A Green Mountain Boy

The candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination for President over the past few months has put the little State of Vermont on everyone’s radar screen—a screen that more often than not it has avoided during my lifetime. One of the many activities my family used to entertain ourselves during our occasional trips from New England to the West Coast during my growing up summers was to see how many days it took us to see license plates from all fifty states. Not surprisingly, Alaska and Hawaii usually turned out to be the last two, although cars from the Deep South were rare, since we never took that route going or coming. We often forgot that the plate on our own car was as rare as a license plate from Mars in some parts of the U.S. One time as an attendant pumped gas into our Chrysler—it was in Oklahoma or some such place—he remarked “Vermont?!? Is that in America?” To which my annoyed father asked “Have you ever heard of Canada?” “Yes . . .” “It’s just south of there.”

I lived all but six months of my life until age eighteen in Vermont, but I am not a native Vermonter. That’s because those were my first six months, spent in southern New York State where I was born just prior to my family moving slightly north and east. If you were not born in Vermont, you are not a Vermonter. Yet this little landlocked piece of real estate (it’s the only New England State that does not border on the Atlantic Ocean), surrounded by New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Quebec, shaped and formed me in ways I am still discovering. I had the opportunity to return to Vermont earlier this week and kill two birds with one stone. Bird one was attending my friend and colleague’s installation as the Poet Laureate of Vermont on Monday evening in Montpelier, making bird two—spending Monday night and Tuesday morning with my uncle and his wife who live fifteen miles away—a no brainer.

I was taught many important things about Vermont in my early public school education, including that Vermont has the most beautiful fall foliage and produces the most delicious maple syrup in the universe (despite the bogus claims of the much larger and more famous state on the other side of Lake Champlain). We took pride in being the first new state in the fledgling United States of America after the original thirteen, earning statehood in 1791 after a successful secession from New York (which they have never forgiven Vermont for). We learned that despite being shaped like an upside-down Vermont, our neighbor New Hampshire was inferior to Vermont in every measure that mattered. I have had many opportunities to test this claim over the past five decades, and have found it to be completely accurate. I was not surprised to learn that there were more dairy cows than resident human beings in Vermont. Robert Frost was our literary hero (we memorized “The Road Not Taken” in fourth grade), Chester A. Arthur and Calvin Coolidge were our favorite Presidents (because they were born in Vermont), and the heroes of every Vermont boy were Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Ethan Allen was a “farmer, businessman, land speculator, philosopher, writer, lay theologian, and American Revolutionary War patriot, hero, and politician.” All I knew about him as a kid was that he regularly kicked British ass, pioneering the sort of guerrilla warfare that was a central part of the American patriot victory in the Revolutionary War. His most famous escapade with the Green Mountain Boys was blowing up the ammunition dump at Fort Ticonderoga, an attack he co-led with Benedict Arnold before Benedict’s name became synonymous with “traitor.” After 9/11, I have often used Ethan Allen in class as an example of how whether someone is classified as a hero or a terrorist depends entirely on one’s perspective. Ethan was our hero; he was undoubtedly on top of the British “Most Wanted Terrorists” list.

As I drove south to north up the spine of Vermont on my way to Montpelier and my friend’s installation as poet laureate on Monday, I listened to two straight hours of Vermont Public Radio. This was nothing unusual, since Rhode Island or Boston NPR is just about the only radio I ever listen to at home. But one hour of VPR was a bit different—it was a local show describing, among other things, the planned “Legithon” at the Vermont Statehouse later in the week where regular citizens could drop in for a day’s worth of workshops on how legislation makes its way from somebody’s good idea into a legislative bill. I got the impression that the congressman being interviewed was expecting the statehouse to be flooded with citizens not only wanting to find out how laws are made but also with their own ideas about what those laws should be. Vermont politics is truly local.

At my friend’s installation ceremony on Monday night I learned some interesting new facts, including that dairy cows now no longer outnumber human beings in Vermont (although it’s still close). But the total population of Vermont is well below the population of the greater Providence area. My friend was appointed poet laureate by the Governor of Vermont, who (disappointingly) was a typical politician in the sense that he clearly wanted to be the center of attention and spent more time introducing the new poet laureate than the new poet laureate took in his own remarks. But I learned from his bio in the program that the Governor “likes to fish, hunt, and garden, and can sometimes be found spreading manure and cutting hay at his farm,” so there’s that—I doubt that the Governor of Rhode Island has spread manure recently. I probably need to rethink that.

I drove to Vermont on Monday by a slightly longer route deliberately to avoid Boston traffic (and New Hampshire), but returned the New Hampshire and Boston way on Tuesday. I have to admit that the New Hampshire/Boston path between Providence and Montpelier is 25 miles and 15 minutes shorter than the Springfield, MA/Vermont route that I took on Monday. But I was reminded on Tuesday that Vermont has far better rest areas and license plates than New Hampshire and that the extra hour or so in Vermont going the other way is well worth it. I’m not sure how much of who I am as an adult is due to my growing up in Vermont, but I suspect that my ponytail, liberal politics, and independent spirit are all traceable back to being a Green Mountain boy. Of the 200 or so people at the installation ceremony Monday night, there were at least ten males with gray ponytails and beards that put mine to shame. I’ve never met any guy from New Hampshire with a ponytail.