There’s a sadness here, to this place. Empty, low hanging silvered clouds clasping the peaks; the town’s closed. Lynn is trying to rent her house for 1300; her mortgage is 2500. She’s underwater, a teacher, and old. This is a state of dreams, she said. She knew she wanted to live here when she was 6 and moved here shortly after that. Things turned out a little different than she had hoped.
The college up on the hill is dark and has been since mid-december, the empty dorms standing cold and waiting for the 19 year olds to come back and spend. Instead there are deer, in the snow, quiet.
On a bridge in Rutland, over the train tracks, a long disused smoke stack stands against the sky, the train car wheels evaporating into rust. On Snow Road, over Rupert Mountain in the middle of Janurary, nothing running but the sapping lines and my engine, in the sun setting winds. The power is intermittent and there is a prayerfulness that meets me wherever I go: spend, spend they say to me. My money comes from the city, where it is made with seeming magic.
A hooded man walks down Main Street. The traffic lights needlessly flashing red.
In an anonymous ubiquitious field of snow a winterized horse stands and stares at a motionless rooster. Their wordless exchange a matter of monumentally quiet import.
Lynn reminded me that everything is expensive and there are no jobs. I nodded shamefully. Everyone here is a teacher or a bartender, a baker or an artist. Bookstores with no readers… I wonder if they know the earnings they strive for would destroy their reasons for living here. This is a state entwined in a catch 22, a place destined to service the engines of economy in the cities. Names, like “Boston” and “New York”, are pronounced with reverance and awe and longing disdain, the same tones we use to speak of the beautiful women and men who don’t know our name.
Driving today, through the roads, I realized that I love it, in part, because I can imagine it as I would like it to be. Passing past a picture perfect farm – the images left in my mind have no reality. Only the poetry of simplicity, beauty, unreality distilled. The completeness of the disconnected.
Here and tonight, I am happy, at rest, lonely, full of ideas, cold, young, and jaded.