“When it’s too cold to glue things up because you don’t have heat in your building, you improvise. Just like when you’re using a chair as a table to put your dinner plate on, or hiking up a hill to use the bathroom. I’m so grateful to be warm tonight. There is a world in Vermont that exists outside the public radio glow, way more sobering. And everything comes to an end. Especially illusions, about what your life is really about, and what it isn’t. As I peruse the paperwork, & apply for my annual landscaper’s discount at a local growers nursery, I can now accurately reflect on what it takes to run a business, and why I would never think of cheating them. And it’s not a far leap to nearby Ottawa, where thousands of parked trucks are idling, in protest, acting as magnets for the discontent of marginalized citizens. Why is it that Vermont can’t officially support this type of freedom of discourse, & celebrate the broad minded, compassionate wisdom of working people? Why are Vermont’s official mouth-pieces continually parroting useless rhetoric? Where is the voice of the under-represented majority? Well, I know. Because I rub shoulders with them and count myself among them: at gas stations & lumber yards, in door yards and behind closed doors. And while I hike into the hills trying to get away from it all, taking a respite from the kind of nail biting that only self-employed, paid-by-the-hour professionals can understand, I fear for Vermont. For the salt-of-the-earth portion of what has been here, that is being driven out. I could tell you a story, about each person who’s showed up in my life, to help me do something, & then given even more. Or who cared so much about a barn cat, that I had more intel on that animal than any septic system I was about to inherit. The ones who moved rocks. Who looked up at me, out of holes. Who tried to save trees. Or maybe thought I was just another useless piece of privileged ass. Well, I’ve had to keep on working, too, but I don’t advertise it & you may not know me that well. If I didn’t work, who would do what I can do? That unique category of “what I can do”, for what its worth, I rightly claim. Which is why I disappear, when I can. I map read with the intensity of someone who is intentionally, trying to get lost. I have a dozen places in my cross-hairs, where the ambiguous town properties merge into national forest. My redneck friends tell me to be careful, & that describes a certain angle on our reality, doesn’t it? There are dangers, in this life, for sure. But which ones are real, and which ones are imagined, we have to decide for ourselves.”
