt. Ralph Hamilton, addressed to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Hamilton. The younger Hamilton had enlisted soon after the United States had entered World War II and was stationed in the South Pacific. Vosburgh knew that his parents hadn't heard from the soldier in weeks and had grown worried.

  There were no phones and no electricity yet in this corner of Addison County, so Vosburgh couldn't simply pick up the telephone and call the Hamiltons with the news that a letter had arrived from their son. Nor could she ask one of her parents to drive the few miles south to the Hamilton farm, not with the roads buried under snow.

  And so she did the only thing she could. She put a bridle on Queenie, one of the dappled gray workhorses her father used on the farm, and started off in the storm to the Hamiltons' house.

  The ride was an adventure for Vosburgh. First of all, Queenie was a workhorse, not a saddle horse. Her family didn't even own a saddle, so Vosburgh was riding the animal bareback, clinging to the animal's mane and bridle as she tried to navigate the tempest.

  Second, the snow beyond their house was almost up to the horse's belly. Once Vosburgh slipped underneath Queenie. At another point, she simply had to climb off the animal and lead her through a patch of waist-deep snow.

  But she made it to the Hamilton family's farm, where Ralph's mother greeted her at the front door. Though the woman later admitted that she wondered what Vosburgh was doing on her front stoop covered in snow in the midst of a blizzard, she said simply, "Well, look who's here."

  Sixty years later, Vosburgh says she won't forget the rapturous gaze--part wonder, part relief--that filled Mrs. Hamilton's face when she told her that she'd brought a letter from her son.

  "Seeing that smile was worth anything I went through," she recalls now at seventy-four.

  Nevertheless, it is hard for her to fathom that a mere six decades ago so many Vermonters lived without electricity or phone lines or even running water. But live they did.

  Ralph Hamilton died last month in Ohio, though his sister, Lida Hamilton Cloe, eighty-seven, remains here in Lincoln. She is among the neighbors who are helping Vosburgh these days endure a bad patch with her back and her hip.

  "I look out for Marjorie," Cloe says. "She's a very good friend of mine."

  Many of the outward trappings of our world indeed have been revolutionized by technology, but the basic generosity that marked Vermont sixty years ago remains unchanged.

  Chapter 6.

  LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PLENTY

  OF CHARMIN

  TOMORROW MORNING, I will join my neighbors from Bristol, Starksboro, and Lincoln and celebrate the birth of our nation, that day in 1776 when a small group of patriots in Philadelphia put their pens to paper and their necks on the line, and declared that their outhouses would no longer be subject to English tyranny.

  As many historians have noted, the Revolutionary War was the last great armed conflict fought over outhouses. It was Thomas Paine himself who wrote that fateful summer of '76, "Tyranny is the hell that sits on the throne--far from the paper."

  Even Ethan Allen, an otherwise tireless self-promoter, admits in his account of the captu
re of Fort Ticonderoga that the British would never have surrendered and come out if they'd had an outhouse inside the fort's walls.

  In any case, of all the towns in Vermont that accord Independence Day the respect it deserves, it is Bristol alone that understands the crucial role the outhouse played convincing Thomas Jefferson to get off the pot and draft the Declaration of Independence. As it has every Fourth of July for a decade and a half now, Bristol will celebrate the bombs bursting in air with a series of outhouse races, beginning tomorrow morning at 8:30.

  Conceived, managed, and run by the Bristol Rotary Club, the outhouse races are a combination of the great chariot races from Ben-Hur and the low-tech wizardry of a Pinewood Derby.

  The outhouses that race are powered by people, and the rules are fairly specific:

  * As many as four people may pull or push the contraption, but there must be one person sitting inside it in a position that reflects what those in the outhouse race world might describe as anatomic and functional accuracy.

  * The outhouse must resemble, as this year's organizer Ted Lylis puts it, "an old-fashioned one-holer." The sides must be covered, the wheels must be rotating casters, and--for reasons I hate to imagine--the floor must be solid.

  The current outhouse race course is a straight path down Bristol's Main Street, with the village's lone stoplight as its finish line. In past years, however, the course has actually wound its way around the Bristol commons, which meant there were the sort of sharp curves that occasionally resulted in accidents between outhouses (versus accidents in outhouses, which is a whole other premise I'm not going to touch).

  It's not surprising that the idea of an outhouse race was conceived at the sort of New Year's Eve party in which there was rigorous intellectual debate. In the midst of one especially animated discussion of philosopher John Locke's influence on Jefferson, Rotarian Larry Gile turned to Rotarian Bill Paine, or Paine to Gile (no one's quite sure who's to blame), and said, "Hey, let's have an outhouse race."

  And while I've no doubt that the outhouse races are a fascinating historical re-creation of the Revolutionary War charges and countercharges that occurred on Vermont soil at the breakfast battle of Hubbardton, their real role today is as Rotary fund-raisers.

  Through a combination of race entry fees and spectator wagers, the outhouse races some years raise a sizable sum of money for the Rotary Club to return to the community. This spring, for example, the Bristol Rotary awarded four $500 scholarships to high school seniors. Much of that money was raised from last year's outhouse race.

  And so tomorrow, in addition to savoring the parades and fireworks and barbecues that commemorate the great spirit of '76, I will also watch that unique homage to the outhouse's place in colonial history. I will take the time to pay my respects to the thunderbox, to cheer on the Revolutionary War's armored personnel carriers and commodes, and salute those women and men who remember the courage of Hancock and Hale by racing one-holers.

  Chapter 7.

  MEETINGS MESSY BY NECESSITY

  WHENEVER I WORRY that town meetings are going the way of the dinosaur and thumbing a ride to extinction, I talk to my neighbor Dave Marsters. Marsters has been moderating town meetings in Lincoln for twelve years, standing serenely at the front of Burnham Hall before the long rows of folding chairs still made of wood.

  Once again Monday night he will be on stage--literally, as well as figuratively--protected from the chaos he calls neighbors the other 364 days of the year by a slim book called Robert's Rules of Order.

  Marsters, more than anyone else, is capable of reassuring me that the town meeting is not quite ready for the respirator. "Attendance goes up and down," he says thoughtfully, "but I haven't seen a pattern of diminishing attendance over the last decade."

  A decade is roughly how long I've been going to town meeting. I went to my first one in 1987 and have since learned the three basic rules:

  * When the moderator requests that you keep your comments "germane," it means it's time to sit down. You've lost all touch with the discussion at hand, and what you think sounds to your neighbors like the Gettysburg Address is in reality a big bowl of meandering word goop.

  * "Graders" and "grader chains" have something to do with the town assets and the town budget--not the school assets and the school budget. "Grader" questions, therefore, should be directed to the Board of Selectmen.

  * Never propose an amendment to an amendment, unless the article involves a budget appropriation in the upper six figures, and you want to make sure the debate goes on into April . . . or you want simply to fluster the moderator.

  Marsters loves town meeting, especially when the discussions grow animated. His biggest fear? We're growing too civil as a culture.

  "I'm really scared when people tell me, 'I shouldn't say that in town meeting.' The fact is, if you feel that strongly about it, you should say it," Marsters insists. "Think back on the things people used to say. People really did debate things, and things really did get hot--and it wasn't just because of the old stove that used to sit in the center of the town hall."

  One of Marsters's favorite memories is the town meeting four years ago when it looked like the Lincoln school budget might fail--a first for the town. The irony of that memory is that Dave Marsters, private citizen, father and teacher, wanted desperately to see the budget pass.

  He recalls how "the debate was long and detailed, exactly what it needed to be. People finally agreed that we absolutely couldn't afford the budget as a town, yet that didn't matter: It was important for the kids that we pass it. And what was really meaningful was that people left the hall feeling that they'd had the opportunity to speak their voice."

  Marsters wonders if the biggest threat to town meetings isn't one of the usual suspects we round up this time of the year: suburban sprawl and the demise of the village; the end of the volunteer ethic; the time pressures put upon the two-career couple.

  Marsters fears a more insidious drift. "There is a cultural trend in our society to make democracy quick and easy, just like everything else. And that eliminates the hard work that real democracy demands," he says. He cites the initiatives that appear every year to replace public voice votes with Australian, or all-day secret, balloting. The result, he says, "is a lot more people voting who haven't been a part of the discussion."

  Marsters's moral? He has two. Democracy takes time; at the very least, a single Monday night or one Tuesday a year. And, at its best, it will be a messy business.

  Perhaps that's why someone long ago picked the first week in March for Town Meeting Day: What better way is there to emerge from a winter's hibernation than to gather as a tribe in the center of town and welcome in mud season with the sloppy but satisfying work of self-governance?

  Chapter 8.

  VILLAGE'S CENTER STARTS IN

  AISLE ONE

  DESPITE MY DEEP appreciation for electronic mail and the power of the Internet to ferret out information quickly, we have yet to invent a means of communication as efficient, speedy, or dependable as a good general store.

  We have that sort of emporium in Lincoln: well-stocked aisles of bread and canned goods, a couple of refrigerator cases and freezers, and a small hardware section in the back, all serving as the front, essentially, for the sort of impressively low-tech transmission station or relay center that must make phone companies jealous.

  Everyone in Lincoln, of course, understands this. If you absolutely must get a message to somebody fast . . . you call the store. If you simply must know why the fire engines just left the station . . . you phone the store. If you have to leave town in a hurry and need someone to milk your three-hundred-pound llama . . . well, you call the store.

  Husband and wife co-owners Dan and Vaneasa Stearns have become human fiber-optic cables, linking the village in ways no technology ever could.

  One day this summer, I saw how we depend upon them. I was in the midst of the sort of home repairs that demand an hour from most guys and take me about a week
. So I wound up walking to the store every few minutes in need of yet another three-cent nut or four-cent bolt, or some free (but invaluable) advice from Dan about how to drill a new screw hole into a metal light fixture.

  In the time it took me to visit the store three times, Vaneasa received four phone calls.

  Nancy Stevens, the local private investigator (every village needs one) and llama-meister, had to travel abruptly to Boston, leaving behind Holly, her llama, and Holly's new calf, Barn Baby. Barn Baby was going through a phase in which she insisted on nursing from a barn beam instead of from Holly (hence the name), and so Nancy needed someone to help her friend Ruth Shepherd milk Holly until she returned and could get Barn Baby back on llama-manna instead of pumpkin pine.

  And since you won't find an assistant llama-milker in the Yellow Pages and Nancy needed one fast . . . she called Vaneasa.