“Without knowing, I passed the house, drove uphill on wicked washboard-corrugated dirt, wishing I’d switched to 4WD earlier. But how can you know in advance. I was looking for her number, and I’d expected it to be higher on the hill. From photos seen on Facebook, her world seemed rigged amidst hayfields, maybe an old farm bought in the 60s. I squinted, trying to see any green 911 tags, on fence posts or trees. It was all getting too chichi. The white, wooden horse fencing few can still afford, and long driveways, well turned out with designer gravel. Then the town’s delineating marker. Okay, I said to myself. I’ve kicked around these parts long enough to know that if she said Woodstock, she didn’t mean Hartford. That said, it might take a half a mile to turn a half ton pickup around on a single lane track. So I did. The jogger I’d passed was still moving stylishly along, in the early morning quiet. You can tell the out-of-towners, and they can tell you, that you are trespassing on a road they’ve come to think of as their personal property. I’ve no need to quibble. Only, we used to come up this way, during lunch, to check out a home business that was selling plants. Maybe 15 years off, I was someone shopping up here, behind a bunch of dove cages, marveling at the cottage industry of one family. I remember the cotton gauze she’d draped, to protect her birds, viewed as one walked along the pathways to perennial landscape plants for sale behind the house. The whole scene, was out of Tolstoy. If Vermont lets go of all this, in favor of stricter regulation, the loss will be inestimable. The creativity and vitality of such businesses, cannot be quantified. The younger generation may not remember, though they were dragged hill & dale by parents, intent on instilling natural values, easily available at that time. Now, sadly, we do not have the luxury. Which is partly why I sought out my friend. Lalita. Having talked about planetary influences, garnering her wisdom on the matter, including startling harbingers rarely included in a discussion, like Bellatrix, or Sedna, I realized the true import of my overland journey to find her hidden enclave was love. Walking east, on a path of wood chips, no less than horse radish, bee balm, Jerusalem artichokes (for the deer) and squash. Add to that, blueberries, kale, parsnip, potatoes, and spearmint. The weathered fencing, put up for goats against coyotes and also for deer, amiable-like, and not military. White mulberries, kiwi vine, a private sanctuary enclosed by shrubbery; a chicken coop turned aromatic cabin, on the edge of a cliff, pumping pristine, structured water to the farmyard. We didn’t chit chat, not much. We both know, intuitively, that the crux of what we’re up against will engender a smarter system, devised by locals. What to do if the grid goes down. What to do if they come to your door. What to do if the whole inverted world, goes spiraling down in a cacophony of self-destruction. Because we were too polite to say no, too mild to speak up, too unsure of our own moral ground to push back against alien values, completely antithetical to everything we ever believed in, in our heart of hearts.”
