Altered State
It's not just dairy farms that are dying. So are old Vermonters and their memories of a different way of life.
Ever since the interstate highway linking Vermont and southern New England was completed in 1967 and down-country immigrants discovered the Green Mountains, we have had a glorious split personality.
On the one hand, there are the Vermonters with pedigrees dating back well into the 19th century, the hardscrabble farmers whose ancestors actually chose to continue farming in this hilly, rocky soil when (to paraphrase Edith Wharton in Ethan Frome) the smart ones got out. On the other hand, there are the relative newcomers from Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York who descended upon the state in tsunamilike waves. The state's population increased by nearly 60 percent between 1960 and 2001, growing from a mere 390,000 people to a still small but decidedly more robust 613,000. What brought those newcomers? Idyllic images of crimson dairy barns and hillsides dotted with black-and-white Holstein cows. Communities where everyone knew everyone's name. Sometimes the simple chance to start again far from home.
But not too far, which is where the highways came in. Vermont is such a seductive pastoral throwback that it seems a lot farther from Manhattan or Boston than it really is. In any case, hippies, back-to-the-landers, high-tech engineers, poets, playwrights, musicians, and burned-out bond traders all descended upon the state in the last third of the 20th century.
My wife and I arrived from Brooklyn in 1986, a pair of 25-year-old emigres from the Reagan '80s. We moved to a village in the northwestern corner of the state that had fewer than a thousand people, and though the town felt the pull of Burlington's gravity, it was not then (or now) fully under that city's spell.
Still, we have witnessed the character of both our village and our state undergo transformation in the last decade or so. When we arrived, Vermont had more than 3,000 dairy farms; now there are barely 1,400. My village had five thriving dairy farms; now there are none. We certainly were not the first New Yorkers to settle in Vermont. Writer Grace Paley, politicians Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean, and ice cream makers Ben and Jerry lived in New York City or its suburbs before venturing north.
But sometimes I worry as my elderly neighbors pass away -- those old farmers and loggers and carpenters whose family names pepper the local cemetery -- that an important part of the Vermont personality is dying with them. Our state eccentricity is dependent upon the invigorating clash of cultures that occurs when you put, for example, a novelist from Brooklyn in the same room for town meeting in March with an old farmer who knows what a logging bob is or how to use a hog hook.
My neighbor Marjorie Vosburgh, 75, grew up in my town. Recently, she told me how in 1943 she rode through a snowstorm on one of her father's plow horses to deliver a letter to neighbors at a nearby farm, because the postal truck had been unable to navigate the country roads in the snow. The letter was from a son serving in the South Pacific, and Vosburgh knew his parents were worried about him, so she was determined that they receive it that day. She couldn't call them, however, because there were no phones then in the town. What I found so interesting about this story is that a mere 60 years ago, she -- like so many Vermonters -- was living in a world without electricity or phone lines or even running water. She was living on a dairy farm that had a mere 20 cows. A dairy farm that size today would be a money-losing hobby at best.
When Marjorie passes away, what will be lost are both the particulars of her ride to deliver that letter and her memories of a Vermont farm that could prosper with fewer than two dozen cows.
In the 17 years my wife and I have lived here, the number of stoplights between my home and Burlington has grown from six to 19. The number of hunting licenses the state issues annually to Vermonters has fallen by 13,000, and I can't remember the last time my village held a venison supper. These may not be monumental barometers of change, but they are telling.
With the exception of the towns surrounding Burlington, the state is still far from suburban. But I fear that a balance is tipping, and an important half of the yin and yang that have made Vermont so wondrously idiosyncratic is being lost to . . . well, to people like me.
And if it goes, it won't simply be a pastoral landscape that will be lost. It will be the memories of the people who once worked those fields, and the way they welcomed us flatlanders into their world.
Chris Bohjalian is the author of eight novels, including, most recently, The Buffalo Soldier. 
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