Chapter 1

Take the High Road
2000

“Here we go.”

  An insignificant maroon Ford Festiva hatchback, rusted and wheezing, wound its way down a steep hill. For the umpteenth time, Jim Sutton said a silent prayer as he pressed the brake pedal. Relieved to feel the brakes respond, Jim winced at the whine as the worn pads engaged the drum. They were long overdue to be replaced, but you try to find the time or the funds when you’re a public-school English teacher.

“Atta girl…” Jim soothed his car as he slalomed the hill. Since he had started the trip, he had developed the affectation of speaking to himself. Mostly to pass the time, partly just to hear another voice, even if it was his own. His thoughts were interrupted by the keening wail of a car horn. Jim looked in the rear-view mirror. Reflected in reverse he could see the driver of an obnoxiously orange SUV gesticulating wildly. He supposed he was going a little slow down the steep hill. Jim could see the two-lane road up ahead became a four lane. He struggled to roll down the window while steering his little automobile. Jim stuck his hand out and made a waving motion for the orange monstrosity to pass.

Jim could hear the SUV engine rev as it sped to pass him on the left.  “Fuck off, asshole!” the driver shouted as he sped off. Jim looked up to see the custom New York State plate as he drove off.

WL-HNG

Jim shook his head as he cranked the window up, looking over at the green sign on the side of the road that read:

BORDER TO VERMONT 50

Jim could feel himself getting tense. He had been driving for a while up through New York state. Of course he knew this was his destination.

“At least it’s not fall,” Jim mumbled, looking across the green valleys around him.

Jim hated autumn in Vermont. Spring was Jim’s favorite season. Spring, when the new leaves opened, fresh, new and alive…light, lush, green, verdant, and vibrant. Jim felt at home and at peace under canopies. He would stand and stare up at the boughs, watching the new leaves ripple in the wind, moved by unseen eddies and currents. In those rare moments, Jim could lose his sense of self. He felt part of something bigger, more connected to nature than to other people. The colorful displays of fall in New England were just a prelude to winter. With winter, of course, came Christmas.

Just the thought of that holiday made Jim shudder. It’s not like he was anti-religion, or anti-Christian. He was none of those things. If anything, Jim was anti-Christmas. The holiday itself. The pageantry, the symbols, the overwhelming omnipresence of it. He had grown up with a strange perspective on the holiday. So, some latitude could be granted to Jim Sutton in his dislike of the holiday and the season of winter that heralded its arrival.

Fall is the quintessential time of the year to visit the Green Mountain State. Thousands vacation in the small, unassuming state every year. Leaf peepers, the locals call them, in a mix of fondness and derision, or flatlanders, the catch–all designation for those whom God did not give the good sense to have been born a Vermonter.

Jim Sutton’s parents did not have the foresight to birth their brood in Vermont, but rather in the city of Boston in the adjoining state of Massachusetts. If New England were its own country, Boston would be its financial and cultural capital. Boston holds a special, sometimes mystical place in New Englanders’ hearts. The Red Sox may play in Fenway Park, right in the middle of the big city of Boston, but in the furthest rural areas, they were THE team of the land, held in the highest esteem.

The same could not be said for how New Englanders felt about New York City. Perhaps it was a remnant of colonial times when New York laid claim to half of the state, but Vermonters do not trust New Yorkers. You could live in Vermont for fifty years after moving from New York, and you’d still be a damned New Yorker. Your kids would be as well. Some say it takes three full generations to become a true Vermonter.

The only New Yorkers Vermont ever embraced and claimed as their own were Ben & Jerry, the ice cream entrepreneurs and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist Brooklynite. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield helped put Vermont on the map with their ice cream, Bernie’s adoption as native son said more about the state’s fierce independent streak than anything else. Vermont had for generations been staunchly Republican, but the rise of Bernie Sanders from carpetbagger to Mayor of Burlington to (almost) Democratic candidate for President of the United States, coincided with the progressive awakening of the state. Political shifts and realignments notwithstanding, Bernie’s main appeal could be said that he was an unrepentant pain in the ass—a trait that Vermonters recognized and acknowledged as one they not only admired but one they aspired to embody as well.

The whims and laws of provincialism are intricate, delicate and resolute, and Bob and Linda Sutton wandered right into them, like a fly drawn to a field of genuine home-grown Vermont manure.