Editor’s note: This commentary is by Leo Parini, a recent University of Vermont graduate who works in the film industry and resides in Burlington.
As a native Vermonter and recent UVM graduate, I was excited to leave my home state and venture through the American West with my girlfriend. We drove across the country to work at various film festivals and lived in places like Bozeman, Montana, and Salt Lake City. We’d often explore the nearby national parks like Moab and Yellowstone. If I had grown up in any other region, the sheer awesomeness of the terrain might have prompted a permanent move to the region, but Vermont’s gentle green mountains and charming towns have always had a gravitational pull on me.
It was too soon for us to move back home, however, and we had career opportunities in NYC. I was never thrilled by the idea of moving to Manhattan, and it turns out you should trust your instincts: The city turned me into a crabby misanthrope and provoked an existential crisis that left me spread out on our bed listening to Gregorian chants in an attempt to calm down.
For relief, I found myself coming home to Vermont so frequently that I could have deluded a neighbor of my true residency. Burlington was no longer the place I went to college; it was a small hip city looking out over the Adirondacks with charming architecture, a close-knit community and easy access to the outdoors. Winooski was no longer an adjacent town I never visited; it was the Brooklyn of Vermont.
Every time I returned to New York, it hit home that it wasn’t home. I started my own personal protest against Manhattan, self-isolating to a few quiet streets in Brooklyn. I also decided it was a good time to start reading “Walden,” which led to an even more stubborn cynicism with regard to all things metropolitan. My girlfriend was starting to lose her patience and reminded me I wasn’t Thoreau. The old adage — “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” – had never seemed more true.
After six urban months, we decided life didn’t have to be so hard, and that it would be much better for us to move back to Vermont. We rented an apartment in Burlington at half the price and double the size of our studio in the city. Almost instantaneously, my blood pressure dropped, and I found the optimist in myself that had somehow been missing in action. It’s been several months now, and my newfound appreciation for the familiar hasn’t waned.
But as wonderful as it is to live in Vermont — like living anywhere — there are problems: The state suffers from a lack of job and income growth, an aging, overwhelmingly Caucasian population, and of course a devastating opioid crisis, to name a few obvious concerns. My hope is that new industries will move to Vermont, boosting economic growth and making it an even more desirable place for young people to live. There’s lots of room for Vermont to grow in ways that will not turn us into another frightening megalopolis.
