My month in Vermont

My take on Vermont

I think everyone who isn’t miserable outside of large cities would find Vermont charming.

It’s almost entirely rural – even its cities seem barely outposts in the countryside.  Burlington, the largest city, has only 42,000 or so residents.  By comparison, Juneau, Alaska’s 3^rd largest city, had 50,000 or so when I lived there in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Little in Vermont is flat; there are mountains almost everywhere in the state – mostly the Green Mountains, but others as well.

Most of the state is green.  Granted, I’m here in June, and I’ve seen photos of bare maple trees when there’s snow on the ground. But those bare trees had glorious color on them before that, and there are still many evergreens all over.  At this time of year, though, Vermont is a vacation land.

Vermont has lots of industries, but they seem to be almost entirely based either on natural resources (e.g. marble, granite, maple syrup) or on scaled-up cottage industries (e.g. the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream).  Dairy farming – and the resulting cheese – is one of the biggest industries, but it doesn’t seem to be on an industrial scale but instead on a family farm scale.

Vermonters – almost without exception – love their state. They think it’s beautiful. They love the rural character, the small-town friendliness (without people sticking their noses in your business, as one person told me).  They’re proud of their history – the way they carved themselves out of both New Hampshire and New York, both by force and by a clever bit of reasoning.

Also almost without exception, Vermonters aren’t big fans of their winter weather.  Many handle it by moving to (usually) Florida, some enjoy winter sports, and the others stick it out because they like everything else.

Vermont drivers not only stop instantly for pedestrians in or out of a crosswalk, they also try to anticipate whether a pedestrian might want to cross a road and stop anyway.  They are almost 100% polite, careful drivers.  The one exception I found was a guy who sat right on my tail for several miles and, when I pulled onto the shoulder to let him by, he made a very rude gesture and leaned on his horn.  And he did have a VT license plate – I looked.  But all the others more than made up for him.

Tomorrow, recreational marijuana will become legal here, under certain restrictions (no use in public, for instance).  Vermonters tend to elect Democrats but they’ve got a Republican governor.

Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine are the US states with the oldest populations.  Having figured out they need some new blood, both Vermont and Maine have started programs to bring more people to live and work here.  Vermont’s version is to pay people a one-time fee to live and work in rural areas (though I’m not sure how that’s defined, given the realities of Vermont).  They say they’ve already been deluged with inquiries and are sure the available money will be gone quickly.  But if it works, that’ll be information they can use.

There are absolutely bunches of aging hippies living here, but there are also a lot of young people who don’t seem to be planning to leave the state.  Many of them told me they like the small towns and recreational opportunities.  And I suppose if you just have to have big city advantages, you can always drive to New York City – it’s less than 200 miles from Bennington.

In general, people here don’t seem to be in a hurry for much of anything.  They’re happy with the tourism, the local crafts, the farmers markets, the opportunities for culture and education they have.  They’re pleasant and polite and helpful.  They want you to like their state.

Vermonters acknowledge 2 flaws in their state besides the winter weather: the high cost of living and the black flies.  I don’t know about resident housing, but the campgrounds do cost more than the other places I’ve been so far.  And I can say groceries are much more expensive than I’m used to.  And I can also say black flies are indeed the extreme nuisance everyone says they are.  Not bad when there’s a breeze but murder when it’s still.

What I didn't see that I wanted to see

Because Vermont is such a small state, I was able to get to most of the things I wanted to see. 

It's a shame, though, that I spent most of my first week feeling ill because I missed spending more time in the small towns in southern Vermont.  I was sorry to have missed the petroglyphs in Bellows Falls.  I missed the Strolling of the Heifers in Brattleboro.  I didn't go to Manchester - the location of the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, the Marsh Tavern where the Green Mountain Boys plotted to throw out the New Yorkers, and the American Museum of Fly Fishing (Charles Orvis made fly-fishing rods there).  I didn't get to Putney, once the site of a free love commune, now a haven for artists and craftspeople.  Southern Vermont is all villages and mountains and very pretty and pleasant.

Central Vermont has Sugar Works (places where maple syrup is made) all over but I never seemed to get to one - not the right time of year, obviously, but many have tours and photos.  There are also several locations of Vermont State Craft Centers around the state, but the ones I found were smack in the middle of a downtown area and hard for me to get to.  Next time.  As I was driving through Randolph, I didn't realize until I saw a small sign that it was the location of a Vermont Castings foundry - we had their stoves in Alaska and I would have asked for a tour if I'd known ahead of time they were there.

Because I had to spend extra time on health-related matters (mine and the critters's) I missed 2 main things in northern Vermont: the Burlington area and the Northeast Kingdom.  Burlington has quite a few historic buildings - an 1816 Unitarian Church and Ethan Allen's 1787 homestead, for instance - and the Lake Champlain Chocolate factory.  I'd also like to have seen its beach on Lake Champlain and seen more of the town.  In the Northeast Kingdom there are any number of lakes and picturesque scenery that I did get to see, but I missed Lake Memphremagog - an enormous glacier-created lake that straddles the Canadian border and is reportedly beautiful.  And on another note, near St. Johnsbury is a place called Dog Mountain that's said to be used as a very large dog park and has a chapel that has to be seen to be believed.  I wouldn't dare take the dogs I have now to a dog park but in the future, with others, maybe so.

As an aging ex-hippie myself, I found Vermont very comfortable.  It's undemanding, accepting of differences.  It feels like a pair of well-broken-in shoes, though much more beautiful.