Radio Free Vermont

by Bill McKibben

  “But what was it like?” said Vern, who knew it took some work to get Trance to talk about anything, much less this.

  “You know I was a sharpshooter—the first girl, right?”

  “The Guard made sure everyone knew—you were their poster girl.”

  “Those weren’t biathlon rifles, Vern. Those were a whole different thing. You sat a mile away and you watched through the scope, and when you shot, it took three seconds for the hit. We weren’t compensating for wind—we were compensating for the curve of the earth. I mean, far away.”

  “How much did it bother you?”

  “Sometimes not much, when I knew I was shooting one of their snipers—if you could see a gun, fair enough. Sometimes more, when we went after someone for ‘political’ reasons. They were the head of some clan we didn’t like that week, or the enemy of someone we did like that week. Then you’d watch through the scope, and wait till the wife was on the other side of the room.”

  “We were all proud of everyone who went,” Vern said.

  “Yeah, well. We lost more KIA from Vermont than any other state, considering our size,” said Trance. “Not too clear why, or for what. You know I was there when Gus died.”

  Vern knew—he’d been at the funeral, since Gus Robinson was another of the biathletes he’d coached; it was one of the last times he’d seen Trance. But he didn’t say anything.

  “Not there exactly,” she said. “It was an IED—he was on the way back to the airport to head home. We’d had a party for him the night before. The point is, there was no point. Nothing we were doing there had anything to do with protecting any of this,” she said, waving her hand at the skeletal forest. “It was way bigger than this. So big it didn’t mean anything.”

  She handed him her warm-up jacket—he saw the logo from a junior team he’d coached her on twenty years before—and bent to tighten her sneakers. “I’m going for a run,” she said.

  “You’re staying in shape?” he said.

  “I’m staying in habit,” she said with a small smile. “See you back.”

  Vern kept wandering. He’d spent enough time in the world’s great landscapes to know this wasn’t one of them. There weren’t but a few acres of old-growth trees left in Vermont, and even they weren’t especially grand—a few giant white pines, but nothing like a redwood. There were no seas of jagged granite peaks, no Class V whitewater cataracts. When the Audubon Society made calendars each year, eleven of the twelve pictures came from out West, with alpenglow and buck elk and wildflower meadows. Vermont supplied October, and it was usually a close-up of a maple leaf spinning in an eddy on some tiny stream.

  Still, he thought as he meandered, he wouldn’t trade. Not Vermont for Montana, not Big Sky for the filtered glimpses of blue and white through the treetops, not hardwood for high granite. For one thing, when that yellow came to Vermont, and the red and the orange with it, the colors kept you nearly giddy. These last few years had been drab by comparison with the past—summers too droughty, or so the weathermen said—but it was still a kind of explosion, with all of April’s promise and August’s heat building into a climax that came and went with surprising speed. The tour buses came from Boston for Columbus Day weekend, but that was always four or five days too late—the color still sharp, but subsiding.

  And when it was over, it was even better. The leaves were down by mid-October, and you could see the shape of the land again, see the late sun silhouetting the trees along the ridgetops as it set. You could sense the architecture of the hills, every hollow and creekrun and knoll visible from the road. When people thought of trees, they thought of leaves—that’s how a child would draw them. But the natural inclination of trees at this latitude was bareness—seven months of the year, at least upslope, they stood there stoic. Leaves were the fever-dream exception to the barren rule, and Vern felt calmer once they were down.

  He hiked on, watching for the open seeps in what should have been an icy wood. Out West when you walked you looked up—the mountains were mostly open, you could see for miles, hundreds of miles. But Vermont was closed in now that the sheep were gone, more than four-fifths forest. You couldn’t normally see a hundred feet in any direction, and so you tended to look down. And so the glories were minor key:

  The splay of turkey tail fungus on a downed stump

  The root of a birch arched high across a rock

  A healthy pile of moose droppings, just smaller than Ping-Pong balls

  Vern contemplated that last for a moment. You didn’t see moose very often—you didn’t see much wildlife, because the woods were dense, and it was easy for anything shy to disappear. He’d seen more deer in an afternoon at his sister’s house in suburban Connecticut than in a season of sitting in his deer stand, rifle on his knees. (His brother-in-law would circle the house after dark, peeing on the shrubbery to keep the does away.) He remembered a trip to Yellowstone when the kids were young, and how odd it had seemed to be able to stand on a ridge and see bears and elk and bison wandering by below, in full view. He felt embarrassed for them; it seemed much more natural just to come across traces: scat, or a buck rub on the soft bark of a cedar, or the claw marks of a bear after beechnuts. He didn’t need to see the animal itself, any more than he needed to see his neighbors in their houses when he drove down the road—the thin line of smoke coming up from the chimney was assurance enough.

  But knowing that moose had returned to Vermont in his lifetime pleased him enormously. It was the idea that things repaired themselves, that if you backed off a little and didn’t ask too much of the world then it would meet you halfway. This was one of the few corners of the planet that had gotten better in the last century, he thought—greener, healthier. The damage that too many sheep had done was wearing off. Or maybe you didn’t even need to think of it as damage. It had been good then, when Vermont was full of farmers, and it was good now, when Vermont was full of trees.

  Life ebbed and flowed, came and went. Goodness didn’t demand the one-way arrow toward Progress and More. It was, he thought, a blessing to have lived out his life in a place that spun slowly like that yellow leaf, an eddy in the American rapids, a place that was shrinking when most of the country was growing growing ever-growing. A place where—yow, a place where a grouse might fire up at any moment from right under your legs, scaring the wits out of you as it somehow flew off at top speed between the tangle of trunks and branches.

  A place where moss covered the back of a giant boulder, what the geologists delightfully called an “erratic” dropped in place when the last glaciers melted away.

  A place where the beech leaves still clung brown to the branches, shaking a little in the too-warm breeze.

  That too-warm breeze pulled Vern out of his contentment. He saw a sloppy pile of bear scat on the ground next to his foot, and he shook his head—bears were not supposed to be out in the woods in January, not in Vermont. They should be in their dens. Vermont might be a place outside the world’s rush, but the world’s rush was doing it in—winter was vanishing, a fact that he connected to that Walmart, and to that larger globe it in turn was linked to. You couldn’t just ignore the world, that was the problem, because now it pressed in on you, without regard for borders. Most presidents in his lifetime you could forget for weeks at a time, but not this one, with the endless twittering. Too much somewhere else became too much here.

  Which was why he was a fugitive, he supposed—why he was hiding fifty feet back from the edge of the woods, unseen but able to watch Sylvia’s class hard at work in the driveway. They were learning to run a fire truck, an older pumper like the one most volunteer companies could afford in the small towns. This one was a beauty—Sylvia used it in parades, with a sign for her school bolted to the side. But like all fire equipment, it was basically a pump on wheels, and pumps are always trouble, as Vern knew from many years of Saturday-morning fire company meetings dominated by topics like “The Gasket Dr
ied Out” and “It Won’t Hold a Prime.”

  At the moment, a former investment banker and a retired radiologist were standing on the bridge behind the truck’s cab, pointing at a dial and arguing. Vern couldn’t hear them, but he knew what they were discussing: had the pressure risen high enough to open the nozzle? Sylvia jumped up next to them, yelled something, and they flipped the valve for the deck gun, which immediately started spraying a long and stately arc into the woods. It was as if she knew just where he was standing—suddenly there was a rainstorm erupting all around him. Moving quickly, he crossed to a small grove of hemlock, which caught most of the falling water in its needles. As he looked up, he was startled to see Trance standing there grinning at him.

  “How’d you find me?” he asked. “You’ve been running two hours.”

  “And you’ve covered about two hundred yards,” she said.

  “I’ve covered a lot of ground in my mind, though,” he said. “I’m reasonably sure we’re on the right track. Or at least that we’re supposed to be doing something, not just letting the world walk itself straight to hell.”

  “Or someplace of a similar temperature,” said Trance. “It’s too hot.”

  “Well, maybe for the best today if they’ve got the hoses going,” Vern said, peering out through the forest at the fire truck, its thousand-gallon tank spent in less than a minute of wild white spray.

  “They’re having fun because they have helmets,” said Trance. “Guys like dressing up.”

  “Yes they do,” he said, remembering the pleasure of climbing into his turnout gear whenever there was a chimney fire to put out somewhere in town. You needed to keep the cuffs of the pants tucked into the top of the boots so you could jump right in. The heavy coat and the suspenders always made you feel a bit like a boy pretending to fight a fire, even when you had a real hose in your hand.

  “Here’s your jacket,” he added, handing her the warm-ups he’d been holding for two hours. “Let’s get you inside before you chill.”

  11

  “Oh my, the governor is looking pleased with himself,” said Vern. He and Perry were sprawled on the couch in front of Sylvia’s TV. They were watching Vermont’s only television station, WVTV, which today was offering live coverage of an event that even now the governor was calling “the apex and the apogee of what we’ve worked for here in Vermont all these years.

  “People always call us ‘tiny Vermont,’” he continued. “No one likes to be called small; it is demeaning—I remember agreeing when Mr. Trump, during his campaign, reacted strongly to the idea that his fingers were somehow smaller than ordinary. So during my administration we have concentrated on growth, on expansion, on making sure that we can stand erect and proud. We have passed North Dakota in population, and we remain well ahead of Wyoming. And beginning today we have a World Class Facility to showcase our state’s World Class Quality of Life.” Governor Bruce was able to speak in capital letters—each word got its own puff of breath. He was beaming as he gestured.

  “He’s standing on a wooden box behind that lectern,” said Vern. “He’s been using it since he ran for class president at UVM.” Vern had told the others Bruce’s history over breakfast—it overlapped with his own, since he’d known the governor’s older sister since grade school. Some of Leslie’s fixation on size may have stemmed from his five-foot-four frame, Vern maintained, but he conceded that if so, it had only fueled his prodigious work ethic. He’d gained the corner office in Montpelier by shaking more hands and cutting more ribbons than any politician in history—and since Vermont really was a small state, that counted for a good deal. “We used to say that if you forgot to rent a clown for your kid’s birthday party, you could just call up the governor’s office and he’d come make balloon animals for you.” Once installed in office, he’d stayed there by making sure that the state’s few big industries—the semiconductor plant in particular—got every break they needed; in return, they made sure he got every campaign contribution he required. By contrast with the man in Washington, he wasn’t bizarre or even creepy, just standard-issue hack. His main sin, in Vern’s eyes, was that he’d done nothing to arrest Vermont’s slow slide into facelessness. The governor’s credo was simple: no new taxes ever. Unless it was designed to build something Big.

  And nothing was bigger than the building looming up behind him on the TV screen as he spoke. “The Good People of our Great State have never had a suitable place in which to gather,” he said. “Our largest arenas held only a few thousand people. But today we inaugurate this facility, with its capacity of twenty-eight thousand people—twenty-eight thousand Vermonters. And as you all know, it comes with a Retractable Roof.”

  “He’s been talking about the retractable roof for ten years,” said Vern. “He’d come on my show and just say it, over and over again.” Perry shushed him—the governor had paused dramatically, but now was continuing.

  “. . . humbles me to say that the state commission on historic sites—and this is a Historic Site even before its opening—informed me today that it would be named the Governor Leslie R. Bruce World Class Facility. As a reserved New Englander, that embarrasses me a little, but since they are an Independent Commission it would be wrong for me to block their work. In any event, what matters is that the State of Vermont now has a facility as large as the Times Union Center in Albany, or the Carrier Dome in Syracuse—and neither of those have a Retractable Roof. As a result, we will be able to attract National Caliber Acts to visit our state. In fact, today I can announce that I have worked with the state’s arts director to secure the inaugural season of performances, drawing on some of my very favorite artists. You will be pleased to know that . . . Nickelback will open this new Facility with a free concert, and that they will be joined by . . . Barry Gibb, the surviving member of the Bee Gees!”

  “Nickelback,” said Perry, stunned. “Are you kidding me? Are there whiter people in the entire universe. Oh my god. What’s the matter? Was Foreigner already booked? Oh my god.” The JumboTron on the façade of the new arena was suddenly pulsing “Nickelback, Nickelback, Nickelback,” and Perry just groaned.

  “. . . also be ready to host trade shows and events from across the nation. Interstate commerce is the lifeblood of our great nation, and though it is regrettably true that we still have fewer big box stores than some of our peer states. Though I should add that the Saint Albans Walmart Supercenter will have its grand reopening on Tuesday. Anyway, we now have a Facility for holding conventions and exhibitions which will help Jumpstart the Economy by Showcasing our Talented Workforce. I can announce today that, thanks to the hard work of my commerce department, in early March we will host the thirty-fourth annual Leisure Furniture Showcase. Last year in Boca Raton, This Year in Burlington!”

  “Leisure furniture?” said Vern. “That’s definitely what we need more of.”

  The crowd of dignitaries clapped strenuously, and the governor beamed anew. “Because this is such a Signal Event for our state, I’ve asked one of our World Class Ambassadors to raise the flag that marks this inauguration. And not just any flag. This is the flag that flew at the Top of the Olympic Flagpole when Trance Harper won her Olympic Gold Medal in Biathlon. Trance, could you please raise the flag—and when it reaches the top of the pole, I will depress this lever, causing the Retractable Roof to open for the very first time.”

  “Gotta get ready to push my own button,” said Perry, fiddling with the laptop on the coffee table in front of him.

  “No rush, this will take a while,” said Vern. And indeed, Trance had risen from her seat on the dais and was making her way not to the flagpole but to the lectern where the governor stood. He held his ground for a minute, but—no match for solid muscle—stood a step aside. Trance towered above the microphone, until she used her foot to push away the governor’s wooden box. Then she reached into the pocket of her official warm-ups and pulled out a piece of paper, which she unfolded slowly.
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br />   “Governor Bruce and assembled dignitaries,” she said. “I am honored to be here today. As I am not a gifted public speaker such as yourself”—the governor beamed, a little uncomfortably—“I have written down a few words to say on this occasion.”

  Actually, Vern (with the occasional interjection from Perry and Sylvia) had written most of them, though he hoped he’d done it in her voice, and he had his own copy on his knee so he could follow along.

  “I grew up in Vermont,” she said. “And it was always fine with me that it was a small state. My mother had a small business which produced a small income, but we had a large number of friends, many of whom helped raise me. I went to a small school, where I knew everyone and everyone knew me. They knew I didn’t like to talk in public, so they didn’t make me. I learned a small sport, where tiny details make all the difference, and I won the Olympic medal by the smallest of margins. And then I went away, like so many thousands of other Vermonters, to very big wars in a very big world. I do not regret my service, and I’m not ashamed of it; I’m proud of my brothers and sisters in the military. But I didn’t feel as if I was protecting Vermont. I felt like I was protecting bigness—big oil and big companies who made big money running those wars. And when I got home, I saw more clearly that bigness coming to my state: not just big box stores, but big box houses built by people who’d made big money in big banks in big cities. And who drove very big vehicles, usually quite badly. Big dairies putting all the small farms I knew out of business. And the big problems it’s all causing, not least of which is that we never have big snows anymore, which is big trouble if you’re a skier.”