I grew up in the woods. There were people there too, but it was mostly woods. My parents were New Yorkers who moved to Vermont. They met in Madison Wisconsin, attending college, where my father got a degree in teaching English as a second language and my mother started a jewelry business. My father got jobs overseas and they spent some time traveling in the Mediterranean and northern Africa, as well as India and Indonesia. Having recently returned, they had intended to move to Oregon, and were only visiting to pick up an anvil for my mother’s aforementioned jewelry business. But their Volkswagen bus broke down and they decided to stay. After scouting options around the state, they bought some land on a mountain, cleared the trees, and used them to build a house. Things were simpler then.
I grew up looking out over the green mountains, alternately a beautiful red-orange-yellow show of foliage in the fall, or a soft, white wasteland in the winter. I drank spring water pumped from a mountain well, and breathed the air purified by thousands of trees. Nature abounded. Deer, moose and bears were in my yard, eagles and owls were in the trees, newts and snakes in the grass. Rivers and streams housed trout and other fish, as well as insects that floated on surface tension, and monstrous larvae amongst the stones. Ponds filled with tadpoles that turned to singing frogs, along with salamanders and dreaded leaches.
I ate fresh corn, tomatoes, local cheeses, apples and berries, washed it down with cider or maple sap snuck from buckets hung on neighbors’ tree taps. I hiked up mountains, watched the stars, swam in lakes, rivers, and ponds. I climbed trees, although never quite as high as my friends who were less intimidated by a trip to the hospital, and sledded down snow covered hills, although not quite as fast as my friends who were less intimidated by a trip to the hospital. We built forts out of sticks, hopped along river rocks, collected eggs from chicken coops, and rode our bikes to the general store that was also the post office, where we would buy popsicles or pennycandy.
In the winter I learned how to shovel snow and tend a fire, important skills if you didn’t want to get stranded or freeze. Our driveway was a quarter mile dirt road up a mountain. Even with my father's dedicated care, there were times of year it was inaccessible by car and the only option was to hike out. I lived at the edge of town so I was the first one on the school bus and the last one off. My town had no stoplights and all but two of the roads were dirt. My rides to and from school lasted an hour each way, and contained such perils as high school students and bumps in the road big enough to throw you out of your seat. Occasionally they would get so big kids would hit the top of the bus. For a while my friend and I would intentionally sit above the back wheels, where the bumps were the biggest, until we got tired of having the wind knocked out of us, an uncomfortable and terrifying feeling.
My first school had only two classrooms, but this was appropriate as there were only five people in my grade and so each class had several grades. One time bees got loose in the school. Another time a student brought a snake they found on the way in and it bit the principal. Eventually the school got to be too small or too unsafe or both. Certainly, the playground’s many wooden structures were starting to rot, leaving jagged, splintery holes and missing monkeybars. The second school was superior in that it was much bigger, and because in the corner of the property was a washed out culvert where at recess we could excavate cow bones buried back when the land had been a farm.
Socially, Vermont was a strange concoction of eclectic energies blended into something palpable. The three primary tribes of hippies, yuppies, and rednecks, overlapped and blended in a loose Venn diagram that muffled and padded their differences, smoothing communities out into something cohesive and functional. People helped their neighbors, even if they didn’t always agree. The culture was also divided into three parts, although they strangely did not correspond to the social groups. One part was cute, quirky small town Americana, full of coffee houses, summer concerts in the bandstand, neighbors helping each other out, and all of the most generic holiday celebrations. One part was backwoods depravity brought about by wealth or lack thereof, a hidden underbelly of affairs, addiction, abuse, arson, occasional murder or suicide, crimes of the madness brought on by the wild spirits of nature and the extended solitude of the dark winter months. One part was comical hijinks and shenanigans, likely involving some combination of drugs, alcohol, fire, guns, sleeping with someone you shouldn’t, getting in a fight, and going to or from a place while unsafely operating a car in bad driving conditions. This all followed by reconciliations or an attempted cover ups and repeated with comforting regularity.
I never fit in socially, although in high school I eventually found a small group of freaks and weirdos who trauma bonded together until they could go places where their talents and idiosyncrasies could be appreciated. I am grateful that I got to grow up in Vermont at the time that I did. It is a beautiful place and it has made a lasting impression on my perspective and ethos. But it wasn’t the right place for me, I had to leave and did so as soon as it was convenient. My visits back reaffirmed that Vermont is not a place where I thrive, but also that I am very lucky to have gotten to spend that time there.