Radio Free Vermont

by Bill McKibben

  “Now, I suppose I could see their point. This was a law that would have cost them money, and they paid me. But I’d spent my whole career thinking of myself as my own man—not as an employee so much as something sort of like an artist or a writer. Not that I thought what I did was art exactly, though there’s an art to it. But I found I didn’t like being told what to talk about, and I found that it was enough to make me think in a political way for the first time in my life. That sounds odd to say, because I’d been talking about politics for fifty years, every day, and I had my opinions. But the way I saw the job, it was pretty important not to have those opinions too strongly. Like I say, I started before Rush Limbaugh—I would have been embarrassed to be a spokesman for some party, and I would have been embarrassed if everyone who called in felt like they had to parrot back my thoughts on everything. But I’d led a sheltered life, I suddenly realized—and the minute someone told me what not to say, I felt as if I had to say it. And I felt, too, as if I understood more than I ever had before about why people had been calling me for fifty years, and why they’d been feeling angrier and more helpless. I felt like I wasn’t in Vermont anymore—my own idealized Vermont, where what mattered were your neighbors and your values. And I realized that a lot of you had been forced out of that nice place long before me.

  “As I say, I should have retired and gone home and sat in my chair and read my books and ventured out on Friday nights for Middlebury hockey. But I felt the way some people feel when they have a sudden flash of religion. I wanted to spread the word. For a few weeks my guest list was heavy with local foods activists and sprawl opponents and so on. I’d interviewed them before, of course, but before I was always careful to see both sides of the question—I was a pretty good devil’s advocate. And now I wasn’t—I was a convert. But it didn’t feel like talking was going to move the needle. If I wanted a different Vermont, I’d have to do something more than talk. And I felt like I wanted to run some risk. My wife was gone, and my kids were grown, and after fifty years of talking it suddenly seemed silly to just keep on chattering. I wanted to do something.

  “Which was the same moment when the station manager assigned me to broadcast from the opening of the new Walmart in Saint Albans. Now, I’ve done a million of these over the years: three hours at the new Hyundai dealership or the new appliance store or whatever. You interview the owner in little chunks in between records; it’s kind of boring because how much can you really say about the selection of washers and dryers, but I was used to it, and I always saw old friends, and it was part of the job. But this Walmart was different. They’d been fighting over it for a decade—over the cornfield that got paved over, over the runoff from that pavement, over the traffic. And over what it was going to do to the downtown in Saint Albans. Some folks wanted it, because some folks are poor enough or bored enough that the thought of a cheap place to go and shop is nice. Some folks hated it. Didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Walmart had lawyers enough and money enough and time enough to make sure that in the end it finally went in.

  “Once I knew I was going to make the broadcast, I called a few friends of mine who’d been active in the opposition, and we hatched a little plan. And it was a good little plan—a joke, mostly, but with a barb. It worked well, too. I was roaming the store with my little portable broadcast unit, and I was interviewing the people who’d be running the different sections. The hardware guy described the cheap snow shovels, and the sporting goods guy described the cheap fishing rods. About what you’d expect. And then the nice lady in the women’s clothing section described, at some length, why the clothes there were so cheap—she described the factories where the blouses were sewn and the wages of the people who did the sewing. If you missed it, the broadcast is archived on the Radio Free Vermont website—I was pretty good and deadpan if I say so myself. And the same with the fellow who happened to be managing the electronics department, and who explained just how much more electricity you could use simply by buying one of the enormous cheapo TV sets. There were five of what I’d guess you’d have to call ‘plants’ scattered around the store, and I’d gotten to three of them when I saw the store manager hustling my way across the vast floor. Someone had clearly called the station, and they’d called him, and I was about ready to sign off and plead ignorance when something happened that we hadn’t planned. Or rather, I hadn’t planned it. Someone had, who’s standing here next to me, and I’ve almost forgiven him.

  “The first I knew of it was the smell, which took me quickly back to the barnyards of my youth. The store manager smelled it too, and he stopped before he even reached me and started looking around. We both saw it at pretty much the same time—a kind of tide, maybe six inches high, of water moving across the store at a stately but determined pace. Brown water. It turns out, I have since learned, that if you know how to program the switches, you can make a sewer system reverse itself. Walmart had installed a particularly big pipe, because they had to somehow cope with the runoff that would come when a late-August thunderstorm dropped two inches of rain on all that endless parking. But right now that pipe had gone from an intake to an outflow, and from all across Saint Albans, the contents of five thousand commodes were emptying onto the wide concrete floor of this well-scrubbed new outlet of global commerce.

  “My compatriot had, he later said, intended it as a kind of visual pun—a play on the fact that he considered the store to be a crappy venture marketing crappy merchandise, though ‘crappy,’ I must say, was not the word he used. I don’t know why I’m not using his word, since the FCC probably doesn’t care, except that I refuse to be Mikey or Mickey at this late stage in my career. Anyway, it was quite a sight and quite a smell, and by the time it reached us I knew that we were, metaphorically as well as literally, in deep excrement. I did a quick assessment of how much merchandise was stored at two feet or below in this store, a rough calculation, but enough to be sure that it passed by several orders of magnitude the seven hundred and fifty dollars that Vermont sets as the boundary between a misdemeanor and a felony. And so, at the age of seventy-two with a total of four speeding tickets to my name, I panicked. I grabbed my compatriot, and two pairs of hip waders from sporting goods, and we headed quickly to the exit, as the fire department arrived on the scene. We abandoned the waders as we climbed into my car, and we abandoned the car a little later since it had ‘WVRT Mobile Studio’ all over the side, and we made our way—elsewhere in Vermont. To someplace safe.

  “And just as well, as it turned out. Since Governor Bruce, who was looking for a way to scare people enough to get reelected yet again next fall, declared that this was ‘an act of terrorism aimed at disrupting the Vermont economy’ and called in the FBI, the EPA, and the Border Patrol. The last two were a bit of a stretch—he wanted the store named a hazardous waste site, but the EPA, which barely has any budget left anyway, told him it could be cleaned. The Border Patrol said that while the store was indeed near the border, the clear ringleader, which would be me, had spent his whole life in Vermont and hence was not their problem. But the FBI, I believe, are still on the job. And my picture, as the terrorist in chief, went out across the Web.

  “After which—in for a dime, in for a dollar—we launched the movement for an independent Vermont. Not much of a movement, not yet—mostly just a website that’s hard to find, a few small bands of allies scattered around the state, and an occasional action to galvanize the public, as for instance yesterday’s small escapades with the beer and the Ethan Allen exam and the wonderful Grace Potter. I’m not much of a revolutionary, and this was all an accident, but I can’t say I’m sorry it happened. And I hope you will give my best to your cows in Derby Line.”

  Vern sat back in his chair, and Perry tapped the button on the keyboard that stopped the digital recording. “That was weird?” he said. “You just sat there and talked for half an hour, without a script, without anything.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing every morning for
half a century,” said Vern. “It’s actually kind of easy once you’re able to imagine someone in particular sitting and listening. I used to think about my wife; now I think about my mother, though I’m not certain she’s good enough with the Internet to actually track us down.”

  “You know I’m still kind of sorry about the sewage,” said Perry. “I hadn’t really thought it through.”

  “If you’d have thought it through, I’d be sitting home reading my books, instead of holed up in a safe house wondering when Tommy Augustus will come walking through the door. So—thank you,” said Vern.

  5

  The clock had just pushed past noon, and from downstairs they could hear class beginning—quite easily, in fact, since the walls were thin and Sylvia’s voice was not. “Gentlemen—welcome to the School for New Vermonters,” she said. “I am well aware that most of you are here because your buddies at the investment bank thought it would make a funny retirement present, or your wife saw a clip on CNN and thought it would be cute. That said, I take it very seriously.

  “We here in Vermont are of two minds about newcomers—actually, a good many of us are of one mind, but that would make you sad to hear. Everyone agrees, however, that if you’re determined to move here it would be better if you knew how to fit in, not cause trouble, and be a decent neighbor. Where you came from, neighbors didn’t matter—everyone in your cul-de-sac could die of some plague overnight and your life would go on largely unaffected. But here, neighbors are more than decorative; Burlington, our only real city, has fifty thousand people—it’s more like a neighborhood. And if you live in the country—and statistically Vermont vies with Maine as the most rural state in the Union—then neighbors get you out of scrapes. My job is to keep you from getting into scrapes, and to teach you how to help others who do. Jesus said ‘Love your neighbors,’ yes? Well, think of me as Jesus with a tow chain and a Stihl saw.

  “Today we’ll cover driving in the mud; before the month is out, we’ll have cut down small trees, learned to drive the kind of pumper you’ll find in most volunteer fire departments, chopped, split, and stacked cordwood for several of the older ladies in this town—what are you saying?”

  Vern and Perry could hear someone faintly asking a question, and then Sylvia’s answer, in the same booming tone.

  “As a matter of fact, I wasn’t born here. I was born on the Upper West Side, Seventy-second and West End Avenue, a block from Riverside Park and a block the other way from the Famous Dairy Restaurant, which my grandfather ran. But my parents moved here when I was four, part of the hippie migration. I wasn’t much of a hippie, but I was a pretty good Vermonter—I joined 4-H and raised sheep. There’s still plenty of New York in me, though, which is why I work so well with migrants. You could say I’m an interpreter.

  “And since you’re asking personal questions, let me answer another one you haven’t asked. As usual, most of you are men—that’s because women, I think, generally know how to fit into a community more easily. They’re good at making friends. Anyway, despite the fact that I look remarkably good in my red snowmobile leathers, I don’t want to go on a date with any of you, or get fixed up with your sons, for a number of reasons but chiefly because I am a lesbian. Those of you from Boston or New York will not find this very remarkable, but some of the rest may have journeyed here from places where people still think it’s okay to, for instance, tell you not to get married if you want to marry another girl. You’re entitled to your opinion, but Vermont was the first place in the Union to legalize civil unions. We live and let live, and if your opinion is different from that, you’d do best to keep it to yourself.

  “Now, if everyone has signed their releases, let’s head out to the field for mud-driving, which is a key skill now that mud season seems to last all winter. I want you to remember a few things. You don’t need four-wheel drive; you need brains. Traction is your best friend, and when traction disappears, momentum is going to have to take its place. Once you’re in those ruts, know which way your wheels are pointed, because you don’t want to come out the other side and drive into the trees. And if it looks really bad, deflate your tires a bit. Those of you who don’t know how to drive a stick should be ashamed of yourself, but if you stay after class we’ll work on it.”

  Vern listened with a chuckle; he’d known Sylvia since the week she opened her school and he’d had her on his show. Perry listened with a kind of rapt awe. They watched through the window as a dozen cars, one after another, bogged down in the mud pit Sylvia had built by the back of the barn. Each time she climbed in the passenger seat and talked the driver through the hole—by the time they got out the other side they were smiling and shaking her hand.

  “She yells at them but they still seem to like her?” said Perry.

  “If you show people how to pull themselves out of a hole, they’re apt to like you,” said Vern.

  6

  The three of them were sitting on the patio behind Sylvia’s house late the next afternoon. It was sixty degrees in the fading sun, and if it didn’t qualify as freak weather—more like the new normal—it still unnerved Vern and Sylvia. Perry not so much—he was young enough that he’d grown up with odd winters and was inclined to think of a warm January day as something to enjoy, not an omen.

  “I’m always glad when we get past chainsaw day,” Sylvia was saying. “I mean, they look so cute in their brand-new Kevlar chaps and sleeve gauntlets and hearing protectors and safety goggles and hard hats and steel-toed boots, but once they start up the saws, no one can hear a word I say. I have to space them fifty yards apart so the most they can kill is themselves.”

  “They did seem a little . . . eager,” said Vern.

  “Today was the worst in a while—two doctors in this group. Doctors take advice from no one. They figure that if someone pays them four hundred thousand dollars to read X-rays, they must know how to fell a tree. I mean, after all, a logger only makes twenty dollars an hour, right? How hard can it be? But if you read an X-ray wrong, it still takes the patient a couple of years to die, and someone else might even catch it along the way. If you don’t bother to check what’s in the path of the ash you’re felling—as Dr. Keith Ervin, lately of Raleigh, North Carolina, almost demonstrated today—there’s a pretty good chance it is going to twirl around and fall on you. No one else is going to catch it, and your demise will take about two seconds, though it would probably be painless. I’m not certain anyone would have missed him, but I’m virtually certain someone would have sued.”

  She reached over and refilled Vern’s half-empty glass from a big bottle of Rock Art Extreme Vermont Pale Ale (“Guaranteed smooth, mellow, and so bitter every hole will pucker”). Perry had hardly touched his.

  “Too strong for you?” asked Sylvia. “I should have saved some of that Coors Light.”

  “I’m not a big beer-drinker,” said Perry. “I mean, I’m only nineteen.”

  “When I was nineteen . . .” said Vern, but he said no more, because it wasn’t really true. When he was nineteen, he’d been a good boy, and also an athlete, and he’d mainly drunk milk from the family dairy. Still, Sylvia inspired a bit of showing off.

  “If you weren’t drinking beer in high school, what were you doing?” said Sylvia. “Don’t mind my asking,” she added, when Perry looked away. “I’d never met you before you showed up at my house smelling like sewage, and I’m curious. I know you don’t get on with your parents or else you’d have to have figured out some way to call them. But who were your friends? What was your scene?”

  “Not so many friends,” said Perry. “I’m interested in computers? Not, like computer games, so much. Computers? Like, coding. And I’m extremely interested in soul music, especially the great Atlantic recordings from the 1960s and the Stax/Volt stuff, right up until, like, the mid-seventies. Not Motown—Motown is, like, too obvious? Don Covay. Archie Bell. The Mar-Keys, Joe Tex, Donny Hathaway, Rufus Thomas, Mavis Staples, Major Lance,
Isaac Hayes, the Emotions. Like, the Memphis Sound. I mean, not just Stax, but like Hi Records, whose studio was down the street. Where Ann Peebles recorded ‘Part Time Love’ in 1969. And also Al Green, before he became the Reverend Al Green. And then—”

  Sylvia held up a hand. “Two questions,” she said. “Why soul music—why not whatever it was that everyone else was listening to?”

  Perry paused. “Well,” he said. “I think, because it was complete? Like, over? Not completely—I mean neo-soul, and like Raphael Saadiq. And D’Angelo? And Erykah Badu? But classic soul. When I was a kid I was interested in presidents, and in astronauts. Because they were, like, lists? I mean, I knew a lot about the astronauts and their missions and whatever, but all of it was wrapped up. It didn’t have so much to do with now. You could know all of it.”

  “Second question—and remember, I’m blunt,” said Sylvia, though she said it with considerable tenderness, facing him head-on. “Did you ever get tested?”

  Perry looked at her. “Um, Asperger’s?” he said. “Mild? Like, the doctor said no need for medication. He told my mother that I was ‘socially inept,’ and she said, ‘That sounds like him.’”

  “I know about Asperger’s,” said Vern. “I did several shows about it. It’s most common in boys—”

  “I don’t think we need you going all Asperger’s about Asperger’s,” she told Vern. “I bet Perry knows a good deal about it. I know a little. My brother more or less lived for the periodic table.”