Part 1: You died in Vermont
I took an old boyfriend home from college and he eyed me queerly, looked around the room unimpressed. “Your family does not know how to dress for a funeral,” he said.
When it didn’t land the way he wanted he played it off as a joke.
I couldn’t help but agree, yet only people who haven’t lost anybody care what you wear to bury your dead.
I knew this even then.
Now I am a poorly dressed visitor in this place I came from. Where you stayed and waited and now it is too late.
Where I came from. Where I came from. Where I came-
I come from blue collar hands you could trust with your roof, or milk, or snow.
I come from men and women who scrubbed their homes floor to ceiling, Marine style, every Saturday.
They do not eat in their cars.
They love weather; after my grandfather died, Hurricane Irene stranded me in Vermont for 10 days.“He would’ve lived for this,” his children said watching the news reports.
They are as good as their word.
We come from doing what you gotta.
We come from “blooming where we are planted,” as pastor Ken Post says.
In “Shopgirl,” Steve Martin had an affair with a gamine Claire Danes, practically just off the high school bus. He pleads with her, why can’t she just accept the affair, and the world, for what it is?
“I’m from Vermont.” She says.
She repeats it more slowly, “I’m.from.Vermont.” He doesn’t get it.
But, why would Steve Martin’s character ever get it?
The antagonists in my own life call me a hippie, but I always say “I’m just from Vermont”.
I’m. From. Vermont.
I’m more hick than hippie. But those two things blur together where I am from.
My husband knows I am angry if he suddenly can’t understand a word I’m saying.
“Vermont-speak,” he calls it. We call my dad back in the Green Mountain state and he says, I’m jest comin’ in the dooryard. You can hear me in the door yard.
When I pray lately I ask God to put a watch on my lips. My lifelong obsession with words is both a gift and a curse, if I let it be. My tongue is a chameleon.
Lately, God tells me to loosen up the way I’ve trained myself all these years to enunciate.
I’ll never stop writing about Vermont because it’s so misunderstood.
We are from sugar-on-snow-supper, which is a truck full of snow pulled up to the back door of the brightly painted volunteer fire station.
Temperate conditions don’t favor a sap run- it’s the trees weathering hot and cold that makes the best maple syrup.
We are from down dirt roads so long you don’t know what state you’re in, anymore.
We are some of the eldest surviving kin in a long line of gone too soon.
And now you’re gone, too.
I didn’t go to your funeral. I was 7 months pregnant and had just been back to bury another friend from the place I am from.We are from. Where you rest.
Part 2: Our ticket out
My parent’s businesses were built from one truck, essentially. Eventually, we enjoyed the finer things in life.
We learned that you can lose a lot of time chasing the almighty dollar. The nicer my skis, the less I saw my dad. He gave me wings, though.
Skiing took me flying down mountains across the world by high school.
Skiing allowed me to move to Oregon during a recession, ski instructing when even restaurants weren’t hiring Oregon.
Skiiing saved me more than once. Now, I skate-ski. It’s the purest form of flying I’ve known yet. Just you and your breath whooshing your body through the silent woods. No chairlifts.
I didn’t fit in with the rich ski hill kids, though. I dropped down to high school racing by senior year, no more USSA racing, where you could qualify for nationals.
I never did. But I went far for somebody whose dad taught them to ski at 7 on the neighbors too-long skis at Maple Valley. Maple Valley has long since shuttered, like all the smaller ski hills the locals favored.
Skiing taught me courage, discipline and about pain; how it tempers you into a version of yourself four times stronger than your original form, strengthened by your journey.
There is an ecstasy in spending so much time on the mountain, we were birds. Flying through the untouched snow in our bright coats; cold, clear 8 a.m mornings, slushy rainstorm practices, and so many storms in our rubber suits over snow pants so we didn’t get soaked. Sometimes it was just us and the creatures out there. And the lifties, perhaps the toughest breed of all. But that’s for another essay.
We skied without poles to set the courses; skiing with my arms out straight horizontal down mountain faces remains one of the greatest experiences of my life. Like skiing with you, bud.
That’s another soft skill; knowing how to pick your fall line. In topography, a fall line is the most direct line down a mountain or hill. That’s how you win the race.
It’s not always the fastest or the strongest skier who wins. It’s the one who manages, above all odds (unexpected conditions, ruts, sleet, fear) to stay closest to the fall line.
Icy, deep ruts made by the previous racers are left on the course for the skiers who go last. Deep ruts chatter your teeth. You hang onto your thin, sharp metal edge, latched into your bindings cranked up maximum tight, hanging on for dear life.
So many people my age have died in our tiny Valley it feels like a plague but it’s all drugs, suicides or car wrecks.
So many young men seem to be leaving us, good solid men.
Men in pain who have no way to ease it. Physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain. Men are not supposed to be in pain, not pain the doctors can’t quickly fix.
There is no social language for men’s pain that is acceptable to the general public.
Women's pain is historically neglected, but at least women are expected to go through changes like Jupiter; storms and moons, dust and scars.
If I could go back and ski with you one more day bud, or we could drive down one more muddy dirt road, get stuck and need to push ourselves out for hours.
Or back to my grandpas field at 4-years-old and sit in the clover, while our grandparents played crazy eights.
I’d sure meet you there.
I can still smell the inside of your coat you’d lend any girl in the class who was cold, because that’s how you were raised. You always smelled a little bit like woodsmoke, gasoline from your chain saw and good soap. I last hugged you on the side of the road, pulled over when I saw you there on a break from another beloved longtime job. Not many can really cook on a line so busy, either.
Our paths diverged in life; and the hand I got was simply better, bud, as twisted a road I’ve tracked. But we always made sense to each other, no matter the shoes we wore. No matter the road we traveled.
I told you once, nothing you could ever pick up would ever make me love you any less than how I already loved you like a brother.
You immediately hated that one old boyfriend, and you were slow to have a bad word for anyone; but you smelled him out; his judgement of the wedding you met him at, his wandering eye. You warned me, like a brother would.
The timelessness of the green mountains seems a little less ancient, now that you’re gone and took a piece of their heart.
It seems fitting that your jobs all required skill and managing dangerous situations adeptly. Your favorite one was grooming snow and snow making, up at that same rich-kid ski hill where we flew as kids.
Driving that groomer, you were king of every sunrise; it seemed like your God -given right as a Vermonter to be at the top of your world.
You skied more elegant than all those rich kids combined, tall and unbound by arrogance, you out skied ‘em all.
We both left Vermont where you are now buried.
Your fall line was fearless, flawless.