By the Seat of My Pants

by Lonely Planet

  ‘Billboards!’ Bill shouted, beginning his two-day assault of Vermont-based information. ‘This is the only state in the US that has banned billboard advertising on highways.’

  It was true – I really hadn’t seen a lot of towering, hideous signage. No golden arches peeking like sneaky corporate eyebrows over tree lines; no red Texaco stars lighting the late-afternoon skies; just all this green. ‘It’s very beautiful’, I said.

  Uncle Bill told me that I hadn’t seen anything yet.

  A while later, once we’d ‘exited’ the freeway (to put it in American motoring parlance), we drove through the minuscule township of Guilford, which consisted of a general store selling more varieties of home-made root beer than I’ve ever seen in my life, and a parking lot where they hold town meetings (and possibly Friday-night rumbles). After another few miles along a winding dirt track we came to Bill’s house, which he shares with his girlfriend, Carol, an editor. They’re very rural, Bill and Carol. They like being in the middle of nowhere, and they’ve chosen well.

  As soon as I climbed out of the car I was greeted by a very large dog of no particular breed. Ordinarily I don’t mind a canine welcome, but this particular fella was foaming at the mouth. Quite a lot. ‘This dog’s foaming at the mouth, Bill’, I reported from the roof of the car. ‘Quite a lot. Am I allowed to see that?’ Bill’s almost fifty, but more fit (and rural) than I am, so he wrestled the mutt to the ground and yelled at me to find some pliers. ‘You go’, I told Carol, unable to leave my position. (It was a terrific view from up there – trees and mountains, men and dogs.) Carol returned from the garage a few moments later and handed a pair of pliers to Bill, shaking her head wearily up at me. ‘You mind taking the luggage inside?’ I asked her. ‘I’ll be down in a minute. Once the dog dentistry’s done.’

  ‘It’s not dentistry’, Bill corrected me, his clenched fist halfway down the dog’s throat. ‘Rocky’s got a mouth full of pine needles.’

  ‘Damn trees’, I muttered. ‘Only good for Christmas.’

  ‘Porcupine needles.’

  ‘Oh.’ I realised then that there was a great deal I didn’t know about life in the country. Then either Rocky or Bill let out a little yelp. Or maybe it was me – I might have seen a spider.

  After Carol unpacked my bags, I was coaxed down from the car and the three of us took a small wander around the large property which has been occupied since about 1770. Ethan Allen even passed through this very spot in 1789, I was informed. ‘Ethan who?’ I made the mistake of asking. Fifteen minutes later I realised that there was also a great deal I didn’t know about American Revolutionary War militiamen. ‘What about Ben and/or Jerry?’ I enquired, not wanting to seem completely ignorant of Vermont’s favourite sons. ‘Did they ever pass through on a dangerous ice-cream run?’

  Adjacent to the house was a wild maze made from small, dense trees. It was cool and dark in the maze, and as we stumbled about pretending to be lost, I tried to imagine other children (or other thirty-four-year-olds) from centuries before treading these same twisting paths. I cast my eyes to the loamy ground, hoping to find an artefact left behind by some long-gone kid – an ivory button, a slingshot maybe, or a sack of priceless marbles. To my surprise I soon found a coin and, too excited over my discovery to bother with reaching the centre of the maze, I turned and tried to retrace my steps back to the house, about six metres away.

  Forty-five minutes later I reached the kitchen and immediately plunged the dirt-encrusted coin into a dissolving solution (white vinegar) and waited for its secrets to be revealed. Could it be a rare Civil War-era silver dollar? I wondered. The exclusive and elusive twenty-dollar coin issued between WWI and WWII? Or could it be an American penny from around the time of the Gulf War? Yes, it turned out, it could.

  The next day we took a drive. Bill was behind the wheel, while Carol, wearing a pair of dark, square sunglasses that covered most of her face, navigated. I sat in the back, awaiting visual instructions from Bill. It was a perfect day. Bright sunshine shot through the dense forests of balsam, fir and maple. Vermont’s incredible lushness, Bill explained, comes from a combination of warmth and water, subtropical summers and winters that regularly reach twenty degrees below.

  Our first stop was Newfane, a small and, I thought, altogether too pretty town of fifteen hundred mostly older people. In the middle of Newfane Common, a gently sloping square of green flanked by a Congregational church and the Union Hall, was the Windham County courthouse, a large, spired building made, like just about every other building in rural Vermont, of white clapboard. Hoping to stumble upon a Scopes Monkey Trial-type situation, we took a look inside and met the bailiff, a pleasant-seeming fellow. ‘Where you folks from?’ he asked. (I assumed that the question was not directed at Bill and Carol because everybody in Vermont knows each other.)

  ‘I’m Australian, but I live in Holland.’

  His face lit up. ‘Oh really? My daughter was there just last week.’ Yeah, I thought, rolling my eyes, I can just imagine. Typical college kid summer vacation – come over to Amsterdam and smoke pot all day for a week. What a loser! ‘Part of a tour she was on. She just won a Nobel Peace Prize’, he concluded with a modest, fatherly smile.

  ‘Oh, that’s your daughter!’ Carol said. The bailiff’s daughter, Jodie Williams, had recently collected the prize (Nobel) for her work in landmine clearance. Moments later, as I stood next to him for a photograph, I couldn’t help wondering whether, if the bailiff was my father, I might have made more of myself than… me.

  Behind the courthouse was a restaurant/inn known as the Newfane Four Column Inn (because it’s in Newfane and has four wooden columns on the porch). Mick Jagger held his fortieth birthday here, and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman liked to come here to ‘get away from it all’ – ‘it’ being those things the residents of Newfane probably wish were just a small part of their own lives. The rest of the town consisted of old clapboard houses which all looked the same. In fact, I figured the only way the Newfanians could tell which was their own particular white clapboard home was by painting the window trim different colours, which ranged from light green to dark green.

  ‘Back in the late nineteenth century about one house in three had somebody hang themselves in it’, Bill reported loudly.

  From Newfane we drove along more small, hilly roads flanked by apple orchards and maple trees sprouting syrup tubes to another tiny town named Dummerston. There’s not much to say about Dummerston apart from the fact that it’s named Dummerston. And that the buildings are made of white clapboard, which, around here, is pronounced ‘clabberd’.

  ‘Have I seen anything yet?’ I asked Bill.

  ‘Look at that house’, Bill ordered, pointing left. ‘Beautiful house and barn there in a lovely setting.’ The barn was red. There was a rusted old tractor next to it. ‘Gorgeous old stone walls lining this road’, he continued. ‘Beautiful. Built – by hand – in the early eighteenth century.’ They were nice, too – the first few miles of them, anyway.

  We stopped for lunch at a genuine roadside barbecue pit owned and operated by a friend of Bill and Carol’s (and, I assumed, the rest of Vermont) named Jon Julian. There was rich blue smoke and Stevie Ray Vaughan pouring from the smoker shack out back. It smelt (and sounded) good. ‘Shouldn’t we be in Texas to be eating this kind of food?’ I asked.

  ‘If all you’ve ever had is Texas barbecue, then you ain’t tasted nuthin’ yet’, Bill insisted.

  I had a double-pulled pork sandwich with a side of coleslaw and beans, both of which also contained quite a bit of pork, possibly pulled. I don’t know exactly what the ‘pulled’ element in pork is, but I liked it a lot. It ruined me for regular pork. The view from the terrace where we ate was of a lunatic asylum about a mile away in Brattleboro. The smell of barbecued smoked meat drifting across the valley probably drove all those poor bastards crazy with culinary lust.

  After the pork festival we were off to Putney, right on the New Hampshire border. On the way we passed more
houses (white; clapboard), trees (green) and stone walls (old). With the possible exception of Santa Cruz, California, Putney is the New Age hippie capital of the United States. Carol explained that according to a popular joke, if there’s a support group for any kind of dysfunctionality, it’s being held somewhere in Putney on Thursday nights. It didn’t take long for me to believe it. Sitting on the grass outside a bookstore specialising in mysticality was a group of three women, all wearing loose, comfortable, purple clothing. I overheard one of the wymyn telling her friends that she was home-schooling her girls today. ‘Their philosophy doesn’t really suit being enclosed by four walls every day’, she said slowly. While my companions ate non-Ben & Jerry ice cream, I ventured inside the bookstore and didn’t buy anything about channelling, crystals, shamanism, dreams or reincarnation. I asked if they carried Popular Mechanics and got a dirty look. Back outside, in what passes for the real world, I saw the young, home-schooled philosophers – a four-year-old sitting in a sandpit banging her head against her seven-year-old sister’s toy bucket. I remembered that I used to rather enjoy assaulting plastic with my forehead at that age, too. But I went to a state school, so presumably my head-banging had no deeper meaning.

  Three or four miles outside Putney we stopped at the semi-famous Putney School, founded in 1935 by radical thinker Carmelita Hinton. Set in five hundred rolling green (naturally) acres of field and forests, the school housed some two hundred students whose parents were paying $26,000 per year to send them there. Parents like Roy Liechtenstein, Jonathan Schell, William Shawn and at least one member of the Grateful Dead. Probably Ben and/or Jerry, too, but Bill refused to confirm or deny this. For their twenty-six large, the children of America’s Bo-Ho elite were almost guaranteed entrance to an Ivy League college; however, while attending the Putney School they had to do pretty much everything except teach themselves. They grew their own organic (naturally) vegetables, tended to the pigs and chickens and cows in the huge red (naturally) barn, baked sixty loaves of bread every day and cooked their own meals. (When Bill reported that about ten per cent of the students were vegans, I couldn’t help but think that there would probably be a lot of pizza delivery orders placed on nights when the vegans were on kitchen detail, cooking up sand-and-wood casseroles for their colleagues.) The students also ran a blacksmithery and a literary magazine as well as indulging in plain old scholastic activities such as establishing madrigal societies, playing in hot jazz combos and building their own dormitories. ‘These kids developed their own missile defence system yet?’ I chuckled, to nobody’s amusement.

  As a bell rang and the students left their classrooms, I expected to meet some miniature genius in a bow tie and straw hat who would bow and call me ‘Sir’. Maybe toss off a wry Shavian icebreaker. And the more I thought about this encounter, the more I looked forward to it. I like being called ‘Sir’. (Only later did I learn that students and teachers at Putney were on a first-name basis, an idea which has always given me the creeps, preferring as I did to address my teachers as ‘your highness’ and to be addressed by them as ‘you there’.) Bill led us around like he owned the place or was an alumnus (neither of which was the case). His magisterial sense of entitlement came from the fact that he was friends with the dean of students. ‘So who don’t you know in Vermont?’ I asked.

  ‘Ben or Jerry’, he replied. ‘I know one of them, but I can never remember which one.’ When we finally did come upon a group of students, there was not a single bow tie or straw boater amongst the lot. They weren’t required to wear any kind of uniform – apart, it seemed, from spectacles and an unflattering haircut. What the group was replete with, however, were dazzling, confident, mature smiles and greetings to us strangers. Back in my high-school days, if my friends and I saw someone coming, we ran away. (Sure it was because we were usually smoking, but still.) These were very self-contained kids who made me feel extremely inadequate, despite their almost Stepford Wife-like demeanour. I was therefore rather pleased to find out later that there were a few expulsions every year, for such infractions as setting fire to things, drug and alcohol abuse and generally being an idiot. Also, the students weren’t allowed to watch TV, whether they’d done anything wrong or not. To me this bordered on cruel and unusual punishment, but I figured these youngsters probably didn’t miss it at all. One boy I chatted with told me, ‘I need to think. I can’t just read and spew back information. I need to call upon everything that I know, and maybe a little bit that I don’t, and try to put together what I think is the truth.’ I thanked him for his time and ran away, smoking and thinking about various episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard.

  As we left, passing a sports field full of strong, bright, healthy youngsters playing lacrosse, I couldn’t help wishing that I’d attended Putney School. Perhaps if I had, I might have made something more of my life than… this.

  Ten minutes after I arrived back in New York City the following day, I realised how much I’d enjoyed my brief time in Vermont and decided that I would definitely return the following October. When the leaves turn, everything explodes into beautiful burnt orange (except the houses, which remain white). I called Bill to tell him the news. ‘You’ve never been to Vermont in the fall?’ he spluttered. ‘Well, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!’

  NO FOOD, NO REST, NO…

  PICO IYER

  Pico Iyer is the author of several books of ill-starred travel, from Video Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk to The Global Soul and his most recent work, Sun After Dark. He tries not to travel with his friend Louis, but somehow they have ended up in Cambodia, Haiti, Morocco, Burma, Turkey and far too many other places (not least the Oakland Coliseum) together. On their most recent trip, to Bolivia, they had a car crash at 3500 metres that left one of them gibbering in nonexistent Spanish and the other training furious glances at their errant driver.

  I got off the plane in Addis Ababa and there, as in so many airports so often in the past, was my school friend Louis, extending a shaky hand. ‘This place is pure magic’, he assured me. ‘We can go around the whole country with Ethiopian Airlines – the best carrier on the continent – for not much more than a hundred dollars. The plane stops at five major points of interest, and is perfectly suited to people on their first trip here, with limited means.

  ‘The only other option’, he continued – he was always shrewd in getting to places one day before I did, and so installing himself as boss, with the unquestioned upper hand – ‘is to rent a car. This isn’t very advisable because there are more car crashes than cars in Ethiopia. Also, they don’t have much in the way of roads. The car costs $240 a day, and takes at least ten days to make the circuit.’

  ‘Excellent’, I said.

  ‘It is’, he said. ‘The car’s coming for us in two days.’

  Travelling with Louis was always a bittersweet experience. The bitterness came at the time, the sweetness in happy retrospect. We’d studied together as teenagers, in a dusty classroom in southern England where we’d played out the whole game of cards from Pope’s Rape of the Lock and been treated to luscious evocations of Antony and Cleopatra’s Egypt by an ambiguous teacher. ‘The bhaji she sat upon’– an inspired transcription of Shakespeare’s jewelled ‘barge she sat upon’ monologue, to capture an England now filled with Indian restaurants – was one of Louis’ best party tricks.

  Nonetheless, the dilapidated hotel in Paris (Louis walking down the corridor in pyjamas, eliciting tea and sympathy from the staff), the rancid place in Marrakesh (across from the nicest hotel in Africa, where we pretended to be staying), the snowstorm in rural Turkey (the kind locals offering us a daily array of kofta, kofta or meatballs) – none of these experiences had prepared me for this. I’d just flown across the Atlantic from New York on Ethiopian Airlines, and was more than ready to sign up for its frequent-flier programme and ensure free trips to the walled city of Harar for life. The beauty of being on holiday is taking to the air.

  ‘The first point of business’, Louis continued, �
��is to fix up a visa for Eritrea.’ This was arguably worse news. I’d come all this way in order to see Ethiopia, which was just concluding a shaky peace with neighbouring Eritrea, a country it had been fighting for years. One fruit of this peace was that visas were now available for Eritrea; an added advantage, as I saw it, was that there would be even fewer other visitors to bother us in Ethiopia. Louis, however, had met a man who promised to smooth our way into the Eritrea of his dreams.

  It was the day after Christmas, and the streets of Addis Ababa slumbered in a pure blue calm. The weather was as perfect as advertised, and eleven days from now the rending celebrations that mark Christmas in Ethiopia would represent the highlight of the ceremonial year. Few other travellers were in evidence, but the locals were surely delighted to meet a distinguished investment banker (my friend) who was celebrating the chance to pay $2400 for a trip that could be made in greater comfort and with more ease for $240.

  ‘He said that we should just go to his house for coffee, and he’d fix up a visa.’

  At this point our benefactor appeared: a shifty man, in clothes almost as shabby as my own, whose eyes were red, though not with tears. ‘My friend’, he said, extending his hand towards me. ‘Please come.’

  His home was appointed with a young woman in very short shorts who was brewing coffee in an atavistic fashion. Our host pointed out her gestures with some delight, and talk passed to Eritrea. As the diplomatic chitchat went on, more young women in very short shorts drifted in and out of the room. Louis looked quite delighted to meet so informal a member of the diplomatic corps.

  We were served the ceremonial coffee, and felt many eyes upon us.

  ‘The visa to Eritrea…’ Louis prompted.

  ‘For that, you must go to the embassy’, our host averred. Women continued to come and go, talking, as Louis shrewdly noted, of something other than Michelangelo.