Vermont

When I was a kid, I often imagined that I'd end up living in New Hampshire. There is no particularly good reason for this, and it probably had a lot to do with the fact that by the time of my seventh birthday, I'd only ever stayed overnight in two different states. I guess if I take my net migration up till now, then I have made it halfway there.

Although I only get rare occasions to visit, I have always liked northern New England. It has the right mix of civilization and population, the former of which retains scraps of the notions of self-sufficiency and sometimes overeducated cleverness that makes us homers think we're better than everyone, and the latter is suitably low for my comfort. That emptiness isn't the intolerable openness you might find in other rural localities, but is decently surrounded by old hills and endless trees, interspersed with the occasional farm. I'm most familiar with the Litchfield Hills in western Connecticut, as well as the wooded mountains of the Massachusetts Berkshires (which are the lower part of the Green Mountain range). Proceeding north, the major difference in the landscape is the scale length. The trees are just a hair more sparse up there; and the hills are more spread out and significantly larger. The southern mountains are scrappy rolling affairs, but up in the vert monts, they spread out into majestic peaks, between which roads more calmly wind. Vermont also lacks the industrial towns that are nestled into every one of the Connecticut foothills, suddenly visible around every turn of the highway.


Around the time of American independence, the state spunkily carved out an identity from New York and New Hampshire (and earlier, from Quebec--if we want to go back even further, Vermont appears to have been caught between Iroquois and Algonquin power centers as well). I get a kick out of the comparison. New Hampshire's license plates command us to live free or die, features a self-important conservative rag as the state paper, and even today it attracts these "free state" chuckleheads hoping to turn it into a market utopia. (With hardly any people, libertarianism has a chance of working there if anywhere, although with all that money in that little section near the coast, a tax-free environment where the right to property gets equal billing with life and liberty is going to work out better for some than others. As usual.) Although it had a mind to eventually integrate, Vermont is one of the handful of states that was originally a separate republic. The Green Mountain boys were the ones that actually lived under their neighbor's motto, keeping the Brits down and backing its the New Somethings the hell off. The Vermont constitution is the first new world political document to outlaw slavery, and it didn't limit the vote to property-owners. When it comes to living free, New Hampshire is a fucking poseur.


The original Vermont constitution also provided for public education, and has generally been ahead of the curve (by U.S. standards) for public health care. Also: Bernie Sanders. I don't know if Vermonters feel the government is intrusive--nothing feels very obtrusive in Vermont except maybe tourists in ski season. (My wife came across a brochure advertising that "what happens in Vermont stays in Vermont...although nothing really happens.") Here progressivism, and what with the various farm cooperatives, something maybe approaching mutualism stands a chance as well, also thanks to having hardly any people. Competing notions of freedom.


Thanks to college students I knew, occasional skiing trips when I was that age, and Phish, I think of Vermonters as hippie-ish, and generally easygoing. [Actually, the green mountain state has at least two free state/secessionist/teaparty movements, at least one of which is pushing batshit territory.] Certainly Burlington is like that, with more hemp stores and breweries per population than I've seen anywhere else. I haven't quite worked out the connection, but these kids somehow have to turn into the outdoorsy enflanneled geezers that populate the Vermont of my imagination, but even on last weekend's trip, I saw few people over 40. Maybe they hole up and become recluses when their knees give out, eventually snowboard into a tree (to the extreme!), get beaten to death with lacrosse sticks, or eaten by bears. Vermont has a growing foodie culture, excellent cheese, and, importantly, a fine local beer tradition. The college breakfast joint we stopped at had over five excellent beers on tap, which seems mandatory for about anywhere I breezed by in the state. I should also add that of the New England states, Vermont has the least ridiculous accent, approaching the dialectical perfection of Connecticut English speakers.


For the first six months of its independence, Vermont was called New Connecticut. I like that. I'm more seriously entertaining the idea of changing where I'm from. Since the dump I live in now was so cheap, there's some actual cash flow now that we've entered dual income world. Doubling our mortgage still keeps us under McMansion territory, and the market right now favors picking another one up. Here's the theory: buy now (actually a year from now), and use the upstate place as a vacation home, just in driving distance, for the next ten years. When the kids are done with high school, we'll make it a permanent residence, or, if we change our mind, we can sell it, confident that the housing market will rebound in the longer term. (Or if the whole world goes to hell by then, it's a place where there's a chance to fall back on some hard-lived self-sufficiency.) The goal is to make the fastest possible living exit from the rat race. Flaws in the plan include paying for the kids' college educations (yup, one of the awesome things about overpriced education is extorting parents to stay on the goddamn hamster wheel even longer), and the interim possibility of lost jobs and an extra home we can't sell. What are the odds?



Pound for pound, two states worth of Berkshires are prettier than the Vermont range, but except for the aforementioned difference of characteristic dimensions, the main distinction is that a whole lot more of the northern state is like that. Growing up in Connecticut, I didn't get to live in the beautiful hills. There's a north/south industrial line that runs up the state I landed just opposite. A town west, and there were the rich (dominant now) and the farmers (fewer), and the foothills begin rising up with more earnestness. I've only just now realized that the crappy burg in which I currently reside is at the same point relative to the Massachusetts urban divide. I'll complain about the terrible compromise with any provocation at all. I'd like to live west in either state, or in a quality urban center--anything but in-between--but those settings not only fail to let me off the wheel, I'd need to run a lot harder to not get there.



Do I really need to head north? It's not that southern New England lacks codgers, it's just that you have to inherit the land, or somehow get rich working. Mom and Dad blew it in the first department, and I'm in the wrong field for the second. I fantasize about moving to a low-stress job instead of early retirement (community college professor? follow my wife into clinical lab benchwork?). I mean, I think well on outdoor activities and I like the trees, but only a small commute stops me from being more enthusiastic about that stuff here. I'd like a goat and a few chickens if I had room, but I'm incompetent at growing things. I'd consider taking up hunting and fishing with enough outdoor space, but that's really not my religion. By looks, I am sufficiently hirsute to pass for a hippie or (before too long) a codger, so I'm covered there, and if I'm happy whiling away my weekends cooking, tinkering, reading, blogging, hacking talentlessly on my mando, and being an irritating know-it-all, could I really do it for decades on end? Part of me worries that the answer is no, and the rest worries that it's yes. I fear an easy (or difficult) seasonal drift from the wood stove to summer porch, and eventually dying of existence. Maybe there are worse ways to go. Or maybe that's the way we all go, whatever we pretend.

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