Loose Nuts

I am back on the blog, after a long time away. My blog skills are rusty, but I am drawn back today as I spend some time focusing inward and trying to make sense of the events of recent days. Herb is upstairs working on his professional commitments and I am sitting in a sunlit room beside the pellet stove, trying to stay warm.

It has been two months since we posted anything. 2013 is gone and 2014 has been here long enough for us to be able to make out checks with the appropriate date.

I have been back in the classroom and out again. I am working again in the online version of the educational world. And that is a blog post in and of itself. Herb has a new project pending which looks as though it will give him a chance to stretch his professional wings a bit further. He is also now a Justice of the Peace and can perform marriages. He is running for the Selectboard which is the governing body of our town.

We are both recommitted to our writing, but it is fragile enough - the writing, not the commitment - that we are yet hesitant to share what we are working on.

And as the old song goes, the wheel keeps turning.

But last night we heard some stories that felt like a flat tire. There were echoes of those dark stories this morning. They are not headline news, but they have shaken me.

Some years ago, one of our local officials had nails strewn in his driveway after a particularly ugly battle over local services.There are reports that someone sprinkled sugar into the gas tank of town equipment, and then the local official was blamed for not keeping the equipment safe. I thought that was about old grudges between hard-boiled men.

A year or two ago, a  disgruntled nephew stole a can of coins from his uncle. Word went out that a green Jeep had been seen around town and that we should watch for it. It turned out to be the car of the local appraiser who was making notes for tax appraisal time. The two events were unrelated.

There are reports of major drug problems in the town next to ours and some of it is reported to have slipped in here, though all I have seen so far is a very pale skinned, somewhat wild-eyed, pit-bull-paired, loose jointed couple buying a child's table and chair set at the local library yard sale.

And then I heard that the lug nuts on one side of a friend's Jeep had been loosened after a disagreement over a town issue that engendered some tax increases. She made it to the shoulder of a snowy highway, and the wheel made it across the lanes of oncoming traffic with no injuries.

This morning, I heard that  a friend who built a tiny "half-house" on land some few miles away had found out that  her windows had been broken though nothing was stolen. She is returning "from away" to repair the damage.

This morning, as I stood at the top of the stairs, Herb said there is a dark side to this town. It is something I've not seen or acknowledged until today.

I am stretching for the lessons in this. I am stretching to understand how a town that vaunts its sense of community, and its safety for the children can have such a dark side.

The friend who had her wheels loosened said she had been a newcomer at the time, and that people were angered by her stand on a local issue. She said she might have been scared but instead was angry. "If you want to argue with me, come up here and do it on the porch," she said. "If you want to punch me, come up here and punch me. Don't put my friends and my kids at risk when they could have been in the car."

A friend worried that a new town office building planned for the main intersection in this tiny town, on two county roads, should not house the library for fear that some disgruntled person would come with a gun and shoot the children there.

There are shadows here that I have not seen.

Some of those shadows are the long shadows of Newtown where the children were shot by a madman who had been someone's son. All of our towns are vulnerable to the loose nuts. Some of the shadows are of problems with economic disparities and a lack of jobs, and a sense that our lives are tenuous, and that just a little sip or a little snort or a little something in the veins will make it hurt a little less, at least for a time. Or that something small will make us feel stronger, as though our outrage has a place to settle, our anger, an expression in someone else's pain.

It is too easy to say that it is about newcomers and oldtimers which is what I've often heard. It is too easy to say (as I have) that it is about old grudges. Or kids with too much time on their hands. Or wounded men with a streak of violence.

Or of loose nuts.

It is of course all of the above...and more.

But I am spending time again, as I have before, looking at my own expressions of loss and anger and disempowerment, at the way I express my own rage....and wondering how to repair the damage. Mine and that of those I love.

A blog presumes that there is some discovery, some lesson to be shared. It presumes that what we have written, like a recipe blog that tells us how to boil an egg or make charlotte russe, has something tasty at the end. We have built a society that seeks an instant-fix googled answer to our questions.  In 2008, The Atlantic published an article called Is Google Making us Stupid?  The author Nicholas Carr wrote,

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.... But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought."

I find myself longing for the google-wikipedia answer, the recipe for something light, sweet, nourishing. Maybe it is my version of the shot, the sip, the little something in my veins.

Carr continues,

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies... Lewis Mumford  described how the clock 'disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.' The 'abstract framework of divided time' became 'the point of reference for both action and thought.'...
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

I find myself wondering whether we have become a googled community which seeks instant answers rather than the process of consensus building which takes time and the capacity for listening to other people's stories. We seek instant fixes and all-or-nothing responses. In a recent controversy, one of the members of the Historical Society insisted that instead of agreeing to disagree, all the members of the Board needed to come to consensus and since none could agree and the discussion was stalemated, any movement forward was stymied.

I am seeking to understand how to fix my own google life. I want to understand how to stop depending on instant fixes, all or nothing scenarios that leave people out and block movement forward.

Carr continues,

"In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas...If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture....

The work of community building requires time and work that is unaccustomed these days. We worry that a real record of the extended time spent by the committee planning the new town building (and responding to individual and group concerns) will be seen as time wasted, at the same time that we worry that others will contend we are moving too quickly ahead.  We worry that our efforts to make good policy will take too much time, alienate our friends. We worry that we should walk to town rather than risk the lug nuts on the car or the gas tank. But the roads at night in a rural place are dark...

Carr cites playwright Richard Foreman saying,

"As we are drained of our 'inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,' Foreman concluded, we risk turning into 'pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Have we become pancake people who are spread so wide and thin, by loss of jobs, and loss of respect that we no longer know how to build the layers of trust in each other and in a future that we can share, where we can agree to disagree, without having the wheels come off? 

Daydreams and the status quo

"Maybe your daydreams might find a home in mine."

That was the closing sentence of a friend's email yesterday. She is looking for new opportunities that will challenge her, that will broaden her already broad areas of competence. She is looking for something that will bring her into contact with more people. She has asked H and I to brainstorm directions for new pursuits.

It comes at a time when many people I know are hunkering down--for the winter, yes, but more for lives constrained by economic fact and spiritual imagination. I am not talking religion here, but the power to have something broader in one's life, the hope, the belief that we can dream.

It makes me wonder what my daydreams are. (And that's not to begin to take on the transfer of my daydreams to someone else.) It makes me wonder how our daydreams find a home with open windows or one with few doors and closed shutters. It makes me wonder when we give up daydreaming to walk between layers of need-to-do and how we bury desire to keep our heads down more than one might hope.

I had begun writing a post for another blog, inspired by the conflict in our town over the installation of equipment that would provide a WiFi hotspot at the center of town. I had begun writing in that blog about the manner in which we head-down keep fighting the old battles and forget to look to what can be. The local government worries about liability; the local historical society worries that it will introduce something unknown in the past; parents worry about access to the internet letting their children know things that they have not prescribed for them; the church worries about conflicts with god's waves over the town green.  And head down, we bull our way forward calling lawyers and building coalitions of outrage.

In the room that is made of anger and opposition, the doors and windows are firmly shut. There is no opportunity to daydream. No opportunity to imagine.

A childhood without imagination is a cramped and shriveled thing. A town without invitation to those "from away", that concentrates on our darker natures, our desire to assign blame for those things we cannot control is a poor place for civic values and the vaunted community we claim for this beloved place. A Historic Society that looks only to the past, cannot see what past paths have wrought in the now, or what is worth holding on to and celebrating. It becomes a place of dusty shelves with unseen artifacts rather than a place of learning that celebrates the shared geneology of the land and the shared home. And a church that worries that radio frequencies conflict with god's word has little faith.

In that other essay, I wrote about the way in which attention to the local can cramp our ability to see something larger. I wrote that I felt that I had been stuck inside the macro setting on a camera lens. There are deep pleasures in looking at the color and pattern in a leaf. There are lessons in the intricate weave of a vireo nest. I have always found that spinning a fistful of fiber into a lace-weight yarn is a meditation. But there are times when the neck-cramped position can make movement impossible. There is a cramp in my neck and my pedometer is silent.

That day of email, that day of focusing on the crisis at home, I happened to open another email from the management consulting firm, McKinsey. Please understand that this is not an endorsement. I haven’t even really read very far in the material they provided. But there is a post about the manner in which small towns in India are using technology for entrepreneurial access. There is a post about how important it is to make entrepreneurial acumen available in the US at the hands of the foreign students we have trained in our educational institutions and sent back to the nations of their birth. There is an article that describes the incentives for entrepreneurial work offered to immigrants to Chile in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. And I am struck by the manner in which my stuck macro lens hasn’t allowed me to think beyond solving the minutiae of local problems.

Now that is a dangerous row to hoe. I am a believer in the power of the local. I am committed to the importance of building sustainability in community institutions at ground level, and to understanding how local institutions work, and to talking with the power brokers who can make needed change or protect indigenous values and vernacular landscapes. But sometimes you can lose sight of the proverbial bigger picture.

Many years ago I studied with the founder of a field called Social Impact Assessment. He maintained that we needed to know the broad social impacts of change before we made planning interventions. It was a sibling to Economic Impact Assessment and the ever-popular Environmental Impact Assessment which attempted to assess how a new highway built below-grade level in New York’s Hudson River would impact fish spawning. That project timed out in controversy but we have since gotten one of the most splendid pieces of modern planning ever in New York’s High Line which reclaimed the old railroad bed and has turned decrepit warehouse districts into powerful public spaces and commerce. And yes, people were undoubtedly displaced.

My mentor Charlie Wolf talked about a radical idea—the no plan alternative. What if we did nothing, no highway, no commercial district, no social change. It was a radical way of re-examining who stood to benefit and who the losers were. It identified social costs and benefits of the perpetual momentum machine and the opportunities available to a steady close-up look at what would be lost if plans moved ahead.

It is perhaps where I learned to use the macro lens on community and on change. It was probably there that I learned that the vernacular was beautiful as is the veining in a leaf. Just so communities have midribs and veins that share resources and strengthen the whole.

But I find myself thinking about not seeing the forest for the trees. And that is an unusual perspective for someone so wedded to the particular.

As we concentrate on the minutiae of old feuds and allegiances, as we speculate on the potential for legal suit by people who fear change, as we champion the no-plan alternative, we lose sight of what can be. We lose sight of the children who can become entrepreneurs bringing new businesses to a cash-strapped economy. We lose perspective on the child who can find writers and musicians and artists who inspire their creativity. We lose sight of those who can find meaningful work and those who can make meaningful work. We lose sight of the character of a community that supports its best impulses rather than its fears. In a "visioning" process  on the new town building, there was no desire for space for the arts or for a library...just for what we already know.

As I stretch my spine and my legs for a walk on a sunny day after days of immobility, I don’t have THE answer of how to walk between the local and the larger of course, but there are times when I think we need something that is unfamiliar, something that stretches us and makes us think about what is possible rather than what we know. For an ethnographer that is a dangerous idea.

I am off, for now, to seek some daydreams.

Shifting gears

I drive a car with automatic transmission that makes the appropriate decision about what gear I should be in as I round a curve on an icy road. The car has something called paddle shifters that will override that decision to some extent. I have not used them.  I learned to drive stick shift in Ireland when I was out of college on the "grande tour"  - only mine was less grande and more tour. I took lessons from a very attractive Irish "lad" so that I could save money by renting a stick shift car and so I could learn to make turns on the "wrong" side of the road. I "drove stick" from time to time after that trip, but most of my life has been "on automatic".  Make of that whatever metaphor you like.

But as I sit here staring at the computer screen, I realize that I have spent an inordinate amount of time switching back and forth between the email program, the internet search engine and H's book that I have been editing. Occasionally I get up to add wood to the wood stove or to snack on something - empty calories indeed.

I am having trouble with emptiness and trouble switching gears. I finished grading my students' work ten days ago. Since then, I cleaned out the supply closet, fixed the knitting conundrum that I have been dealing with, cleaned the litter box and did the storm windows - and most of that took part of one day. I also walked 5.5 miles yesterday and will head out shortly - before dark - for another walk. Tonight I have a scheduled talk with a colleague. I have filled a contractor's bag with shredded paper - the product of my mother's tax records, and financial statements, some of which date to 1988. There remains a box to do. 

I planted the garlic I bought a few weeks ago, and the tubers I pulled up in search of the  hole that was allowing some small critter into the wall of the bedroom where it wakes us with its skittering at night. I put manure on 4 of the 5 garden beds and need to mulch them and get cardboard down on the weed whacked bishop's weed that lines the east side of the property across the street. That will need to get covered with mulch. But it is chilly inside the house and I have all the lights on, because the grey sky makes it look like dusk instead of being just past midday.  I don't want to do anything other than sit by the stove with a book or take a walk to further compete with myself on my tiny fitbit.

What I really want though is to be back to my writing. I seem to have forgotten how. I don't know which document to open or where to start with the book manuscript I have been working on for a decade. I usually pick it up again at page 1 since that seems obvious, but the result is that I am stuck on what has been edited a hundred times, and by the time I get to the meat of the ideas, the areas where I can make useful progress, something else gets in the way, and the project languishes until the next time I try to find a thread unraveled from the fabric, a place to begin. I have an assortment of files, and an assortment of folders, all of which made sense when I was working on them more actively. That was then.

Now it is easier to address the calendar and contact list fixes. It is easier to plan a meeting with colleagues. It is like the yellow footprints on the floor that we used to use to learn to do the cha cha. Tell me where to step and I am on it as they say. But there are no yellow footprints for the writing. Unless you are doing it and there is that thread left unfinished. Unless it is recent enough to require a finished thought or narrative or persona.

There have been reams of paper covered with writing about the devastation of the multi-tasked life. But I am finding that I have been devastated by a to-do life.... one which is laden with the Scyllas of preparing for the seasons' changes and the sultry whispers of Charybdis in the form of organizer demons that call to me to set up a meeting, follow up on a commitment to find someone to talk about the new health insurance plans, edit some copy on our web site. There are the siren calls of novels and magazines and books not yet opened that draw me deeper into this distractable head when there is only one path I should be following.

The writer Ann LaMott once wrote something about writer's block. She said something about it not being about being too full, but rather about being empty. There's that word again. I suspect what I need is to turn away for a time, do something I haven't done before. Venice was good for finding my voice, but that's a bit more of a financial commitment than I can make right now. And this isn't really about writer's block.  You know when you are about to shift gears from a stop, to enter the two way street, and you aren't sure which is the wrong side of the road?  There is that hesitation, long enough that someone comes into sight, and you have to wait again for the traffic to clear. I am trying to get to the point where I know the shift well enough to make the turn in a natural rhythm. I am trying to get to the point where I don't grind the gears when I pull away from that stop.

Deus ex machina

I think I wrote about this some months ago, two and a half to be specific. But just in case you (whoever "you" are) don't have total recall, here it goes again...

I was driving through the BIG town where we do our grocery shopping and build meaningful relationships with the folks at the hardware store, when my car turned into the parking lot of a small third generation shoe store. I truly don't remember having any intention to shop for shoes. Remember the deus ex machina from high school English? Well the deus turned the steering wheel and there I was. I was pretty gimpy and so I slowly emerged from the car and hobbled into the store where I found myself looking at  a pair of sandals in a rather obtrusive blue. They were somehow suddenly on my feet in the appropriate size, and I found myself walking, nay, striding around  the store. By the time I was done, I had bought two pairs of Keens (Venice is a more subtle brown and Newport is the obtrusive blue-who names this stuff anyway?). I found myself walking the street in front of our house the next day, and walked myself up to five miles within a few weeks. Amazing what a comfortable supportive shoe can do. I truly felt like the proverbial different person. But then there was a week in Boston and my knee got worse, and I worried about taking too much Advil, and one thing led to another, and you know where this goes....

So flash forward...

I woke up a few days ago and realized that the plantar fasciitis that I have been coping with on and off, mostly on, for the past two years, was gone. And I still wear those shoes ALL the time. They seem to have "worked". And I happened to read an article in The New Yorker by Susan Orleans  about the growing competition between her husband and herself over who can log the most steps in a day, using something called a "fitbit". I don't remember much more about the story, but when I found myself at the local sporting goods store in something analogous to that deus ex machina experience, there in front of me was a "fitbit". It is a tiny oval piece of electronics that logs your steps, mileage, calories burned, the time of day, and has a smiley face that responds to the number of steps you have logged. It automatically synchs to your computer and makes a record of what you have accomplished and gives you "badges" when you reach particular milestones. It tracks your food if you want it to and will notify all your friends on Facebook or Twitter if you are so inclined. There is a version that will track your sleep habits, but that isn't something I particularly want to attend to with two cats, one of whom likes to stretch across my face in the middle of the night.

Yesterday, I walked 12007 steps. Full stop... Do you hear the cheering?

After about ten weeks of sedentary, self-indulgent, knee-focused behavior, I was back out looking at the leaves. Herb in what may be an increasingly worrisome trend, bought a fitbit of his own, one day after returning from his most recent consulting gig. I beat hm by... nah... that's not the point, right?

But I am struck by how our lives can be altered by these tiny techno changes, by the way there is some unseen current that influences our very physiological state. (Luckily, lest you call the guys with the white coats that buckle around the back, I haven't yet given in to the notion that the contrails above are monitoring our thoughts, though perhaps I should, given recent revelations about the NSA!)  I am struck by the way we can obsess unproductively (ok, I can obsess unproductively) for months without change and then something tiny comes from left field that makes a difference in the quality of life.  I am struck by how something so simple and childish as a techno-generated "badge" can make us healthier, and a smiley face on a piece of plastic can feel like a friend cheering us on. I won't be putting my achievements, such as they are, on Facebook or twitter, but this blog post isn't all that different, and there are probably Russian "bots" who are laughing in their own mechanical way.  I will probably be fielding ads on Google for running shoes and pedometers shortly.

There is of course, one downside to all of this. As I sit here at the computer, fielding emails, writing this blog post, reviewing my students' projects, there is that blank screen where the smiley face should be...Got to run!

Notes on living in Vermont

In 2009, when President Obama was elected, the writer William Rivers Pitt wrote:

"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....

Greetings from... wait, where?

Atlanta.  Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, to be specific, with a three-hour layover before my flight to San Antonio.

One of my favorite writers, Alain de Botton, spent a week as a “writer in residence” at London’s Heathrow Airport.  And although he’s proven to be able to make Proust and working lives and even architecture interesting, I haven’t been tempted by his resulting book that reported on that week.  There’s just nothing interesting to me about the human experience of airports.

Certainly, they’re fascinating machines.  An airport like Atlanta brings in close to a thousand passenger flights per day, plus an equal or larger number of freight flights.  Let’s figure 200,000 passengers per day, all of whom are coming from and going to different places for different purposes.  But really, the closest analog isn’t a human experience at all.  An airport isn’t anything but an Amazon.com warehouse and shipping center, with all of us playing the part of cardboard boxes.  It’d be more efficient if we just let ourselves be bar-coded and gate-shunted through the building and into our seat; it’s only our desperate clinging to the illusion of free will that makes the machine less speedy. 

The human veneer of an airport is as thin as paint.  We inhabit the corridors and the first twenty feet on each side, a row of snack bars and magazine shops and loyalty-customer lounges fed by invisible freight corridors on the back.  The rest of the machine is where the planes and the luggage and the police and the utilities and the waste stream move along unseen. 

The choice between restaurants is as illusory as the choice between airlines or bottled waters.  Beer taps, grills and Fryolators can only provide so many alternative facades.  I’ve unfortunately been to an Applebee’s, but I’m holding firm to my life goal of never setting foot inside a TGIFriday’s.

The chairs in the gates are just the racks where we’re stored between arrival and departure, only the lack of a fork lift differentiating us from the pallet of fertilizer at Home Depot.  We’re prevented from potentially delaying interactions.  The chairs are side-by-side so we can’t talk.  Wolf Blitzer, the human suppression agent, blares from all sides so that we can’t hear ourselves, much less one another.  CNN and Fox News and CNBC are as equal as Aquafina and Fiji and Poland Springs, letting us feel the power of choice while acquiescing to the power of advertising.

I used to have a deal with Nora that I’d bring home a piece of airport trash from all of my trips: a Governator shot glass from Sacramento, a Michelle Obama nail file from DC.  But I’ve given up now: it’s the same coffee mug, the same fridge magnet, the same snow globe, the same coin purse, with only the decals to identify their sources.

Airports are the purest distillation of James Howard Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere; the Atlanta airport is the same as Albany, which is (I guess not so surprisingly) the same as Venice.  There are some local history posters along the moving walkways, and I can hear recorded greetings by Tom Menino and Deval Patrick when I go through Logan, but we could replace those with happy chats by the CEOs of McDonalds and Citigroup and be none the wiser. 

I would very much like to be given a year to rebuild an American airport, to see if I could make a real urban experience out of it instead of the strip-mall franchise machine that it tends toward.  It would be really interesting to have an Albany airport that was reflective of Albany, a place that spoke of the local habits and patterns of the Hudson Valley.  Some would be displeased, no doubt, but could it really be worse?

Choosing a life

H suggested yesterday that we go out on "a date". Usually that means going to our favorite bar for dinner and a chat with the bartenders we've gotten to know.

Danny is from South Carolina and is dating a correspondent for the local television news. He was a baseball player when he was younger but gave it up after some injury. He still gets animated when he talks about baseball though. We know something of where he lives, and his landlord who made his money in something deep-pocketed and so provides a better quality of rental housing than most, including a flat screen TV. Danny's mom has never seen snow, so he's looking forward to bringing her here this winter when the drifts are deep enough for her to play in.  This past weekend he was planning a drive to check out a Chevy Tahoe he wants to buy, and he was planning a trip to the beer festival up on the ski hill nearby.

Amanda just moved out of the "big" town of Rutland  (population: 16,495 as of 2010, down from 17,292 in 2000 ), and to a more rural community to the south. There's more room for her two kids, and her husband who works at the regional paper. He is also part of the leadership of the local repertory company.  She lived in Tampa for a while during school, met him in an acting class, but she  grew up in Vermont and returned when she got married and was pregnant with her first. She has been taking pictures of the landscape as the leaves fall and the ridgelines turn color.  She was surprised to see that among her new neighbors were a few cows and a horse or two, in a pasture behind the house.

But this time, rather than visiting with Danny and Amanda, Herb invited me to go for a drive to look at the leaves ourselves. It has been many years since I really saw "peak color" and I had awakened thinking that I would like to do so this year. H seemed to have read my mind. So we launched off on that American experience of driving to no place in particular, just for the sake of driving...and looking. It rained a bit, but mostly the leaves were set off by layers of clouds -- from dark charcoal to slate grey with layers of  white and froth.  The red leaves were intense and there were shrubs that carry leaves that are both red and green, like one at the corner of our house. Ours is still more green than red; I don't know its name. There were the trees that I particularly love that have a particular shade of orange that is somewhere between coral and peach. Their leaves seem translucent against the light. In some places the evergreens made islands of dark green or painted the ridges black depending on what clouds hung above them. There was a yellow maple growing out of the inside of a white painted silo beside a red barn.

I realized how hungry I have been for color. I realized how much I would miss it as the winter comes on with its slate and white and early dark. We eat off plates that were salvaged from the beach house after the hurricane. They have names like "terra cotta" and "mint green" and oddly "orange". They please my senses in ways that my mother's fashionable white china never did.

As we drove, Herb pointed to a pasture with cows, set against the foliage of Fall. "That's Vermont", he said, and I argued (as I too often do). "Vermont is spending two weeks getting ready for the  winter." We had split wood and stacked wood and collected leaves. Herb carried 135 40-pound bags (2 2\3 tons) of pellets to the basement and stacked them against the wall. We had pulled weeds out of the raised garden beds and along the fence line, so the fungus on the leaves wouldn't impact the garden next year.  We sprayed the fruit trees against the hungry deer, using something that smells like rotten eggs and will have the trunks wrapped before the rodents find them a tasty winter treat. We cut down the native fern and yellowing hostas to find the chipmunk holes that probably hid the critter that scratched through the foundation, and climbed into a hollow wall beside the bedroom, keeping us awake much of the night. We have consigned papers to the wood fire and the recycling; we have removed the rust from flood-soaked cast iron pans with vinegar soaks and a dremel tool. We will clean the grill and move it into the garage, wrap the spruce in burlap, and cover the shrubs beside the porch with angled boards to protect them from the snow dropping from the roof.

People fill the hotels this time of year with "leaf peepers". Danny and Amanda are providing directions to the best places for the leaves, and making well earned tip money providing "pumpkin white russians" and "toasted macaroon martinis". Most of those who come for the view of the hills and for the snow and for the artisanal cheeses understand little of what lies behind the pastures and rows of corn stubble against green, gilded marsh grasses and red barns with trees growing through an abandoned silo.

Danny and Amanda make $5 an hour for their work. They depend on tips to make it possible to buy their cars or their houses. That's a lot in a restaurant industry; their waiter and waitress friends make $3.75 an hour. Their boss paid them a day wage recently, so that they could turn over their tips to a girls' soccer team. That wasn't their choice, but they aren't complaining.

Our friend Derrick came by with his puppy and his parents' dog, a Giant Schnauzer with a proclivity for opera. Derrick works at felling trees, and weed whacking, and milling downed trees into boards with his portable saw mill. He does roof raking in the winter and snow plows for new homeowners who haven't mastered the machinery. And in between he plants, maintains, and harvests an acre or more of multiple varieties of carrots, squash, tomatoes, basil, sunflowers, peppers, eggplants, pumpkins, lettuce, corn.... And he and his partner put it all up as salsa or sides or dinner for the frozen months. Today he is making cider with a neighbor. When the weather turns colder and wetter, he will be making charcoal to sell, and trying to keep his own home fires warm. He salvaged an old black locust that had been struck by lightning, and will be letting it season for a few years, 'til it gets dry enough to not wreck his chain saw. And then he will be using it, mixed with an assortment of other wood that doesn't threaten to melt his wood stove, to warm his house. 

We don't know much about his background, but I asked him about his parents today. I asked why they acquired (from rescue), this enormous shaggy and mouthy beast of a dog. "My dad had one when he got out of the army," he said. "He served during Vietnam but was in Holland, met my mom at a USO event. He saved everything he had, and came back after the war with a wife, a dog, and a Rolls Royce built in Europe that he had shipped over. Bought 22 acres and raised blueberries."

I thought of H's brother who had tried to do the same thing - saving his money while in the army. Saving every penny while others spent it all on shore leave. I thought of H's brother whose money had been stolen by an officer, and who had "decked" that officer, and who had spent time in the brig for that act. I wondered what he would have done with his life if he had had the money to buy the life he might have chosen. I wondered what life he would have chosen.

I thought of the way Derrick has learned to save everything, to be resilient. I thought of how he had learned that any task could be solved with ingenuity a few good tools that he treats carefully, from his portable saw mill, to the way he wraps the ropes that he uses for pulling stumps or climbing trees. I thought of how that was the lesson that Vermont had taught me...to listen and learn and care for the tools that you need and the people who can teach you to use them.

We are stacking the wood again today. Herb built a new shelving system in the basement using 2x4's from the small town hardware store, and the pallets that he salvaged from under the 3 tons of pellets that will heat us this winter. We'll probably store some onions, and next year, potatoes and carrots for the winter. We'll store the pint, quart and half gallon ball jars that we use to store leftovers, and for applesauce, and chutney. We'll store something else on the bottom shelf, something that we only need to remove once a year or twice, something that will keep us warm, or keep us cool, or feed us.

The leaves are blowing in a 25 to 30 mile an hour wind today, and I am thinking we should go up to the potato fields for a view over the technicolor hills, and to look at the leaves before the landscape turns black and white, to look at the life we have chosen.