Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Bob Stannard, a lobbyist and author.
I was driving home from Montpelier the morning after a late afternoon meeting followed by an evening of playing some great music at a blues jam at On the Rise Bakery in Richmond. The blues jam occurs the first Wednesday of each month. It was fortuitous that my meeting coincided with that day. You get lucky sometimes.
I left I-89 and came into Bethel. As travelers of this area of the state know, Route 107 is closed from Bethel down to the bridge near Stockbridge. However, I learned shortly after Irene hit and closed many of our roads that it was possible to still get there from here by going on River Road. In my nearly three decades of making this trip I had never been on this road; no need to really.
This road offers a nice, albeit different, perspective on this part of the trip. You can clearly see the damage done by a river out of control. Thousands of tons of silt have covered what were once low meadowlands. There are hundreds of cords of inaccessible firewood pushed up into great piles.
To get to this road you have to wait your turn. The railroad is dumping rocks onto the bank on the side of the road. Giant bucket loaders scoop up the rocks and load them into equally giant trucks, which in turn dump the rocks at their final resting place on the banks of the river. Over the past three months, many of the large rocks have had smaller chunks split off. As these chunks get driven over every day, they get crushed into small pieces; some apparently rather sharp.
It was one of these honed pieces that jumped up and slashed the outer wall of my brand new snow tire. I got about half a mile away from the construction site when a light came on telling me that my tire pressure was low. Impossible. I stopped, got out of the car and, sure enough, this tire was flat as a pancake. I checked my cell phone to call AAA. Zippo. “No service” was displayed where many bars were supposed to be.
What the heck. I hadn’t changed a flat in many years and notwithstanding the fact that I had another meeting back home, how long could this take? I unloaded all my music gear out of the trunk and piled it carefully on the road directly behind the car. I got out the spare, the jack and finally the manual, which hopefully would show me where the jack goes on this car.
Just then I sensed someone standing behind the car. I looked to see a man, maybe 40, with reddish, disheveled hair.
“Need a hand?” he asked as he started looking around my trunk. My first impression was that he was a little too friendly. Was that a whiff of alcohol that I smelled emanating from this guy? I now sensed another person behind me. I turned to my right and there stood a woman staring at me.
I was thinking, “This might not be good,” as the man proceeded to aggressively take over changing the tire. I kept a wary eye on the woman as the man said, “Looks like I might get a little wet here,” and laid down in the slush to set up the jack.
Together we raised the car, loosened the lug nuts and pulled the tire off. If there was going to be a time where these two would stick me up, this would be it. I recall the feeling of being very alert trying to prepare myself to hear the words, “Kindly give me your wallet.” That is if they felt like using the word, “kindly”; not that they were obligated to do so.
In what appeared to be record time we removed the sliced tire and installed the spare doughnut tire. “Can I give you a few bucks for helping me out here?” I asked.
“Oh no,” they both replied nearly in unison.
“We’ve helped about a dozen people change flats on this road since the construction began,” the woman said. “We’ve told the town that they’ve got to do something about all the rocks in the road, but I guess there’s not much they can do, really.”
“So you guys don’t want any money or anything?”
“No, we live just down the road and are happy to help out.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“For every one of you there are thousands of people who would never have stopped. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I guess, but that wouldn’t be right.”
“You do know that you guys are angels.”
“Naw, we ain’t no angels.” Maybe they really were going to mug me after all. We’re just Vermonters.”
If you ever wonder what it is that separates this state from the rest of the country you need only to break down in the middle of nowhere, with no phone reception, and if you’re lucky, a Vermonter will come along to answer that question for you.
I wish you all a Happy New Year.
