Air & Space

CRAFTSBURY, Vt. -- Bill Lee has commandeered my rented Chrysler 300 and we are careening over a gravel road through the rolling woods, brush swishing past the open window frames, Lee barking directions from the passenger seat and encouraging all due speed, bragging that he can navigate us all the way to Burlington without seeing another car.

But there are some real ruts and washouts.

"Don't worry," he says with all the confidence he once exuded shaking off a sign from Carlton Fisk, "the big tires on this baby'll get us over anything."

Before we launch high up on the car's suspension, only to clang down hard on a high rock, Lee, the former Red Sox lefthander -- his "Spaceman" hat perched atop his thick white hair -- has rattled off a partial list of his loves and hates.

He loves pitching and playing first in the Vermont Men's Senior League; wooden bats in which weight matches length; Spaceman Ale; morning fog in his Black River Valley; tequila; Sunday morning church bells cascading down the valley from a steeple on Craftsbury Common.

He hates white shrink-wrapped haybales in fields; aluminum bats; lying politicians; motorized vehicles in the back-country (notwithstanding my Chrysler 300, which may now have lost its oil pan in a gymnastics attempt not meant for a 3-ton automobile on a rutted road).

"One thing I love about Vermont is you can take all back roads so you can drink," Lee is saying in one of his free-association rambles, which somehow gets his loves and hates out in a coherent monologue. "You go back there and you're not going to hit anybody. I love Vermont. You're back there and you slow down when you see a deer or a moose. It's a great state. It was 16 miles where we took the cutoff, and I said we would not see 16 cars; we saw five. You just have to slow down and be nice."

But one of his deepest loves is for where he lives, not just Vermont, but the Northeast Kingdom -- 2,000 square miles of rolling countryside in the northeast corner of the state that has thus far escaped the tourist/vacation crush two hours to the south.

The Northeast Kingdom, says Lee, who built a house in Craftsbury when he left professional baseball, is also a state of mind. He writes and speaks prolifically about it.

"For me, there is no better place in America than the Northeast Kingdom," he wrote in one essay. "I started out in Craftsbury in 1988, thinking it was a halfway house between a bar in Boston and a bar in Montreal. Now when I'm away, I can't wait to get to my own little rehabilitation center on the hill. What a view . . . All I know is that when I get through New Hampshire's Franconia Notch and see those highlands to the north, I breathe a lot easier."

So, too, for the growing band of aficionados of the wide-open space, rolling farmland, glacial lakes, and cold-running trout streams that attract those in search of a quieter, less expensive lifestyle, whether permanently or in vacation mode. Sensing the growing interest in the Northeast Kingdom -- whose mirror image lies east across the river, New Hampshire's Connecticut Lakes region, Lee says, "I know they're coming, and when they do, I'm heading out to British Columbia. I came out here to get away from the world, and now the world is encroaching on me."

Rebel with a cause
In many circles here, Lee, affectionately known as the Spaceman to Bostonians over 25, with particular reference to his unpredictable, random, and often verbal delivery, is looked on as a kind of treasure by his fellow Northeast Kingdom dwellers, often called "nekkers."

His life varies from weeks kicking back in his hilltop home with his wife, Penny, tending gardens and home repairs, to playing baseball all over New England, to making extended trips for charity appearances and promotions of his various causes.

And at the core of Lee's well-known boyish playfulness -- which does not diminish with age -- is the game he fell in love with as a boy growing up in Southern California. One of his cottage industries -- making wooden baseball bats -- is part profit center for him, but it's also for a cause he takes most seriously: ridding baseball of aluminum bats.

Lee is standing beside his gloriously blooming garden swinging one of his bats -- 32 inches, 32 ounces, the perfect ratio. A dissertation is in progress:

"This is beautiful premium yellow birch," he says, taking a slow, precise swing. "We're the only company that makes bats out of yellow birch. They're gnarly and they don't break. I won the home run hitting contest in the Triple A All-Star game down in Pawtucket [July 11] using my own bat. I designed this bat so that kids could learn to swing right. The problem with aluminum bats is they're too light and kids swing them with their arms, like this. With a wood bat like this, we keep our hands back and when we swing like this [ripping the bat head out over the daisies], we keep the hands inside and hit the ball with good wood.

"You don't try for the home run unless all of a sudden you're going the other way and the guy slows up on a fastball or something, then you hit it [another rip] out. When a kid hits with a bat like this, they learn technique. The key is getting into a good position, keeping your front shoulder in, staying on the ball, and then hitting it with the good part of the bat. But they don't learn that swinging an aluminum bat with their arms, and they try to hit everything out, no matter where the ball is. That's not hitting. Look at Wade Boggs, who never tried to hit the ball out. He had the most amazing record in baseball -- he went a whole year without hitting a single popup to the infield. That's an amazing statistic, and it's because he hit properly."

Lee's bat company has produced about 1,000 bats in two years, he says, all of which are marketed to the high school and college level. He often goes on tour, putting on clinics. But when he went to Major League Baseball to get the bat sanctioned, Lee says, "I got into a big fight.

"They wanted $10,000 to sanction the bat. But I sent them a bat three years ago and they lost it. So I told them I'll show them 10 grand if they produce my original bat. I want it back because it was worth 10 grand. It was my prototype."

Man for all seasons
Les Otten, part owner of the Red Sox and a self-avowed, middle-aged baseball nut who plays with Lee in the senior leagues, finds a two-tiered personality in his friend.

"Did you know Bill got a new haybaler?" says Otten, leading into a favorite Bill Lee joke, one Lee tells on himself. "We had to explain to him you don't bale hay to smoke it."

But Otten also has a more serious assessment.

"Bill has friends everywhere, and people love to be around him because of that Spaceman personality," he says. "He's self-effacing, tells jokes on himself. But the other side of Bill Lee is the guy who's extremely bright, knowledgeable, very well-read, a serious thinker, an eloquent conversationalist who has a deep knowledge of baseball, politics, and a lot of other things. That's the side of him most people don't always see."

Another frequent batter against Lee, Steve Wright, who is communications director at Jay Peak, sees a fierce competitor.

"That guy is amazing," says Wright, a third-team All-American at Providence who was drafted by the White Sox. Wright, who lives in the Northeast Kingdom town of Newport, finds the Spaceman intimidating on the mound.

"He still plays hard-nosed baseball, as hard as he ever did. He's not afraid to come inside, and then he shows you what he's really got. He can still get the ball up to 85 miles an hour and he still plays with the attitude, `That's my batter's box. That's my plate. You better know that.' "

The home Lee built, with the help of a neighboring carpenter, on his hilltop in Craftsbury is a lofty farmhouse with big windows -- all open, no air-conditioning for him -- high ceilings and a cavernous feel. It is the morning after a party as we take the tour, and one room has an army of tequila bottles lining the floor.

He picks up a large green bottle. "It's Spaceman Ale," he says. "They dedicated an ale to me in Massachusetts; you can get them at Blanchards but I think they're all sold out. This last one I'm saving for my son."

Though he came from the West Coast, Lee says he discovered his beloved Northeast Kingdom by accident. "I was on Route 14 in Newport [Vt.], and I took a right instead of left and drove out here. I saw farmers haying with horses, and I said, `Wow, this is gorgeous.' And right then I decided to retire here. But it's changing. Flatlanders are coming up with money, lucky guys like me. And that puts pressure on local people, changes things."

Lee takes full advantage of his wilderness paradise, hunting, fishing, hiking, and skiing, and threatens to leave for even wilder country if the Northeast Kingdom changes too much. But the single item that strikes him as a symbol of that change is the modern technique for storing haybales, shrink-wrapped in white plastic.

"Just say no to round haybales in plastic," he says. "It's ugly. And with the hay outside like that, farmers don't build barns anymore, and that's just wrong.

"But it's just the way Vermont is going, I'm afraid."