Radio Free Vermont

by Bill McKibben

  Here she put aside the paper and looked straight at the governor. “Anyway, now we’ve got this big palace to dedicate.

  “The first thing I want to say is that Nickelback really sucks and if you want some out-of-state music you should bring in”—and here she took another piece of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it—“the Staples Singers, to perform ‘If You’re Ready Come Go with Me,’ which peaked at number nine on the pop charts in 1973.”

  “Yes!” said Perry.

  “And the other thing is, Governor, I decided to bring a different flag with me for the dedication, this one even more special than my Stars and Stripes from the Olympics. This one was sewn by Mrs. Addison Barclay and friends at the Blake Avenue Home for Elder Women in Montpelier. If you want, you could call her the Betsy Ross of a Free Vermont.” And with that she stepped to the flagpole, snapped the lanyards through the grommets in her flag, and hoisted it hand over hand, seven good pulls sufficing to reach the top.

  As the flag unfurled, several things happened at once.

  For one, the giant JumboTron stopped flashing “Nickelback” and started flashing, in quick sequence, “Size Matters,” “The Gods of the Valley,” “Are Not the Gods of the Mountains,” “Drink Local Beer,” and “Radio Free Vermont.”

  For another, Tommy Augustus, who had been watching with slowly dawning trepidation, started talking rapidly into a cell phone. “She’s with Barclay. Get her!”

  And for a third, the governor, who had long since stopped beaming, nonetheless carried on as if everything had happened according to plan. He stepped to the lectern and declared, “I will now Depress the Lever that will operate the only Retractable Roof in northern New England . . .” He’d lost his crowd, however—they were too busy pointing at the flag, and the scurrying policemen, and the JumboTron, which now was flashing “Good Things Come in Small Packages,” and “I Voted for Leslie Bruce and All I Got” “Was This Monstrosity.”

  In the uproar, the state police managed to miss the five-foot-six woman in the USA warm-ups, who ducked beneath the temporary bleachers, trotted two blocks down a side street, and jumped onto the running board of a pumper truck. Someone tossed her a helmet and a coat, and they sirened off south down Route 7 unnoticed. Meanwhile, the roof ponderously retracted, opening the Gov. Leslie R. Bruce Facility to the warm winter air.

  12

  “Are there actually any white people whose music you appreciate?” Sylvia asked. They were discussing the events of the day before, which ended with the JumboTron flashing “Nickelback? Why Not Kenny Rogers?”

  “Dusty Springfield?” said Perry. “Queen of blue-eyed soul? I mean, ‘The Look of Love,’ all by itself. But in 1970 she came to Tennessee to record Dusty in Memphis, one of Rolling Stone’s hundred best albums of all time. It’s true that white people loved it—‘Son of a Preacher Man’ reached number ten on the Austrian charts, and number three in Switzerland. But she also brought the first Motown revue to England. And when she went to South Africa in 1964, her contract stipulated she’d only play to unsegregated audiences. It basically shut down the tour?”

  “I liked that Staples song,” said Trance. “Can you make me a mix for when I’m running?”

  “You’re not running anytime soon,” said Vern. “You’re a prisoner here for a while, with Perry and me. If there’s anyone in Vermont the governor would like to see locked up this morning, it’s you.”

  He was looking through the morning papers, which Syl had spread out on the dining room table. “BIG-Time?” the Rutland Herald asked. “Trance Rains on Governor’s Parade—Right Through Retractable Roof.” The Burlington Free Press had a picture of the Free Vermont flag flapping, with the giant building looming ominously out-of-focus in the background, and another of Vern’s mother and six of her gray-haired friends holding a different version of the banner out on the steps of their retirement home.

  “Aren’t you worried we’re going to get your mom in trouble?” Sylvia asked.

  “I was more worried about what she’d do if I didn’t give her credit,” said Vern. “She’ll love every moment of this. And even Leslie Bruce is not crazy enough to do anything to a ninety-six-year-old.”

  “Did you know your mom had a Facebook page?” said Perry. “She just updated it with the sewing pattern for the flag.”

  “Speaking of which, are we reaching the world?” Vern asked.

  “Well, our site is shut down, of course, but it doesn’t matter that much. People have cached everything important a hundred other places. And the YouTube of the flag is going viral—forty-eight hundred thousand views as of six a.m., and there’s a version set to ‘If You’re Ready Come Go with Me.’”

  “That means we’ve got work to do,” said Vern, pouring a large cup of coffee. “Here’s how the news cycle works. We’re hot till something else happens, hotter still if they react. But the moment some pro wrestler conceives a child with a politician’s daughter, then we’re out of the news. We might as well make hay while the sun shines, as my haymaking father used to say. And since we can’t exactly call a press conference, that means back up to the studio. How many people listened to the last podcast?”

  “Sixty thousand downloads,” said Perry.

  “This will be six hundred thousand, thanks to Trance. So I guess it better be good,” Vern replied, cracking his knuckles with pleasure.

  “Just like your radio show, isn’t it?” said Sylvia. “But no yells of triumph when you’re done. My class arrives in an hour, and we’ll be indoors today, down in the basement. And hopefully we’ll be very quiet. Trance, you’ll need to make yourself scarce. But if you’re interested, you can sit in the laundry room and listen—just keep the door locked.”

  Perry and Vern trooped upstairs, settling into the pair of chairs on the braided rug arrayed in front of the microphone and laptop. “I don’t really need the headphones, but I feel easier with them on after all these years,” said Vern, covering his right ear with one pad and letting the other rest just behind his left, so he could still hear Perry. “It won’t take much to get me started today, but fire me a question or two that have come in—and I take it you’ve got some music ready for the outro?”

  “Of course,” said Perry. “And here’s a question that I’ve been thinking about too. It comes from Dana in Hartland—where’s Hartland?”

  “Over on the Connecticut, near Dartmouth,” said Vern. “Read it into the microphone.”

  “‘Dear Mr. Barclay—The last time anyone tried to secede, my great-grandfather went down to Tennessee and got killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. There’s a monument in our town to all the men who died “to preserve the Union.” Were they wrong to do it?’”

  Vern settled forward, elbows on his knees, chin resting on his laced fingers, eyes closed, mouth a few inches from the mike. He paused just a second, and then began:

  “Dana, thanks for that question. Let’s make it the frame for broadcast number seven from Radio Free Vermont, underground, underfoot, and underpowered. We’re brought to you today by Hill Farmstead’s revelatory Abner IPA, a beer from the backroads of Greensboro Bend brewed for those warm days of . . . January. Sorry about the weather, folks, but you have to admit it made for a great show outside Bruce Stadium yesterday. And I hope you’ve pulled out your favorite Nickelback long-playing records to get ready for the big show!

  “Now, to the excellent question from the Upper Valley. Dana, a confession first. If there’s a single place in the United States of America guaranteed to make me weep, it’s the Lincoln Memorial. I can’t look up at that sad, wise face and keep my composure, nor read the Second Inaugural etched on those stone walls. The president gave that speech after a week of rain—the dirt roads of the national capital were a sea of mud. And he spoke while the war still raged—things looked good for the North, but the South had not surrendered; he could have brayed for blood and vengeance, or boasted about ‘Mission Accompli
shed,’ but he did neither. If I recollect, he finished with these words: ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’ And a month later he was dead at the feet of the coward Booth.” Here Vern paused, rocked back for a moment, then reset his chin on his knuckles.

  “If you wanted to explain why Lincoln fought so hard to preserve the Union, the main reason of course is obvious. South Carolina and her Confederate sisters left the republic because they wished to continue the practice of owning slaves—wished to continue, as Lincoln put it in that inaugural, ‘wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.’ The Vermonters who marched off to fight in that war—a higher percentage than in any other state—did so singing ‘John Brown’s Body.’ They did so intending once and for all to end that odious practice. And no wonder. In 1777, while still an independent republic, Vermont became the first sovereign state on earth to constitutionally outlaw slavery; admitted to the Union in 1791, it was the first American state to do the same. In 1843, when Frederick Douglass toured our state, the legislature passed an ordinance forbidding sheriffs, bailiffs, jailers, constables, and citizens from detaining fugitives.

  “And it was not just brave words—our cemeteries each November still sprout thousands of flags by the graves of those who died in the cause. Thirty-five hundred Vermonters entered the Battle of the Wilderness in Orange County, Virginia, in May of 1864, and 1,234 never returned. And an aside: a few years ago Walmart tried to build a store in the middle of that battlefield.

  “But Dana—while slavery alone would be sufficient reason for Lincoln to have fought for Union, there was another cause as well. And it helps us understand the gulf between his time and our own. Remember the U.S. of Lincoln’s day—a population of thirty million, already ten times larger than at the Revolution, but ten times smaller than our total today. Eighty percent lived in the countryside, but most of the countryside was as yet uninhabited, at least by Europeans. There was a great national project at hand, the project of settling a continent, and it needed the power of a central state to make it happen—to build the railroads that linked the oceans, to divide the land the homesteaders would settle, even to build the land grant colleges that would make America the most democratically educated place on earth. It was a Vermonter, Justin Smith Morrill, who introduced that bill, and Lincoln who signed it.

  “I’m not saying that the spread West was all good. It came with many curses. Rutland’s John Deere invented the ‘plow that broke the plains’—and washed half the topsoil of a continent down the Mississippi. As the riches of the prairies were exposed, the Indians were routed and killed; the bison hunted near to extinction. It was not all good—but it was probably inevitable. The riches of those fields and forests and mines were going to be gotten, and the very bigness of the government made that project easier and fairer than it would otherwise have been. It’s no accident that the first road across the country was called the Lincoln Highway.

  “But now—now we have no such project. Lincoln’s dream of a continent united sea to sea has long since been realized. We needed to be big to fight the Nazis—but fighting terrorists is much easier if we’re quick and nimble. We needed to be big to send a rocket to the moon—but we’ve been there, done that. Now—maybe now we need to be small, or at least smaller. It’s not like we can or should go off on our own—this Internet thing seems to ensure we’ll always be in easy touch. But maybe we can trade recipes, not food. Maybe instead of oil in a giant ship from ten thousand miles away, we need sunlight on a small bank of panels on the roof. Maybe after a few hundred years of growing steadily bigger we’re now big enough—now that our adolescence is over and it’s time for our hormones to recede and bittersweet maturity to finally come. I want to leave you with something else Lincoln said, words that should be as famous as the Gettysburg Address. They came when he launched the Department of Agriculture, now a gross supplier of subsidy to corporate agribusiness. But that was not Lincoln’s vision. Instead, he said—and here, friends, I can’t pretend to remember, I must look at the notes I took yesterday, while I was waiting for our friend Trance to raise my mother’s flag. Lincoln said that cultivating even ‘the smallest quantity’ of ground bred freedom and independence. ‘Ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of oppression of any of its forms. Such community will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.’

  “We would like very much to be independent of kings, even kings with retractable roofs. And so we should think about going our own way—about standing on our own feet. We still have soil, and we still have people who know how to farm—and how to do a lot of other things as well. My guess is, Vermont on its own will be a lot closer to what Lincoln had in mind for a healthy country. And so, Dana, even once Vermont has won its independence, I hope you’ll join me in keeping the celebration of Mr. Lincoln’s birth—the twelfth of February approaches. And with it I note that the Thetford League of Women Voters will be holding a bean supper that night. Congratulations to the St. Johnsbury Academy girls for that double overtime win at Burr and Burton last night, and good luck to the Catamounts as they take to the ice against Boston University tonight. Perry, do we have a song for Lincoln?”

  “We have a song by Lincoln—Abbey Lincoln? It’s ‘Freedom Day,’ from the album We Insist that she recorded with Max Roach in 1960.” He pushed a button on his laptop, and the hard bop poured out through the speakers, her voice riding the notes. The two listened right through the song, Vern a little dazed. “That was harder than I meant to go,” he said. “It wasn’t really radio. It was more like a speech. But if we’re going to get them, this is the moment.” He straightened and stood and walked to the sofa against the window, where he lay down and closed his eyes.

  13

  The laundry room offered all the standard charms: slight mildew, lint fuzz, ancient linoleum. But there was a plastic lawn chair, and Trance sat in it, quietly folding a load of clothes and listening to the slightly muffled sounds coming from the basement room next door.

  “You may wonder why we’re spending the day indoors on folding chairs,” Sylvia was saying to her assembled class. “I’m aware it’s not as much fun as running the fire truck or sawing down trees or driving in the mud. We’ll be back outdoors next time, practicing how to haul your neighbor’s truck out of a ditch, or a snowbank if we ever get any snow again. But today is one of the most important lessons we have, and one of the hardest.”

  Trance could hear the squeak of chalk on board, and surmised that Sylvia had turned to the blackboard. “The first Tuesday in March—can anyone tell me why that’s an important day on the calendar?”

  “NCAA basketball?” ventured one man.

  “The Oscars?”

  “No. The first Tuesday in March is the traditional time for town meeting. In Vermont, government begins at home. People gather on uncomfortable metal folding chairs exactly like the ones you currently inhabit. They spend all day discussing whether or not to build a new soccer field, if it’s time to buy a new grader for the road, how much the town clerk should be paid. This is a democratic heritage that dates back to the Greeks, and as newcomers to Vermont, you will have a crucial role to play. Can anyone guess?”

  No one answered, and after a minute Sylvia said:

  “That is absolutely right. Your job is to stay silent. Not to say anything. After two or three years it is appropriate to congratulate the road superintendent for the good plowing work that winter. But if you want to fit in, your basic job is to shut up.

  “This will be hard wor
k,” she continued. “For instance, what if I propose a resolution to raise the tax rate for a year in order to buy a rebuilt pumper truck.”

  “That’s dumb,” came a voice almost immediately. “It would be cheaper to pass a bond and pay for it over two decades—you’d be paying in 2030 money.”

  “Maybe so. But you wouldn’t be paying it—your kids would,” Sylvia said. “You will notice a Yankee aversion to debt that you may find quaint. But when the economy tanked in 2009, not one Vermont bank went under. There weren’t thousands of homes built on spec. Let’s keep going. Now I’m going to propose a tax increase to put a new roof on the school, even though it’s only got twelve students in the incoming kindergarten class.”

  “That sounds like my new town,” said one man. “It’s ridiculous. It’s time to consolidate with the next town over.”

  “Maybe—it would be more efficient,” said Sylvia. “But you need to remember that the school is the center of a town. People went there, their kids went there. Sticking them on a bus is a hard decision. And small schools are good schools—if you have a private school somewhere, the classes are small. You guys can afford to pay more taxes—don’t complain. But by the same token, for some people an increase in the tax rate is tough news—it means they have to log off the twenty acres of land they own. So don’t be too quick to demand that the town build a swimming pool like the one you had back in Westchester. The point is, don’t be too quick to demand anything. These towns are all two hundred and forty years old, and they’ve lasted that long because people have figured out how to make them last. They’re good at this. Don’t be so sure that your version of reality is better because it’s newer. Watch for a few years and see if your town changes you before you change your town. Now we will practice for a while.”