Moose, photo from stock.xchng
If your introduction to our state was one of its many quintessential and often baffling institutions, you were probably getting mixed messages — come hither, get lost! Vermonters by choice, be it old or new, from “Shlot” (Charlotte) to Callous (Calais) to “Snallbans” (St. Albans) have all at some time gone Birkenstock to Birkenstock with an array of quaint customs, creatures, topographical features, practices, or organizations that are uniquely Vermont and definitely eccentric.
For example, as a former flatlander, if you thought that “deer camp” was where The Buck-Doe family sent Bambi on a sleep-away to learn the manly arts of archery and gun safety, you’d be wrong. Or perhaps “game suppers” sounded like weekly family dinners where the cook was inept and the main course was mystery meat with a chaser of Pepto. And “Ice-Out,” you speculated, would’ve got you a martini straight-up at that quaint watering hole Joe’s Pond.
Now Vermont institutions — the real thing, not the flights of fantasy–are easily categorized. You have your seasons — mud, moose-rutting and hunting; your suppers (game, chicken pie and church); your creatures (Champ, catamounts and cluster flies); and your unique topographical features — gorges, gores (just what is a gore and who the heck was Buell?), ponds (Ticklenaked and Joe’s), and your rocks, both plain and fancy (Barre granite and Proctor marble). In Vermont, all God’s children got rocks!
Which reminds us of the apocryphal story about the farmer in his field and the lost tourist who stops to get directions.
“What are you doing?” the tourist asks, unable to contain his curiosity about the natives.
“Picking up rocks,” replies the farmer.
Where’d they all come from?” asks the stranger.
“Glacier!” offers the farmer.
“And where’s the glacier now?” counters the tourist.
“Gone back for more rocks.”
In the interest of communal digging, Vtdigger.org invites you to unearth your tales of first encounters of the Vermont kind, the kind that may’ve left you feeling like the Groucho Marx song: “Hello, I must be going.”
Barbara Ann Curcio of Charlotte is a former reporter and columnist for The Washington Post.
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Encounters of the Vermont kind . . . Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote a book in 1932, Tourist Accommodated. It’s a good read for all you flatlanders. Many visitors that stay long enough to send kids to school start to consider themselves Vermonters after 15-20 hard winters but real Vermonters know it ain’t so. Just because a cat has kittens in the oven it doesn’t make them biscuits. My great grandfather always welcomed visitors from away and he passed that attitude along to the rest of the family. My parents left Vermont for Maine long before I was born. I moved here as a Mainer in 1972 looking for a job. I remember meeting with the school board in Cabot and being asked several questions about my character and my teaching skills. My hair was long as was my beard. I wore orange, black and yellow stripped bell bottom pants and a fancy gold blazer. I can’t forget to mention the purple Converse sneakers. The chairman of the board had one final question. “Why did you leave Maine?” I really didn’t know why and danced around the question not to his satisfaction. His response was, “You should’a stayed there.” Nothing more was said and I didn’t get the job. My first encounters taught me to be to the point and spare any long winded meaningless dribble.
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You got me thinking about that flatlander thing. I should first say I haven’t met a single Vermonter in person who talks that way, but read it all the time in the news and on blogs.
I don’t know that I ever felt a first encounter with Vermont, though I am a New Yorker who now owns property in Vermont. See, my family traveled to NY after generations in VT, from Quebec, and my parents traveled back and forth since I was born, via Washington County.
In upstate eastern NY and western VT, there is really hardly a border of any kind.
If we’re doing “flatlander”, I’ll say “My mountains are bigger than your mountains.” But I don’t do flatlander either.