The late Burlington author Bill Mares had yet to be diagnosed with cancer when, two autumns ago, the 83-year-old received a call from Jeff Danziger, a Dummerston friend and nationally syndicated political cartoonist.
“I remember Bill sitting here by the fire,” Chris Hadsel, Mares’s wife of 53 years, recently recalled, “and, next thing we knew, Danziger was suggesting a book about what Vermont’s going to be like in the future.”
No one foresaw how the resulting essay collection — “2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future,” set for release this weekend — would arrive with a bittersweet backstory.
In his lifetime, Mares — a beekeeper, brewer, history teacher, journalist, legislator, marathon runner and traveler to more than to 60 countries — could boast to publishing 20 books on everything from a 1,200-mile camel trek across Saudi Arabia to “Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats,” a 1983 humor collaboration with University of Vermont professor Frank Bryan that sold 70,000 copies (or one for every 10 residents).
Danziger saw his book suggestion as a follow-up to his 2017 teaming with Mares on “The Full Vermonty: Vermont in the Age of Trump,” which featured 20 collaborators ranging from former Gov. Madeleine Kunin and Vermont Life magazine editor Tom Slayton to Weybridge writer Julia Alvarez and the late Brookfield artist Ed Koren.
But Mares, who had endured open heart surgery just before Donald Trump was first elected president, was reluctant to step back into the pain of politics.
“Bill felt he’d been there and done that,” Hadsel said. “He did not want this book to be consumed by the vicissitudes we thought were coming, the ups and downs, the crisis of just yesterday that now nobody can even remember because there’s a whole new one.”
Instead, Mares wanted to springboard forward a quarter century by inviting friends to share their thoughts about Vermont in the year 2050.
“This is not a book that solves Vermont’s problems,” Hadsel said. “A couple of the essays are fanciful or fun, some are worried, but none of them are gloom and doom. There’s a common theme of hopefulness and faith that Vermonters will stick together and figure out how to work around the change that’s coming.”
In the book, Vermont Gas Systems CEO Neale Lunderville, a gubernatorial appointee under Republican Jim Douglas and Democrat Peter Shumlin, proposes the idea of a state “reboot” through better housing, schools, business opportunities and infrastructure.
“Vermont’s future is in the strength of its communities,” Lunderville writes. “Real prosperity comes when every town, and every person in every town, has the opportunity to grow and thrive.”
Jen Kimmich, co-founder of Stowe’s Alchemist Brewery, expresses hope that all future residents will be embraced, regardless of whether they were born in the state like herself.
“In 2050,” Kimmich writes, “every Vermonter, those of us with families that have been here for generations and those of us just arriving, should be celebrated for our experiences, appreciated for our contributions, and welcomed for being here.”
Mark Breen, senior meteorologist at St. Johnsbury’s Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, calls for a disclaimer on any long-term forecasts.
“Considering how changeable Vermont weather has always been,” Breen writes, “it should be no surprise that we might see almost any kind of weather, in any season of the year.”
Mares faced his own storm clouds in the spring of 2024 when he was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma. Stuffing his friends’ essays into a shoebox, he focused on finishing a memoir — “Better to Be Lucky than Smart!” — that he published five days before he died July 29, 2024, through use of the state’s medical aid-in-dying law.
“I feel in better shape than most and more grateful than all that I had the chance to drive the bus of my own disappearance,” Mares told VTDigger podcaster David Goodman a week before his death.
Hadsel, inheriting three-dozen forward-looking essays, was left without a book title, introduction or illustrations — just her husband’s wish that she and neighbor Jane Smith, a former Vermont journalist, finish the work.
They reached out to Rootstock Publishing of Montpelier and frequent Mares collaborator Don Hooper of Brookfield, the latter who had toted his sketchbook to Chicago as a Vermont delegate to the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
“Don sent me a doodle of an old codger who looks like Bill waving a pen that’s spearing a piece of paper,” Hadsel recalled. “I looked at the picture and said, ‘Aha!’”
That scrawl is the book’s cover illustration and inspiration for its “Take a Swipe at the Future” subtitle.
Hadsel is set to debut the 140-page paperback Saturday at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum before joining essayists for readings Sunday at Stowe’s Alchemist Brewery, Nov. 18 at the Charlotte Public Library, Nov. 20 at Montpelier’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library and Nov. 25 at Burlington’s Phoenix Books.
Former Gov. Howard Dean, quoted on the back cover, hopes the collection “will inspire people to take action.”
Disclosure: Bill Mares was a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust that governs VTDigger.
