Idyll Banter (7 page)

IT'S THE CREAM CHEESE BROWNIES
THAT BRING OUT THE VOTE

THE OTHER DAY
I told my father in Fort Lauderdale how one votes here in Lincoln. We were discussing our process because South Florida is clearly no more capable of handling a modern election than it is a blizzard in April. This is the corner of the country, after all, that in 2000 brought us the terms “hanging chad” and “pregnant chad” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), and in 2002 introduced computer voting machines that would have befuddled the engineers behind the Nintendo GameCube.

I told my father that our procedure is pretty straightforward. On election morning I walk from my house to the dining room in Burnham Hall, the closest thing we have here in Lincoln to a town hall. We vote in the dining room for a lot of reasons, but I believe the most important is that invariably there is a bake sale sponsored by the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Lincoln Volunteer Fire Company and it seems appropriate to have the sale in close proximity to the hall's kitchen.

I don't honestly know whether more people vote because they can purchase homemade apple pie at a price so agreeable it is almost embarrassing, or whether the Ladies' Auxiliary chooses this moment to have a bake sale because there is already so much traffic at the hall. This is one of those great chicken-and-egg questions, though I will confess that I once voted in a meaningless primary because I heard there were some delicious angioplasty-causing cream cheese brownies for sale.

When I arrive, Eleanor Scully crosses my name off the town list. You can vote early here in Lincoln, but you can't vote often. Eleanor, who happens to be a member of the local rescue squad, helps out with elections while her husband, Bud—who hasn't let a little thing like lung cancer interfere with his own responsibilities on the rescue squad—handles her shift at the rescue station.

Mary Pierce, the organist at the local church, hands me a ballot, a piece of paper about twice the size of a diner place mat. The document has thick black boxes separating each office, and the name of each candidate in type about the same size as the print in a Curious George picture book. It's nice and big.

I take my ballot into a wooden kiosk with a curtain that shields me from the waist up, and there I use a pencil to make my choices. The ballot instructs me to make an “X” in the boxes beside the names of the candidates for whom I would like to vote, and informs me precisely how many candidates to vote for in each section: two state senators, for example, or seven justices of the peace. There are lines on which I may write in a name, if I am feeling either curmudgeonly or rebellious.

When I exit the kiosk there is a ballot box waiting. It has a thin slot at the top, so my privacy is preserved—though I know if I were one the folks who stands vigil beside it, once in a while I'd peek.

After the polls close, our town clerk, Kathy Mikkelsen, rounds up her volunteers to count the ballots. We don't have special auditors like the Academy Awards, but we have representatives from the mighty impressive-sounding Board of Civil Authority, and that has always been good enough for me.

The next day I wander by the general store, and Vaneasa Stearns, the owner, informs me who won.

That's all there is to it, and even separated by 1,600 miles I could tell that my father was shaking his head the way he does whenever he learns that another Belgium-sized tract of land in the Everglades is about to be turned into condominiums. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, my father used to be disgusted. Now he tries to be amused.

Unfortunately, Florida will never be able to vote the way we do here in Lincoln—the way we do in most of Vermont. It's too crowded. It's too impersonal. And those cream cheese brownies wouldn't stand a chance in the South Florida heat.

THE SLOWEST DRIVER IN VERMONT

I NOTICED THE
flashing lights behind me just north of a freshly cut field of corn, and pulled over beside a ramshackle white equipment barn.

The state trooper, a woman about my age, asked me if I knew I was driving seventy-five miles per hour in a fifty-mile zone.

I told her that I did, and explained, “I had to go that fast. I was passing a truck going sixty.”

This was the wrong answer. As a result of that truck, that trooper, and that ticket (my second), I now have nine points on my driver's license—or one short of hitchhiking.

By necessity I have become, I am confident, the slowest driver in Vermont: slower than my neighbor Ray Grimes, who was ninety-two this winter (only a few years older than his rust-red pickup truck); and slower even than the long yellow school bus that honked at me to speed up just south of Starksboro one morning at 7:15.

Now I'm not proud of being the slowest driver in Vermont. It is a distinction without glory, a notoriety born of the aggravation I inflict on all who must drive behind me. Though perhaps not literally cruel and unusual punishment, the time I spend with this scarlet “A” (Acceleration) upon my license is proving to be a sentence of far more consequence than the simple monetary fines I paid for my transgressions.

Burlington, for instance, is thirty-two miles from my home here in Lincoln. I must now drive each and every one of those miles at exactly five miles below the speed limit. Forty-five miles per hour in a fifty-mile zone, twenty-five miles per hour in the thirty-mile zones. I can no longer pass the dump trucks that emerge like dinosaurs from the Hinesburg gravel pits and lumber north toward Burlington at thirty miles an hour. I can no longer race through the yellow traffic lights in Williston, but instead must coast to a stop before them and wave politely at whoever has stopped behind me and honked.

And although most of those thirty-two miles are on Vermont's Route 116, an extremely scenic little road dotted with dairy farms and villages, how many trips will it take before the wonder of the largest manure storage tank in the county wears thin?

I estimate that my new pace has added somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes each way to the drive.

Time, however (or lost time, more exactly), is the least horrific part of being the slowest driver in Vermont. There is an element to my punishment that is far worse.

I have become an automotive pariah, a thing to be avoided, a car to be shunned by my peers on the road. I know this because I have seen it in the eyes and scowls of my fellow drivers as they pass by me, often glancing to their sides to view the source of their frustration.

Certainly some drivers find me more aggravating than others, but it has now gotten to the point where I can tell almost instantly the degree of contempt I will see abruptly beside me by the way a driver warms up to pass.

There are, essentially, two kinds of tailgaters. There are the passive-aggressors, and then there are the aggressive-passers. No small distinction, this.

The passive-aggressors are those drivers who pull up directly behind me, but are—for whatever the reason—afraid to pass. Passive-aggressors tend to be hunched forward over their steering wheels, and often look as if they are trying to blow my car forward with their exasperated breaths. They believe that by driving as close as possible to my rear bumper, they can literally will me to drive faster. (Uh-uh. With nine points, not a chance.) Eventually they become desperate enough to pass, glaring at me as they whiz by with a look that would wither fruit.

The aggressive-passers, on the other hand, usually appear out of nowhere. One moment there is nothing in my rearview mirror, and the next there is a monster pickup truck with tires as big as a house. And then—just as suddenly—it is pulling into the passing lane, it is beside me, and then it is gone. Aggressive-passers don't scowl at me the way the passive-aggressors do. Occasionally they will glance at me, register brief surprise at the fact that I'm nowhere near ninety years old, and shake their heads. But usually they just fly by.

I tend to believe that the passive-aggressors hate me more than the aggressive-passers because they spend more time behind me. They stew.

Now I don't think any of this would bother me quite so much if I could just explain to these people that I did not become the slowest driver in Vermont by choice, that I drive the way I do because I have to. One of these days I just may take my wife up on her suggestion to have a bumper sticker printed that reads, “Have mercy on me. I'm a nine-pointer.”

VERMONT HAS CHANGED—BUT NOT ITS PEOPLE

SIXTY YEARS AGO
this month, Marjorie Vosburgh took a ride on one of the family workhorses in the high hills between Lincoln and Ripton. The ride lasted barely four hours and covered no more than a couple of miles, but it's an interesting barometer both of how much Vermont has been transformed in the past six decades and yet how little its people—when they are at their best—have changed.

It was February 1943, and Vosburgh was fourteen. She lived with her family on what was then a common-sized dairy farm—twenty cows and a couple of horses—three miles south of Lincoln village. Their farm sat at the intersection of the roads that led west into Bristol Notch and south into Ripton, at an elevation of roughly 1,800 feet. In a winter snowstorm, they were the very end of the line, even for the postman, who most days was a study in fortitude and perseverance.

On this particular day, however, the postman could drive no farther than her family's farm. The storm was one massive whiteout, and the snow was piling high on the roads back to Bristol. And so he delivered her family's mail, and left them as well with the correspondence for the farms farther down the road. Perhaps those other families could pick it up from them over the next couple of days.

Among the letters Vosburgh spied was one from Sgt. Ralph Hamilton, addressed to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Hamilton. The younger Hamilton had enlisted soon after the United States had entered World War II and was stationed in the South Pacific. Vosburgh knew that his parents hadn't heard from the soldier in weeks and had grown worried.

There were no phones and no electricity yet in this corner of Addison County, so Vosburgh couldn't simply pick up the telephone and call the Hamiltons with the news that a letter had arrived from their son. Nor could she ask one of her parents to drive the few miles south to the Hamilton farm, not with the roads buried under snow.

And so she did the only thing she could. She put a bridle on Queenie, one of the dappled gray workhorses her father used on the farm, and started off in the storm to the Hamiltons' house.

The ride was an adventure for Vosburgh. First of all, Queenie was a workhorse, not a saddle horse. Her family didn't even own a saddle, so Vosburgh was riding the animal bareback, clinging to the animal's mane and bridle as she tried to navigate the tempest.

Second, the snow beyond their house was almost up to the horse's belly. Once Vosburgh slipped underneath Queenie. At another point, she simply had to climb off the animal and lead her through a patch of waist-deep snow.

But she made it to the Hamilton family's farm, where Ralph's mother greeted her at the front door. Though the woman later admitted that she wondered what Vosburgh was doing on her front stoop covered in snow in the midst of a blizzard, she said simply, “Well, look who's here.”

Sixty years later, Vosburgh says she won't forget the rapturous gaze—part wonder, part relief—that filled Mrs. Hamilton's face when she told her that she'd brought a letter from her son.

“Seeing that smile was worth anything I went through,” she recalls now at seventy-four.

Nevertheless, it is hard for her to fathom that a mere six decades ago so many Vermonters lived without electricity or phone lines or even running water. But live they did.

Ralph Hamilton died last month in Ohio, though his sister, Lida Hamilton Cloe, eighty-seven, remains here in Lincoln. She is among the neighbors who are helping Vosburgh these days endure a bad patch with her back and her hip.

“I look out for Marjorie,” Cloe says. “She's a very good friend of mine.”

Many of the outward trappings of our world indeed have been revolutionized by technology, but the basic generosity that marked Vermont sixty years ago remains unchanged.