Category: Northeast

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Vermont

Robert Frost, New Englander, wintered in Key West, and he went often enough that in the Key West literary tourist travel boom of later years his rented cottage was dubbed the Robert Frost Cottage. Sixteen winters he flew south. He got into an argument there with Wallace Stevens, but I’m not sure whether it was before or after Hemingway knocked Stevens down. Stevens seems to have been a bit of a drinking man, but there wasn’t any internet, so what else did he have to do? As a young man I preferred Stevens as a poet, he was stylish and inscrutable, but I think as an old man I’m growing into Frost.

I can imagine Frost, sitting as far south as the American South can go, and thinking about the New England winter. I wonder if he missed it? I wonder if he felt guilt that he was warm? How can someone named Frost ever be warm?

I first saw Vermont 30 years after Frost spent his time in Florida, 50-odd years ago, not live but on an RCA console color television. Almost all my notions about Vermont I learned from White Christmas, a movie filmed in a California back lot of Paramount Pictures. No. Snow.

But the lodge! It was so beautiful, stone and wood and that great fireplace where Rosemary and Bing talked about liverwurst and other things. It didn’t matter that it was a set in California. It was beautiful! It was Vermont!

My sister says that Vermont is like a foreign country. I imagine it as rambling lanes and small farms and white clapboard churches. I figure I can’t say it’s as close to a foreign country as the continent offers, since both Mexico and Canada are literally foreign countries, and I suppose New Englanders don’t think they’re foreign at all. But to my sister the Texas girl it might as well be Switzerland. There’s snow, and trees, maple syrup and other cute things. We don’t do cute in Texas.

Vermont was once in fact a foreign country. Not yet having attained Vermonthood, in 1763 the area was ceded to Britain by France after the French and Indian War. It wasn’t clear if the new territory was governed by New Hampshire or New York. Both claimed it, and both granted conflicting land grants to settlers. Tired of its neighbors’ shenanigans, during the American Revolution Vermont formed its own independent republic, the Republic of Vermont. It was not one of the original 13 colonies. It did not join the United States until 1791. The state constitution was the first to ban slavery.

Al Zifan, Vermont Presidential Results 2016, Creative Commons Attribution.

Vermont is forever linked to its mirror-image neighbor, New Hampshire. There are probably other states it could be compared to, Wisconsin and Oregon come to mind, but New Hampshire and Vermont are connected through history and temperament and geography. You can’t read about Vermont without both state mottoes being mentioned, and that Vermont has fewer Walmarts than New Hampshire, and that Vermont has no Dairy Queens. Why the Dairy Queen factoid gets mentioned I don’t know, but it’s part of the litany.

They sprang from different geological forces that produced the soft rolling Green Mountains of Vermont and the rugged, angular White Mountains of New Hampshire. The differences run through their colonial histories and are evident today in their cultures, politics and certainly in their state mottos: Vermont’s feel-good “Freedom and Unity” shrinks before New Hampshire’s stark ultimatum to “Live Free or Die.”

More Than a River Separates Bernie Sanders’s State From Primary’s, Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times, February 7, 2016.

The Spaceman, Bill Lee, lives in Vermont.

Here is the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire: Vermont, population 625,741, voted 55.72% for Hillary Clinton, and only 29.26% for President Trump. Favorite son Bernie Sanders pulled an additional 5.68% as a write-in. New Hampshire, population 1,316,470, also went for Clinton, but it was 48.2% to 46.1%. New Hampshire has greater ethnic diversity, being only about 90% white, while Vermont is more than 95% white. Snow, Snow Snow! Vermont, along with Hawaii, is consistently one of the most progressive states in the country.

Calvin Coolidge Fishing Near Home in Vermont, 1931 From Twitter.

And taxes. You can’t talk about Vermont and New Hampshire without mentioning that Vermont’s tax burden is 4th, New Hampshire’s 46th. I tracked down my old friend Mark who with his husband moved to Vermont after he left Texas. Mark worked for the IRS for a while but left when President Trump was elected, but now he’s moved on to Florida, largely because of . . . wait for it . . . Vermont taxes. The tax burden for the average resident is roughly 10.31%. If I’m going to sneak a new bamboo fly rod into my luggage on this trip, I’ll pay a combined 7% sales tax, though that’s cheaper than Texas.

New Hampshire has no income tax or sales tax, but it does have one of the nation’s highest property tax rates, with a rate of about $2.19 per $100 of value. All of that said, I gather that the Vermonters who stay, who like their state, are for the most part proud of its peculiarities and political stances, and want to be there. Freedom and unity! Ok, it’s not the quirkiness of Live Free or Die!, but it’s at least as good as Friendship. I could be perfectly happy with freedom and unity, at least as long as I don’t have to buy Birkenstocks.

There’s plenty of speculation about why the states are different. Sure, you can chalk it up to New Hampshire’s historic development as a water-powered mill state, a port state, a state with more difficult geography and weather, but my favorite theory is that modern Vermont was the result of an effective advertising campaign. They picked what they would be, a place of ski lodges and cows and Birkenstocks, and they sold it. Cultural immigrants like Bernie Sanders and Bill Lee believed the pitch, and Vermont was its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bringing in maple sap to the sugar house. Frank H. Shurtleff farm, North Bridgewater, Vermont, 1940, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

A colleague suggested that I check to see if New Hampshire and Vermont are ranked by any sort of happiness index. The World Happiness Index is published by the United Nations, and in 2019 the happiest country on the planet is left-leaning, frigid Finland. I don’t pretend to have studied the Index methodology, though it’s based on polling. Finland though would seem to bode well for left-leaning, frigid Vermont. There’s a Gallup poll that’s supposed to measure happiness and health, and left-leaning but decidedly un-frigid Hawaii seems to come out on top most years. Last year Vermont was way down, but this year it was 7th. New Hampshire was 11th. Alabama and Mississippi, those other bookend states on the Southside, are Nos. 44 and 47. West Virginians are still the least happy of our lot.

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Island Kingdom

Catskill Mountain House Hotel, opened 1824, ”View From The Mountain House” by W.H. Bartlett, 1836. Engraving by R. Branford, published in “American Scenery”, London 1838.

I have been to New York City just enough, and I could live the rest of my days without returning. How often? I don’t know. A half dozen times? A dozen? But the number of times I’ve actually been there isn’t really the point, is it? Most times I’ve turned on the television or listened to the radio or read a book I’ve likely as not been on a trip to New York City, or at least someone’s idea of the place.

Getting ready for the Catskills we’ve been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and yes, she is Marvelous, and because of the tv show I’ve been reading about why the great Jewish Catskill resorts died: greater mobility, mismanagement, dispersion from the City by the New York Jewish community, air conditioning, and assimilation.

I have a favorite movie moment, ok I have a lot of favorite movie moments but one is when Cary Grant is abducted from the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room in North by Northwest. Everything in that sequence, the room, the martini, Grant’s suit and perfect shirt and tie, were meant to show the rest of us New York City. Becoming a man who takes a phone call in the Oak Room and begins an adventure was at least one of the things that I could aspire to. It was as exotic as Tahiti, and just as appealing.

North by Northwest (1959)

When we were getting ready for Louisiana I read a book by Shane K. Bernard about the Cajuns, called, fittingly enough, The Cajuns.* The premise of the book was that until after the World War II mobilization the Cajuns were culturally isolated, and that after World War II and the advent of television the Cajuns were assimilated into a national culture. Not completely: we still thank God have red beans and rice and boudin and spring crawfish, but a Cajun boy born in the 50s or 60s or 70s no longer looked solely to Lafayette or New Iberia or Lake Charles for his only point of reference. The television beamed New York and Los Angeles and London into his home every evening, and what it beamed was inordinately influenced by New York City. As much as any place it came from New York City.

It worked both ways though. If New York had more influence on the national culture, the rest of the nation was more accessible to New Yorkers. New Yorkers also assimilated. Air travel opened the nation physically and at the same time old prejudices declined. New Yorkers were no longer confined to the Castskills. The Catskill resorts died.

Getting ready to go to New York, I’ve been reading a history of Catskill fly fishing by Ed van Put, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Burrows and Wallace, “Rip Van Winkle”, E.B. White’s short essay “Here is New York“, a book of New York geology (orogeny, glaciers). But whatever I read now, whatever I might try to read before we go, much of my reading life has already involved New York, and I give up. It wins. Just to name a few important books to me: The Last of the Mohicans; The Great Gatsby; The Summer Game; The Emperor’s Children; Netherland; How the Other Half Lives; Bright Lights, Big City; The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; Eloise; Washington Square; Kaddish; Enter the Goon Squad; Veronica; The Pushcart Wars; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Lunch Poems; The Boys of Summer; The Poems of Hart Crane; Brooklyn; Catcher in the Rye; The Poems of Charles Reznikoff; Motherless Brooklyn; Leaves of Grass; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay; The Age of Innocence; The Bonfire of the Vanities; it wins. It wins.

Spider-Man lived in New York City.

I suspect though that New York doesn’t win in the same way any more. There was a time when a good part of our notions were bundled and delivered from New York, but our notions now come from Fox News or CNBC or what our friends, defined as the people we haven’t unfriended, post on Facebook. We have so many media choices that we only need to see the things that affirm our own prejudices. We can happily return to alienation and separation.


The Oak Room closed in 2017.

Maybe it was always really this way, but it seems that every man is now his own island kingdom of inclinations and prejudices. I’ve been to New York City plenty enough, but at least I’ve been, and it has always changed me in ways I didn’t expect. While there are other places I’d rather go, I don’t at all mind going again, or another half-dozen or dozen times. Mrs. Maisel is still Marvelous. And each time I ‘ll likely come back a little different, a little surprised at what else there is.

* * *

There are roughly three weeks each spring when Houston is the best place in the world to be. Home-grown tomatoes ripen, the largemouths move onto and off of their spawning beds, the reds and the flounder return to the bays from the Gulf, baseball returns, the last of the winter northers come into town not for revenge but gently, sweetly. It is always green in Houston, but for that three weeks it could be no other color. Best of all the walls of climbing star jasmine bloom and add their scent, a scent less cloying but as lovely as a roomful of lilies, and you smell the scent of jasmine on every walk or bike ride or run.

We went Sunday to Damon’s Seven Lakes to catch post spawn bass, and I caught three of these on my new five weight rod. The rod is a Winston Pure, and Trout Unlimited sent it to me because I am kind, handsome, and amusing. It was very good of them. I also saw, cast to, and caught a six or seven or eight pound catfish, which for various reasons neither Kris nor I got a picture of, mostly because she thought I was taking the picture and I thought she was taking the picture. Anyway I caught a trophy catfish and three good largemouths on a rod that, if you look carefully at the picture, is inscribed “Trout Unlimited.” It’s not inscribed “Bass Unlimited,” and certainly not “Channel Cat Unlimited,” but “Trout Unlimited.” It’s not just any trout rod either: according to R.L. Winston it’s Pure. That must mean it’s probably too pure for bass, and certainly too pure for a big channel cat. I hope Trout Unlimited and R.L. Winston don’t find out. They might take the rod back because I abused it, and it really is sweet.

Since I didn’t get a picture of the catfish, I took a picture of a half-eaten plate of cheese enchiladas from Ninfa’s on Navigation to show you. They were delicious, and you’ll have to let that serve in the catfish’s stead. In a Texas sort of way it seems an appropriate trade. Probably because of that fish I had the catfish at Brennan’s of Houston on both Monday and Tuesday, but it’s just not my week to take pictures of catfish, live or fried. The Brennan’s catfish was good though, and the Damon’s catfish was magnificent. Just don’t tell the folk at Winston.

*Actually the name of the book was The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, but the shorter title works better in the paragraph.

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New York, Vermont, New Hampshire

At the end of June we go to the Bronx to see the Astros play the Yankees, then we drive north to the Catskills, the home of the Hudson River School, stand-up Jewish comedy, and American dry fly fishing. We’re staying in Sullivan County on the upper Beaverkill. Our inn, the Beaverkill Valley Inn, has a mile of riverside. This is important, because under New York riparian law landowners can post the river, and almost all of the upper Beaverkill is posted. The lower Beaverkill, past Roscoe, is largely open, as are other Catskill rivers, but hopefully we’ll see less of a crowd. Or not.

Google Maps

We’re matriculating for a weekend at the Wulff School of Fly Fishing near Livingston Manor. My reasons for going are confused, it’s the basic trout fishing curriculum, and I like classes, but it may be for beginners, which I am but am not. I’ll learn something. We’ll also fish a day with Pennsylvania casting champion Craig Buckbee, who instructs at the school. I hope it’s legal for him to cast in New York.

After we graduate we drive from Livingston Manor to Manchester, Vermont. There are lots of Manchesters. There’s Manchester, England; Manchester, New Hampshire; California, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, and on and on . . . you get the idea. The big ones, England and New Hampshire, are industrial towns known historically for their grittiness. Now they’re gentrifying. Manchester, Vermont, on the other hand, isn’t known for its grittiness. It’s known for Orvis, which has more of the genteel than the gritty.

Google Maps

We’re staying at the Orvis-endorsed Equinox Resort. As we were settling dates I made a reservation then called to move things around. The reservation clerk at the hotel, we’ll call him Jacques, told me in Québécois French-accented English that I couldn’t move my dates. He told me that my dates were fixed and I would never be allowed to move them, ever, and that my only chance to move them was to call corporate, which is now Marriott, who would not under any circumstance move my dates without charging substantial penalties and inflicting corporal punishment.

I called corporate, stunned and humble, and told them that I was pretty sure that when I made the reservation I had left the dates flexible. They told me I was right, and they didn’t know what Jacques was talking about. They moved the dates around and gave me a better rate. They were nice. They were great. It was great. Everything is great except Jacques, with whom I am still annoyed. I wondered if he was demonstrating New England taciturnity or Gallic bellicosity: whichever or both he was good at it.

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Henry S. Allen, Equinox House, Manchester, Vermont, c. 1880, New York Public Library.

Apparently at the end of the Civil War, over the summer of 1863, Mary Todd Lincoln and their sons stayed at the Equinox to get out of the heat of Washington and away from the War. The family planned to return in the summer of 1865, this time with the President. They never did. Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, almost immediately after Appomattox.

I have read that the Equinox has Manchester’s best donuts. Manchester also has the Orvis flagship store, and the American Museum of Fly Fishing.

Google Maps

From southern Vermont we drive north to the Canadian border to Pittsburgh, New Hampshire, to the Lopstick Inn on the headwaters of the Connecticut River. Everybody probably knows this but me, but the Connecticut River separates New Hampshire and Vermont, and otherwise New Hampshire and Vermont would be the same thing, which they pretty much are anyway. We have to return south again, to our second Manchester, New Hampshire this time, but that’s in the Boston orbit and we’re only going there to spend one night before we fly back to Houston.

I’ve been to New York plenty, but I have never been to New Hampshire or Vermont. I have a vague notion that this is classic fly-fishing territory, and I’ve already learned something important: I’ve learned that looking north Vermont is on the left and New Hampshire on the right. I’ll be a New Englander yet.