“I can’t fully explain it but Vermont is so unique, ordinary, unspoiled, commonplace, interesting, beautiful, astonishing and ghastly that I can’t get it out of my system. I tell people it’s like your favorite jacket or pair of jeans and every favorite childhood memory and adult romantic interlude rolled into one, wrapped in a psychotic’s vision of bizarre weather.”
I am happy to welcome an old friend, the semi-mythic former Vermonter Mike Aiken to this site; he will be posting whenever the spirit moves him, perhaps even with his own photographs of New England.
His comment above is perhaps the finest description of Vermont I’ve ever come across, and one I thought had been lost forever (last seen on our refrigerator door some eight years ago, and only recently rediscovered – originally sent in an email).
He lived in a caboose near the Canadian border for a time, and sold me some magnificent Lodgepole Pine poles for my own tipi experience in my formative years.
Unfortunately I missed this concert by a couple of days, but it was easy to imagine – the sense of community and the power of the songs – in the vibe that lingered.
Mike Aiken comments:
“A town hall, in New England, is exactly that: a hall where the town (the people of the town) can gather to discuss their business, air their concerns, be heard and (possibly) influence the town’s future. The buildings themselves are therefore a statement of faith: that what goes in, comes out transformed by the town mind. And there indeed is a core democratic principle.
Woody Guthrie held this faith, and preached it far and wide, probably in many small towns like Jamaica, Vermont. 21st Century Vermont, however, is not the Dust Bowl of the Thirties, and not even close to the Vermont photographed by the Works Progress Administration in the 30’s. But Woody Guthrie’s songs are remembered, and celebrated, and out of THAT act of keeping faith with the man and his thoughts and words, maybe there is a new world coming along out of what he saw and heard.”
