Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.

[W]hat have any of us here in Central Vermont got to do with the people of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, 1,802 miles to the west of us, whose people have been struggling for months, in all kinds of weather, to protect the source of their drinking water from the Dakota Access Pipeline that has been inexorably burrowing its way across their ancestral lands, and is stopped now, critically, at the river that supplies their water?

A lot.

It’s a quiet fact that TD Bank (used to stand for “Toronto Dominion”) that occupies the handsome granite-and-brick building that stands at the corner of State and Main streets, in our own modest little city of Montpelier, is a major investor in the Dakota Access Pipeline. The small-townish look of the Montpelier branch of the T.D Bank belies the fact that it’s a branch of the 10th largest bank in the U.S., with assets of a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Banks will be banks. With a zeal for investment that comes naturally to such an entity, the overall TD Bank corporation has invested $365 million of its quarter-trillion-dollar worth in the Dakota Access Pipeline … seemingly without a thought for how that affects the native people of that portion of North Dakota, through whose lands and under whose drinking water the oil pipeline is mapped to run.

Facts like these have been in the minds of people across America for many months, as we have watched and read about the daily harrying by police of protesters at the Standing Rock construction site, and saw blood on the fangs of at least one police dog, and heard of the malicious use of water cannons directed against protesters, in literally freezing weather.

What to do about all that? What to do? Is there anything I’m called on to do, myself, personally, this writer, the one-dot person that I am in Vermont?

Uneasy in my own mind about these questions, I looked up last week the weather forecast for Standing Rock, North Dakota, for the coming week, and saw that, starting on Tuesday, the temperature there would vary between the single digits above and below zero. While here, close by in Montpelier, the high 20s and low 30s would prevail. Not balmy, as some of us discovered on the day of our protest, but not fierce, either, like the weather in North Dakota.

That weather forecast for North Dakota registered somewhere in my old bones, which nowadays compel me to keep clear of the deep cold, and it got me going. I discussed with my wife, and then, on the internet, with friends, the idea of joining the local protest I had caught wind of, against the Montpelier branch of the great TD Bank conglomerate that, business as usual, was helping to finance the construction of the soulless Dakota Access Pipeline. We couldn’t appear ourselves at the Standing Rock grounds, my wife and I, although thousands from across the country have traveled there to do just that, but we could tug at a nearby strand of the great web of finance woven by TD in its corporate majesty, by making our feelings known at the local TD branch, right there — right here! — at the corner of State and Main.

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Now I’ve gone and used most of the space I can expect to be allowed, and I’m not halfway to the end of my tale.

So: briefly now.

First thing Monday morning, to prepare for the demonstration, we more than 200 prospective protesters crammed — cheerfully crammed — ourselves into the big Parish Room of the Christ Church, our initial gathering place, up the block from the TD Bank. There was standing room only within the first quarter of an hour as more and more people jammed the entrances to the room and slowly filtered inside. I think I saw wonder and gladness on the faces of people, as we took in how many we were.

A second fine experience as the morning began was to see and hear what I can only call a quiet worthiness in the faces and words of the protest’s half-dozen main organizers, who stood up to speak to us briefly before we left for the street about what might lie ahead. All of them were young people, on this and that near side of 30, who had worked together selflessly, planning the demonstration with what must have been extraordinary care.

Multiply those central six in that room that Monday morning by a few million other such young people across America, I thought, and there, in that fraction of ourselves, lies America’s hope for the near years to come. The assorted 200 that we were, the rest of us — grayheads and toddlers and the mass of others in between — could feel we were being led and guided by men and women of a certain steady virtue. Just so.

My own party, numbering four, as we waited for word to start out for the site of the demonstration, were an unaverage bunch. I’m 92, hale and nimble, but awfully deaf. My wife, younger than me, is lame. Our two companions were a blind man, a few years younger than me, and his daughter, who is also blind. Father and daughter were accompanied by their personal guide dogs.

Such as we were, we four were exceptions in the crowd, outliers. I mention our disabilities for the novelty and variety of it, and for identification.

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Snow was falling and slush had formed on the ground when, around 10 a.m., with police permission, we walked (not “marched”) six or eight roughly abreast, the short distance down broad State Street, from Christ Church to the corner of Main Street and proceeded to cram ourselves thickly, the 200 of us, against the walls of the bank, and, crucially, blocking the bank’s main entrance, as well. No through-the-front-door business would be transacted on that day. And we knew that the bank’s shame at Standing Rock would be published abroad, because of what we were doing.

Such old bones as there were in my party of four got cold, then damned cold, as time passed and we stood our 18 inches of ground and listened to speeches and witnessed a solemn ritual, centering on a peace pipe, performed by a Dakota Sioux woman. We pitied our two dogs standing stock-still and barefoot in the slush.

So we stayed only a couple of hours in our places on the street with the others, and then left quietly, the four of us, with visions of hot soup lively in my mind, for one. Leaving the ground to younger people who could take the cold better than we could.

Of the number who held their ground till bank closing time, in the late afternoon, eight were arrested for refusing to leave the bank vestibule.

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P.S. Donald Trump, pay heed. No one knows what you crazily have in mind for the country, in the four years to come. But know yourself that if and when you rile us up, as I think you’re bound to do, there are plenty of people around here and around the country who will come out and speak their minds, as the 200 of us just did in Montpelier.

That coming out in the “public square” will be a kind of citizen’s tax we will have to levy on ourselves, to keep the country on a more even keel than you’re likely to allow.