Where to Go in Vermont 2021
Charlotte, Vermont -- July 2021
In this new normal, Covid rages yet you feel safe if you have the mRNA vaccine, you’re like an ancient Hebrew strolling through parted waters that hoard their destruction capacity for Pharaoh’s cavalry. You may get wet but you will not drown.
In the middle of July 2021, and at the dark sky start of the dark Jewish month of Av 5781, I took off with Emily from NYC for two weeks of R&R, as my Vietnam-vet dad calls it. We were house-sitting for a friend in Vermont while he and his family went to Cape Cod. It was a game of musical chairs with Vermont and Massachusetts the winners and Brooklyn seatless.
My friends — a family of four — had moved from New York to Vermont last year in the early summer months of Covid, when we were all unvaccinated and kicking to keep our chins above water. By the time they moved north, I had left my Manhattan rental apartment and was living near a farm in Massachusetts with dwindling housing options. On their invitation, I joined them: a dad, mom and two kids. I was their family-friend uncle. They were my safe harbor.
I explored the region in my car when work was slow. I discovered Vermont was a reprieve and gift. It’s elevated, transcendental beauty creates a calm. It settles and soothes while somehow also motivating and inspiring. I don’t get it, but it’s not the getting that matters when you’re eating wild raspberries in a mountain meadow.
There are verdant hills and glimmering lakes and mountain ranges and pastures and swimming holes full of children’s shouts. People are kindly and talkative when not masked up.
A summer stupor settles over Vermont each season, the sunshine and warmth creates a cocktail mix of amiability and solidarity. By enjoying all this beauty together, we become altogether beautiful.
Emily hadn’t been to Vermont, at least not like this or for this long, she’s been working in her apartment for all of Covid, so it was my job as manual-transmission caretaker of the Sapphire Dragon (she later learned the bipedal clutch/gas ratios for the car) to drift her in and out of valleys and dales and woodlands and mountain passes and coves as I retraced my steps from a year before, but this time with the sheltering family gone and in their stead, a woman with me in the car, living with me in our room, spending each minute together for two weeks and a day. The familial loneliness of last year, where I hovered on the periphery of a welcoming family, had inverted to an intense and leisurely tete-a-tete with a companion.
We enjoyed all this beauty together as we — or at least she — was altogether beautiful.
I’d like to share what we’ve learned about the Burlington area. It's a lot of writing, so best to scroll through the bits that interest you at https://medium.com/thacher-report/where-to-go-in-vermont-2021-886ab3222ec0.
You won’t regret spending time in Vermont. You may even move there.