Radio Free Vermont

by Bill McKibben

  More than that, though, the sheer brownness of it all just depressed him. This was the middle of January, for most of his seventy-two years the happiest part of a happy year. When November came and the days grew short, his mood always began to soar. Cold meant snow and ice, and snow and ice meant: sliding. Meant the annual exemption from friction, meant that a solid Vermont farmboy became fast and agile. Graceful, almost, though when he’d been growing up that’s not how he’d thought of it. “Lethal” was more like it: he’d grown up on cross-country skis, and he’d grown up deer hunting, and when he was a teenager, a neighbor had taught him to combine the two. Even then, biathlon—skiing and shooting—was never much of a big deal; he’d been far better known in high school for doing play-by-play of the basketball games on the local radio. But he was good on the snow, good enough to hang on to the bottom of the national team for a couple of years. Not Olympic years, which always made him a little sad, but medals had never been the point for him. It was the sheer painful pleasure of charging fast uphill on a pair of skis, legs pistoning, lungs sucking in air, skis slamming against a hard track. He’d coached the juniors from all around the state for years afterward. He was a better coach than an athlete, having sent several of his charges off to the Olympics. Trance, of course, the best of all—Trance, the once-in-a-lifetime athlete every coach waits for. “Giving back,” he called it. But he’d done it mostly as an excuse to keep pulling on the boots and grabbing the poles and going off to . . . glide. It never stopped seeming unlikely and magical to him, the way friction just quit, and gravity turned from adversary to ally.

  But no glide now, and not much for the last few years. The globe had warmed faster and harder than anyone had predicted. With Arctic ice melted, there was no place to build up the intense cold that had always marked winter in Vermont. Lake Champlain didn’t freeze much anymore, and if snow fell, it was usually for a few nighttime hours in the middle of a rainstorm. He knew he should have been worrying about the people in Bangladesh busy building dikes to keep the sea at bay—but these warm muddy winters were what really bothered him about the change. No glide, just the suck of mud on his boots. It made him feel old, as if he’d outlived the very climate of his life, and it made him feel mad, and it made him feel tired. He lay back on the couch next to the desk, propped his hands behind his head, and settled in for a nap.

  3

  Maybe it was the afternoon nap; maybe the lack of exercise; but Vern Barclay slept poorly that night, and was wide awake by five. By long habit he flipped on the radio next to his bed, but the first thing he heard was a weather report (rain, in the low fifties) and the next was a nationally syndicated chat guy describing the quality of his orgasms from the previous night, and neither one cheered him up. He clicked it off and lay in bed, listening to nothing and then to the faint sound of tires on mud coming up the mile-long drive. He knew, as a wanted man, that he should probably go hide in the basement till Perry had figured out who it was, but in his current mood, capture didn’t seem so awful, and he knew that Perry was pretty sure to be asleep with his headphones on. Anyway, he was growing more confident he recognized the slightly underpowered whine of a Subaru Outback, which would mean Sylvia returning from her fun with the beer truck. Which meant, in turn, coffee and papers.

  “Hi, friend,” he greeted her as she climbed out of the car, still in her Carhartts, looking rumpled and a little gray. She’d clearly slept in the backseat after making sure her two helpers had gotten safely home, and she barely grunted as she walked past on her way toward the shower. But she had copies of the Free Press and the Times Argus, and she had a paper cup of Vermont Coffee Company coffee and a piece of crumb cake, all of which she handed off as she shuffled by.

  Vern had been eating breakfast with these newspapers for more than half a century. Most of the time it was with a microphone open in front of him, and the news columns as a text to guide his show: obituaries first, local news, state news, milk prices, and if there was time, a mention of the national headlines. By his journalistic credo, something happening in, say, Oregon had to be pretty big before it mattered as much as an arson fire at a barn in Ferrisburgh. The Red Sox score was obligatory, of course, but followed quickly by Harwood Union boys’ lacrosse and Otter Valley field hockey. So he eyed the newspapers professionally, as a baker might regard the bran muffins in a restaurant in a town where he was vacationing. It was, as always, a mild shock to see his own name in the headline (“A Voice from Nowhere: Barclay Fills Starbucks Airwaves”), and he did not like that damned file picture. But he read the story with interest—and when Perry wandered sleepily into the kitchen, he read it again, this time out loud.

  “Listen to . . . this,” he said, pausing for a second between “to” and “this.” After decades on the air, he was locally famous for his pauses—for the intimacy they provoked, as the listeners would lean forward toward their radios a hair, caught a bit off-step. It was a trick he’d stolen from Paul Harvey, and in any event it didn’t seem to work on Perry, who kept stirring his eggs, but still the habits of fifty years were hard to break. “Secession Capers Roil Local Schools, Merchants.” A three-column picture showed students flooding out of Montpelier High even as the principal tried to shoo them back in, a look of alarm across his face. “Happy Ethan Allen Day, whoever he is,” one tenth-grade scholar told the reporter, who also quoted several commuters who said they’d decided to break their Starbucks habit.

  “Listen here, Perry, I think you’ll enjoy this,” Vern continued.

  “At an afternoon press conference, state police commissioner Tommy Augustus said the manhunt for Barclay would continue, and that authorities had added ‘unlawful school dismissal’ to the long list of charges the fugitive radio host already faced. ‘This is an act of irresponsibility,’ the commissioner said. ‘Children could easily have been hurt when they were turned loose in the streets.’

  “Asked if yesterday’s string of escapades challenged their theory that Barclay was acting alone, Augustus said, ‘He is an experienced communications professional. We think he is fully capable of manipulating the Web in this fashion, but the public should rest assured that the FBI is assisting us in the search and that with their technical capabilities we believe he will be captured shortly.’”

  Perry turned from the range and opened his mouth to speak, but then stopped. “I know what you’re thinking,” said Vern. “I may be an experienced communications professional, but I am not even fully capable of manipulating a coffeemaker. I’m the guy who couldn’t figure out how to turn on the automatic reply so he could let people know he had gone into hiding and wouldn’t be answering their e-mails.”

  “It’s okay,” said Perry. “I just thought newspapers got things right?”

  “I’m sorry you’re not getting full credit. I’d send Tommy Augustus a note, but I’m not sure he can even open e-mail. He’s the state police commissioner because he drove the governor’s car for two terms and was extremely good at not noticing which lobbyists were slipping in and out of the backseat. ‘Not noticing’ may not be the first thing you’d look for in a police chief, but in the Bruce administration it’s an essential skill.”

  “But what about the beer? Have they noticed that yet?” asked a voice from the next room. Before he could answer, Sylvia Granger strode into the kitchen, and this time Vern’s pause was involuntary. No more Carhartts, no more ponytail. Syl, all five-feet-two of her, wore a set of cherry-red snowmobile leathers, as form-revealing as winter clothing gets. A cascade of blond hair, wet from the shower, fell halfway down her back.

  “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve never seen a teacher before,” she said. “Okay, the snowmobile suit is a little hot for this weather. But it’s the first day of semester, and it’s got the school logo on it, and anyway I hardly got to wear it a dozen times before the snow started disappearing. Which reminds me—class starts at noon, so get out of sight by eleven-thirty. And what about the beer?”

&
nbsp; She pulled a glass jar of granola off the counter as Vern began to read:

  “Brattleboro brewer Angus McTavish told police he had no idea how his beer had ended up inside the Coors truck, Windham County troopers said yesterday. Reached at his brewpub last evening, however, McTavish said he considered it a ‘major public service,’ adding that beer was ‘a living thing.’

  “‘What would you feel like if you’d been stuck in a truck and driven across the continent?’ asked McTavish. “That’s what beer from Colorado feels like,” he said, adding that he now plans to brew a special batch of LiBeerTy Ale to help promote the secessionist cause.”

  “Good for Angus,” said Sylvia.

  “Beer really is like liquid bread,” said Vern. “You wouldn’t send bread in a truck from Mexico. Or probably you would, if you were a big company and could find a bunch of cheap bakers. But you shouldn’t.”

  “Remember,” said Syl. “Eleven-thirty.”

  4

  Indeed, by eleven-thirty, the first few cars—hybrids, mainly—had begun to arrive, and Vern and Perry had secured themselves upstairs in the studio.

  “I downloaded questions last night—the site was up for a few minutes on a mirror somewhere in Turkey,” said Perry.

  Vern had no idea what Perry was talking about, but he said, “Let’s remember to be nice to Turkey once we’ve joined the UN. Maybe they need cheese. What do we have in the mailbag?”

  “Well—one guy compared you to Benedict Arnold and Barry Bonds? A history guy and a baseball guy? Lots of ‘What happens to my Social Security if we leave the U.S.?’ The best one came from someplace called Derby Line.”

  “You’ve never been to Derby Line?” asked Vern. “Right up on the Canadian border? The line right down Main Street?”

  “I didn’t travel much?” said Perry. “Anyway, you’ll like this one. ‘Dear Vern: I’ve been listening to you every morning for my whole life. We’d keep the radio on in the barn during milking. All the cows loved it—they’d get nervous when you went on vacation. I’m not really a politics person, and I haven’t followed all the back-and-forth, but I seriously doubt that you are a terrorist. I want to hear the story from your own mouth, the way you used to tell stories every morning.’”

  Vern paused for a moment, pressed his hands together as if in prayer, brought his index fingers to his nose. “Press the button,” he told Perry, glancing at the whiteboard propped against the wall.

  “Hello, friends, and welcome to broadcast number six from Radio Free Vermont, underground, underpowered, and underfoot. We’re brought to you today by Lawson’s Brewery in the Mad River Valley, where there’s always a ‘Sip of Sunshine’ to be had. When I say ‘brought to you by,’ I’m not implying that they’re paying us money or giving us free samples. I’m just saying that they, and the at least fifty-seven other Vermont breweries, are symbols of everything that’s right and good about a free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors—and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character. Remember, drink responsibly: if your ale doesn’t hale from your county, then just say no.

  “I don’t know when you’ll be listening to this podcast, but we’re making it here in our undisclosed and double-secret location on a fine Vermont morning—fine for May, not so fine for January, since the ground is brown and the temperature is in the fifties. Still, we’d like to thank all those Remote Education Specialists, or whatever they’re called, who gave our children some extra recess yesterday: a sound body goes with a sound mind, as Ethan Allen himself knew, since he once was able to throttle a full-grown catamount that leaped onto his back. If old Ethan hadn’t taken sufficient recess, we’d still be part of New York. And I see from today’s paper that the girls from Harwood Union beat U-32 on the ice last night—congratulations to the Highlanders on getting through the first half of the season unbeaten.

  “In our broadcasts so far I’ve tried to explain a little bit about what an independent Vermont might look like, and I’ve maybe railed a little about tyranny and empire. I don’t think they’ve been very good shows, to tell you the truth, and that’s because, since we can’t open up the phone lines, there’s not much way for me to carry on a conversation, which is what radio should be about; I get carried away when it’s just my own voice. But since I think that even Tommy Augustus might be able to track us down if I gave out our phone number, the best we can do is answer those e-mails that come in on the odd moments that our site goes up somewhere around the world. So keep sending them. Today’s best comes from way up north in Derby Line, from a milkmaid of indeterminate age but undoubted beauty who asked me to drop the propaganda for a while and just tell the story of how I came to be here, sitting behind a microphone talking rebellion, and how my mug came to grace the wall of your local post office. It will take a while, so settle in—and remember that the good thing about these podcasts is you can just slide on ahead to the end if you’re getting bored.

  “I began talking into a microphone when I was sixteen, calling the basketball games at Bristol High. That was back before we started consolidating all the schools, about which don’t get me started. I wasn’t much good at first, partly because I’d usually go straight from the biathlon range to the gym; I liked both, but I was more interested in skiing than talking. And I was the worst homer you ever heard. But I got a little better, and after I got out of high school and put in my few years of trying to get to the Olympics, I went to work for WVRT, reading the news, playing records. Good records, I might add—these were the 1960s. I called a hockey game or a basketball game almost every night of the winter, and I couldn’t wait till April because we carried the Red Sox and it meant I could spend summer evenings on my own—or, before long, with Fran, and then our kids. Life was as sweet as I could imagine, and it went on like that for many years.

  “Vermont was changing, of course. All the small farms were going out, and new people were arriving—the back-to-the-land people. But I didn’t pay too much attention, at least not until I started in on the morning talk show every morning. This was long before Rush Limbaugh or his type: I didn’t shout, I didn’t take positions, I just brought on interesting people to interview and I took phone calls. It was a conversation, and it went on for many years, and one of the things it taught me was that lots of Vermonters weren’t as happy as I was. I heard, more and more as the years went on, from people who thought things were changing for the worse around here. Sometimes they’d blame it on the newcomers, and sometimes they’d blame it on politicians, but mostly what they seemed to me to be saying was that our communities were starting to fail. That the towns where we knew each other and looked out for each other weren’t working so well anymore. Maybe people were too busy at their jobs, or too busy sitting in front of the television set—all I knew was that old people were lonely all of a sudden, and a lot of others were feeling on their own too. Vermont was becoming more like the rest of the country, is one way of saying it. There was money, and it was exciting, but it was also different.

  “I suppose that those changes helped me in certain ways—there was never any shortage of people wanting to call in and talk, and sometimes I think it was because they didn’t anymore have the friends, the people around town, to talk to instead. So I did my job, and watched Vermont change, and talked to everyone who was anyone, and knew where the bodies were buried, and my boys grew up and went off to school, and Fran and I grew middle-aged (middle-aged if I was planning to live to a hundred and thirty), and then she died and that was that. I’d spent my life in a comfortable bubble, a little bit of the old Vermont that was fading everywhere around me but which I’d never had to really leave behind.

  “And so it would have ended if Bob Earle, the man who’d built WVRT, hadn’t gone and died too, and his family had to sell the station for taxes. Now, he’d passed up a dozen chances to sell while he was alive, and we were about the only independent station left in the state, but there was ju
st no way to keep it going even though we had high, high ratings. We got bought up by a conglomerate out of Oklahoma, of all places, that had two hundred and seventy-five stations, including four others in Vermont. They changed us to an all-talk format—no more records in the afternoon—and the rest of the talk came through a satellite dish they parked out back. They kept me on—maybe they figured I’d retire soon, and anyway they liked my market share. But the blocks of commercials kept getting longer, and there was no more local news team, and the thought of covering high school hockey would have made the new owners laugh if (A) anyone had ever met them and (B) they knew how to laugh, which I sincerely doubt. Cackle, maybe, as they counted their money.

  “Anyway, I kept pretending I was still doing something useful. But it hurt to say goodbye to just about everyone else who worked at the station—even the ad salesmen got put out, because they had a selling team out there in Oklahoma that tracked down national accounts. They cut an hour out of my show every day to make room for Mikey and Mickey in the Morning, which was two young gentlemen from somewhere sunny that specialized in making ribald comments. I’m no prude—well, maybe I am, but I’ve never quite come to grips with the idea that you should get on the radio and discuss bosoms and flatulence. Anyway, it somehow made it hard to follow up with a discussion of, say, school boards. I should have just retired—I would have just retired—except that they got my goat. You may remember that our Senator Sanders—my favorite politician, your favorite politician, and the man who should have been president—was organizing what little opposition there was in Washington to a new rule that would have let the big media companies own even more radio and TV stations. I had him on to talk about it, and he said a few things about ‘big media barons,’ and my boss out in Oklahoma e-mailed me a memo saying the topic was off-limits from then on. Which was, believe it or not, the first time in my whole career that I’d ever been told not to talk about anything.