Welcome to Vermont, Please Don’t Move Here
Hey! Yeah, long time, no see, no talk, no digital contact whatsoever. Nice of you to visit ye olde Burlington. For real though, this place hit its economic peak right around the War of 1812. What? Oh, yeah, no, those are the Adirondacks. Yeah, sure, they’re beautiful. What? You can totally get used to the mountains. You ever listened to one song you love for a long time on repeat? How long does it take you to get sick of it? That’s what happens to the mountains.
How long have I been in Vermont? Well, I mean, which stint? It’s only been half a year since I moved back up here, but, buddy, I’m Vermonter born and bred, so if you have a time machine set the dial to 1990 to 2009 and I’m right here. I mean, not here here, not Burlington, but down south, near Windsor. I’m assuming your time machine would also be a teleporter. How could it not, you know, with the movement of the Earth and the solar system and our galaxy through the universe, you’d have to find some way of locating “place” independent of the dimension of time and — wait, turn back, here’s that coffee shop I mentioned. Do you want something? I want something. They make an iced-coffee shake here with an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s in it.
I know, reclaimed wood floorboards, Christmas lights all over, bespoke as fuck, I know. The brick walls have little bits of paper in the grout with written notes on them, yeah. Real cutesy stuff most of the time, though once I pulled one out that told me to “go do something with your fucking life”. And I thought, aren’t I doing something? Isn’t this doing something? I was reading a book about institutional racism at this coffee shop that night, one of those books that makes you think that your reading it means doing something when really it’s just doing something for you and maybe, if you can think on your feet, something for those around you. But the world? I guess I’m part of the world. Technically. I wonder about that sometimes.
Yeah, I dunno why I moved back. No, scratch that, I know: I’m poor. I went looking for good premedical career-changer programs and this one gave me a discount so that I’d only have to double my total educational loans instead of multiply them by ten. Still, here I am again, back in the wilderness. The most populated part of the wilderness, at least. Burlington is Vermont’s largest city at 43,000, and most diverse at only 89% white. And as much as this place offers, and as much as people here feel like it’s the shit, I don’t think I want to live here.
Maybe this is a better conversation to be had with alcohol. My place? Southside, by the old textile factories. They’re all restaurants, bars, and studios now. Oh, and one tech startup.
Yeah, I noticed that it was almost entirely young families in there, too. Winter vacation, right? But I feel like that’s sort of the purpose of this place. It’s where well-off families go for a really pretty shelter if they can afford it. It’s the ultimate suburb. No, think about it! Some people call Vermont part of the Boston metropolitan area with a straight face.
So it makes this strange population dynamic here where there’s the very young college students, then there’s the youngish families, then that’s pretty much it. This is a secure, secluded place for mostly-white, mostly-rich people to not have to worry about things outside Vermont so they can focus on the important stuff. Like getting their kids through school. Or being the kid, getting through school. And outdoor activities. And local breweries.
Still, isn’t that a little fucked up? Like, it’s a hollow education you get here, because you’re not going to become an adult in this dreamworld. You’re most likely going to do that in a city in the rest of the US. The rest of the US isn’t Vermont. It isn’t as wealthy, or as decently-governed, or as forested, or as white as Vermont. So what can you learn or teach about how to be a part of society when you’re so far removed from it? Yeah, hold on, let me get the door. Could you actually — yeah, we keep the alcohol cooler on the porch. Cold enough this time of year. Lock combination’s 34–12–16.
You’re right, those are places in life I’m not at. I can’t rightly judge them. I’m smackdab in my twenties, a failed writer with a history degree wanting to do something solid, something direct, something helping other people face-to-face with their problems while applying those big-idea history-major concepts to that directness, like feminism, like activism, like, I dunno, anticapitalism. I feel like I was born into a shitton of privilege up here and that I need to use it to help in places that desperately need it instead of going all Hobbit in my hometown. I know it’s weird to try to delineate degrees of suffering, but I don’t think Vermont’s high up on the list of hurting places, even within our country. In Vermont life’s idyllic. And that’s the problem.
It’s not that you’re not welcome here. If you have the money, career stability, and willingness to accept the holy trinity of ski resorts, craft beers, and pet worship as your day-to-day then yeah, sure, you’re in if you want. It’s just, you know, isn’t there someplace besides this bubbled-off, white-flight paradise in need of the help we can give the world?
I dunno. Could you get me a beer? No, no, let’s try the maple stout, the local brew. When in Rome.
So, how are you?
