Vermont Journal: Clamming Up

Is there some reason why the fried clams and clam chowder in landlocked Vermont are delicious while those on Long Island which is surrounded by water suck? Is there some reason why the strips and bellies on Long Island tend to be tough and emaciated while those in Vermont are tender and luscious? Is there some reason why fried clams in many places on Long Island seem like they've been frozen while those in Vermont taste fresh? Why is one of the best fried clam rolls in the United States to be found at the roadside stand outside the Chelsea Royal Diner in Brattleboro, while those served in comparable establishments in the Hamptons are meager by contrast. And why are there such an abundance of lobster rolls and lobster in Vermont. Recently for example a lobster dinner was offered on the Woodstock green for the modest price of $30. How many places in Maine can compete with that? We live in a rational universe in which there's a scientific explanation for everything. Is there a species of fresh water clam, a secret trove originally discovered by Ethan Allen and now hidden away in clandestine underwater caverns in the Green Mountains? Perhaps the answer is more simple. People want what they can’t have. It’s comparable to the New Yorker who's in love with being a Parisian and cuts the cheese before he serves dessert or the Parisian who to the horror of his countrymen speaks Franglais. Maybe it’s a little like what they say about married men and illicit sex. Just because they can read the menu doesn’t mean they have to order.

Vermont Journal: Going Through the Roof

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Going through the roof is an expression that indicates someone has lost their temper. When someone goes through the roof it’s often a sign that they’ve received some news that they didn’t enjoy hearing. For instance, you might go through the roof if the roof job you'd commissioned turned out to be faulty and there were leaks which ruined the freshly stained and polyurethaned floors of your converted barn. In fact when you travel through horse country, like the lush fenced in fields in an area like Woodstock, Vermont, which boasts the famous Billings Farm, you see many barns with roofs which have been punctuated by ancient vents which could be mistaken for weathervanes. In the middle of the current heat wave, you are easily able to see the virtues of going the through roof as long as it's a thing rather than a person. Most of the barns you view are comprised of these unique contraptions which also convey an extraterrestrial aspect, as if while allowing in fresh air they might also be signaling something to creatures from outer space. Sometimes a simple appurtenance can turn out to have an unanticipated meaning and you never know in our world of Edward Snowden and government spying if an innocent looking device were really collecting data, about the horses in the barn and who or who isn’t going to hit the roof  when they find out that that their privacy can even be compromised in even the most backwoods environment.

Vermont Journal IV: Hero’s Welcome

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

We know when in Rome and we know where the names of Rome, Ithaca and Sparta NY came from. But what about North and South Hero, Vermont? It’s unlikely that these towns were named for heroes in general. Can we conclude that antiquity is to blame in this case too and that the name derives from the myth of Hero and Leander? If you remember Hero is lured by Leander, but then loses him and kills herself. It’s a melancholy myth to tag onto a town, especially one that exists on the edge of a large body of water where storms and floods are always a threat. Actually any omens that might be presaged by the name are belied by the peace of this hamlet which is just south of the Canadian border. If you are looking for a timeless redoubt stay at one of the lakeside rooms at North Hero House, a vintage inn and then stroll onto the jetty outside your window on which Adirondack lawn chairs face an old-fashioned raft. There’s no surf to speak of, but children paddle their surfboards out past the raft and into the vast lake. Back on shore there’s a faded shuffle board deck and a college student manning a table advertising aquatic rentals simply bakes in the sun, undisturbed in her studies, by the threat of prospective customers. What do people do in North Hero for fun? They ride their bikes to Hero’s Welcome, the kind of timeless general store that has just about anything anyone could possibly need during their stay in either of the Heroes.

Wild in the Streets

Seeing that most patients have a parental transference with their doctors, is it a stretch to look at the other patients in a psychiatric practice as an extended family? Part of the fantasy that patients in therapy perennially have, is that of entering the inner sanctum. They want to know all about their doctors, just like they wanted to know whether their parents were sexually active or not. It’s rare that patients get to know much about the person they’ve been seeing, but perhaps they will do better if they try to find out the identities of their therapeutic siblings. Adopted children are usually successful when they set out to identify their biological parents and finding out the patients who a doctor has treated, while difficult, is probably not as hard as an adopted child trying to locate his or her birth parents. Why bother to do this? The most obvious answer is to compare notes. All therapists have their peculiarities and peccadillos and it’s always fun to discover how much is transference on the patient’s part and how much results from the fact therapist X just acts the same way in every situation. Is the complement of patients parentalizing their therapists, the tendency of therapists to infantalize their patients, turning them into helpless adoring creatures, tabula rasas, petrie dishes in which Victor Frankenstein can perform his wonders? Naturally it would also just be fun to gossip and collect any information you could about mommy or daddy’s extra curricular activities?  Could you imagine attending a convention where the current or former practice of your beloved doctor takes over an inn in Vermont for the purpose of discussing his or her treatment of them? It would be something like the civilian population bugging CIA headquarters or better yet Wild in the Streets, the l968 B movie starring Christopher Jones, Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters in which children take over the world.

Autumn Sonata

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

Autumn Sonata was a film by Ingmar Bergman. It starred Ingrid Berman and Liv Ullmann and it was literally Ingrid Bergman’s autumn sonata to the extent that it was the last film she ever made. Autumn is usually associated with death and endings; naturally it’s the time of the year when vegetation dies and yet there is a form of autumn that is like a premature baby, an autumn that arrives extravagantly and sometimes too soon and there are unfortunate souls who reach the autumn of their lives before it’s their time, people whose lives are curtailed just as they are beginning to come into their own. In Vermont, Autumn is almost miraculous to the extent that it comes like a robber almost over night.  But its coming is like one of those supernovas, whose death is heralded by a great explosion of energy. No death is as demonstrative as autumn in Vermont. The burst of colors is almost like a blossoming. Even though he was effectively talking about spring, Ezra Pound’s words in his great poem “Exiles Letter,” express the mixture of sadness and ebullience, of death and life, that characterizes Vermont in Autumn. “And if you ask how I regret that parting? It’s like the flowers falling at spring’s end, confused, whirled in a tangle."