“Hard to tell what the theme of a day might end up being. On my trip out, the car was so jam packed, there was no way I was going to put my hands on the Gazetteer. So I stuck to only one new route, which I’d memorized yesterday, notable for its “Plunkton Road”. I seemed to have a vague memory of a P-named road just past the hand-painted “North Hollow Road” sign off Granville Gulch. Some things come easy to me. I have pretty good visual recall.But as I’ve said before, you gotta want it. I did so want Blueberry Lake to unfold out of the primeval forest, out of nowhere. Or nowhere I’d ever been. None of us really knows what we’re missing. It’s only apparent in small doses, when doors mysteriously open adjunct our most familiar places. Prickly Mountain, Moss Glen, old ski clubs with their criss-crossed insignia, faded by weather, still garnishing run down hovels barely standing next to Route 100. I wasn’t a part of that era, but I aimed towards it anyways. Just a little too young and not ready to put a down payment on an old farm, or even know what a down payment was. Chapters and chapters of Vermont’s hippie flatlander history has been rolled up into a mystique by now, practically impenetrable. But there’s more to the story. If you weren’t born here, or didn’t ride a wave to get here, and were not a trust funder or a college graduate of UVM ... how the hell did you slip in, unnoticed? They won’t write histories about us, or curate how we migrated on mass into the state, or give us any kind of romantic tale to tell, about horse logging or starting newspapers. People like me who took waitress jobs in Vermont’s larger cities and worked our way out of Vermont’s larger cities, using intuition and elbow grease ... no story there. We had bad luck and divorces, befriended dump managers and rich folks alike, and just wanted to help our kids have a better stab at the good life. By the time it was over, it was likely a day much like today. Pulling into the Valero gas station to buy beer, a quick in and out, then back to the parking lot, fumbling with my keys and my block of Cabot Cheddar and a quart of half and half, I didn’t notice him in his truck. I was absorbed with the difficult task of keeping the tomatoes from being crushed in the front seat, moving instruments to the back seat with the gardening tools, while keeping the audio book on my iPhone handy. He was there watching, I guess, the whole time, parked next to me. When I’d repacked the front seat, making sure the seatbelt alarm would not go off, I turned around and there he was. He put out his hand. “Don’t worry, I don’t have Covid”, he said and I shook a hand, for the first time in months. I don’t want to draw this story out too long, so let’s just say he said he’d never asked a gal for a phone number on such short acquaintance before. I was pretty impressed with his credentials, fixing trucks and school buses. I’m glad I dug out the Gazetteer for the ride home, and connected some dots on some of the world’s prettiest dirt roads, without having to back up a half a mile or destroy my muffler. That ended me up at Valero right on time to meet Bobby. Why the heck not?”
