I moved to Vermont in 1976 after college graduation to attend Vermont Law School. I wanted to help people achieve justice in their lives. The justice system in my Vermont has allowed me to do that.

In my Vermont, judges, prosecutors, defenders, social workers and litigants all live and work together in the same communities. Judges, prosecutors, defenders, lawyers and agency workers often feel a sense of failure when we lose a victim to violent crime, a parent’s rights are terminated, a defendant re-offends or anyone struggles with the misery of addiction. We all can feel hope and accomplishment when a victim is protected, an offender is rehabilitated, and children return safely home.

In my Vermont, citizens, lawyers, and legislators created strengthened and created institutions and agencies to fill in gaps in our justice system. Vermont Legal Aid, the Vermont Defender General and Public Defender system, Prisoners Rights Office, Vermont Network Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, Have Justice Will Travel, the Vermont Volunteer Lawyers Association, Vermont Bar Association Pro Bono Project, the State’s Attorney’s Victim Advocates, Adult and Juvenile Diversion Boards community justice centers, Superior Court mediation programs and Vermont Family Court have all been created or significantly strengthened to help us in our efforts to provide justice in the past several decades.

The justice system in my Vermont is far from perfect. But it has our human faces, is woven through the fabric of our communities, and its workers and our communities are constantly striving to improve it.

Jean, Brattleboro
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

I came to Vermont for the woods, and oh, what woods I got! And into the bargain I got people, real Menschen, with their hearts in the right place and a deep love of the land. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words ring true to me here -- “In these woods, we return to reason and faith”.

My first summer in Vermont – now 12 years ago - was spent almost entirely in the woods, working for the Green Mountain Club on the southern slopes of Mt. Mansfield. Ever since then, what initially looked to me like a vast expanse of generic forest has unfolded into ever more complexity: A fascinating treasure trove of balsam firs, wood thrushes, blue-spotted salamanders, and an impressive array of soil and bedrock types, which in turn support dozens of distinct forest communities. And even in the deepest woods, legacies of human presence: Stone walls and cellar holes, apple and lilac trees, big old pasture trees that tell of another time when they grew in open land rather than forest.

So the Vermont woods have long been a cultural landscape as much as a natural one. And, compared to many other states, Vermont seems to maintain a healthier balance between nature and culture, between human impact and ecological processes.

And yet, even in the short time since I added myself to the mix, I have also noticed rapid changes in the landscape that threaten this balance: We Vermonters fragment the forest with our ever-multiplying houses and roads, we hold national records in commuting miles, and we cover our lawns with pesticides. I suspect that we know better in some corner of our minds, but that knowledge so often seems to be remote from our conscious actions.

Perhaps it is the knowledge of the land itself that is remote for many of us, especially those of us living in the cities or larger towns. The good news in this is that the larger communities are actually a very good place to be in order to express our love of the land, especially if we cut down on car travel. The time I spend in a car is by definition time I do NOT spend connected to the land, whereas time riding a bike or even walking to the bus stop allows me to observe much more closely what’s around me. Just from my front stoop in Burlington, I have learned over the last four years that the red maple in front of my house flowers a good two weeks before the sugar maple.

This kind of observation gives me intense joy, and it gives me hope: It tells me that we can connect with the land in whatever way offers itself, wherever we are. And by getting to know even small components of the landscape, we can begin to understand the complex web that holds it all, and us, together.

By Kerstin Lange,
Burlington, VT.

It started with the cute farm boy, incredibly well read and full of opinions, from my UVM philosophy class.

Dear reader, I married him, and thus became submerged in my Vermont, the world of the untacitern Vermonter.

We moved into the hired man's house on the 100 year old family farm. A farm is a semi-public institution for eccentric folks of all types, people who have the
confidence that comes from never having a boss. They stop by to give opinions while the tractor is being fixed, while the sap is boiling. My lanky, laconic Vermont father-in-law, once you got him started, would tell hilarious stories about the local characters who had lived near each other for generations, tales often colored by his cattle breeder determinism, "the females were ok in that family but the males were a bad cross".

Flatland family would be horrified on visits to observe friends and neighbors just walking into our house, being given a cup of coffee, and proceeding to rave about politics, their partners, and the stupidity of the world below
Brattleboro and above Montpelier.

Town Meeting is an expanded version of our living rooms, where every crackpot is allowed his say and is honored for it.

Sara, Weathersfield
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

In my Vermont, more people "get it" than anywhere else I know. This is a comfort and a blessing. What do Vermonters "get"? They get that the humans are rapidly over-populating the planet and depleting its resources. They get that we need to think globally and they actually act, not only locally but in far-off places. Vermonters think before they act. Should we have more children? Paper or plastic? Or bring your own? Vermonters get the transportation situation. We work at home, live near work, walk to work, bicycle, motorcycle, carpool, drive high-mileage cars, and even public transport gets used. Vermonters get the need to have energy-saving shelter and work places, that energy saving is cheaper and easier than energy making. They get the need for energy independence through greatly expanded use of renewable resources. They get that this will make a cleaner environment. Vermonters get that their lifestyles make a difference, what they eat, from where, how they play, with what, what community institutions they support, and how. Yes, in my Vermont, folks get it. Then I wake up. But it is not all a dream.

Peter, Cornwall
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

My Vermont is where Mom, Woody, Eva, and Plumpie live. My husband named them. Woody's gray-brown baby fox fluff blends in perfectly with the aged natural wood of our old Vermont barn, a structure that two national chain insurance companies has told us to paint and then to demolish. We don't (yet) have chickens or a bunny or a cat so I don't worry about our coexistence with the foxes as our neighbors. I suspect they are not the neatest of tenants in our barn, but on the other hand I can see that they are doing their part for frog and rodent control in return.

My husband and I moved to Vermont, perhaps a switch of the supposed trend of young people leaving the state. We had been visiting for Vermont for years as often as possible from our home on Cape Cod. While with many things to love about the Cape, living there was not an ideal paradise that many of our friends enviously imagined. My husband always referred to leaving as getting off the God-forsaken peninsula of sand, commenting that he felt instantly relaxed upon entering the Green Mountain state, and instantly the opposite once we crossed the border to return home. We found welcoming inns and endless back roads to explore, and when the opportunity came, made our decision to move here. The choice reminds us of our favorite Frost poem The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We took a risk leaving what was familiar and in many ways comfortable to us. We left being Wash-a-Shores to become Flat-Landers. The change has been fraught with uncertainty and new twists at every turn but we have found a welcoming community with new friends, new careers, and a new home with friendly or interesting new neighbors. My Vermont is where on Fur-Mother's day I can plant the dahlias that are a gift from our dogs, which they will probably later trample with their abandon of energy in their new found open space. I can hope that I have judged the timing so the plants at least won't succumb to another late frost before the dogs have their turn with them. And while I work in my garden, I can watch the babies roll on the grass in front of our still standing old Vermont Barn, the one for which I am looking for a new, local insurance company to cover so that I can watch the babies play every spring.

I moved to Vermont in 1993 to serve as pastor of a small village church. Over the years I met many Vermonters who were deeply spiritual. I have also met many who have a misguided view of God. I recently gave the following devotion to the Vermont State Senate and thought it was something other Vermonters might enjoy.

Three children were overheard bragging about their fathers. An investment counselor's son said, "My father makes $60 an hour just sitting at his desk." A lawyer's son replied, "My dad talks on the phone for 30 minutes and makes $125." The pastor's son laughed, "That's nothing! My father preaches for 15minutes, and it takes four men to collect all the money!"

Kids love to brag about their parents, but I think parents love to brag about their kids even more. Every parent loves to talk about how their kid made the winning basket in the game or how they earned the leading role in the school play. Parents like to brag about this because they are proud of what their kids have accomplished.

Did you know that God, our heavenly parent, likes to brag about the good things we are doing in our lives? Though many people think of God in a negative light as a parent who is always looking to punish His childlren when they do wrong, this is an unbalanced view of our Heavenly Parent. For God watches us, brags on us to His angels and then showers us with gifts. James, the brother of Jesus, writes about this when he said:

James 1:16-17 Don't be deceived, my dearly loved brothers. Every generous act and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights; with Him there is no variation or shadow cast by turning.

The apostle Matthew echoes this thought when he writes:

Matthew 7:11 If you who are imperfect parents know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!

Today I want to encourage you to do something good. Do something that will make your Heavenly Father proud. Do something that will make God smile and brag to His angels about you. And then watch as God gives you some good gift
in response to how proud He is of you.

Terry Dorsett
Director, Green Mountain Baptist Association
Barre, Vermont
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

My Vermont is a place where good fences make good neighbors, where we don't mark our friendships with luvya at the end of a text message or smiley faces on a post-it note, but rather in real gestures of practical support.

Some of my friends, from away, think that this sentiment, good fences make good neighbors, from Robert Frost's famous poem Mending Wall represents Yankee reticence, a chilly reserve that Vermonters express in their relationships.

Not me.

I see this effort at repairing the stone wall that separates the properties of the two figures in the poem as an annual ritual of friendship. When we mend fences, we're not building barriers - we're fixing something. It's a reconciliation, time together, bent over a task.

We know what it took to make these beautiful stone walls, so when we see one that has crumpled in places, we have an impulse to make it right. It brings order to the universe. In their own way these stone walls represent the relationship between the human and the natural world, so central to our love for Vermont.

So good fences do make good neighbors (do you hear the Yankee rhyme: Good fences; good neighbiz.)

I'm gonna go work in the yahd.

Karl, Cornwall
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

My Vermont starts at age 8, when my family, along with another, left the sticky environs of summer in urban Connecticut to get a breath of fresh air. I knew at that age, I had finally arrived home. We stayed in a cabin somewhere near Roxbury. I recall the smell of intense hay, a morning light that I'd never seen before and air so clear and crisp, I forgot it was August. I recall asking my parents why we couldn't live here, and they just gave me that slightly condescending look that parents give their children when they "don't understand." From that moment on, I wanted to figure out a way of getting back home. Five years later, now at age 13, we piled into the family car and aimlessly traveled north, once again to find a vacation somewhere. My grandmother was with us at the time, playfully helping my brothers and me find that perfect motel, preferably with a pool in a nice setting. We couldn't define the perfect pool, motel or nice setting. We figured we'd all we would know it when we saw it. We traveled for hours, winding up just south of Burlington, with Lake Champlain in view. We found the right setting. I remember the fire-like sunset, boats gently sailing upon a calm water, and mountains framing the entire scene. The large pool didn't hurt either. I didn't want to leave. Another 5 years went by. I had started college near my urban Connecticut home. Growing up in an Italian/American household, you just didn't stray too far from the nest. Yet I was miserable.I commuted on that auto-choked concrete ribbon, better known as I-95. One of my buddies had gone off to St. Michael's. He told me I was a fool not to be here, and, in the end, I knew he was right. So I transferred and spent the next few years where I belonged. The pull of family brought me back after graduation, but I never gave up my dream of being here. Several more years go by, and when I had my fill of concrete ribbons, sticky air and where pride about place had long ago been replaced with the need to shop, I moved my family up north for good. It took several more years for me to recoup my earnings. That has been a source of frustration for me sometimes. But I had to balance a slimmer paycheck with a safer, saner place where I know and care for my neighbors, where community still matters and natural beauty still trumps unmindful development. It's not exactly Shangri-la here, but it's still a place of distinction for its natural setting and its commitment to human-scale values. People and relationships still matter here. For me, my Vermont was love at first sight. Now, more than 40 years later, the love grows deeper with each passing day, except maybe on the coldest of winter days. And yes, I still get a little choked up when I hear "Moonlight in Vermont." (Any version will do.) Hearing about your home, even in this stylized way, will do that to you.

Mark, Bristol
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

Our family moved to Vermont from the cosmopolitan city of London 9 years ago. It was not an easy decision. A move to Vermont meant personal and professional sacrifices that would require long journeys, particularly for me and my work in Africa, half a world away.

When we moved, our children brought the world with them. My oldest son, whose best friend was born of an Iraqi father and an Iranian mother, wanted to start his own communist party. Our daughter lamented the loss of family journeys traveling the globe. When we got on the plane to return to the US, my youngest asked us “what language do they speak in America?”

Adjusting, we shifted gears and started to relish the experiences of life in rural America: snow days and town meetings; potlucks; mud season and an endless wardrobe of fleece. And we discovered that we were not alone in our decision to move to Vermont. We were part of a community of people from other places - expatriates from the urban world who moved here to escape and connect with something more meaningful.

Our oldest two children are now off at college and they value their identity as Vermonters and take pride in bringing friends home from college. It has become for them, as it is for me, a place of refuge, a quiet place to think. Having my home base in Vermont makes the work I do possible. And my experiences while I travel reinforce what we take for granted – the precious knowledge that we live in one of the safest places on earth.

Many people worry about the aging of Vermont and our inability to attract young people. I hope our family is representative of a positive trend of migration from the urban to the rural that will enrich our state in many ways. Thanks to the possibilities of virtual commuting and home offices, I believe that this will be an option for future generations. I expect that my children, after years of college and experience in the working world, will return to Vermont with their children. They will migrate to Vermont to give their children the privilege of innocence and the comfort of safety.

Of this I am quite sure.

Kathleen, Dorset
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

This is the latest in a casual journal I am keeping since moving here in February. Happy to send you the others if you wish.LS. Sometime during the night the sky fell in a thick mix of clouds, weather, stars, and planets. Sometime too during the night my house shoved off its old stone moorings and is now at sea, though becalmed in an archipelago of floating islands. All my tenuous reference points are gone in the fog, so I am adrift but feel a somber peacefulness. I think I’ll stay by the window as lookout. The swallows have been desperately looking for places to nest. Last spring the barn was filled with their nests, crying babies and parents whipping around protecting and feeding their young. We couldn’t get in without risk of attack. So now, we closed up every opening in the barn with new glass and chicken wire. You can hear their frustration as they fly round and round in disbelief, as I am sure the barn has been theirs for years. I like them and I don’t, but hope they find another place close by so my sky is filled with their calls. My neighbor tore down an old house on his property, the one that greeted you as you turned left on to the road that tops the ridge. It was small, badly built with a chimney of river rock that probably outweighed the whole house. Behind the house towards the west, are apple orchards, an old maple at its front door, low meadows and the Green mountains to the east. It sat empty yet ready, without need of notice, to again be lived in. Reason enough to exist I thought. It’s manure spreading time in Vermont. The air fills with a stench that’s gagging and shuts down your nostrils. There are large, lumbering trucks on the roads that look like heaps of manure on wheels. They go very slow, dropping wet piles here and there and if you are behind one of these things, you have to fight to stay conscious. So you focus; this is natural, this is not chemical, this is the right way to do it; you think about night soil in China, you’re passing apple trees in full blossom, and then the road widens- you pass and go flying by in complete jubilation, the orchards a pink blur.

Linda, Orwell
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

First of all, it's not my Vermont. It's yours, it's ours,
it's theirs. It's his, the young man who boards the Amtrak at 125th Street in Harlem and rides it north. He passes through Albany and Saratoga Springs, and then cuts east through the Taconic Mountains, passing white farmhouses, red barns, tractors and cows.

The train pulls into Rutland and he gets off behind Wal-Mart. It's a damp drizzly Monday night. He's carrying a small duffel bag that's packed with clothes and little baggies of brown powder.

Her car, a rusted Nissan, pulls into the parking lot, splashes through the puddles and picks him up. He doesn't know it, but her great-grandparents, on her father's side, owned one of those sprawling farms he passed on the train.
Her mother's people came from Poland to work in the slate quarries. Their Vermont was their America.

The young lady, their offspring, never made it through high school. She turns the car around, careful to avoid the late winter potholes, and pulls onto the street. The light's dim, even downtown, and he asks her why it's always so dark and cold up here. Near her apartment, they pass a retired couple on their way to their weekly bridge game. The couple, originally from Connecticut, moved permanently into their second home three years ago. It's in Mendon, on the mountain, as the locals say. They built it 40 years ago, when the kids were small. And they used it almost every winter weekend for skiing and in the fall they'd come up to pick apples and rake leaves.

They love Vermont. He gets up early and drives down to the Mendon Country Store for his newspaper and coffee. In the fall, he buys cider donuts and chats with the men who come in before work. As their pickups idle out front, they talk always of weather and some of taxes, fuel costs, roads and what's become of things. They talk of young people and how the good ones move away and the others stay because they have nowhere else to go. And then they start in about the dope dealers and how they're wrecking the city. They come in from out of state and shack up with local girls who long for excitement, who get hooked on what they sell.

In mud season, buckets hang from the maples and the man often pulls over on Route 4, just past Sugar and Spice, to revel in his favorite Vermont scene. Three horses graze in a pasture; the Taconic Mountains rise behind them, in the
west. No matter how many times he sees it, he never tires of it. There's always something new in it.

Our piece of heaven, his wife calls it. But he believes otherwise. It's no more ours than theirs. Or his, the young man whose girlfriend drops him off at the Home Depot farther down the road. His shift starts at 7:00 and he can't be late. He'll find another job soon, he thinks, or wait till the baby's a little older. Then they'll move south, maybe to Florida. He's got a cousin down there who works construction.

Conrad, Rutland
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

I thought I knew... I thought I knew exactly what I would say about what Vermont means to me, two weeks ago. But that was before I read the 16 grant applications I was assigned to read as a council member of the Vermont Women's Fund, an organization that funds causes and projects supporting Vermont women and girls.

I still remember my first visit to Vermont. It was the fall of 1975. I was 17 and on a college tour with my mom, who was more determined than I that I would go to Middlebury. I had grown up in a small rural town in New Jersey.

We drove up Route 7 in a blaze of colored leaves, and stopped at a country store with a lunch counter somewhere off the beaten track near Rutland. It had an old creaky screen door and wide wooden floors, and sold everything from fishing tackle to loaves of bread. I had never seen a store like it. I fell in love, with the store, with the road, with the red and orange leaves, with the undulating hills to our east as we drove north. I fell madly, deeply, in love with Vermont. I never wanted to leave. At 17, I had never seen such an unspoiled place.

I did attend Middlebury, and Vermont became for me, its beautiful granite campus; skinny dipping in East Haven; swimming at Bristol Falls, studying amidst apple blossoms near the Middlebury College library, and jumping into the quarry near Cornwall. Holsteins and Jerseys. Ben & Jerry's; Frog Hollow. My sense of Vermont was, and has been ever since, dominated by images of its visual beauty.

But then two weeks ago I read 16 grant applications to the Vermont Women's Fund. And a new picture emerged, so clearly. Suddenly I saw a new picture. A picture of newly emerging populations...Bantu immigrants, newly arrived in our Green Mountain State, so far from home, needing a sense of community, and help connecting with resources. Underserved groups... teenage girls in Milton, isolated, needing entertainment undominated by the presence of boys, and more confidence to grow. Women who want to learn to draw in Brattleboro,but don't have the money to take a class. College girls who want to become choral conductors, but have only male role models. Women who needed shelter...

My Vermont became something different. A pastiche of people, all part of this state. I hoped that they are not immune or indifferent to the visual beauty I have had the privilege to enjoy because of not having to be worried about day to day survival.

My hope for my Vermont is that Vermont's beauty will be reflected and extended in Vermonters helping each other and in defining community to extend a hand to all Vermonters, those from Africa, and those from Milton.

Lauren, St. Johnsbury
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

I am from the Midwest but from practically my earliest days up here, I have said to friends, that “…when I came to Vermont, I came home.”

My move to Vermont, nearly fifty years ago, was from New York City, to raise my two sons in a more rural atmosphere similar to the one I had been raised in. However, it was simply and quietly met, from garden produce to watchful playtime for my sons. My first year here raising my sons saw a fire that destroyed our cabin. We stayed the first night with friends. The next day a committee from the village found us there and had an offer of a place for us to stay temporarily until we could either rebuild or find a new place. We took them up on it and the very next day after that, there was a line at that door with the villagers brining something to help us get started – all the way from bed sheets and pillows, knives, forks and dishes, to articles of clothing. I can’t think of a single place in New York City where that would have happened. People there don’t know and don’t care about the people next door or the people behind the next door down the hall.

It is this beautiful friendliness that has endeared Vermont to me. My sons are still here with lovely families and successful jobs. As far as I know, they have the same feeling of Vermont’s caring welcome that imbues my being and it is one that I will try to continue to put out, as best I can, for the rest of my life.

Robert, White River Junction
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

My Vermont – our Vermont – is an incredible place. Its landscape and climate still give me pause after more than thirty years of living here. But, ultimately, it’s the spirit of the people that stands out most.

I escaped here from New York City in 1975, and one of my first friends was Larry - an old farmer who lived across the road. He was a fourth-generation Vermonter with a mischievous twinkle in his sky-blue eyes and a dry country wit. He could fix absolutely anything and, to an ex-city boy, Larry was a revelation in practical wisdom, experience and common sense. Politically, though, we were at opposite extremes, as the old and the young often are.

In those days, around the time of our nation’s bicentennial, “Love it or leave it” was a popular slogan of the right. The words, printed boldly below an image of our unfurled flag, seemed to be everywhere and, every time I saw the phrase in a window or on the bumper of a car, its terse, self-righteous dispensation bothered me. One night, I brought it up to my conservative friend, curious on his take. Larry ran his fingers through his snow-white hair, and gave me a wry smile. “You know”, he said, using his favorite expression - “I think it’s kind-a-ridiculous.” And then he reminded me that it was a reaction to precisely that way of thinking that gave birth to our country in the first place, and that it was therefore perfectly un-American! We found common ground on other issues as well - though not always - and grew to be close friends. Larry died a few years later, in the early eighties, but I still think of him fondly, and often, as his was an original and an open-minded perspective, even though he was from ‘across the aisle’, as politicians like to say.

In an age of increasing polarity in terms of politics and class, it would be nice to realize that we have it within us to leave the politics of the blue vs. red behind in favor of our own color - green. Green is the color of spring, of promise, of growth. It’s the ‘Ver’ in Vermont and, in the spectrum, in a rainbow, it bridges and complements the blue and the red - two colors that otherwise don’t mix well, whether on an artist’s palette, or in the often-ungracious politics of our day. As with diversity of race and culture, diversity of thought, of opinion, make our state a unique and a special place not only to live, but to belong.

George, Williston
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

I read the other comments on My Vermont and most of the comments play up the mythic charm of Vermont, so I hesitate write my opinions. Vermont is a double edge sword. The charm brings you to Vermont, but it is the charm that has driven out the ability to make a living.

I moved back after Graduate school in California in 2002 because quality of life, the natural beauty and the mountain biking and Vermont community, however, I was naive regarding how underdeveloped the professional job market and communication technology is in this state. Now after 6 years, I realize the depth of this. My view of truth about Vermont is that it has a excellent quality of life, its people/my people are industrious, well educated, intelligent, clever, tenacious, and hard working.

We as Vermonters all know this, but we have done our best to hid this from the rest of the nation. By this I mean our indirect/direct marketing and general out word message of Vermont, has been one of quaint outdated nostalgia. We welcome being the history museum/retirement home for the United States. “Come to Vermont and see the backwards Vermonters struggle to make ends meet”, “aren’t they cute, I’ll take three of them, and that farm on the hill”.

This economic dependency on nostalgia that has served Vermont in the past, is now it’s the virtual brick tied to our collective ankles as we try to swim in our current century. To quote a friend, “Vermont is suffering from “death by nostalgia”. His meaning being, Vermont has flogged, it’s nostalgia cache so long, the market changed and now is what hurts us economically. I have learned from speaking with hospitality professionals, business owners and freelancers that the general message that Vermont has created is a New England version of “Disneyland”. Our Disneyland does not match the truth of who we are as Vermonters.

We have abandoned the “Authentic Vermont” in favor of the lazy and uncreative harvesting of low hanging fruit of nostalgia. People can go do Disney land to get lied to, but the folks I have talked with that come Vermont want an authenticity, not kitsch. We put little effort into selling the authenticity of our landscapes, history, culture, work force, quality of life and professionals. We fabricate what we wrongfully imagine what the rest of the world wants to see.

If you are a business professional outside of hospitality, skiing and specialty foods, the Vermont Cache is a liability. Tell some one you work in high tech and theirs eyes light up. Then then say you work in Vermont, and its like saying your not a serious professional.

Andrew, West Berlin
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

I lived all around New England when I was growing up, including Vermont, and never fully appreciated my enjoyable yet uneventful childhood. After college and while I launched my career in advertising, I left for brighter lights and bigger cities, lived in Manhattan and Los Angeles, and established myself as a career woman (whatever that means). Then with marriage and children came the realization that the life I had constructed just wasn't much fun and that whatever had led me to LA had lost its grip. Somewhere sitting in traffic on the 495 at rush hour as I crawled by each exit ramp with envy for those getting out of the daily gridlock, it came screaming at me: "this is not how people were meant to live". My husband, who is a native Vermonter, agreed.

Fast forward a few years and we were indeed finally settled in the small town of Cavendish, Vermont, population of 1500 or so. For reasons that are clear to me, and a mystery to my kids, I love the fact that we live on a winding dirt road far from our small town center and that my only neighbors can be glimpsed when the leaves are gone and if you stand on tippy toes on the deck and squint. You can breathe here!

When it comes down to it, it's not so much what my Vermont is, but rather what my Vermont is not, that is so extraordinary. My Vermont is not a succession of exit ramps that pass for towns with a strip mall and a subdivision off a super highway instead of a town green. My Vermont is not excited about where the closest mall is. My Vermont does not allow billboards.

My Vermont does not lay down the red carpet for big business to raze farmland and put up industrial parks. My Vermont does not have a fast food joint on every corner or even in every town. My Vermont still has its soul and has not sold itself to the highest bidder.

Yes, the nearest movie Cineplex is an hour away. And yes, doing the big shop for groceries is a planned event. And yes, dry-cleaning has become a four-step process. But I wouldn't give up those small inconveniences for anything. I've seen what convenience brings, and trust me (those of you who have lived here all your life), we are all better off without it. So instead of working for a high-powered advertising agency, I started my own not so high-powered version. My financial planner husband now has his own small branch. Because I think what my Vermont is, more than anything, is a place that inspires you to be better than you thought you could be and welcomes you to make your own way. You know, how people were meant to live.

Sharon, Cavendish
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

The reality of My Vermont continually contrasts itself against the preconceptions I came here with. Those included cheese, Ethan Allen, moose roaming freely "things they put on postcards“ but exotic birds of prey weren't on the list. Now, when I walk out of my apartment in St. Johnsbury,
I'm often greeted by mysterious screeching sounds that emanate from the belfry of the courthouse. I only recently learned of the species that makes these sounds.

Another thing they don't show on the postcards is the small commuter bus I take to Lyndon State College. The morning driver claims I look like Jim Douglas. Occasionally when I board he greets me by saying, "moanin'guvna!" Once he even clipped a photo of Douglas out of the newspaper, just to prove the resemblance. I can't see it, but nonetheless feel esteemed to occasionally be called the governor.

On a recent bus trip, another rider had left behind a copy of the local newspaper. Inset into one of the cover stories was an enlarged quotation. It said, "If you've ever swum butt naked in that cold water, it's absolutely wonderful." Digging a little deeper, I learned that there's a big debate raging about a nude beach up at Lake Willoughby. Never saw a postcard for that one either.

I have a friend back in Michigan who continually asks me if I've seen a moose yet. I was finally able to give her an affirmative answer after visiting the Fairbanks Museum and seeing the taxidermied moose that is displayed there. She informed me that such a moose sighting "doesn't count."

As I was leaving the museum that day I met the museum's director. I thought he might know the answer to a nagging question: "Do you know what kind of bird makes the screeching noises that come from the courthouse?" I asked. "It's a recording," he replied. "The screeching sounds keep the pigeons away." What a cool answer. Every time I think I have a line on what My Vermont is, it turns into something else.

Lawrence, St Johnsbury
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

Only a day or two passed before I began to learn something of Vermont’s complicated political landscape after my Vermont- raised husband and I arrived to teach at the University of Vermont in late August of 1966. Before we left North Carolina where we met as graduate students at the University in Chapel Hill, my parents, devoted and active Democrats, voiced their concerns that I was moving into staunch Republican territory and might forget my upbringing, an upbringing that meant long dinner table conversations with extended family about current political concerns and issues both local and national. But here I was in Burlington at McGeorge’s Beauty Salon across from UVM, getting a badly needed haircut before classes started and being introduced to the current Governor’s wife, Joan Hoff, as I took my place in the chair next to hers. I am not sure I was even totally aware Joan Hoff was the Governor’s wife, so low key and natural was the exchange.

Yet that moment turned out to be emblematic of my nearly forty-two years of living in the same house for forty of those years, teaching in UVM’s English Department for thirty-four years, raising a family in a generous and strong community, and becoming a part of a state that involves its citizens in decision making from the local to the state levels. We have the advantage of knowing those of all political persuasions and parties (and we have a vibrant spectrum of both), almost always meeting and talking to those we are considering supporting for office. And, on occasion, I have voted for Republicans in this state of towering figures like George Aiken.

Our children have turned into aware and informed citizens because, in Vermont, the political was often the personal, something I was reminded of recently when my son, his family and I found ourselves seated next to former Governor Kunin at a Flynn performance. As soon as lights went up for intermission, my son, having only returned that fall to live and work in Vermont, rose with his teen agers to speak to Kunin and introduce his son and daughter to her, explaining to them how important her service to Vermont has been and how important it was to his own political development to have known her.

Through the years we, like hosts of Vermonters around the state, opened our home to political gatherings, often fund raisers but even more importantly, informational forums with lively exchanges as candidates for town and state offices answered substantive questions from people with names and faces they would be accountable to if elected to office. Some of us have seen friends and neighbors run as our representatives to the legislature. Many of us solidified our support for candidates during these evenings.
Another significant aspect of Vermont’s political landscape is the self-governing process so many of us have participated in, whether it be serving on local school and library boards, town select or zoning boards or boards of civil authority (elected by our townspeople) or the crucial November and March Tuesdays where many of us volunteer to keep things running smoothly at the polls. Even though many worry about the health of March town meeting, this institution remains central to our political life. This hands-on experience makes us into citizens who have a stake in what happens. Democracy has always seemed alive and well in Vermont.

I never fully appreciated the importance of this ongoing participatory democracy until I had the privilege of teaching students in 1998 at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa, a prominent traditionally black university graduating Bishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Biko among many other outstanding leaders. It had not been long since the freeing of Mandela and the election of the ANC as the ruling party. The fledgling democracy was in its earliest days. I met people who distrusted government even when it was their own elected government. All around South Africa, its black citizens were learning, sometimes painfully, how to run things from the local to the national levels. As I observed their hard work, I realized how we take for granted the daily workings of a democratic society that comes from an active citizenry—and how much we must learn to become responsible citizens.

Our first across-the-street neighbors were conservative Republicans who invited us to see a John Birch Society film, thinking surely we were of that persuasion. Good neighbors with daughters who became valued babysitters, they eventually sold the house to the Lacey Symington family with young children and a new baby on the way. It wasn’t long before a “Bernie” sign graced their yard and we were invited to a fundraising supper to get to know Bernie Sanders who was running for his first House seat. And now that neighbor has become actively engaged in the state’s political scene, offering many of us once again the opportunity to be a part of Vermont’s political landscape, as vibrant in its way as our storied physical landscape.

Mary Jane, Burlington
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

The Future of Vermont Where are we going? And why are we in this hand basket? anonymous bumper sticker Think about what Vermont will look like when the Cheney Energy Plan reaches its final stages, and gasoline, diesel, and heating oil reach the $10 to $15 a gallon level. Think about transportation, heating, electrical energy, jobs and population. By and large, it takes a car to get around in Vermont. Public transportation only works where the population is dense enough that there are a lot of people wanting to go from point A to point B at the same time. This might work in Burlington, but it is hard to think of too many other places in Vermont where this is true. Public transport in Vermont, from the usually near-empty red and white phantom busses that cruise smaller downtowns, to Howard Dean’s aborted commuter rail experiment from Charlotte to Burlington, always requires taxpayer subsidies and usually burn more energy than they save. And no, bicycles are not the answer. Not too many people are going to get on their bikes in midwinter, the peak of Vermont’s energy consumption year. People will end up driving smaller and more fuel efficient cars.

There seem to be an awful lot of SUV’s and pickups with For Sale signs on people’s front lawns lately. There are acres and acres of them at new car dealer’s and used car lots. Not everyone in Vermont can afford to buy a new Prius or Honda. Used cars from the existing, not terribly fuel efficient, stock will remain the only option for many people. If people lived closer together there would be some hope, but very little affordable housing is being built in downtown areas. I suspect that Vermont will de-populate fairly quickly, with the smallest towns leading the way.

Home heating may become impossible for most people. I live in a small, fairly well insulated house. I heat with oil. During the coldest six months of the year I burn about 175 gallons of oil a month. During the other six months, I burn an additional 350 gallons, mostly for hot water. If fuel oil goes to $10 or $15 dollars a gallon, I will end up spending $14,000 to $21,000 a year. I can’t afford this, and I don’t know too many people who can. Of course, there is always wood heat. A lot more wood will be burnt in Vermont homes and businesses, in addition to what will be used to run wood-fired power plants (see below). This may lead to some significant deforestation, and will certainly lead to dirtier air. Wood doesn’t work very well in the more built up areas, and the thought of installing wood stoves in a lot of Vermont’s existing housing and commercial buildings is pretty scary. Wood prices will rise to keep pace with oil prices. Cutting, splitting and transporting wood is fairly energy intensive in its own right, and the simple application of supply and demand will drive prices up further still.

Electric energy is going to problematic as well. Politics in Vermont will prevent the construc-tion of anything in the way of power plants that produce large amounts of cheap electricity – a second nuclear reactor or a coal-fired plant, for instance. Wind really isn’t too practical, and so-lar advocates seem not to have noticed that the sun doesn’t shine too often during Vermont’s peak energy season.

There is a brilliant move afoot to shut down Vermont Yankee within four years, removing a source of four cent per kilowatt hour electricity from our power grid. Alternative energy sources should play to a region’s strength. Large solar arrays make sense in the southwest deserts. Wind farms work in the plains states and along the coast. Unlike Tennessee or the Pacific Northwest, Vermont lacks the big river basins needed for large scale hydro. Also, the days of building large scale hydro projects in the United States are over. We are one of the most forested states in the country. Large scale wood-fired plants seem to make sense. If new plants are built, let’s hope that the mistakes of the McNeil plant in Burling-ton will not be repeated. You don’t build a wood burning plant forty miles from the source of its fuel and bring it in by truck. Rather you build in the woods and ship the plant’s output to the con-sumer via copper wire.

Farming is going to get harder and harder with higher energy prices. One salvation might be a large scale conversion to biofuel production, but to make this work economically, the actual production of the fuel should occur fairly close to where the feedstock is grown. Also we’re talk-ing about very big farms, and Vermont is not really set up for this scale of agriculture. Possible, but not too likely. Conservation has had little real world effect on electric demand in most places. In Vermont, demand might actually decrease somewhat as the state depopulates and large scale energy users close up shop and head for warmer climes. This is not a terribly cheerful prospect.

What kind of jobs will be left in Vermont? Even before the current energy crisis and reces-sion, younger people were leaving Vermont. The net population of Vermont has still been in-creasing, primarily due to the influx of older retirees from other northeastern states. If this trend continues, there will be plenty of jobs for health care workers and attendants at assisted living facilities and nursing homes. I don’t see too many other growth areas. Many people would like to see Vermont become a leader in high tech, non-polluting, alterna-tive energy development and production. Forty-nine other states would like to grow this way as well. Many are better positioned than Vermont.

There are some decent schools in Vermont, but there aren’t too many MIT’s, Cal Techs, Berkelys, Stanfords or Carnegie Mellons around here. Making alternative energy (both the hardware that produces it and the actual energy itself) is going to require some serious industrial capacity. Vermont has not been terribly receptive to large industrial growth projects during the last thirty years, and the state’s location away from major ports, railroad lines and transcontinental highways puts it at a competitive disadvantage.

So what is Vermont going to look like? It will probably be a less populated, colder, older, and poorer state with fewer farms and small towns. The air will be dirtier, the tax base will shrink, and the whole state will get shabbier. On the other hand, everything might turn out just fine. The price of fuel may fall back to $2.00 a gallon, lots of bright and well educated young people may move here, global warming may turn Vermont into the new Florida, and a new cheap and clean energy source might be dis-covered. At about the same time, my Prozac will kick in and I’ll feel much better.

Larry Rogers Brandon
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson

On a summer’s day the view south from the crest of Lake Hill Road in Wells, Vermont, is a wonderful spectacle of verdant hills with Little Lake in the foreground surrounded by idyllic summer cottages. That same vista only improves as summer turns to fall in late September. Here on the western fringe of the Green Mountains retirement has afforded me the pleasure of living five months out of the year on Lake St. Catherine, a larger lake to the north and connected by a navigable channel to Little Lake.

As I came over the top of Lake Hill Road this afternoon and caught the post card view for the umpteenth time, I felt a philosophical urge coming on. I became focused on the subject of living out boyhood dreams and how my daily commune with nature is a priceless gift that was truly just a fantasy of my teenage years until retirement set in. As I reached adulthood I almost let go of those Walden Pond illusions, because after all they’re just for the very eccentric – or are they? Happily, I am discovering that a life with no TV, a newspaper about once a week, but ample human contact with fellow lake dwellers and small town folk has rekindled the youthful desire to get back to nature and live a more simplistic life. Great satisfaction derives from taking a few saplings and weaving them into a Swiss Family Robinson style fence to keep dogs out of the flower garden. Using the local native slate to construct walls and other landscaping features has become a wonderful diversion from past regimens knows as modern day living. And, what great satisfaction comes from picking pounds of strawberries and bags of apples and making them into jelly and sauce. Those primeval urges of the hunter and gatherer are amply served through such activity. While outdoor cooking is only a sometime thing, I have taken to cooking over a wood fire in preference to charcoal or propane grills. That 20th century paraphernalia just gets you to thinking about nothing but the 21st century!

It was probably a combination of some good Boy Scout leaders and an early proclivity to wanderlust that led me to look to the hills, the woods and lakes at an early age to frame my fantasy. However, one very compelling reason that brought me to savor the kind of unique setting in which I now find myself has a lot to do with what I call the Buck Street hill syndrome. In my hometown in southern New Jersey, just 30 miles west of Atlantic City, the landscape was dominated with scrub oaks and pines rooted into the sandy plains that were a source of silicon for the glass industry. There was little change in elevation with only an occasional rolling hill. In the 1930’s and ‘40’s, when I was a kid, soap box derbies were a popular activity conducted by communities to challenge the inventiveness of boys (and their fathers) to make a race car propelled by gravity alone. Probably the biggest challenge of all was to find a hill worthy of this event. The best they could do in Millville, New Jersey, was to use Buck Street hill which had a change in grade of only 20 feet over a distance of approximately two city blocks. For the better part of a day this otherwise busy thoroughfare was cordoned off from traffic and the young racers had their way.

Harry, Poultney
Posted by VPR Online Producer, Tim Johnson