One reason I left home

Vermont has made the news this week for the wrong reason: a bizarre homicide at the edges of the Northeast Kingdom, followed by a quick arrest and (in the circumstances) an even more bizarre charge of second degree murder.

If the state's allegations are correct, the perps showed a singular degree of premeditation. Makes one wonder just exactly what constitutes first degree murder in the Green Mountain State.

When my spouse and I lived in Boston's Fens area, we quickly developed street smarts. In the city, one learns to expect, and to anticipate, criminal activity. Barring one purse snatching (spouse) and one failed attempt at car theft (me) we made out all right.

People from urban areas who get away from it all in rural northern New England usually leave their street smarts at the border. They don't realise that certain of their neighbours may be more dangerous than any street punk in the cities they are from; more dangerous than anything in the woods on four legs. Among the native stock, inbreeding occurs with remarkable frequency, and the results can be unpredictable. Just guessing here, but I detect the singular sexual mores of certain northern New England natives as a contributing factor here.

Having been raised country, among similar stock, and seen photos of the alleged perps, I know I wouldn't trust either one to make change, much less would I drive to their rescue on a deserted road. The trial in this case promises to be interesting. One account calls the wife a "New Yorker." Big state, that: many parts of it compare culturally with northern New England. I'd be interested to learn where exactly she's from.

The sturdy, pious upcountry Yankees of a certain level did their cousins, sisters and mothers indiscriminately. Nor was this something out of the remote past. My town had a couple of dirt-poor families who had carried this habit on one generation too many. As a result the offspring of my generation were, um, remarkably sub-normal.

Oddly enough, both these habits, and mere illegitimacy, were barely hidden. One of the pillars of our church had an illegitimate son. Pretty much all the natives, and a quorum of newcomers, knew it and knew who the father was. The mother's family were respectable stock (i.e. land and dairy). The father's were a cut below (labourers without much land who kept only pigs and chickens) so there was never a question of marriage.

The common knowledge didn't extend to the grandchildren, of my generation. That is, until the lady's grandson began dating the granddaughter of her lover. That was when my parents taught us the facts of life, country style. I never knew whether the pair stopped dating from natural teenage causes or because of parental intervention to keep the gene pool pure. My town managed to miss out on homicide; not the case in some nearby towns with a little more genetic blending. Nope, the locals stuck to indiscriminate sex and occasional bestiality.

Last summer I bought a used kayak in New Hampshire. The male partner of the sellers was a painfully earnest Libertarian. When we mentioned that we were both raised in New Hampshire, he wondered why we hadn't moved back. Although we've both wondered the same now and then, keeping some distance between ourselves and the back-country hybrids is one reason.

Silver Linings

The first silver lining on the programme is that by being behind in one's musings, one is freed from the necessity of making topical comments.

Last week, we were on holiday in somewhat northern parts of Vermont. The objective was kayaking, not uncommonly late spring skiing. We had hoped that by taking off before July 4, we would avoid vast family crowds and hordes of motorboats. We didn't expect to avoid motorboats and their bastard offspring, "personal watercraft," almost altogether.

We have the prodigious spring floods of Vermont to thank for that. Although the flood stage moment has gone by in most places, there is hardly a body of water in this part of the state that has got down to normal. We were on Lake Champlain proper once, and another time paddled two of its tributaries. Water level was two to three feet above normal. Launching ramps, beaches, and one large pier were still submerged. A good part of the day-use facilities at Burton Island State Park were more or less in ruins.

Those who haven't been around a flood of long duration may think that the water just comes and goes. Oh no: especially not when the flooded lake is so large that it has a visible horizon line North and South. There are waves on that flood water, which extend the damage well above the official flood stage line. Three or four weeks under water is enough to permit all sorts of marine life to gain a foothold. In some places, small isolated ponds full of fish were stranded by the receding waters. This was a blessing for the seabirds, foxes, cats, and carrion feeders of the area, but they were untidy eaters. To walk along the newly-freed waterfront property was to stroll over marine slime and partially-devoured fish.

As usual, the inhabited areas most exposed to flood damage were those whose residents were least able to afford disaster. The camps of the affluent were mostly well above flood stage. It seems that many of the flooded dwellings had long since ceased to be seasonal. They were, instead, homes for people with little choice but to take a chance. They lost, in this year of 500-year floods.

The floods also left behind a vast amount of driftwood, especially in the smaller ponds we visited. Few motorboaters care to be banged about by floating objects ranging from the size of baseball bats to that of fence posts. Fewer were attracted by the smelly ruins along lakes and rivers. Thus the public waters generally belonged, by default, to human-powered vehicles.

We went bear-less again. Part of our troupe stayed in a campground, not in a cabin, and were once escorted back by a juvenile moose. We shared one lunch spot with a trio of otters. (Judging by size they were an indifferent father, a helicopter mom, and a clueless and accident-prone juvenile.) Our chief companions were birds, ranging from swallows to herons and snowy egrets, plus several ospreys and an eagle.

Final silver lining came after we arrived home and I found my cell phone missing. I began the motions of reporting a lost phone, which came to naught because my daughter owns the account. She was spending the weekend communing with condors in the California boonies, far beyond any cell phone tower. At this moment my wife opened her phone and found a message from Grantham, NH. A couple there had found the phone by the roadside. (We determined I had lost it during a brief driver swap on the way home.) They left their number and arranged to send it back. I have it now. This is a valuable corrective for a cynical old fart with a low opinion of most of my fellow primates, and I suppose I should get myself out and pay this forward. There is all the more reason for doing so, in that the people who returned the phone were themselves paying forward a similar gesture.

Finally, a tangential comment on current affairs comes to us from Thoreau: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." Google and ponder that, if you will.