wanderlust

Wrong Way Closed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

While poor California is burning, Vermont is flooded.

Driving to Burlington to meet my older daughter at the airport, my younger and I are suddenly stopped on Route 15. Road closed. I pull into a gas station and run up to a young man and ask him for intel. He’s from somewhere else and tells me Wrong Way Bridge is closed. That’s all he knows. The Lamoille is impassable at this point — the river, I’ve already seen, has risen wildly above its banks.

I stand there, thinking, unwilling to follow his advice to cut back through the mountains. I’m driving my older daughter’s car, which has — naturally — no paper map.

I approach a man who’s just bought a six-pack of tiny Coke cans, and ask for advice. He’s much taller than me, and bends down to look at my face, putting us at eye-level, then takes me to the edge of the parking lot and tells me where to turn, which roads to follow. It’s beautiful country, he says, where I’m sending you.

He tells me to turn left at the Y, but he’s gesturing right. I ask for clarification, and then he has me repeat the directions back to him, so he’s sure I know where I’m going.

We drive along the western side of Mount Mansfield, through farms with their cornfields shorn to stubble. November. His breath had a vague scent of whiskey, but the directions were spot-on, and countryside? Enchanting.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in — when the old loyalties — God, country, and the hope of Heaven — aren’t very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends.

— William Carlos Williams

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Burlington, Vermont

Wanderlust, Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

We’re at the Burlington airport at four in the morning, in a rainy darkness, in that discombobulated airport way — where the everyone in town seems to be at the airport and then, outside, it’s just me and my teen driving through intersections amped down to blinking lights.

The way is familiar, but the night is so solid — and, honestly, I’m so tired — that we might be in upper New York state for all I know, and not Vermont, or maybe wandered farther away, all the down to mountainous Virginia.

The commuter traffic begins only as we’re nearly home. Then, with still an hour and a half before high school starts for the day, my daughter walks around the house, doing this, that, and finally stares at me on the couch. I close my lap and ask simply, Yes?

She looks out the window where the dawn is trying mightily hard to push away some of the dusk. Wanderlust, I see. There’s nothing more to say.

“There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?”

— Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (elegantly written by a former border patrol officer — I can’t recommend this book enough)

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Photo by Molly B.

Constellations

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

11 at night, I’m at the high school, waiting for my daughter to return from a band/amusement park trip. The sun set hours ago, and I grab an extra sweater on the way out. It’s cold, cold enough I’m surprised I don’t see a ghostly cloud of my breath.

I get out of my car and hurry down the steep hill to the soccer field. Away from the lights in the school’s parking lot, the constellations appear, this silent beauty. I walk all the way around the field, to the far end where the woods begin. These fields, one of the most well-used places in Hardwick, are empty. On the rise of land above, I see moving car lights as parents pull in.

If the grass weren’t drenched with cold dew, I’d lie down. I remember being 19-years-old, the first year I lived in Vermont, and hiking in the middle of the night with a friend to a field. Rural Vermont, there were no human lights surrounding us at all. It was November and quite cold, but we were well-dressed and very young, and we lay down in the field and talked and talked.

I could feel the universe’s energy come up through the not-yet-frozen black earth, through the glacial pebble and tangled root, through my vertebrae and flesh, all the way up to the countless stars overhead.

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Vultures/by Molly S.

Vermont Postcard

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A few years ago, an enormous storm dumped gravel on local farmers’ fields and generally wrecked significant agricultural damage. Farmers around here are small, small-scale, no one ever gets adequate insurance compensation, and the storm hurt.

I bought this sketch below at a community fundraiser for local farmers at the Woodbury Town Hall, where the people from the surrounding towns came together for a dinner and live music, and many folks donated all kinds of beautiful handmade things that switched from hand to hand with some cash.

Some money, no doubt, was raised. The night was a goodwill, community gesture after a bad event. This is the better, more generous, gracious element of Vermont. We are not always so kind.

Walking around this small town where I live – Hardwick – whether to the post office, or crawling under broken boards with my visiting nephews to get into the  empty granite sheds for an “historic” tour, I keep returning to the notion that more deeply understanding all the variations of this small town, I would gain some tenor of illumination.

Just to mix things up in the little-light month of December, I’ll aim to share a few snips of life within walking distance.

Whether the recollection is of fascist Italy in the 1920s, of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, of the Soviet Union during the Great Terror of 1937-38, or of the purges in communist eastern Europe in the 1940s and ’50s, people who were living in fear of repression remembered how their neighbors treated them. A smile, a handshake, or a word of greeting – banal gestures in a normal situation – took on great significance. When friends, colleagues, and acquaintances looked away or crossed the street to avoid contact, fear grew.

–Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century

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