Radio Free Vermont

by Bill McKibben

  For a solid ten minutes Trance heard nothing at all, except toward the end, the sound of Sylvia climbing the basement steps, and then descending again, and then unwrapping tinfoil. “Any good town meeting comes with refreshments,” she said. “No one will mind if you bake some cookies, even for your first one.”

  14

  Sylvia got back from the store at dusk and shouted an all-clear—as she pulled down the blinds in the kitchen, the crew reconvened. “I think we may be on a roll,” she said. “There’s a big ‘Trance for Governor’ sign out by the entrance to the landfill.”

  “Sheesh,” said Trance.

  “And at the general store Dick says he’s pulling non-Vermont beer off the shelf. Bud Light will remain, since no one makes a light beer in Vermont and he says his lady clientele demand a light beer or else they get big in the rear. Did you know that men get beer bellies but ladies get beer bottoms? That’s what Dick says. Present company excepted, of course. He had the Trout River Rainbow Red Ale on sale, so I got some.”

  “That’s from Springfield,” said Vern. “That’s good beer.”

  Perry flicked on the small TV that hung next to the kitchen sink. A picture of Tommy Augustus filled the screen. “We’ve got several solid leads on the whereabouts of Barclay and his associates, including Trance Harper,” he was saying. “Terrorism—the deliberate attack on private property—is very much a crime, and so is flag desecration.”

  “I didn’t desecrate the flag. I just put up a different one,” said Trance.

  “This is good—they’re reacting,” said Vern. “What we’ve got to hope is that they keep talking about it, so that it’s not a one-day wonder. We need a movement to start building, and since we’re in no position to organize it ourselves, we’re going to have to hope they do it for us.”

  The anchor reported “brisk sales” of the free Nickelback tickets, but added “good seats remain,” and then showed the latest publicity photos of Barry Gibb, squeezed uncomfortably into a white suit.

  “Oh my god,” said Sylvia. “It looks like someone put too much bleach in the Enterprise washing machine.”

  “Let’s turn on the radio instead,” said Vern. “It’s six past the hour, which is when they switch to the local news on WVRT. It’s about the only local thing left over there, but they’re good reporters, and they’re my friends.”

  “. . . Fallout from yesterday’s fireworks continue across the state. In Shrewsbury today, two local chapters of the Boy Scouts of America announced they were disbanding and re-forming as ‘Ethan Allen Scouts.’ Their new greeting is ‘The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills.’ And in Clarendon, the local post of the NRA announced that they’d named Trance Harper an honorary chapter commander. ‘I think she’s right—when government gets too big it wants to take away your guns,’ said Avary Holback, chapter president. ‘We need small government and long rifles. Also, of course, handguns.’”

  “Check this out,” said Perry. “Your mom’s Facebook page is going nuts. She’s linked it up to Eldernet, and now there’s a contest around Vermont for which home can stitch the most flags. They’re bulk-ordering the green cloth for the Camel’s Hump.”

  “. . . interest in the independence movement is spreading outside the state as well,” the radio reported. “In Boston this afternoon, where the Catamounts beat the BU Terriers two to one on a late shorthanded tally, UVM goalie Chris Chambeau pulled one of the new flags from beneath his jersey and began circling the rink. This is the sound of the chant coming from the BU students: ‘Ver-mont. Ver-mont, Ver-mont.’”

  “It’s starting,” said Vern. “It’s starting to work.”

  15

  That very night, in fact, some Wikipedia-wielding historian noticed that it was the 247th anniversary of the day in 1777 when Vermont declared its independence from Britain. Since he also happened to be the Dorset volunteer fire chief, not to mention well into his second four-pack of Fiddlehead’s bracing Second Fiddle IPA, he sounded the siren on the top of the firehouse for several minutes, which would have annoyed all the men who answered the call if he hadn’t had several four-packs in reserve. They had cell phones; before the deadline for the eleven p.m. news, half the towns on the western side of the state had sounded their alarms, and coverage on the late newscast from WVTV was enough to convince the Norwich, Vershire, and St. Johnsbury departments that they were missing out on the fun.

  The next morning, five postmasters in Caledonia County arrived at work to find the American flag neatly folded in a regulation triangle on the front steps, and a Vermont banner flying from the pole. Four replaced the flag; the fifth called the local newspaper to take a shot, and by noon the picture was spread across the top of the New York Times website to illustrate a feature story titled “In Quaint Green Mountain Hamlets, a Push for Independence.”

  In early evening, two young men with a piece of rope set up a “Free Vermont Border Check” on the Addison side of the newly rebuilt Crown Point Bridge. As incoming cars with New York plates slowed to a halt, they handed each driver an apple and a flyer advising of “national customs and cultural sensitivities”:

  Vermonters do not like having their pictures taken, but if you offer them a beer they will usually allow it.

  ~

  Skimpy clothing is encouraged in Vermont.

  ~

  Being a dick and/or asshole or acting like a New Yorker is discouraged in Vermont.

  Before the day was out, Ben & Jerry’s had announced a new flavor: Trancicle, made only with Vermont milk and maple syrup, and “bullets” of dark chocolate. The lid showed Ben and Jerry holding the new flag and a newly discovered quote from General Allen: “Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty—and ice cream with a high butterfat content!”

  Seven Days, the state’s alternative newspaper, printed a page of oval portraits of great Vermonters, sized so readers could paste them over the presidents on their U.S. banknotes, “pending the adoption of our own currency.” Particularly popular were, besides Calvin Coolidge, the actor Orson Bean (born Dallas Burrows in Burlington, 1928), singer Rudy Vallee (born Hubert Vallée, Island Pond, 1901), suffragette Clarina Howard Nichols (Townshend, 1810), and Fred Tuttle (born Fred Tuttle, Tunbridge, 1919). Less cherished, according to a count of random tills published by the newspaper: Chester Arthur (Fairfield, 1829) and Fred Pabst, whose “pioneering work as a ski resort developer in the Manchester area was apparently outweighed by the fact that his money came from the family’s watery beer.”

  Buch Spieler Records in Montpelier, the last record store remaining in the state, reported a run on Staples Singers CDs, and issued an instant mixtape: “Soulful Sounds for an Independent State of Mind: the Perry Alterson Collection,” with every song he’d mentioned in his podcasts, plus a special coda: The Scorpions version of “I’m in a Trance.”

  Vermont Public Radio put out a press release acknowledging that its switchboard had been overwhelmed with calls from listeners who thought it was “un-Vermontlike” to continue describing itself as a member station of National Public Radio. “We will take no position on this controversy,” the station said, adding, “but we encourage all sides in this dispute to pledge their support in our winter fund drive, which begins tomorrow.”

  Though Perry provided regular updates from the Web, the crew holed up in the Starksboro farmhouse missed firsthand glimpses of what was going on. Only Sylvia, trekking to Hinesburg daily for groceries, had a real sense of how they were dominating not just the news but the imagination of their neighbors. “I saw three bumper stickers on the way back today,” she said. “Two said ‘Barclay for Governor.’ One said ‘Barclay for Prime Minister.’”

  “That will not make Leslie Bruce happy,” said Vern. “And it’s only a matter of time before they start to hit back, and hard. But right now we’ve got the momentum, and our problem is we can’t do anything about it. We star
ted all this, but without figuring out how we’d make it real. We don’t just need sentiment—we need a plan.”

  “We could call on people to rise up?” said Perry. “We could play ‘Get Up, Stand Up for Your Rights’ by Bob Marley, or the Peter Tosh version or the Toots and the Maytals version, but really not the Tracy Chapman version, I don’t think.”

  “Excellent song, and it makes me want something a little stronger than this Harpoon UFO, hoppy though it is,” said Sylvia. “But my guess is Vern will say we don’t really want people just rising up. Anyone who simply rises up would get shot down, and our campaign with them. But I keep thinking about my last class. Town meeting is only, what, five weeks away? Isn’t there something we could do there?”

  Vern looked at her and smiled. “I think you’ve figured it out,” he said, after a few minutes. “I really do. And I think we need a new broadcast. I need the computer for a few minutes of research, but let’s do this one from the kitchen. Trance, we’ll need you to say a few words.”

  “I’ve already talked too much!”

  “People will just want to know you’re here, and carrying on the fight,” he said. “You can read the hockey scores. And Perry, you can start it off with Mr. Marley.”

  The laptop and the microphone sat on the kitchen table, and Vern sat with his eyes closed, meditating. He felt a particular mix of pleasures—he was about to talk into a microphone, which he was very good at, with two women he admired on hand to watch. And an impressionable boy—he was showing off. And not just for them, he realized, but for his audience out there in . . . not radioland. Podcastland. It was the same place really that he’d been speaking to for decades. But in this case he wasn’t just telling someone else’s story. He was the teller, and he was the tale. And the tale right now was going well—though he felt some serious foreboding, for the moment the wave was still building, and he could ride it. He could push it higher. He had to remind himself that understatement worked best, that he couldn’t get too hot. He was talking about small and modest and Vermont, and he had to be small and modest and Vermont.

  “Are you asleep?” asked Trance. “Because I’m pretty close to it. I didn’t work out today and I’m more tired than if I did.”

  “Don’t go yet,” said Vern, who wanted the moment to last, and the audience right here in the kitchen was part of the moment. He wanted to add: I always watched to the last lap of every race you ever entered. But to say that would be to let on that he was competing, that he was putting on a show.

  He nodded to Perry, and suddenly the sound of the great Jamaican filled the little room. After the first chorus, Perry started to fade the music out, and the slightly richer, slightly deeper voice that Vern used for the radio began to roll right in.

  “Hello, friends. This is Vern Barclay, with broadcast number eight from Radio Free Vermont, underground, underpowered, and underfoot. Tonight we’re brought to you by the McNeill’s Brewery of beautiful Brattleboro, producer of among other things the very fine Duck’s Breath Ale that animates our time together this evening. I’m sitting here with my friends Trance Harper and Perry Alterson and others of our co-conspirators not yet known to the powers that be. We’ve watched with great interest and a small amount of pride in the last few days as you’ve begun to take matters into your own hands. You’ve concocted ways to spread the idea of a free Vermont that would never have occurred to us, though I believe that its namesake would prefer if Ben and Jerry’s made their Trancicle flavor more of a mint–chocolate chip.

  “This movement is finally started, but movements need somewhere to go. We’re not in charge of this effort, but we have thought about it a good deal, and we do have a suggestion. Think ahead, fellow Vermonters, to the first Tuesday in March, and Town Meeting Day. As you know, it is the right of any voter to propose an item for the warrant of that meeting, and to gather the signatures that will require the selectboard to put it before the gathered whole. Now, it’s normal and proper that most of the work of town meeting is spent on local issues—the budget must be approved, after all. But it’s by no means uncommon for larger issues to be raised from time to time.

  “Many of you are old enough to remember, for example, the spring of 1982, when Ronald Reagan was president. That March, one hundred and ninety-two of Vermont’s towns debated a resolution calling for a freeze in the testing and production of new nuclear weapons, and one hundred and sixty of them passed the measure. It carried no legal weight, of course—but it garnered immense publicity, and helped launch a global campaign. Before the year was out, a million protesters had gathered in Central Park, and twelve state legislatures, our own included, had endorsed the idea. By 1984, Reagan and Gorbachev were talking hard about a nuclear-free world, a goal we have yet to achieve but one we are much closer to than when that March evening began.

  “But I want to tell you another story tonight, an older story. There can’t be many left who went to a town meeting in March of 1936, but those who did performed a great service for this state—in fact, Frank Bryan, Vermont’s foremost political scientist, called what happened that night ‘the most democratic expression of environmental consciousness in American history.’ Some years prior, a New York engineer had proposed building a scenic highway along the backbone of our mountain range. For those of you who have traveled south, imagine a Green Mountain version of the Blue Ridge Parkway. It would, its boosters calculated, draw in millions each year in tourist dollars. And in the depths of the Depression it would provide work—work paid for with federal funds. Indeed the National Industrial Recovery Act would provide eighteen million dollars, and the State of Vermont would have had to pony up only five hundred thousand dollars. It was, its backers believed, a slam dunk, though of course at that point there was no such thing as a slam dunk. The Burlington papers supported it, the chamber of commerce supported it, every man of the right sort supported it. And the state legislature, which usually bows to men of the right sort, supported it too. In most states, that would have been the end of the story.

  “But not in Vermont. The legislature asked for town meetings to vote on it the following spring. And it was in those town meetings that the real debate took place. Some did not like the idea of the federal government turning the center of the state into a national park. Many did not like the idea of that wild mountain spine turned into an auto playground. And even more did not like the idea that Vermont wasn’t good enough already. One of the boosters of the plan, James P. Taylor, secretary of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, made the mistake of saying what it was he most liked about the proposed road. By letting Vermonters ride to the heights, he said, it would cure them of their cussed and conservative ‘valley-mindedness.’

  “The votes were tallied slowly that day. Towns had other business, of course, and the parkway vote was often left for last. And we had no computers to instantly e-mail the votes, only town clerks and telephones. But when the last meeting had reported in, the sentiments of this state were clear. There was not enough money in Washington to buy the Green Mountains—the project had failed, 43,176 to 31,101. Bear and deer and moose and college coeds with rucksacks now wander where the gas stations and scenic pullouts would have been. And some of us are still narrow and conservative and cussed and valley-minded.

  “If you’re part of that fraternity, I hope you’ll join the effort to make this town meeting special. Passing a resolution in support of a free Vermont will not make it happen, of course—no one knows yet quite how it would or could happen. But it would be a start—a signal to our legislature, and to the Congress in Washington, that we have begun to think small rather than large, that the time is approaching to hunker down instead of sprawl. At the very least it will give focus to our efforts, and allow us to see if we’re just a small and loony minority, or if we’re giving voice to a feeling that many people share but never really articulated, simply because the possibility never arose.

  “Trance, I believe you have the high sc
hool girls’ hockey scores from this evening?”

  “Stowe six, Harwood four,” she said. “Mount Mansfield three, Rice two; Rutland nil, Woodstock nil.”

  “Thanks for that. And thanks to you all for listening tonight. Remember that the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, which helps settle immigrants from around the world in our state, is holding volunteer orientations at their Colchester offices all month—call 655-1963. Perry, more Bob Marley as we sign off tonight?”

  “No, we’ve been talking roads, so it has to be Motown? And it seemed to me Diana Ross said pretty much the same thing as the voters of Vermont. ‘Stop! In the Name of Love,’ number one with a bullet in the spring of 1965.”

  16

  The rain was coming down in sheets outside the kitchen window, and Vern knew that Trance was calculating the same thing in her head as he was in his: How many feet of snow would this be, assuming it was falling as snow the way it should be in the very dead center of winter?

  “Two feet anyway,” he said, and sure enough she answered him without any hesitation.

  “Two feet at least. Not that it would do me good—couldn’t go for a ski if we had all the snow in the world. I hadn’t figured out that being a fugitive would mean no exercise. I haven’t worked out for four days—even when I was injured, I could go for a bike ride or something.”

  “Why’d you keep working out when you retired? Why didn’t you go to pot like the rest of us ex-jocks?” he asked.

  “Well, probably I will when I’m as old as you.”

  “No, but really?”

  “Well, there was always a good reason of some kind. I was doing some coaching, and needed to be able to keep up with the kids.”

  “Trance, most of the best coaches I know have beer bellies you could balance a tray on.”