These Are The Ghosts

Whenever someone mentions Vermont, I immediately think of two things: White Christmas, and Gary Cooper playing the tuba in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. My hokey celluloid impressions of the state are sappy, maple syrup drizzled images of snow covered inns and vibrant town squares surrounded by picket fences and freckled boys swinging from birch trees.

When, inspired by early eighties back issues of Vermont Life Magazine and craving genuine autumn, we decided we would spend the weekend in Vermont, I hoped I would find it at its most idyllic, its most Capra-esque. While watching the leaves turn and feeling self-conscious about being New Yorkers, I was secretly searching for these old sentimental celluloid impressions, that eternally hoped-for perfect small town. My own Mandrake Falls.

But it's October. Ghosts are stirring. And Capra's wasn't the only ghost who was stirring in the waning autumn light.

My parents spent their first year of marriage in Vermont, when they were in that early tricky elated phase of trying to figure out what it might mean to be a family of their own. Our first stop over the state line wasn't a pumpkin patch or a covered bridge, but tiny Fair Haven, where their old house still stood, attached to the animal hospital where dad cut his chops.

Seeing their house awoke an old sentimental ghost in me, the specter of my mother in that first year, while dad was out with the cows or mending horses. I've never asked her much about what they did in Vermont. It was before we came along. Maybe she took walks up 22A into the center of the town, a library book under her arm. Maybe she found a bench, first pausing to watch a crow land on one of the church steeples. Maybe she took up knitting.

The green in the center of the town was prime for ghosts. Desolate and oversized, it was lined with elaborate and spread out mansions where slate-mining slave owners once lived. One built of marble was lit from the inside and out, now an inn, abutted by an awning under which children were playing with pumpkins. The rest of the square was quiet and startlingly empty, left to ponder the grave weight of its own vast emptiness. I had never come across such an enigma of a town, stuck, like the grande dame who refuses to move on from her increasingly poorly attended tea parties, in a very awkward stage between grand and desolate.

Not quite Mandrake Falls.

Further south, where the hills became steeper and roads wound round like string, we tiptoed past Mount Okemo through the tiny ski resort town of Ludlow, and to our inn on the other side.

"The moose are rutting," our kind innkeeper warned us as he showed us to our room, on hearing that we'd booked a dinner table at an inn up the road. "You hit them going forty miles an hour and take their legs out from under them."

After feasting on artichoke soup and buckwheat gnocchi, lamb stew and cinnamon ice cream, we drove slowly back in the rain, full-bellied, gripping the steering wheel and watching for dark objects moving in the roadside. "Out of forty moose hits this year, there's only been one survivor." We didn't like those odds. Lest we become ghosts ourselves.

We slept underneath a mama spider guarding her egg sac, hearing the occasional creak of the floorboards above.

And we rose early, cold. "I think I might buy a blanket today," I said, and so in a textile shop of linens and lace in Woodstock, Vermont (one tuba player short of Mandrake Falls), I found an old wool blanket, well-loved, for a price I was willing to pay for warmth. This was after we'd hopped over rocks at Quechee Gorge, invigorated, laughing out loud. Watching the sky for patches of blue. Dazzled by the colors.

In the oldest independent bookstore in Vermont, I nearly bought Robert Frost, but thought that it would be too cliche. Not that I didn't buy maple syrup and Vermont cheddar. Not that I didn't talk about the dazzling colors. Not that I didn't honestly go there looking for Gary Cooper playing his tuba or Rosemary Clooney singing at a piano because she can't sleep.

I could hardly be so innocent with my talk of ghosts.

Three hours into our trip back, we were already on CT-15, listening to This American Life, a story about prisoners performing Hamlet. Shakespeare and prison - on the opposite end of the spectrum from Capra and marble mansions. We listed the things we looked forward to coming back to in New York: Public transportation. A hot shower. The absence of colonial furniture. A nice cup of tea.

And, still, it was bittersweet. Because as hard as it is to imagine ever being able to carve a life out for ourselves in Vermont, among towns that aspire to be Capra's Mandrake Falls and the quiet of wide and desolate greens, among rutting moose and foliage tourists, the ghost of the place won't leave me alone. When I close my eyes I see picket fences and crows landing on steeples; I see reds, golds, oranges, and greens.

(Dad: now I get it.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.