"We're at the beginning again, and moving in the right direction. The final resolution, in every meaningful sense, depends almost entirely on us.”
When our friend Nan was dying, she made sure that the roles she had in town were covered by people she trusted. She asked one friend to be on the Library Board, another to handle one of the endowment funds, and she asked me if I would be willing to Chair the local Democratic Caucus. As with most offices in this town, if you are willing to serve, you will be accepted by the organization. It is a marker of a small number of people willing to fill the needed roles. I was voted in a mere two weeks before she died.
As the new Chair, I had to convene a meeting to fill her seat as a Justice of the Peace, and I had to "warn" that meeting by posting sheets of paper with the time, date and place that we would gather, in three places that are public. I chose the library, the general store and the post office. I posted a notice in the town office for good measure. The choice of places is pretty standard, but it also makes it likely that people of the various factions in town will get to see the notice. Of course, I also put it in an email, and posted it on the local electronic bulletin board, but there are still people who depend on reading it in hard copy at a place they pass through on daily errands.
Now, as in all writing, there are many stories that can be told about a simple daily event.
Chapter 1: The Caucus
The Caucus has a small membership with about 15 people on the distribution list and a reliable attending core of about 5 or 6. Some of the remainder will come to meetings if they can; most are members in name only. There is a Treasurer and an Assistant Treasurer and a cash balance of $0.00. At the meetings, the Treasurer's reports are usually pretty short. (The balance in the Progressive Party coffers is similar.)
This year's "annual meeting", attended by six of the regulars took about a half hour -- far longer than most. One of the decisions made was that we should sponsor a voter registration effort. Three and a half people were registered in a four hour morning at the town transfer station, where everyone shows up at least one of the two days the "dump" is open. (The half was the woman who took a registration form home for her husband.)
The second decision was that we should sponsor a conversation with someone from the state's health care system, as Vermont is moving toward a single payer system.
Chapter 2: The State
As of January 2014, the State hopes to have all its residents registered with one of two companies that are providing care, but there are many questions regarding how the new plans will cover existing health care conditions, chronic care, children and seniors, the need for emergency care and hospitalizations. In a state with long distances from rural communities to limited opportunities for state-of-the-art medical care, these are real life-threatening concerns.
I dilly-dallied for a while on who to call, but because I had to get information on how many Justice of the Peace nominations to forward to the Governor (that's right! The Governor makes interim appointments!), I contacted the agency in charge of these appointments (thank you Google!)--the Secretary of State's office. I called the main number which was answered on the first ring. I spoke with someone who forwarded me to someone who would know what I needed. He did. He forwarded the remainder of my questions to someone "in the Governor's office." I left a message as she was out of the office, saying that I would be out for the next hour and then back at the desk; that she could call me later (oh no! I realized it was already 4:30 and she would surely be gone by the time I got back)...or the next day. In most places, that message would have withered and died.
At about 6 p.m., the phone rang. It was the someone-from-the-Governor's-office who turned out to be Director of Constituent Services and yadda yadda... We had a nice chat; she answered my questions; told me that she would put the nomination for Justice of the Peace on the Governor's desk when she met with him next, but that the week's schedule was not yet set...(yes, within the week, the Governor would have taken care of this relatively minor matter. Himself.) She gave me her direct phone number.
I took the opportunity to ask her about who to call on the health care issues. She gave me the names of the Governor's Health Reform appointee and the Commissioner. She gave me their emails. I sent off a message and got a response the following morning from the Governor's appointee.
Living in Vermont just isn't like living in other places.
Chapter 3: The Town
Back when I wrote my dissertation on New Jersey's rural Pine Barrens, I identified a number of themes of rural life. They were surprising to me as a native urbanite. Chief among them was the twinned desires for independence and interdependence. People in rural areas don't want to be told what they can and can't (or should and shouldn't) do. They want to be able to manage their land and their schools and their roads as they choose without outside intervention (and the nature of "outsideness" is a particularly rich vein for analysis). But they also know that rural life means that they need to depend on neighbors and their resourcefulness. Neighbors can pull you out of a ditch when the road shoulder disappears in a rain storm or snow drift. They can help care for the kids, the cows and the crops when you need to get to the hospital thirty miles away. One of the town curmudgeons who played many roles in town over his 60 or 70 years GAVE his car to someone who had lost his car in a fire. Not on a temporary basis. Permanently. The guy had no other way to get to work. And as Herb said when he first came here, people can circulate the same dollar from hand to hand in payment for maple syrup or for splitting wood, or for fertilizer, or for their accounting skills for a small business. And the rural resident will choose to circulate that dollar at home rather than "away".
But what I missed when I did that thesis was the deep vein of respect that underlies rural life. The ability to trust that a neighbor will pull you out of that ditch may hang on a wave between passing cars, so much so that it is prudent to wave even when you aren't sure who is in it. Beefy, poorly educated, hard working men have told me that they haven't forgiven one of their neighbors because "he didn't wave to me at the store." So disrespect, measured in a wave missed, is a hard measure of alienation, probably the modern equivalent of excommunication from the Church. Put that together with the general acceptance of anyone who steps up to work in the town's offices, and this month's local politics will be long remembered.
One young Harvard-educated, church-going residents of town has put his house on the market so that he can move an hour north to be with his long term girlfriend. He has left a vacancy on the 5-member Selectboard, the pinnacle of local government. His replacement will be appointed by the other members until voters choose a replacement at the town-wide elections in March. Two candidates submitted letters of interest. For various reasons, both were rejected. Neither got the (mostly unpaid) job. Some felt that it wasn't a decision that should be left to the Selectboard and that there should be a special election called; others felt that that was excessive. In the interim, without a fifth member, most decisions are deadlocked at a two-two tie. (When I called the Secretary of State's office, the person I spoke with asked what had happened at the recent Selectboard meeting; he said that there had been a number of phone calls leading up to the biweekly meeting, but the Secretary of State's officers had not heard what the result had been. That's living in Vermont, where the staff in the Secretary of State's office takes interest in what is happening in a town of 750 people). The opening was reposted in hopes that another candidate would arise.
As I said, there are far fewer people here who are willing to serve the community than there are needs. That's just a fact of rural life. People also have long memories of those that have helped them in the past and those that have disrespected them.
Herb and I have both been asked to serve. We have had lengthy conversations with others we respect (and wave to) about taking on this role. We have all demurred. There is too much else to do. There is a resident who has been suing everyone in the county including our listers and the Selectboard members (and all the county's judges and prosecutors and police officers and... ) There is a sense that there is a kind of gridlock at the Selectboard level that would make it hard to move the town forward.
I wonder how a state that works so well, has local government that is so limited. I wonder how we move forward from stasis. I wonder how we restore the sense of respect at the town level. A wave may not be enough.
Chapter 4: The Grassroots
When I went to post the notice, I stopped to visit with a friend nearby. She told me about a recent flare-up between several of the old-timers in town. "Why would one family member turn in another" she asked with more amazement than question in her voice. I asked what she meant, and she was surprised that I hadn't heard about the "anonymous" note written to the State, turning in a relative for having illegally dumped asbestos siding rather than disposing of it properly. The accused claimed to have followed all the regulations and consulted with the authorities.
That led to another conversation about a decade old wound. Years before, one of the local officials had told the local listers that the family had been building a house in violation of development restrictions that allowed subsidy for their taxes. There was no house site. No one had bothered to check on it. "I guess I still get kinda' mad," she said. The listers didn't come to check for another year. "But the new group is different," she said, as one of the listers walked in.
If you live in a city, there are the inevitable assaults of noise, and crowding and service delays. If you live in a rural area, ironically, everything seems closer. The telephone company / internet service provider and the Secretary of State's office answers the phone on the first ring and takes responsibility for needed action. If you live in a rural area, the old wounds are close at hand, and the sores keep re-opening as someone passes without waving. But in a city, there is far greater distance between what you need and those who can help. The skill sets are narrower because there is always someone else who can be paid for their expertise in a needed niche. In rural places, where everything is closer, we need to be able to do many things, serve many roles, and forget from time to time, who hurt us.
Epilogue:
One of the people who is most embattled is in charge of the roads. In the interests of full disclosure, he has always been friendly and helpful to me, but there are many of the old timers who despise him and watch to see if they can trip him up. Some years ago, he and his wife had gotten a bank loan for the construction of their new home. It happened to be in a particularly rainy Fall, when weather related construction delays threatened completion in the allotted time. If the house was not completed, the loan money would be lost. Over the course of the last week before that loan provision came due, a half dozen men showed up unbidden on the house site. They completed the work needed in the allotted time. Some of them were dedicated to running him out of office, then and now.
Living in Vermont just isn't like living in many other places. Except maybe it is. Maybe the same things happen in Bozeman, Montana and Ames, Iowa and Harbor Springs, Michigan. I haven't lived there. But there is something that sticks in my head from watching the news last night. In a speech by President Obama after the end of the government shutdown he said, "Let's work together to make government work better... Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country's about."
I think people in Vermont get that most of the time. There are too many places where we fail, but when there's a wet Fall and a bank loan to be paid....
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