Editor’s note: This story is by Marialisa Calta, a freelance writer living in Calais. In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
“Years ago, when four-wheel drive trucks had manual locking hubs … someone asked me, ‘What are you looking for in a woman?’ and I said, ‘I’m just looking for a woman who will get out and lock the hub on her side.’”
– a truck owner from Middlesex
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“There are these three wise men … and they go and they follow the star … And they are carrying gold, Frankenstein and myrrh. Precious gifts … gifts that cost really really really much money.”
— a 6-year-old from Moretown, retelling the Christmas story
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“She did make it up there to see me. She was drunk. But you gotta love her, it’s the thought that counts,”
— a parolee, then living in Barre, talking about a visit his mother made to see him in jail
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[T]hese are some of the voices of Vermont. Voices that called out, for one reason or another, to Erica Heilman, who captured them and makes them available in a podcast – a digital audio file available online – called Rumble Strip Vermont. Like a rumble strip in a road, the name suggests that listeners slow down. And pay attention.
On RumbleStripVermont.com, Heilman has posted audio files that last from several minutes to more than an hour. Most of them involve Vermont and Vermonters; she’s done pieces on Barre’s Thunder Road Speedbowl, on taxidermists, defense attorneys, parenting, dementia, wood heat, waitresses. There are old voices and young, voices graveled by smoke, or tinged with exhaustion or sadness, or lilting with laughter or joy.
Some of the voices are ones you might recognize: organic farmer Alan LePage of Barre, singer-songwriter Miriam Bernardo of Montpelier, public defender Kelly Green of Randolph, author and activist Marc Estrin of Burlington. “Someone will say, ‘Oh, you should interview my mother,’ and I do, and it’s phenomenal,” Heilman says.
She is 45, slim with an angular face and a wealth of dark hair. Her voice is classic public radio: soothing, unemotional, well modulated, and unaccented, but in casual conversation certain expressions – “jeez’m crow” and “friggin” among them – creep in, giving away her Vermont roots (she was born in central Vermont and raised in Charlotte). She and her son, Henry, 11, make their home in East Calais, in a blue ranch house on a dirt road perched on the side of a steep hill.
The road from Charlotte to Calais was replete with detours. College took her to the University of Michigan where she majored in musical theater. “It did not suit me,” she says wryly. “I was a terrible tap dancer.” Yet, after graduating, she moved to Chicago, to help found a drama company called the Cook County Theater Department. She recalls a “deeply experimental” version of “Oklahoma.” “There was a leather mini-dress involved.”
Her sensibilities began to shift. “It would be 6 p.m. and time to go to the theater, and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour would be on, and I would have to miss it,” she recalls. “And I just hated missing it.”
Fast-forward a couple of years, to a brief stint back in Vermont milking cows and working enough other odd jobs to save enough money to travel and work more odd jobs in places around the world. Heilman returned to the States, and, through a friend, scored a job as a “desk assistant” at none other than the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.
The job cemented an outlook developed during her travels, when she worked recording oral histories for a nonprofit in South Africa. It was there she learned, among other things, that lots of stories have no neat beginning or tidy endings. “I was young, and I thought that stories should open out into a greater meaning,” she says. The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, she says, reinforced the notion that information cannot always be neatly wrapped up. The producers “actually wanted viewers to be more confused after watching than they would when they tuned in,” she says.
Fast-forward again: The MacNeil stint has ended, and Heilman is still working in television, helping to produce programming for PBS station WNET, for HBO and ABC News. She is in New York and becoming, she fears, “a caricature of myself.”
“New York requires money and intensity and competitiveness,” she says. “I found that my less savory habits were becoming hardened.” Leaving was “like leaving a heroin addiction,” but in 2003, she did. Pregnant with her son, Henry (Henry’s dad is still a good friend and an involved father) she returned to Vermont, where she nurtures a love-hate relationship with the state.
“The isolation can get to me. The color palette” – she is sitting in her living room, and shrugs, gesturing out the window, to a gray hillside opposite, barely visible through a veil of blowing snow. “There’s a darkness here.” But, she adds, “The people, the landscape, the sounds; Vermont makes sense to me on a cellular level.”
Heilman’s path to Rumble Strip and passion for recording Vermonters’ view of life began when she teamed up with the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury recording the experience of survivors of the Battle of the Bulge, a story that earned widespread national airtime. That led to more radio pieces, and an introduction to producer Larry Massett, a veteran of “All Things Considered,” “Hearing Voices,” and other public radio programs, whom she describes as a mentor.
“Erica is interested in the kind of radio that interests me,” Massett said by phone from his home outside of Washington, D.C. “It’s carefully done, with a lot of attention to detail – to sound, to rhythm, to tone. Usually, radio people don’t have the time for that.” And, he added, Heilman is open and candid and gets her subjects to be the same. “She gets great tape,” he said.
About a year and a half ago, Heilman collected her pieces – and a few of Massett’s – and posted them online, and Rumble Strip Vermont was born. She has posted about 40 pieces to date, working on them in her spare time out of a cluttered home office, or from her kitchen table. Her “sound studio,” where she records introductions, is her closet.
Over time, the podcasts have been streamed or downloaded more than 30,000 times.
While stories are easy to find, money is not. She recently received a grant from WGDR/Goddard College and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but to pay the bills, she works as a private investigator (the subject of one of her podcasts), a job which she thinks requires the same skill-set: “Ask lots of questions. Figure out what happened. Try to get a glimpse at why.”
In the meantime, she continues with Rumble Strip. It gives her, she says, “an excuse to hear people from the inside out. To hear what confounds them, frightens them, gives them joy. To find out what matters to them.” She is painting an audio portrait of a state dotted “not just with covered bridges but with Dollar Stores.”
“I’m trying to figure out how to live,” she says. “I want to know what other people know. Every person is an expert and has something I need to know.” She pauses. “It’s like I’m getting ready for some question that I’m going to need an answer to, and I’m trying to get prepared.”
Note: The word “podcast” – a word which drives Heilman crazy, because so many people don’t seem to know what it is – refers to a digital audio file, available for instant listening or downloading on a computer, smart phone, tablet or other mobile device.
