A tale of two Vermonts

I had the good fortune this summer to do my food shopping at two of the more phenomenal organic markets to be found anywhere outside of California. The Place Monge market in Paris and the Waitsfield Farmers Market. I’ve already talked about Paris, but the Waitsfield market gives that market a run for its money. Even in this rainy summer I could buy organic golden beets, fresh garlic, tiny perfect eggplants and patty-pan squash, the first apples of the season, artisanal cheese (my favorite one is called Constant Bliss), and huge loaves of crusty bread. There was always live music and while I shopped, Tommy, Teddy, and Matt wandered from booth to booth, smelling hand poured candles, admiring jewelry, and devouring smoothies, Indian pudding, crepes, cookies, croissants, and hand-cut French fries. It is frighteningly easy to drop hundreds of dollars at this market on wildflowers, honey, and art and most of the people who shop there are well-heeled in a wealthy Vermonter sort of way – wearing sensible shoes and clothing that is not trendy but is handmade or organic or both; subtly expensive. Almost everyone has at least one dog.

Not to sound too much like A Year in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun, but the farmers market in Waitsfield always inspires me with wacky fantasies of dumping everything about my old life, finding an ageing barn perhaps surrounded by an orchard full of heirloom apple trees now gone to seed, and moving in without running water or a phone. Rocks and dirt would be toys…I would learn to make cheese…. Maybe we would find an old wooden cider press to restore and use. The boys would grow up like Johnny Appleseed, on cider, sauce, and freshly-picked Braeburns.

But before I wax poetical about Vermont and the possibilities of genteel poverty I’ll remember our second Saturday of this past vacation, when with Becky and Tim we went from the Waitsfield Farmers Market in the morning to Saint Johnsbury in the afternoon. Saint Johnsbury is about an hour and a half from Waitsfield, a gorgeous drive toward the Northeast Kingdom the top right corner of Vermont immortalized in the novels of Howard Frank Mosher. I’ve never spent much time up there. It is reputed to be the most wild and beautiful part of the state, and is certainly the poorest, a place hit hard by the Iraq War as it has been by every war because the population is small and disproportionately inclined to enlist. I had seen advertisements for the town’s Summerfest celebration and thought that it would make a nice day trip, especially since they were advertising train rides on the old rail line out of town.

We started our outing at the Fairbanks Museum, the self-titled “Cabinet of Curiosities” that is little changed from when it was founded over a hundred years ago by Franklin Fairbanks, local philanthropist and heir to the fortune of the man who invented the platform scales. It is chock full of taxidermied animals, polished rocks, fossils, arrowheads, mummies, dolls, and my personal favorite, pictures of presidents made with dead insects (Abraham Lincoln contains 6399 of them). When we were finished there, we wandered up the street toward the other main attraction in town, the Athenæum, which houses the public library and a small museum (also donated by a scion of the Fairbanks family) that has the famous Albert Bierstadt painting “The Domes of Yosemite.” I particularly wanted to see this since we had seen some of his smaller work at the Rockefeller-Billings museum a week earlier.

Music boomed from behind the Athenæum and we assumed it must be the festival. We circled back to a parking lot which was dominated at one end by a stage. Four musicians huddled in the middle of it, the amplifier making their version of “Gloria” and “Bang on the Drum All Day” echo off the blacktop. The boys made a beeline for the moonbounce in the corner and Matt and Tim went off in search of food, finding it at a stand selling “Indian tacos” which proved to be canned baked beans on a piece of flatbread. The boys ate potato chips and some kind of fried dough (also purchased from the Indian taco stand). I wandered around and looked at the booths: Vermont Vet-to-Vet (their sign read: “Those that need a little help! Those that can give a little help!”), the Saint Johnsbury Learning Center, the National Guard recruiter, who had his table set up next to a woman from Learning Works. She was talking earnestly to a man of about sixty about getting his GED. The band stopped playing and two teen-aged girls named Brittany and Cassidy who wore matching Reba Macintyre concert shirts got up and started lip syncing to one of her songs.

Of course, we weren’t at the Summerfest, as I realized moments later when I saw a poster for the Kingdom Recovery Center Rock Around the Block Party. We had been at the fundraiser for the local substance-abuse treatment facility. Suddenly the number of people giving long, unprompted, generous hugs to almost everyone they met made sense to me.

We went into the Athenæum and after looking at the small collection of paintings, including the impressive Bierstadt, we made our way to the actual Summerfest, which proved to be nothing much more than some Rotarians selling hotdogs next to a small playground and a parking lot full of construction trucks. We didn’t stay long as we had to hustle a few blocks over to the depot to catch the next departing train or spend an hour waiting for the next one (which the adults had all silently agreed that we didn’t want to do). The train belched and meandered north out of Saint Johnsbury going nowhere in particular for 45 minutes when the engineers stopped the train, walked from one end to the other, and took us back in the other direction.

The boys, as always, were thrilled to be on a train, and although we passed nothing of particular significance or beauty were glued to the windows. Tim had purchased another bag of potato chips, which they ate greedily. And before boredom set in, Choo-Choo the clown appeared. He looked like a clown from a paint-by-numbers with a patched coat and big red mouth. He had balloons but informed each child that he didn’t really know how to make different animals. “What do you want?” he asked, and then made each balloon into exactly the same shape, vaguely resembling a dog. Any child that actually played with the balloon discovered that it would come part moments after Choo-Choo had moved on. When it was Teddy’s turn, he demanded a giraffe, and Choo-choo obliged by making one of his dog shapes with slightly longer neck. After he had made his way through the entire train, he returned carrying a small stuffed skunk and dragging a computer mouse behind him. “Well, now, I’m a hobo,” he called, “and I live in a boxcar, and you know, look what I found there.” He graciously allowed each child to pet the skunk as we drowsed back along toward the depot.

As I watched Choo-choo walk up and down the aisles pulling his pet mouse and saw the boys giggling together over their balloon animals I thought about the woman who climbed up on the stage at the block party. She may not have had a shelter lovingly crafted from the twisted branches of local trees like performers at the Waitsfield Farmers Market do, or an audience of well-groomed dogs and well-dressed toddlers, but she planted her broad legs, lifted her face to the blue sky, and belted out “Amazing Grace” as if her life depended on it. I noticed that a dell behind the stage was full of pine trees that softened her voice as she sent it out over the blacktop past the children shrieking in the moonbounce, the old men wearing their military uniforms, the tattooed and pierced girls and boys huddled around the Youth Achievement table, the woman selling Avon, and into the crystalline sky. I said my own quick prayer of gratitude for the myriad and sometimes unexpected splendors of Vermont.