Last Friday, we stopped out at the Bread and Butter Farm in Shelburne for their Burger Night. A long gravel driveway and an army lugging lawn chairs, beach bags, diaper bags, children, pushing strollers that looked like they were built with aerodynamics in mind, strollers that won’t mess up your 5K time. Past the silo and the open-sided barn full of pale yellow hay bails, the hills and a few large houses in the background. Plastic domes on greenhouses carpeted with bright bursts of arugula and kale, maroon-stemmed chard, yellow zucchini flowers, and beet leaves. There is a small structure shading several picnic tables, a large grassy area for laying out blankets, a small stage for the folksy singers, a farm store with a fridge full of raw milk, cake dishes of rhubarb muffins, a table stocked with maple syrup, fresh cucumbers and garlic, the floor and the walls and shelves, everything in the place made of real wood and slate and glass and cast iron.
Out past the edge of the clearing, foot-stomped paths through the high grass loop out toward the pasture, retraced by a dispersed gaggle of children dashing off toward the chicken pen, or the fifteen-foot-tall teepee frame, sideless so they can weave in and out of the cone of leaning limbs, then rush off again to some place in the grass that seems secret, parents in French cycling caps or floppy-billed sun hats standing at the edge of the pasture, scanning for a head of reddish or brown or white-blond mane amidst the alfalfa. Children everywhere. A group of about sixty of them are organized, somewhat, by the music man, into a parade marching through the picnickers, all of them high-stepping like drum majors, wearing makeshift capes of bright sheer—purples, pinks, pumpkin orange, star-spangled silver. Hungry gulls swirl overhead, looking for a sucker who would leave alone a fresh farm-raised cheeseburger sided with pickle slaw and potato and coriander salad. It doesn’t get more local, with the grilled onions and pickled and chopped kale and chard stems in tin mini-milk cans on the condiment stand, all of it pulled from the ground not a hundred feet away.
The city is in constant struggle to exist in Vermont. The greenness is everywhere. Ride three minutes in a car from the University of Vermont’s medical school and you’re surrounded by trees and grass with mountains in the distance. If you’re on Spear Street, there are plenty of mansions, too, some of them all glass on the West side, to open views of the lake dominating everything, an impossible expanse of shimmer, the layers of Adirondacks giving you all the gradations of blue and gray in the spectrum as they sink into two dimensions. Then the houses grow fewer and further between. Then you’re reminded that most of the world for most of the time it has existed, has been this. You’re reminded that we humans in most of the world, for most of the time we have existed, have lived in this.
I love the city. The other day I went to Old Spokes home and picked up a vintage, goldenrod Raleigh bike with an ancient Brooks seat all blackened and cracked, stem-mounted shifters, great fenders, a well-preserved plate on the front, and only a few small chips in the pale gold cursive “Made in England” painted on the frame. It’s a short ride to my office, only a bit further to downtown and the waterfront (twelve minutes total according to GoogleMaps), where I’m going today to take an all-day keelboat class at the sailing center, just a short walk from Foam Brewery, the Skinny Pancake crêperie, Burlington Bay Market, with Church Street only a couple blocks up the hill.
With all this at my fingertips in the city, I have a hard time imagining living in the country again (which is where I grew up), where my life was tethered to the car’s horsepower, facing again the impossibility of walking anywhere I needed to go. But when I get out to Bread and Butter Farm, or pass through the eastern half of Charlotte (pronounced Shar-lot), or sit on a bench across from Prohibition Pig and look toward Randall Street, out at the hills wrapping around Waterbury, I am seduced again, and begin to think I could do the country living thing.
Maybe it will happen one day, years from now, or maybe I’ll spend part of the summer with my family somewhere further out in the greenness. (When I decided I wanted to become a professor nearly twenty years ago, I kind of imagined that’s what my summers would be, me like a brown-skinned and more modern Mark Van Doren, writing about writing on a farmstead in Connecticut, or Western Mass, or Vermont). But, right now, I think my bloodstream simply requires something that is in the air and the water of the city, something vivifying and toxic, something unnatural and comforting, something unpredictable and regulated. It’s great to have the lake right here, as its shoreline curves close to wherever we are, so we’re never far from an escape, from a pool party at a friend’s house on Mallett’s Bay, to a play date and stroll on Appletree Point, to wading out fifty or sixty yards into the shallows at Sand Bar Park, from a slow sail out near Juniper Island, which is where I’m headed right now (my class starts in an hour). This summer they break ground on the new sailing center and docks, which will sit snugly between the waterfront and the new skate park, though they’re still trying to figure out what to do with the old Moran Plant. I wouldn’t mind if it stayed the way it is now, ruined, still, towering up like a lightless lighthouse, brick blackened from the coal soot it used to produce, a little graffiti here, some rusted steel there, grass growing from its terrace and roof, reminding us where this city we’ve built is headed in the future—directly backward, into the great, green past that surrounds it.