Today's Vermont: When Mountains Disappear

One of the many Jernigan Pontiac stories that has stuck with me over the years is Exit Paulie, an elegy for Paul Robar, who owned Benways Taxi Service until he died of a brain aneurysm in 2011. 

Mr. Robar was a mountain of the Burlington taxi scene, and Jernigan compared his sudden absence to a titanic shift in the landscape of Vermont.

“It’s as if we blinked,” he wrote, “and Mount Philo disappeared.”

The end of Hackie, the biweekly column that Jernigan wrote for Seven Days, feels like a cultural loss on a similar scale. Thankfully Jernigan is still very much alive, but his perspective on Vermont will be sorely missed. 

For over 20 years, Jernigan cultivated an intimacy unique to the liminal space of a taxi cab. He listened to his passengers as he conveyed them around Vermont, and relayed their stories with characteristic compassion, humility, and respect. Not since Reuben Jackson retired from hosting Friday Night Jazz on Vermont Public Radio have I felt a similar sense of loss - as if a familiar peak had gone missing from the Green Mountain skyline.

Perhaps I feel the loss of a cultural touchstone like Hackie more acutely because of all the uncertainty wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. The events of 2020 have upended much of what we once took for granted. 

Whether it’s the sudden end of a steady job, the cancellation of an annual tradition, or the disappearance of cows from a family farm, this is a year of disorienting loss. All around the state, Vermonters are seeing their Mt. Philos disappear.

The pandemic may be the proximate cause of these changes, but let’s not forget that the climate crisis is accelerating too. Last month shattered the record for Burlington's hottest July ever. 

Announcements of record breaking temperatures are becoming scarily routine, but this summer the heat has been particularly unrelenting. Every single July day in Burlington was hotter than average. The reassuring rhythm of the seasons - long a reliable feature of Vermont life - now seems discordant, unpredictable, and ever more extreme, like a familiar song being played at faster and faster speeds. 

In a decade or so the Champlain Valley of Vermont could have a climate reminiscent of the Connecticut of my boyhood, back when levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were under 350 parts per million. Winters were snowy in Connecticut back then. My family tapped the maple trees on Maple Avenue, and made syrup in the early days of spring. 

A version of Vermont with the climate of 1980s Connecticut isn’t hard to imagine, but of course it won’t last long...children born in Vermont this year will live to experience a climate more akin to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina than the Green Mountains of Vermont. The sky islands of alpine summits on Mt. Abraham, Camel’s Hump, and Mt. Mansfield will eventually disappear, first gradually and then all at once, as spruces, beech, and mountain ash colonize the pockets of high tundra and inexorably erase the rocky landmarks of yesteryear. 

The Vermont tradition of kindness and generosity among neighbors is a metaphorical mountain that has always felt rock solid to me, but even this bedrock value is cracking under the pressure of extraordinary times. The social trust that accumulated like topsoil over decades of Town Meetings and spaghetti suppers is eroding as inequity deepens and tempers flare. Many of the Selectboard members I know are tired to the bone.

The pandemic is revealing rifts that were already here, and making me wonder whether two people can ever really see the same mountain. 

A cold wind blowing off Mansfield fills some Vermonters with excitement for the coming ski season, and fills others with the anxiety and dread that comes from not knowing how you’ll pay for food, rent, truck payments, heating fuel, and child care. Likewise, I know that if I run out of gas on a lonely mountain road I can find help at any door, but my friend Tofowa, a person of color, keeps a spare can of gasoline in the bed of his truck because Vermont doesn’t feel safe enough for him to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Last month Bill McKibben, of Ripton, wrote an adulatory essay in The New Yorker titled What Vermont and Its History Might Teach the Nation About Handling the Coronavirus. 

Bill highlighted that Vermont has relatively robust levels of social trust, which enabled a collective response to the pandemic. Indeed, Vermont has fared better than almost any other state so far, but the response to Bill’s essay - which went Vermont viral - was a mixed bag. People expressed pride, yes, but noted as Vermont Senate Majority Leader Becca Balint succinctly put it, that Bill’s “privilege is showing”. 

“So much to be proud of,” tweeted Jane Lindholm, host of Vermont Edition, in an appeal for thoughts about Bill’s essay. “But it also feels distanced from a lot of the tension and stress I’m sensing from many Vermonters right now, particularly around issues of racism, schools and masks.”

Maybe this is a moment of reckoning, and an opportunity for transformation. Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, of Hartland, recently wrote that “if you don't feel a deep sense of loss it’s not likely to be transformation.”

Loss can be liberating, and awaken us to possibilities. The key, I think, is to recognize one another’s humanity, and double down on the Vermont tradition of collective action for the public good. 

Again, Dr. Sawin offers words of wisdom: “In times of transformation collective action is self-care.”  

A dose of humor helps too, and no one makes me laugh quite like Maya and Brent McCoy, who recently produced a “Charlie and Margaret” skit called Real Vermont Etiquette for Hardwick Community Television. The skit tiptoes around the fraught topic of who qualifies as a ‘Real Vermonter’ but is inclusive in its reminder to wave every time we pass one another on the road. 

“Do I really have to wave every time?” asks Charlie at the end of the video. “The hard truth,” Margaret replies, “is yes.” 

“When the internet service is this slow, the cell service this spotty, and your nearest neighbor so far away, it makes a big difference just to be seen.”

This is the Vermont spirit that I recognize. It’s the same spirit that permeated the work of Jernigan Pontiac, and that he chose to express in the final words of his final column: 

“So thank you all, and namaste — the soul in me recognizes the soul in you.”

What Mt. Philos are you missing during the pandemic? How are you staying cool this summer? Is there a Vermonter whose voice you want to amplify? Join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #todaysvermont, and thanks, as always, for reading.

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