Summer 2008
Shelf Life
Split Personality
Is Vermont's pastoral countryside a working landscape that produces food and fiber — dairy products, hay, saw logs and more? Or is it a beautiful playground — a peaceful retreat where tourists and artists can recharge their juices and find solace from the turmoil of the city?
According to geographer-historian Blake Harrison, it is both — a fact that has led to decades of conflict, shaping much of Vermont's history and the landscape itself for the past 100 years.
Tourism, as Harrison tells it, was originally seen as an unalloyed economic panacea for a Vermont that was chronically lacking in prosperity. Over time, it has gradually come to be perceived as a mixed blessing, because it became so powerful that it began to affect the quality of the rural landscape that attracted tourists in the first place.
"The View from Vermont shows the ways in which ski "villages, farmhouses converted to summer homes and exclusive inns, hill farms gone back to brush, and superhighway development all changed the Vermont landscape and the work-oriented culture that produced it.
Unfortunately, Harrison's prose is dense, and sometimes his book reads like a doctoral dissertation. (In fact, it began as one.) Nevertheless, his insights are often keen.
"Rural tourist landscapes are political spaces, he writes. "Therefore, the reworking of rural Vermont has always been a political drama.
No one familiar with Vermont's 20th- century history would deny that assessment.
- "The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape by Blake Harrison, 323 pages, paperbound, $29.95, University of Vermont Press/University Press of New England
— Tom Slayton
Rattle Tales
Over the centuries, timber rattlesnakes have evolved in the popular mind from a poisonous terror to a threatened and highly interesting fellow creature. Jon Furman's detailed and engaging look at these snakes traces their changing public image, explores their history in the Northeast, and ultimately issues a plea in their defense: "We should understand them, respect them, and leave them alone, he concludes.
In Vermont, rattlesnakes are found only in western Rutland County, in parts of Poultney, Castleton, Fair Haven and West Haven. A vital portion includes land in the most remote part of West Haven that has been protected by the Vermont chapter of The Nature Conservancy.
Furman covers such aspects as the snakes' physical traits, life cycle and behavior, and also answers such questions as what the various defensive poses of a rattlesnake indicate, and what to do if bitten by one.
But perhaps his most fascinating chapters describe the snake hunters who stalked timber rattlesnakes for the small bounty (in Vermont, $1 per snake) until the practice was ended in 1971. For bounty hunters like the late Bill Galick, a West Haven farmer who lived near one of the major rattlesnake dens, bounties were, for many years, an important source of income.
Today, the snakes are an object of scientific study, and though their fate is uncertain, it seems likely they will continue to survive in their small, stony enclaves in Vermont. Furman's fascinating book, by helping us to realize the value of rattlesnakes in our interconnected world, will surely contribute to their survival.
- "Timber Rattlesnakes in Vermont & New York by Jon Furman, 207 pages, paperbound, $24.95, University Press of New England
— Tom Slayton
Long Summer Day
A noirish nail biter set in the Vermont backwoods, Castle Freeman Jr.'s novel
"Go With Me takes place over the course of one very long summer day, starting after dawn when Sheriff Ripley Wingate pulls into the courthouse parking lot to find a small car with the rear window bashed out and a young woman, Lillian, inside. Lillian has a knife on the car seat, and tells the sheriff that the town bully, Blackway, has been stalking her. He has already cut her cat's throat, she claims. She fears hers will be next.
Violence is in the air from page 1 of Freeman's wiry thriller, and the sense of menace only grows when Sheriff Wingate says there's not much the law can do — however, he says, there is an old mill on the edge of town and there are some men there who, well, they might have some ideas about how to take care of the problem for good.
Freeman, a Newfane resident, says his yarn was inspired by the King Arthur cycle of tales — the book opens with a quotation from "The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney — but this is not high culture, as such. The dialogue-driven action is direct, the flashes of humor dark, and Freeman rubs in grit. Consider his description of a tough local bar called the Fort: "There was no pool table, no pinball. There was a record machine in the corner, but it was unplugged. You didn't go to the Fort to play games, you didn't go there to listen
to music. At the Fort you put away
childish things.
Freeman writes in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, and he packs a punch.
- "Go With Me by Castle Freeman Jr., 160 pages, hardcover, $21.95, Steerforth Press, Hanover, N.H.
— Bill Anderson
