The Farm in the Green Mountains

This memoir, first published in Germany in 1949, covers the lives of Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her family while they lived in Vermont during World War II. Alice was born in Austria to a wealthy family. Her second husband, Carl Zuckmayer ("Zuck"), was born into a wealthy German family. They met in Berlin and married. She had a daughter from her first marriage, and they soon had another daughter. Zuck was a successful playwright, and he had also written the screenplay to "The Blue Angel," the popular film starring Marlene Dietrich. Zuck had served during World War I in the German army, but he became out of favor as Hitler rose to power, because one of his plays was a satirical portrait of the rise of militarism in Germany. They lived in Germany and had a house in Austria, but in 1938 they moved to Chardonne-sur-Vevey in Switzerland because of Nazi pressure. In 1939, when they were officially exiled from both Germany and Austria, they decided to move to the U.S. Ironically, although they both had Jewish ancestries – a fact that doesn't come up in the book – that apparently had nothing to do with their exile.

During their first three years in the U.S., which are not described in detail, they spent summers in Barnard, Vermont and had an apartment in New York City. Zuck apparently also spent time in Los Angeles, but, although no details are provided, he seems to have given up entirely on the idea of writing screenplays in Hollywood. Thus, in late 1941, they decided to move from New York City and live for the duration on a rented farm in Barnard, known as Backwoods Farm, which was different from the ones they had occupied on the previous summers. The U.S. entered the war that year, and most of the book describes the details of life on the farm, where they lived until 1946, at which point they returned to Switzerland and lived in Saas-Fee.

I was interested to know what life was like in Vermont then. Barnard is located in Windsor County, which is adjacent to Addison County, and we drove through there last fall on the way back from Woodstock. Their farmhouse was primitive by current standards, and all of the heating was done with wood and coal. Although they had enough money to build large new chicken coops and send their daughters away to school, they do not seem to have grasped how much labor would be involved when they purchased chickens, ducks, geese, goats and pigs. Operating on a European model, they must have thought that cheap labor would be available when they needed it, but it wasn't. Then and now, most small farms, with the exception of dairies and orchards, require no employees, as nearly all of the work can be done by family members. The physical labor at times became overwhelming, and during wartime there were even fewer adults available to help them. Nevertheless, Zuck enjoyed the lifestyle and even managed to write a play, which became a hit when they returned to Europe. Although they were Germans living in the U.S. during the war, there was no stigma placed on them, and they were merely required to remove the shortwave components of their radio and were not permitted to own guns.

They were shocked by the severity of the winters, which were extremely cold, though I think the temperatures are exaggerated a little, and the snow made travel difficult. Mud season was also bad for travel, since few roads were paved. The chapters each describe specific events that occurred during their stay. Perhaps the most harrowing was the sudden and enduring attack by Norway rats, which chewed their way into the chicken coops and ate the chicks. Eventually, with poison, they killed most of the rats, and finally the remaining rats left. They relied heavily on the USDA for information and found it quite helpful. Many of their household items were purchased from the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

Portraits emerge of the Vermonters who helped them, and they sound much the same as Vermonters today. Their telephone was on a nine-party line, and they got to know their neighbors quite well. My theory is that a sort of natural selection occurred in Vermont, with the people who stuck around being less interested in acquiring wealth and more interested in quiet country lives than those who moved off because they were more financially ambitious. Most of the people who moved here from the late 1700's to early 1800's seem to have moved west by the mid-1800's.

At times it seems that Alice was rather depressed, though she describes this only obliquely. Her relationship with Zuck is never examined closely, though on the surface it seems harmonious. One of her hobbies was making solo trips to the Dartmouth College library, which were harrowing experiences during the winter. I think that she wanted to be a literary person, like Zuck, and the stated origin of this book, as letters to his parents written after the war, seems contrived. However, there can be no question that their Vermont experience was truly moving to both of them, and they briefly attempted to live here again after the war but gave up due to various practical considerations. As I've mentioned before, the U.S. has been alluring to many, but those who have other options often choose not to stay. Certainly there are better places to live for civilized people, and everyone seems to come here for money.

Alice's writing is occasionally rather poetic:

That was the house in which I was to live now, and around the house were the meadows, and around the meadows the woods with their uncut underbrush.

There was a pond out of which dead trees stretched their arms like drowning people.

A brook flowed steeply down into a wood in which raccoons climbed up the trees, snuffling porcupines scraped and slid through the bushes. There were sometimes lynxes that crouched with glowing eyes on the rocks and screamed shrilly. 

There wildcats spat, there wild rabbits ran, there skunks shuffled and stamped, there a bear sat in the bushes and ate raspberries. In the autumn cranes flew over the woods to the pond, in the summer the hummingbirds whirred in front of the windows, unfamiliar birdsongs came from the trees, and in the shed giant spiders with mighty bodies sat in their webs.

At night the moon stood like a half-lowered sickle over the landscape with its strange animals.  

Zuck, much later, also wrote a memoir, which I have ordered. I'm not sure whether I'll read it closely, but I am curious as to some aspects of the story that Alice seems to have glossed over.

Diary

I've been looking at my copy of History of the Town of Middlebury in the County of Addison, Vermont, which is a reprint of the 1859 edition. There is a separate section on the history of Addison County, which I hadn't read before. In that there is a description of the early use of land here that answers some of the questions I had about why the Severance family moved to this neighborhood and what they did. When Samuel Severance, the eldest Severance son, came to East Middlebury in 1786, the area was mostly wilderness, and when Vermont became a state in 1791, the population of Middlebury was only 395. The rest of the Severance family moved to South Munger Street in the 1790's, and Enos, Samuel's younger brother, built this house in about 1798. The book says that the early settlers grew wheat, which was quite profitable initially, but by the 1820's they had depleted the soil and wheat became unprofitable due to falling yields. For this reason the settlers began to graze cattle in order to produce manure to fertilize the crops, but wheat production came to a halt after a weevil blight in 1829. After that, Merino sheep became popular for several years, making Addison County the largest producer of wool in the country.

As far as the Severances are concerned, I think that they must have depleted their soil in Northfield, Massachusetts prior to moving here, and then grew wheat in Middlebury like everyone else. The land that they bought is flat and for a time was suitable for crop cultivation. However, the Severances eventually abandoned farming, probably because of insufficient profitability. The land is now only good for grasses, and that it what is mostly grown on it today. The grasses are used for cattle feed, and the fields are fertilized with cattle manure. Dairy cows are probably the largest industry locally, and there are also beef cattle. At the moment, local farmers are having a hard time getting by as a result of low dairy prices. They are also facing restrictions, since their agricultural runoff is polluting Lake Champlain.

I've read all that I'm going to in Biological Extinction and am going to move on to other subjects. The news just confirmed my latest point, in that individual countries are not doing enough to stop global warming, i.e., things are going to get much worse before they get better, per the latest U.N. report. As usual, I'm not finding new reading material that looks promising. I think I'm going to give up on biographies of artists, because the two I've looked at (on Manet and Gauguin) aren't very exciting. For lack of anything better, I may read a biography of Denis Diderot, which at least would complement my readings on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I have a hard time with reading material, because at this stage I find practically everything that is written for mass consumption to be a little simple-minded and commercially exploitative, whereas I don't really want to delve into most writing that is exclusively academic or extremely technical. I like writing that is informative but not too abstruse, and that is rarer than you might think. I guess that I'm similar to my readers, who seem to prefer my posts on literary and artistic matters to the more scientific ones. As far as fiction goes, I seem to have evolved into a post-fiction state of mind that may be permanent. Krasznahorkai has a new novel that I may skip.

While in most respects I'm getting really sick of this Trump phenomenon, it is still an extraordinary historical event. As the situation evolves, we are seeing that, not only do we have an incompetent president whose habits are essentially criminal, but that the Republican Party has decided to support him, because they are entirely dependent on the votes of the misguided voters who have been brainwashed for years by Fox News and other perverted news sources. The more Trump's life is exposed, the more he looks like a small-time crook – the kind of person who would normally have been in and out of jail several times by now or locked up permanently. If he hadn't had the financial resources handed to him by his father that allowed him to afford legal fights, he would never have got this far. This has sociological significance, because in previous eras Trump would probably have been taken out of commission by law enforcement well before now. This indicates that free speech and the news media have been ineffective at informing the public and brings into question the ability of people in the digital era to think clearly or recognize how they are being manipulated. Thus, my posts on human limitations and stupidity are not about hypothetical matters and are relevant to events that are playing out in real time.

The mouse situation has improved, as there have been no live mice spotted on the porch recently. William is able to use his new cat door in the basement, but so far he hasn't been using it much. I don't think he is comfortable with the new ramp and has not become accustomed to regular entry and exit through the basement. Although we had a strong blast of winter, with snow and unusually low temperatures, the weather has returned to normal, and most of the snow has melted. I think that once it gets cold again William will be more inclined to use the basement cat door when he's outside freezing and everyone has gone to bed. At the moment he still prefers to paw loudly at doors to get attention to come inside. He hasn't been catching much prey recently; the other day I rescued a live chipmunk that he was trying to bring in, and it got away.

Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont

I found this book, by Yvonne Daley, informative regarding this period in Vermont. There isn't much analysis, and it consists mainly of vignettes of people who moved to Vermont in the 1960's and 1970's. The chapters include "The Hippie Invasion," "Life on the Commune," "Higher Education," "Food...and Revolution," "Entrepreneurship—Hippie Style," "Political Transformation," "Creativity," "Drugs," "Women's Work Reimagined" and "The Children of the Counterculture." The title comes from the Canned Heat song. In the appendix there is a list of appropriate soundtracks for each chapter. A few of the people mentioned, such as Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy and David Dellinger, are well known. My neighbor, Jim Douglas, even makes an appearance: he was a student at Middlebury College in 1970, when they ended the semester early and canceled finals after the Kent State shootings; he was the campus Republican club president then and demanded a tuition refund. I spoke to Jim a few months ago, and, thankfully, he does not consider Donald Trump a Republican.

At the time, Middlebury was not a hotbed of antiwar activity. The hippies, radicals and artists were more closely associated with Goddard College, near Montpelier, Marlboro College, near Brattleboro and the now defunct Windham College in Putney. Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English were considered elitist even then. Besides protesting the Vietnam War, nuclear reactors in Vermont and New Hampshire were targeted; in hindsight, the protesters may have been misguided, because more nuclear plants may have meant less coal consumption and less climate change – Daley overlooks this fact. There were assorted communes all across the state, whose members varied in beliefs and activities. Some proved durable while others did not. One was quite libertine, with the leader encouraging a "ten-day-marriage" between members; in a very non-back-to-nature manner, he spent his winters in Florida and returned each spring. It sounds as if the divorce rate was about 100% for young people who moved to Vermont then. Bernie Sanders, for example, got divorced after moving here with his first wife, had an illegitimate son, Levi, with a girlfriend, and later married his current wife. Some parents handled their children irresponsibly, turning them into conservative adults. Conditions for stable households were not optimal, since the hippie men usually had little income, the women were having babies and feminism began to take off in the 1970's.

The wave of people who arrived here then were part of a broad social movement that affected the entire country. Most of the migrants to Vermont were from middle-class families in Massachusetts and New York. Many had been here before on family vacations. Some, like me, were instinctively enchanted by characteristics such as the low population density, the beautiful natural environment and the pleasant but not ingratiating people. A similar history occurred elsewhere, but did not leave as lasting a mark. I am reminded of my summer in Bloomington, Indiana in 1970. I started making homemade bread. There was pot smoking, a food co-op, popular music, and some of my friends from Pelham, New York stopped by in an old school bus on their way out west. I was staying in an apartment with a friend who had dropped out of college and was trying to become a writer. An English instructor who had married a student and left his job brought his wife and moved in with us. They arrived in a VW Microbus, and he got a temporary job at a restaurant while his wife had an affair with my friend. Others were attempting to launch careers as artists. One became a pot dealer and later got arrested; now he's an electrician. Another became homeless and eventually became a Hindu monk. One friend who had led a college protest got married and divorced and later became an architect. In Indiana, as in other states, the hippie movement and antiwar protests tended to be concentrated in the large university towns and did not have much permanent impact on the state – Indiana remained conservative.

The difference in Vermont, which Daley touches on but does not explore in detail, has to do with several factors. First, Vermont had never been an industrialized state, and the anti-establishment attitudes of the hippies had little impact on the locals, who were already used to tourists. I think the lack of factories and the harsh winters made Vermonters more independent than Hoosiers, who, living in the Rust Belt, were used to walk-in high-paying jobs and were more sensitive to anti-corporate rhetoric, which could cause plant closings. The winters also helped screen out the most frivolous of hippies, if only because surviving them required resources and planning: this is not a good place to be homeless in January. Over time, the convergence of tourism and progressive ideas led to the current Vermont brand, which itself is of economic value to the state, allowing businesses to charge premiums on the presumption that Vermont products are healthier and more sustainable than those made elsewhere. The absence of large corporations also freed the state and local governments from the influences of lobbyists, leaving the door open to more radical candidates such as Bernie Sanders. Because of the small population and corporate indifference, it was much easier for someone like Bernie to gain traction here than in other states. I think that this is probably the easiest state in which to become a U.S. senator or governor, because you can practically meet all of the voters and no one is spending millions of dollars trying to defeat you. In fact, although Bernie is often in Washington, he is seemingly omnipresent in Vermont and is likely to show up in your town regularly.

Daley's approach borders on the sentimental, as the book really is about her life and the lives of her friends and family. Conceptually, much of the minutiae that she provides doesn't add much. She tries to stick with the more positive stories without mentioning many negative ones. Drug use must have been a problem, but she devotes several pages to Paul Lawrence, a crooked undercover cop who planted drugs to get convictions. There is no mention of Robert Durst, the probable serial killer who moved to Ripton in the early 1970's, when Vermont was trendy, and opened a health food store in Middlebury. Although she does touch on the dissimilarities between the locals and the newcomers, I don't think that she underscores adequately the fact that the two groups continue to carry on independently and remain segregated. While Donald Trump is more unpopular in Vermont than in any other state, he has supporters here. Daley also says nothing about the quality of the work of the artists and writers who were part of the wave that she describes. As I've said, I don't think that the quality of American writing in general is very good, and Vermont's is probably no exception. I have seen some of the artists' works and find some of them to be above average, but others are more formulaic and suitable for the tourist trade. This is not to say that the book isn't worth reading if you are interested in the topic, which is relevant where I live.

Collapse I

I've finally started to read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, and will comment on it as I go. Diamond is a clear and methodical writer, and I am finding his perspective appealing and somewhat similar to my own. In this book he examines in detail the life histories of societies that developed and eventually collapsed for one reason or another. There is an unusual open-mindedness about it because he doesn't hesitate to compare contemporary, well-understood cultures with ancient cultures about which little is known.

The first culture discussed in detail is located in the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana. Diamond knows the most about this one, because he has been vacationing there since the 1950's and has lifelong friends who live there permanently. It is not exactly a collapsed society, but it has undergone changes over the years and now bears little resemblance to what it once was. Diamond's knowledge of various fields comes in handy for a book like this, because such knowledge is necessary for a full understanding of what has transpired. He knows history, geography, geology, mining, forestry, agriculture, climate change, environmental reclamation, sociology and economics fairly well, and this gives the book a broader perspective than most writers would be able to pull off. Furthermore, he knows and loves the people there and can understand their points of view even when he disagrees with them. Instead of the gratuitous insertion of local color that most science writers resort to, he fills several pages with his friends' descriptions of their lives in their own words. This way, Diamond's narrative has a very human quality, which is fine with me, though at heart I identify more closely with the style of E.O. Wilson, who clearly maintains a biological perspective even when writing about humans. Where Diamond might emphasize the struggle of settlers in a harsh environment, Wilson might be more inclined to portray the settlers as an invasive species, which is probably a more appropriate method if you view the environment as an ecosystem.

The region was settled by farmers and ranchers, but the dry climate and cool temperatures were not optimal for those purposes. Improper farming practices could damage the soil by raising its salt content, and it was a hard life for the early settlers. Forest products were also at a disadvantage, because trees grow more slowly there than in other areas. Earlier practices of cutting down all of the large trees made forest management more difficult, since the tall trees are the only ones that can withstand fires. In the past, fires would consume the underbrush and the tall trees would survive, but now a fire can destroy an entire forest. Mining, particularly copper mining, was the major local industry, but has died off due to competition from other parts of the world. Waste residues from mines have been partially cleaned up, but in some cases the pollution from a mine costs so much to remove that there may have been no economic advantage to opening the mine in the first place if you include the cleanup costs. Besides this pollution, the availability of clean water has been hampered by global warming, which is rapidly melting the glaciers to the north.

With the mines gone, most lumber coming from Canada and farming and ranching practically dead in the region, the locals are generally poor. Because farm work is so hard, not many of the children born there stick around, and many farms are being sold. Diamond has one friend who operates a large, modern dairy, but it remains to be seen whether it will be financially viable in the future. The main change in the local economy has been the influx of wealthy, conservative Californians who build trophy homes there and stick around for a few weeks a year. Some of them live in a large, gated community and hardly interact with the locals at all. They avoid paying Montana taxes by living there less than half the year. This has put further pressure on farmers by driving up land prices, and they are increasingly working in the tourist industry. The main asset of the region is now its physical beauty, which attracts tourists.

The local culture has taken a complex turn. The natives tend to be anti-government rural conservatives who despise the federal government even though they are net recipients of federal benefits. They don't want to pay for anything, including forest management, environmental cleanup and failing dams. They have nothing in common with the Californian conservatives except enjoyment of the outdoors and tax avoidance. The public schools are so underfunded that none of the Californians send their children to school in Montana.

The book so far has been of much interest to me, because the events described in Montana have a lot in common with historical events in Vermont, where I currently live. Vermont was first a source of masts for British ships before the American Revolution and was later settled by farmers. Most of the forests were cut down, and farming did not prove to be viable for the majority. Many of the farmers left the state, and some of them probably ended up in Montana. There wasn't much mining here, but there were large marble and granite industries, which have mostly died off. A major difference would be the existence of textile mills here during the nineteenth century, but those are long gone now. Like the Bitterroot Valley, Vermont's economy depends heavily on tourism. In this case many of the tourists live in nearby states and the ones who decide to move here are not necessarily wealthy. There are a few trophy houses, but many of the outsiders who move here, Bernie Sanders for example, become highly engaged with the state and its government, unlike most of the Californians in Montana. Vermont's proximity to Montreal and Boston makes it less physically isolated than the Bitterroot Valley, and even though both have become tourist destinations, Vermont's tourist industry is probably more sustainable, because it doesn't depend on a few rich people flying in in private jets.

Town and Gown

One of the reasons why I chose to retire to Middlebury was that it has some similarities to the town where I attended college, namely, Greencastle, Indiana. Greencastle is also a rural county seat, and DePauw University is about the same size as Middlebury College. There were things that I liked about DePauw, but I wouldn't want to live in Greencastle again. I still have some connections in Indiana, but none of my relatives live there, it is a right-wing state, the educational level is low, the terrain isn't interesting and it gets hot there during the summer. Middlebury and its vicinity are much prettier and more rural, the people are better educated, the cultural amenities are superior, and so is the college. Actually, it would be fine with me if I never returned to Indiana again.

My first year at DePauw was almost a magical experience for me. I set off on a train by myself to college, sight unseen, from Manhattan, with a trunk and a reel-to-reel tape recorder in August of 1968. My father, the drunk, drove me to the station and symbolically gave me an acorn to plant when I arrived. In those days, prior to the closing of the rail line, Greencastle was a whistle stop, and I had to tell the conductor when to stop the train. It seemed as if I were in the middle of a cornfield, because that was about all you could see, and the old train station had long been abandoned. I left my belongings unattended by the tracks, walked toward town, came across a drugstore and called a cab. As colleges go, DePauw wasn't as bad as it might have been, and living in that environment was nirvana to me after living with a dysfunctional family in a suburb that had become an enclave for social climbers. Knowing that fraternities were idiotic, I elected to live in a dorm. I met many of the international and out-of-state students, so at first it didn't occur to me that the majority of the students were dull Hoosiers or the children of wealthy families from the Chicago suburbs. I was just elated to live in a place where ideas seemed to matter and most of the people I ran into didn't seem like fools. Unfortunately, I was later hoodwinked into marrying one of the dull Hoosiers, and the rest is history.

No doubt there were some town and gown disputes while I lived in Greencastle, but I wasn't aware of them at the time. DePauw is a Greek-dominated college with lots of rowdy fraternities. Things changed considerably while I was there, and by the time I left most of the students looked like hippies and smoked pot, though beneath the surface they were still conservative Midwesterners who ended up becoming accountants and lawyers. DePauw was originally associated with the Methodist Church, but Middlebury had no church affiliation and was created by townspeople who felt a need for an institution of higher learning. If you fast forward to today, there are some town and gown disputes in Middlebury, but they seem to be minor.

The relationship between town and gown has gradually become clearer to me. The townspeople are just ordinary people earning a living, and the college is populated by professors who generally know far less than I once attributed to them. As I've said, professors are usually just good students who wind up teaching college, and in hindsight I don't think I learned much from them. I used to be annoyed by the fact that my college experience wasn't well thought out and that no one at the college took any responsibility. I would have been OK with DePauw if anyone had said that with my curriculum I would receive some intellectual stimulation and have a good time, but that I would eventually have to learn something more useful to earn a living. I did eventually study printing and business, which proved sufficient to finance the rest of my life, but the process would have been far more efficient if I had gone into it knowing that I would be doing a few years of broad study followed by a few years of vocational study, and that the two would not necessarily intersect. I only found this out on my own over a long period without any help. If I knew then what I know now, I would not have expected to be prepared for the workforce when I finished college and would have selected an actual vocation before receiving my B.A. degree. At the time, the people at liberal arts colleges were mindlessly repeating the mantra that they were teaching you how to think critically and communicate well, which supposedly would leave you set for the rest of your life. In retrospect it was a lie, because throughout my working years critical thinking and communication skills were far less important than following instructions and conforming. If anything, my liberal arts education made me more incompatible with the American workforce than I might have been otherwise, because the ability to think independently is a handicap in most jobs. My undergraduate experience turned out to be a personal growth period with no practical advantages. I now view many of my former professors as vaguely incompetent adults who should never have been given the charge of vulnerable minds.

The town and gown here are fairly well integrated, and most conflicts are quickly resolved. It helps that the college has a billion-dollar endowment and doesn't balk at spending it to keep the downtown looking respectable, which makes it appealing to the wealthy students they seek. Some of the students are so rich that they could live off their trust funds and never work. There are cases in which the town and gown have literally merged. After he graduated from Middlebury in 1972, future governor Jim Douglas married his dentist's assistant, Dorothy, a woman who grew up on a farm here. She still does all the yard work (and probably all of the home repairs) and he now works as an executive in residence at the college. We have no affiliation with the college and are just as likely to oppose it as support it, depending on the issue. Recently we opposed the use of a neighbor's house for student housing, since Middlebury students have a reputation for drunkenness and loud parties. On that issue we sided with the local bubbas, who stopped by our house in a large pickup truck to tell us that there would be shooting practice next door to the students' house early in the morning after a Halloween party there. Although I sympathize with students who want to live off campus – I lived off campus myself for two out of four years – I'd rather not have them living around here.

We have many affinities with the college. Occasionally we attend concerts and lectures, and the art museum isn't bad for a small college. We attended the wedding reception of one of our neighbors, who is an economics professor. Her children had been over for some stargazing. The college has an enormous economic impact on the county, and I think of it as comparable to a large manufacturing plant, but with a highly-educated workforce. We're not close friends with any of the faculty, but I think they add to the desirability of the region. Last September, when my daughter and grandson were visiting, we happened to be seated next to Jay Parini and his wife at a restaurant. Parini is a well-known English professor who was a friend of the late Gore Vidal. His wife struck up a conversation with my daughter about babies. I like that informality. If the college wasn't here, this would be an economically depressed county with far less cultural vibrancy than it currently possesses.

Enos Severance

When we moved to Vermont in 2011, I had no idea that I would become interested in local history. As it is, there are so many palpable signs of the past here that it is hard for me not to think about it. Our house was built by the original settler of this land, Enos Severance, in about 1798, when John Adams was president and Thomas Jefferson was vice president. Although the house was remodeled in 1974, it retains some of its original features. It was a basic post and beam farmhouse with an enormous hearth in the center of the ground floor. The hearth is gone, but its foundation is still in the basement. We have the original ceiling beams, the original pine planks on the second floor, and some of the original doors and hardware.

Born in 1770, Enos Severance was the fifth of ten children born to Ebenezer Severance and Azuba Smith in Northfield, Massachusetts. At that time Vermont was mostly a wilderness. Although the legal background is still murky, there were conflicting claims on the land by colonial New York and colonial New Hampshire. Starting in 1749, the colonial governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, sold land grants here, the first of which was named Bennington, after him. Middlebury was chartered in 1761. When New York began to make grants of the same land as the New Hampshire grants, a legal battle ensued, and purchasers of the New Hampshire grants, who were primarily small farmers and land speculators such as Ethan Allen, formed a militia to protect their property from New York. The issue was later resolved in 1791 in favor of New York, when a settlement was paid to New York by Vermont, enabling Vermont to become the fourteenth state. Because the French and Indian War (1754-1763) made Vermont an unsafe place to live, not much settlement took place during that period. This was immediately followed by the American Revolution (1765-1783), which also destabilized the region, with Lake Champlain serving as a conduit for the British forces in Canada. It was not until after the revolution that settlement picked up in earnest.

I have no evidence about what prompted the Severances to move to Vermont. Possibly they were attracted by the cheap land. In those days, modern agricultural methods did not exist, and it is also possible that they had exhausted their soil in Massachusetts. In any case, Enos's eldest brother, Samuel, arrived here in about 1786 and purchased land in East Middlebury, where he soon started a farm and married his neighbor's daughter, Mary Kirby, who had recently settled from Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1793, Enos and Samuel's father, Ebenezer, began to purchase land in our neighborhood on South Munger Street. In 1796 and 1797, Enos purchased adjacent land to the north, which became his farm, where he built his house. Samuel sold his property in East Middlebury and moved to land adjacent to the south side of Ebenezer's. In all, the Severances had several hundred acres along South Munger Street. Ebenezer's original house still stands, as does Enos's, but Samuel's appears to have been replaced by a new building, with a later Severance house dating from about the 1850's still standing next door.

Not many people were living in Middlebury in the late 1700's. Ebenezer Severance, as one of the few mature men, became a town selectman. Everyone appears to have been religious, with much of their social life centering around the Congregational Church, which was built in 1806, but whose members held meetings elsewhere prior to that. The same building stands today, and you can hear its bell from our house three miles away. It is difficult to imagine how physically demanding life must have been for the Severances. They had no power equipment for farming, no electricity, no inside plumbing, and twenty-below-zero temperatures during the winter. They had to cut their firewood by hand, and they probably made their own clothes. Worse yet, death was always nearby, with children not surviving childhood and adults dying before reaching the age of 60 in many cases.

In 1801, at age 30, Enos married Lydia Petty. Their first child, Philena, was born in 1802, and at age 27 she married a reverend and moved to Bristol, Vermont. Their second child, Roxana, was born in 1807 and lived in the house for most of her life. Lydia died in 1813 at the age of 49, and Enos married his second wife, Chloe Emerson, in 1814. Chloe bore him one daughter, Lydia, in 1815 and died while Enos was still alive. Enos soon married his third wife, Abigail Field, who outlived him. He died in 1842 at the age of 72, and his third daughter, Lydia, married later that year at the age of 26. Upon Enos's death, Abigail remarried and stayed on in the house until her death in 1869. Roxana then apparently married for the first time, at age 62. She and her husband, Edwin Landon, remained in the house until her death in 1877.

These were all ordinary people about whom we know little today. At his death, Enos owned about 80 acres, the house, a barn and the woodshed that we just replaced. He had an orchard, of which at least one tree is still alive - we ate a couple of its apples this year. According to family records he was also a beekeeper, though there is no evidence of that now. Several of the Severances, including Enos, his first wife, Lydia, and Roxana are buried in the Case Street Cemetery, about a mile from here.

You can infer some of their culture from their marriage patterns. Apparently it was unacceptable for a woman to live in a house without a male head of household. Thus, the younger Lydia married as soon as her father died, Abigail remarried as soon as Enos died, and Roxana married as soon as Abigail died - presumably Abigail's last husband no longer occupied the house. Conversely, there may also have been pressure for single men to be married. From the little evidence that I have, it is impossible to know whether there was attraction between the couples in every case; among the older couples it seems more likely that the marriages were simply an expedient way of keeping everyone paired up, and they may hardly have known each other before they married. The rural conditions and slow transportation further complicated the situation by making the plausible marriage choices extremely limited, and I would guess that everyone married someone who lived less than five miles away or attended the same church. From the church documents that I've seen it is clear that being an upstanding Christian was strongly emphasized. For example, the son of one of Enos's neighbors was reprimanded by his father for doing woodwork on a Sunday, when all work was strictly forbidden.

I don't know what the collective agricultural activities of the Severances were. The soil here is full of clay, and over time it seems to have shown itself best suited for hay. In this county over the years sheep, beef and dairy cattle have done well. Many grains don't grow well, as is attested by a contemporary farmer who is switching to rice after attempting unsuccessfully to grow other grains. With poor soil, little industry and a consistently small economy, most of the settlers who arrived in the late 1700's and early 1800's had left by the late 1800's. Enos's youngest brother, Moses, lived briefly with his father in his old age, but he then moved on to Ohio.

It is comforting to ponder simpler times, and the idea of a simple life appeals to me as much as anyone. There are people in Vermont now and people who would like to move here who would prefer to throw back the hands of time and live under circumstances in which they can proceed slowly, not feeling the pressures of the modern world, and perhaps even having more genuine relationships than they are likely to find in our competitive, fast-paced civilization. However, it is easy to idealize those conditions, and it would be instructive to transport Enos Severance to the present and ask him what he thought. There is little doubt in my mind that he would soon want a tractor, a car, electricity, a chainsaw and many tools that were unavailable when he was alive. If he were given the benefit of a modern education, his intellectual horizons might expand enough for him to consider belief systems other than the one that dominated his entire life. If you look at the past this way, it is less tempting to idealize it and make false assumptions about its merits.

This last point sums up how I feel about Christian sentimentalists such as Marilynne Robinson. I would not object to her fiction, other than its tendentiousness, if it were sold as light reading for escapists, but because of her academic credentials and popularity among educated readers she has somehow been elevated to the ranks of major thinkers. To me, this is an indication of how unclearly even the so-called intelligentsia may think. There are countless ways to imagine comforting ideologies in which one might live more happily, and Robinson's choice, besides being no better than many others, resorts to idealization that is both historically inaccurate and lacking in applicability to the present. In my view, the credentialled people who embrace her work are only demonstrating their inability to think deeply or imagine anything beyond their existing prejudices. Whether they are willing to admit it or not, they are engaging in escapism pure and simple.

Living in Harmony with Nature

During most of my lifetime living in harmony with nature has been an important idea to me, and it has become popular generally in Western culture. As mentioned, when I was growing up I had an unrecognized sense of separation from the natural environment, and life in the suburbs wasn't satisfying in ways that I couldn't fully understand until later. In the 1960's the hippie movement seemed to change everything. Looking back, the conceptual basis for natural living then doesn't seem particularly coherent. Part of it was a rejection of the corporate lifestyle represented by the military-industrial complex, part of it was the rise of an idealized conception of the lives of Native Americans and other indigenous cultures, part of it was the popular interpretation of Eastern religions and part of it was an increased awareness of the health risks associated with chemicals in the environment. Many of the same ideas can be seen today in environmental activism, particularly in regard to global warming, but also in sustainability thinking, recycling, resistance to GMO's and the growing popularity of organic foods. Ultimately, preferring to live in harmony with nature probably has a strong instinctive basis, which nevertheless becomes obscured by capitalism, fads and religion.

For practical purposes I still advocate living in and preserving the natural environment, and that was a factor in deciding to move to Vermont, which is not only one of the most environmentally-friendly but also one of the least damaged states in which to live. It is obvious to me that people who live in an uncrowded region with natural features intact are likely to be happier than people who live in urban areas, as long as they have sufficient means to support themselves and don't hate their jobs. In my opinion, those who say that overpopulation isn't problematic are in denial, because we are already witnessing multiple problems that would not exist if the world population were still at 1800's levels. There would, for example, be no global warming, no energy crisis, no mega-cities and perhaps even less war and terrorism than there is now if population had been better controlled.

Living naturally involves the recognition that our planet is a giant ecosystem of which we are but a small part, and that as organisms we live on a continuum with all other life forms, though some species evolved via different paths. Although this is all fairly obvious, it still flies in the face of the anthropocentrism that seems to dominate the thinking of many people today. Anthropocentrism, to me, entails the false concept that we, as humans, occupy a higher plane of existence than other organisms and in a sense live outside the realm of ordinary causality and evolution, which is a notion that is becoming increasingly at odds with scientific data. False thinking like this is perpetuated by our antiquated ways of organizing ourselves and society and the illusory impression we have that, as the dominant species, we truly control the planet.

You may be surprised to hear this kind of talk coming from me because it sounds a little New Agey, but it really isn't, and it ties in with other things I've said related to the diminishing centrality of mankind as we come to understand the universe better. So, even if there is a little overlap with, say, the Gaia hypothesis, my view isn't really warm and fuzzy, picturing us living cozy lives alongside our plant, animal and fungal friends here on earth. Rather, like E.O. Wilson, I see us as living in a rare and fragile pocket of the universe that is the only place to which we are adapted, and we are lucky to be alive at all in such a dangerous and unforgiving universe.

Anyone who studies astronomy will come to see how dissimilar our world is to most of the universe. For this reason, I prefer to restrict my thinking on harmony with nature to harmony on our planet. We are merely part of a local phenomenon that is cut off by vast distances from most of the universe. Manned space exploration is a waste of resources in my opinion. We have to think about a future on earth that is likely to include enormous changes due to technological advances, and it is more important to focus on that than to fantasize about human space travel. The short-term picture on AI seems to indicate an acceleration in human obsolescence as employees, and the long-term picture, though murky, could include anything from higher-performing genetically modified humans to human-AI co-evolution to the complete digitization of humans, or some other process that would effectively make us immortal. New technologies make it harder to reconcile our instincts, which provide our sense of what is real and natural, with choices that have never existed in this world.

Utopian thinkers seem to favor fanciful scenarios such as Heaven without considering that we are not physically or psychologically adapted to immortality. As I said in an earlier post, I think super-intelligent beings might prefer to die if they became immortal, because the meaning of life springs from the toil of survival, and I don't think a life without challenges could have much meaning to any creature. In effect, immortality would be a transcendence of nature, and that isn't something that I could relate to. This is an area that could be explored in the arts and the humanities, but it seems to me that they are generally retreating to simplistic escapism. I wonder, for example, what our great writers will do when AI begins to produce better writing than they can - it wouldn't be that hard.

Bernie Sanders

I was hoping not to bore you with political discussions, but Bernie Sanders is one of Vermont's U.S. senators, and he is adding an uncommon dimension to the 2016 presidential race, making it seem almost as if Noam Chomsky were about to debate Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination on national television. The last few presidential elections have been dull, and there usually isn't much point in paying attention to what the candidates say. I am familiar with several of Bernie's positions, but won't go into any detail here. Rather I'll just explain what I generally like and dislike about him and leave it at that.

What is appealing about Bernie is his willingness to state in plain terms the positions that he feels strongly about. I may be slightly biased because I generally agree with him: for example, it seems obvious to me that Citizens United was one of the worst rulings in the history of the Supreme Court and that the federal government is effectively a plutocracy. In the context of how public servants should be spending their time, there aren't currently many national politicians besides Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who actively oppose the interests of those who provide most of the funding for election campaigns. As a politician, Bernie is highly accessible in Vermont and doesn't engage in double-talk when he claims to represent the people. He has honed his message with the help of years of political experience during which he learned how to win people over. His strongest card by far, and what makes him stand out the most, is his visible enthusiasm for the causes he values. That passion is contagious, and you won't find it in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or any of the Republican candidates. Bernie is possibly the best hope in the U.S. for generating a populist movement that counters the relentless trend toward greater inequality.

Unfortunately there are a few negatives about Bernie, from my point of view anyway. Although he has cleaned up his language considerably, his still sounds a lot like an old-school socialist along the lines of Noam Chomsky, and both of them seem to be operating on a conceptually obsolete political model. Bernie loves to say "working families," which means little to me. "Working," I think, is a way of saying "worker" without the direct socialist connotations. "Families," it seems to me, is a toned-down representation of "the people," and shows a conscious effort by Bernie to cast his ideas in a framework that is familiar and acceptable to most Americans. I don't think these are the optimal frames of reference, because they refer back to an industrial period that no longer exists. While it might be argued that we still have oppressed workers, the masses must rise up, etc., the real conditions are far more complex than that, and I'm not sure how Bernie would deal with the present global economic situation. Just saying "workers unite" won't fix anything. Furthermore, I don't know how Bernie would deal with automation and AI, which are inevitably going to eliminate millions or possibly billions of jobs worldwide. Although Bernie is focusing on the real problems, I'm not sure he has the vocabulary or tools to deal with them effectively.

Bernie is a smart Jewish guy from Brooklyn, but he doesn't quite make it into the top tier of that category. The problem is that the smartest people rarely go into politics, which is one of the reasons why I usually find it uninteresting. He followed a pattern roughly similar to that of Howard Dean, another New Yorker who moved to Vermont and found it easy to launch a political career here. The influx of liberals to Vermont has made the state as a whole far more liberal than it used to be, and some old-time Vermont conservatives now consider Chittenden County, where both Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean started their political careers, a different state. However, over the years Bernie has become popular statewide. Even so, our neighbor, former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican, says in his memoir, "A reasonable case can be made that Bernie's legislative accomplishments don't match those of other Vermont senators, but his rhetorical accomplishments certainly do." There may be some sour grapes in that statement, because even though it may be accurate, Jim Douglas would probably have liked to have Bernie's current job himself.

My guess is that Bernie Sanders is using this situation as a method of advancing his causes, and that actually becoming president is not his primary goal. At a minimum the political discussion should be more interesting than usual this time around. In the extremely unlikely event that Bernie wins the Democratic nomination for president I will vote for him. Otherwise I may vote for a third-party candidate, if at all.

What is Progress?

At this time of year the baby birds are leaving their nests and flying around confusedly. Yesterday an unkempt-looking little chickadee landed on the deck followed by its anxious parents, as if it were out trick-or-treating on Halloween in a dangerous neighborhood. The day before that, a baby goldfinch landed on the watering can that I was carrying and looked at me curiously for a minute before flying off. The babies of many species can be quite trusting before they learn the importance of fear.

By feeding the birds I am disrupting the local ecosystem. The goldfinch population, which constitutes the majority at the feeders, has grown over the last four years, and the trees in the vicinity are currently filled with bright yellow dots at certain times of day. They wait their turn at the feeder, and over time some of the branches have been denuded of foliage by the traffic. I'm going through about 320 pounds of sunflower kernels and 30 pounds of nyjer seed per year. The changes to the environment aren't that noticeable to me. There's now more prey available for hawks and cats, but small birds are hardly worth a hawk's effort, and there aren't many cats around. However, there are probably thousands of minute changes that you could detect if you did an in-depth study.

I don't think human populations behave all that differently from goldfinches. If you provide them with the essentials for living, all things being equal, their populations also increase. This is a phenomenon that the unpopular Thomas Malthus noticed over two hundred years ago. In current political thinking, talk of controlling human population growth intersects with racism, communism and any number of politically incorrect positions. I consider this one of the great paradoxes of our time: human population growth contributes to poverty, crime, political instability, war, pollution, climate change and mass extinctions, yet no one can discuss it without being labeled a racist, eugenicist or elitist of some sort. Illegal immigration to wealthy countries has become a fact of life, and few countries are currently able to deal with the problem effectively within their political systems.

While in some ways I am a liberal (e.g. I support Bernie Sanders), I often find this group collectively naïve about human nature. Specifically, it is a taboo to refer to people as animals even though they clearly are animals. Science increasingly shows that we are more like than unlike our fellow mammals. As I have remarked before, there is a denial of this fact embedded in our culture; it is associated with Christianity and Romanticism and oddly belies our professed belief in the separation of church and state. There seems to be an unrecognized assumption in society that man is better than nature despite the massive evidence to the contrary: man is nature, or, more precisely, part of it.

A little observation demonstrates that in broad biological terms humans aren't much different from goldfinches. Under the right environmental conditions both goldfinches and humans increase in population until factors rebalance their ecosystems. Both goldfinches and humans tend to exhibit the same basic behavior before and after population increases. Goldfinches continue to build nests, lay eggs, etc., and humans continue to build houses, have children, etc. Somehow in all of this humans are supposed to be making progress, and that is what I'm questioning here.

To be sure, there has been some progress within developed countries in terms of quality of life, health, longevity, education and knowledge, but at a more fundamental level there has been little change at all. The ideals and goals that people have now are hardly any different from those who lived during the Bronze Age. Agamemnon wanted a big house in a good location with protection from intruders, so did William the Conqueror, and so does Bill Gates. I am struck by what many wealthy people do with their money now: they build big houses in attractive locations just as wealthy people did three thousand years ago. Although it is never stated exactly as such, the American Dream implies that everyone has a right to own a large house in a pleasant location, and that is exactly how many people see it. This is easy to spot here in Vermont, to which about half of the population has moved from densely-populated regions in the Northeast, and many of them bought large retirement homes. In other words, the American Dream wouldn't quite work for them in Bayonne, Brooklyn, Bridgeport or Boston. In what way is this model an improvement for humanity, and is it sustainable?

This is sort of a "what's wrong with this picture?" post. If you live in the U.S. and absorb the ideas in circulation you may get the idea that this is a free country that encourages everyone to own a large house in a nice location and have as many children as they like. Has anyone, other than a few environmentalists, thought much about the impact of population growth? What will Vermont be like in fifty years if ten thousand new people move here every year? On a small scale I can simply stop feeding the goldfinches if they get out of control, but little attention is being paid to the much more significant problem of human population growth, which is already straining us with countless burdens.

Joseph Battell

Since moving to Middlebury and researching the history of our house, I've become interested in local history. This is a relatively well-documented subject, because most of the settlement did not occur until after the American Revolution, and Middlebury College was founded in 1800, providing an educated population to document whatever transpired. History of the Town of Middlebury, by Samuel Swift, published in 1859, goes into great detail about who lived here and when. Swift interviewed an early settler, Mary Kirby, from Litchfield, Connecticut, who in 1791 had married another settler, Samuel Severance, from Northfield, Massachusetts. Samuel was the elder brother of Enos Severance, who built our house in about 1798 and died in 1842. Three of the four old Severance houses mentioned by Swift are still standing in our neighborhood. Compared to most of the U.S., it is much easier here to get a sense of continuity with the past.

Yesterday we went to hear a talk at Middlebury College about Joseph Battell (1837-1915), a well-known figure in Middlebury history. He was an eccentric character and a good example of the dominant cultural values in America during the Victorian period. Battell was a grandson of Horatio Seymour (1778-1857), an early settler, judge and U.S. Senator, and grew up in Seymour's house, which is a landmark downtown. He attended Middlebury College and while still young inherited a fortune from his father's brother, who had worked in the steel industry. He lived the rest of his life in a manner that might be described as spoiled, marriage-averse, whimsical, fatuous, opinionated, imperious, philanthropic and repressed.

Early on he adopted a detached way of dealing with women. Rather than pursue them, he objectified them first by viewing them at a distance through a telescope and later by taking chaste photographs of them in stiff poses. He never married, and although there is no clear evidence, it would be reasonable to assume that he was a repressed homosexual, not unlike his contemporary, Henry James. In no photograph does he look happy.

Battell had several hobbies. He took an interest in the Morgan horse and is said to have saved the breed when he built the Morgan Horse Farm in Weybridge. He was an amateur writer whose first book was so bad that his sister bought all of the unsold copies and burnt them. His most notorious book, called Ellen, or the Whisperings of an Old Pine, involved a Socratic dialogue between a girl and a wise tree in which, among other things, Darwinism and the wave theory of sound are supposedly refuted. Though it didn't help his literary reputation and was universally regarded as unreadable, that didn't stop him from printing a second, deluxe, edition.

In most practical matters Battell fared somewhat better. He decided to host a summer retreat in Ripton, Vermont, near the pass over the Green Mountains. Named after nearby Bread Loaf Mountain, the inn grew into a large, popular hotel that drew people from across the country. In conjunction with the hotel, he purchased thousands of acres of land along the summits of the Green Mountains from Bread Load to Camel's Hump. He also bought the Middlebury newspapers and published the news for many years. As a newspaperman, he used his paper to rant against things that he opposed. He hated cars and printed stories of car accidents from around the world. For a time he managed to block car traffic on the road, now Route 125, to the Bread Loaf Inn. He ran for and was elected to office in the Vermont House and Senate, but was not able to win when he ran for governor.

Battell's legacy is visible today. The Morgan Horse Farm is intact. The commercial building downtown that he built and inhabited, called the Battell Block, is still occupied. The stone bridge over Otter Creek on Main Street that he insisted on building is still in active use. His Bread Loaf property was given to Middlebury College and still hosts the writers' conference that dates back to Robert Frost. For a time, Middlebury College must have had the largest campus in the world with the 30,000 acres it received from Battell. Most of that is now part of the Green Mountain National Forest. He also provided funding for some of the current buildings on the Middlebury campus.

As a Victorian, Battell shared some similarities with another contemporary, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Although Roosevelt was more specifically raised to be a high achiever and to contribute to the public good, Battell also thought that it was his duty to make lasting contributions to society. Both valued preserving the natural environment, with Battell planting hundreds of thousands of trees in the then-deforested Green Mountains and Roosevelt creating the National Park and National Forest systems. Both were eccentric, but in different ways. Battell was part Luddite and Roosevelt was part imperialist. Another difference was that Roosevelt belonged to a large clan and Battell did not. The realization of Victorian ideals is probably best seen in Theodore Roosevelt's fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose early role model was Theodore.

Economic Development in Vermont

One of the very few people who have responded to my poll requested that I write about a topic that often comes up in local discussion: the shortage of well-paying jobs in Vermont. It is difficult to find them here because the state has relatively little industry compared to the surrounding states. There is a large IBM plant in Essex Junction, but the primary state industry is tourism. Some counties are agricultural; Addison County, where I live, has significant dairy and beef farming, and apples and maple syrup are produced in several counties. Wood and mining industries still flourish, and in recent years craft breweries and whiskey distilleries have been growing, but none of these employ many workers. Most of the jobs are tourism-related and don't pay well.

There are historical reasons for the current state of economic affairs in Vermont. Few came early on compared to other states, as the remote, landlocked location was not optimal for industrialization. Many of the early settlers were farmers from nearby states; they soon found out that the soil and climate are not optimal for most crops and joined the migration to the Midwest. Not many industries thrived here, and the rate of population growth significantly lagged behind that of the surrounding states. The population here has multiplied 4.1 times since 1800, compared to 33.1 times for New York, 15.5 times for Massachusetts and 7.2 times for New Hampshire.  As the economy boomed along the coast, Vermont became a vacation retreat. In the 1960's, Vermont gained a counterculture image, and wealthy people from other states began to move here, shifting state politics from conservative to liberal. As in other parts of the country, liberals emphasize protection of the environment and quality-of-life issues, while conservatives emphasize economic growth and wealth creation. To be sure, few Vermont political conservatives resemble Tea Partiers, and they don't correspond closely to the contemporary Republicans in Washington, D.C. A liberal political environment makes it harder to attract new businesses here than to pro-business states.

As a retiree transplant, I oppose wholesale economic development in Vermont. First, speaking as an individual, I came here for the low population density, the pleasant physical environment and the like-mindedness of the people. Having seen firsthand what happened when economic development hit areas such as Indianapolis, Indiana and Schaumburg, Illinois, I would definitely move somewhere else if that were to happen here. I would vote against strong economic growth purely out of self-interest. As far as the status of the unemployed or underemployed is concerned, it has been a fact of life for centuries that people go to where there are jobs, not vice versa. The breadwinners in my family, including me, have done that for generations, so I don't think of it as a punishment to impose it on others. Those who insist on living in a place without jobs are behaving like narcissists if they think they have a right to both a good job and the living situation of their choice. That privilege has been a rarity for most of recorded history.

Second, on a more fundamental level, this topic touches on what I perceive to be serious flaws in our economic and political systems. Neither democracy nor capitalism deals with the consequences of economic development on a long-term basis. Because of economic growth and population increases, the U.S. is not the same country that it was in 1776. Economic growth has historically damaged the environment and contributed to overpopulation across the globe, and the warnings of Thomas Malthus have generally been ignored only because the human race has thus far managed to survive in spite of them. Few seem willing to admit that the country and the world might be better places if they more closely resembled Vermont than New Jersey. It is certainly no coincidence that many of the retirees here moved from that state.

Most of my childhood was spent in a suburb of New York City, and though I didn't understand it at the time, I felt that I was not getting enough exposure to the outdoors. After leaving for college, I developed a sense of relief at being able to live in uncongested places with woods and fields, which, it now seems to me, more closely approximate the kind of environment to which we are adapted. I think the same is true for most people, whether they realize it or not. This takes on significance when you consider that it is a fact that has been almost ignored since the country's inception. Most of the population now lives in or near cities.

Policymakers and economists chuckle to themselves whenever someone suggests that less economic growth would be beneficial. However, economic growth is usually accompanied by population growth. Currently, the world population is projected to reach about 9 billion by 2050, almost ten times the estimated world population of 1800. Ten thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in geological terms, it is estimated that our ancestors inhabited a world with a population of only 4 million. The fact that we have survived this growth does not imply that it is desirable. Rather it has contributed to an illusion of normalcy where none should exist.

I view the world as our deteriorating habitat, with diminishing pockets of habitability. Though I feel fortunate to be able to live in a desirable state within a major economic and military power, I see no reason to support American ideology, which I have never believed. Directly or indirectly, many of the world's woes are connected to conflicting groups that have been forced into contact with each other by overcrowding. Small groups can't wage wars with people whom they don't know exist, neither can they seriously deplete world resources or create global warming. When people aren't forced to live and work in cramped quarters, they can have environments in which they feel comfortable and never encounter conflicting ideologies.

Finally, I am not opposed to all economic development. Here in Middlebury a process is in place to create a small number of jobs that do not impinge upon the existing nature of the town, which still operates much as it did in 1800.

Retirement

My mother died on August 17, 2007, and had accumulated more money than expected. I had been managing all of her assets since 2004, ever since she went into assisted living, and knew exactly what she had and that I would eventually receive one third of it. That plus my own savings, pension, and future Social Security were enough for me to retire. At the time I particularly disliked my job at R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., and, from a career standpoint, at age 57 in a dying industry, there was little point in continuing to work. After thinking it over, I abruptly retired on September 9, 2007, giving no notice.

I am interested in investing and spent much of my time on that for the first few years. As it happened, the stock market peaked on October 9, 2007, declined throughout 2008, and then crashed precipitously starting in September, 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. At the lowest point I had lost about 40% of my holdings, but they have more than recovered as of today, and my total assets after almost seven years of retirement haven't changed much. I elected to start receiving Social Security in 2012 at age 62. Though this is negative in that it will reduce the total payments that I'm likely to receive, it provides a significant portion of my annual cash needs and allows me to keep all of my assets permanently invested. If my investments do well, I may even come out better than I would have by taking Social Security later. Either way, I am unlikely to run out of money. I haven't spent much so far, except on telescopes.

Another thing that I did initially was look up old friends. I found and visited an artist friend who became a Hindu monk and lives in Ganges, Michigan. I contacted a former college roommate who is now a lawyer living in Portland, Oregon. I contacted and later was visited by a former college acquaintance who was then a computer science professor at Clemson University and has since retired to Asheville, North Carolina. I contacted an Iranian acquaintance from college who was in Tehran during the 1979 revolution and has lived in England ever since. Also, 2008 was the fortieth anniversary of my high school graduation, and I was in touch with several people from Pelham, New York. One of them got me thinking about Vermont, because she has lived here since the 1970's. She and her husband are like old hippies. They live in Bristol, Vermont, where he is a potter and she spins and weaves wool from sheep that they keep. We visited them when we first came to explore the area but haven't seen much of them since. In case you're interested, here is their website: http://www.robertcomptonpottery.com/.

On the whole, I have found it unrewarding to contact old acquaintances, and probably won't do it anymore. At best, you may catch up on a few things, and in my experience not much comes from it. People move on with their lives, and after forty years they're not about to change their habits. Although I have very few friends, I find that I am more interested in people generally than most people are.

Another time consumer for me has been Internet discussion. I put a fair amount of effort into comments that I made at The New York Review of Books, but, as mentioned earlier, I now find that to be an unacceptable organization. I still am looking at other sites and make posts occasionally, but with much lower expectations than previously. I like to write down what I'm thinking mainly as an exercise in clarity, and now have almost given up on the idea that meaningful communication might occur during Internet discussion between strangers.

In full disclosure, I also have to admit that I waste time playing games on my computer. I like bridge, and have been playing a very good computer program, which I think has significantly improved my bridge skills. Recently I tried playing online hearts, which I liked, but I was put off by some of the bad Internet behavior exhibited. It was not uncommon for people to get a losing hand and drop out of a game immediately and disrupt it for everyone else. Some people were rude and insulting, especially when they were losing. I also play off-line games such as chess, which I'm not particularly good at.

I like being outside and doing things outside. The winter limits what you can do here, unless you want to ski, and I don't. During the warmer months I spend time on lawn mowing and gardening. I have done a lot of tree removal, because we had many dead trees blocking views and near power lines when we moved in. I had hoped to do a lot of hiking here, but so far haven't much. The better hikes require ascents of at least a thousand feet and take several hours, and I'm more interested in that than my partner is. We do go on walks together on the dirt road by our house. It dead ends to the south at a farm near our house, and runs to the north for several miles, with good views of the Adirondacks, which are about 30 miles away. The sky conditions have been poor for stargazing over most of the winter, though I left out the telescope all winter and viewed even when it was near zero.  Currently my telescope is in storage until I return from Missouri.

My partner is in charge of our social life, and we are gradually getting to know a few people here. As mentioned earlier, I'm not very interested in routine socializing.

Springtime in Vermont

We have had a long, cold winter here. This morning the temperature is twelve degrees Fahrenheit, and a few days ago it was below zero. The snow is still about a foot deep in the yard. The maple syrup hasn't started to flow yet because of the low temperatures, but it should be a lot warmer by the end of the week. And then the dreaded mud season will begin.

It takes a little toughness and resolve to live in Vermont during the winter, which lasts for about six months. Some Vermonters are proud about this. One of our neighbor boys walks about half a mile each way to catch the school bus wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, even when the temperature is below zero. I asked him about it, and he said "I guess I'm just a Vermonter." He does wear a hat sometimes, though.

You have to plan your heating carefully, because it's expensive. It looks as if we're going to make it with four cords of firewood and three hundred gallons of heating oil for a total cost of about $2500 for the season. That may sound like a lot, but it could have been three times that if we had only used oil and set our thermostats at 68 degrees. We set them at 60 degrees during the day and 50 degrees at night. Of course, it's warmer by the wood burning stove, where I'm sitting right now. We also wear woolen long underwear all winter, and I wear a wool hat and wool gloves with open fingers around the house. You get used to it, and the cold doesn't bother me at all. We buy kiln dried wood, which is expensive, but this way we don't have to dry unseasoned wood. I have also burned tree limbs and dead tress that I cut down on the property.

Getting around during the winter isn't difficult, because they take good care of the roads. They also use a lot of road salt, which causes cars to rust prematurely compared to other parts of the country. The roads are usually bad only during a snow storm. We drove over the mountains right after a storm in December and had no trouble, thanks to snow tires.

You do get cabin fever if you don't go out much. I like to hike, which is difficult when the trails have three feet of snow on them. Some people use snowshoes. A lot of people ski. As a diversion, I drove to St. Johnsbury, across the state near the Connecticut River, a few weeks ago. The only time I had been there previously was in 1974 on my honeymoon during the Arab Oil Embargo, when gasoline was being rationed. Little has changed in St. Johnsbury. Not everyone sticks around here all winter. Some of our neighbors left for warmer parts. Robert Frost, who supposedly was a quintessential New Englander and has a mountain nearby named after him, used to winter in Florida.

Even though it is still wintry here, the birds are returning. The robins manage to find food where the snow has melted. Our bird feeders have been busy all winter with goldfinches, chickadees, tufted titmice, mourning doves, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers, and they are now being joined by redwing blackbirds and crows that can't find enough food elsewhere. I just saw my first grackle of the year.

Human Ecology

When my daughter was born, I used to think about creating an environment that would be beneficial for her. I had limited control over that, but her first five years seem to have been good. Then I was divorced and she lived with her mother until age ten. I retired in 2007 and spent a lot of time deciding where to live, and the thinking process was similar. You have to look at what will be a good environment in terms which may not correspond with what other people think. After living in the Midwest for about forty years I was sick of it. I didn't want to live anywhere near a city. I wanted to live in a rural area that wasn't populated by conservative Republicans and didn't have much commercial development. The location had to have cultural amenities and it had to be physically attractive. Believe it or not, these criteria rule out almost the entire United States. They more or less limit you to a rural college town in a blue state. If you eliminate the Midwest, your choices are confined pretty much to Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Maine and Western Massachusetts. I favored the East Coast because I grew up there and it has cultural attributes that I prefer to those on the West Coast.

In piecing this together, I had to take into consideration the needs of my partner. She is from Yorkshire and studied at King's College, Cambridge, where she befriended a fellow member of the working class, Tony Judt, and met her American husband-to-be. In 1979 she moved to Chicago and married, and they remained in the Chicago area, raising two children in Lake Forest. Like me, she dislikes cities and is introverted, but she is more social than I am. Her lifestyle prior to meeting me can be described as "suburban housewife." Her husband was a lawyer who worked nonstop, and they lived in a ranch-style house. She devoted all of her time and energy to her children, who are now turning out to be successful adults. I would probably be fine with a cabin in the woods, but that wouldn't suit her at all. She likes gardening and knitting and belonging to groups. I'm fine with gardening - vegetables mostly - but don't care about knitting or groups. I prefer cutting down trees with a chainsaw and hiking in the mountains. I used to be interested in Internet discussion but am finding stargazing and astronomy to be a more constructive and satisfying use of time. For all its vaunted openness, in truth the Internet is controlled by ruthless oligarchs who will delete you out of existence if they perceive you to be disturbing their agendas.

In 2011 we decided on the Middlebury area, took a road trip, found a house that we liked and bought it. Middlebury is in Addison County, which is the most agricultural county in Vermont. Once it had the highest wool production of any county in the United States, and now it has lots of cattle. There are no interstates here, which makes a difference for the better. We are far enough out in the country that it really is rural, but downtown is only a short drive away. There is a good food co-op. The college has surprisingly good musical performances for a small college and an art museum that isn't bad either. There are several good restaurants in the area that are operated by French immigrants. I recently met the owner of one that just opened in downtown Middlebury and overlooks Otter Creek, and he said that he likes it here because of the variety of people he can talk to. I also find that to be one of the best features of the area. You have local farmers who have lived here for generations, retirees like us, people from all over the world who moved here by choice, college students and professors, and no one is inaccessible or ghettoized the way they are nearly everywhere else. There are no McMansions or gated subdivisions.  Our neighbors include a farmer, a forester, a former governor and an economics professor. This is about as egalitarian as you can get in the United States. My partner belongs to a garden club, takes a tai chi class and volunteers as an usher at the Town Hall Theater.

I like it so much here that I am not inclined to travel. I haven't been on a plane in over three years. We know a couple who retired to a property near Lake Champlain because they like boating. They used to do their boating to get away from things, but since they no longer feel a need to get away, they sold their boat.

These comments are not intended as a plug for Vermont. Actually, I don't want more people moving here. The point is that it is possible to find living conditions that are nearly optimal for yourself. You may need resources that you don't have, but I think the harder part is knowing yourself.

Vermont

Two and a half years ago we moved from Illinois to Vermont. I'm still learning about the state, but will relate some of my current thoughts to you. Vermont has a combination of characteristics that make it a desirable place to live.

As the only landlocked state in New England, it was the last one settled. By 1749, Massachusetts and Connecticut were becoming crowded, and farmers were looking for new places to live. The colonial governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, accommodated them by illegally selling land grants in what is now Vermont. The sales were illegal because, at the time, the land belonged to New York. Settlers in the New Hampshire Grants, led by Ethan Allen, formed a militia, known as the Green Mountain Boys, to protect their property from New York authorities who attempted to seize it. Allen developed an intense dislike for New York landowners. They typically were well-connected Englishmen who had been granted enormous estates of thousands of acres, on which tenant farmers lived much as in England. In contrast, the New Hampshire Grants went mainly to small farmers who owned their land outright.

The settlement of the region was slow from 1754 until the end of the the American Revolution in 1783. The French and Indian War placed Vermont in a vulnerable position between the English colonies to the south and the French colony to the north, with Lake Champlain providing free access to marauding French soldiers and their Native American allies. In 1777, Vermont became an independent republic and was initially called New Connecticut. Because of property disputes, it did not become the 14th state until 1791, at which time Vermont paid $30,000 to New York State to resolve the issue of land ownership. By then, settlers were moving in in larger numbers.

Many of the early settlers didn't stay here for long. Better farmland became available in the Midwest and drew them away. Although some small pockets of industry developed, the state never became industrialized, and the population has always been small. Because of this, much of Vermont that existed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is still intact. Beyond the Burlington area, there has been minimal development.

Where I live, I get a deep sense of continuity with the past. We live on the corner of one of the original hundred-acre lots of a New Hampshire Grant chartered in 1761. The stone marker is still there. Our immediate neighborhood was first settled by the Severance family, which moved here in about 1793 from Northfield, MA.  Except for a few additional houses, it probably looks about the same now as it did then. Three of the four Severance houses, including ours, are still standing. Our house was built in about 1797 and has the original foundation and frame, and the upstairs floor is mostly the original pine planks, some of which are 22" wide. In the Town Clerk's office, you can find copies of the original hand-written deeds.

The Severances were all farmers. They cleared the flat lands along the creek. Our house was built by Enos Severance, who was a beekeeper and kept an orchard. One of his apple trees is still alive. Enos's father, Ebenezer, lived about 300 yards down the road, and his house is also intact, though it was remodeled in the 1800's. Enos's younger brother, Moses, lived there and took care of Ebenezer when he grew old. The eldest son, Samuel, who first came to the area in 1786 and had another farm, moved and built a house at the end of the road. That one is gone, but the Severances built a new one next door which is intact.

I like the fact that so little has changed here. The worn mountains across the fields have been there for 450 million years, longer than the Atlantic Ocean or even land animals. The lack of overpopulation and the natural setting are more agreeable to the instincts than the urban and suburban environments that most people inhabit. Moreover, the outdoors and locally grown food are popular here: the natural life is part of the culture.

There are some negatives here too, just as anywhere. Having a tourism-based economy and being in New England, with wealthy states nearby, makes it a little expensive. The people tend to be relaxed, which is characteristic of many rural areas. However, the mix of people includes descendants of New England's early religious fanatics, which perhaps makes them a little taciturn and closed compared to rural people elsewhere. And rural life means that some goods and services can be hard to find.