Going Vermont

     We called it "Going Vermont."

     You'd first see it in their eyes.  Eyes that once bored through you with glaring intensity, absorbing, were now averted behind a dull glaze, deflecting, their gaze faraway.

     There were other signs -- the shoulder slump, the meandering shuffle, the late lunches, the gradual fade -- but if you paid attention you'd see it first in their eyes.  The eyes were the leading indicator that they'd gone Vermont. 

     Pretty soon you'd get their departure memo, you'd squirm at their last day lunch, you'd promise to stay in touch, knowing you won't.  Then they'd disappear from the office, never to return, gone forever from your life. 

     I don't remember anyone actually leaving for Vermont. "Going Vermont" was figurative, not literal; Vermont was a state of mind, not a state of the union. I thought of it as a handy stand-in for anywhere that wasn't here. And in our cramped cubicles bathed in a flourescent glow staring into our LCD displays high up in a hermetically-sealed climate-controlled Manhattan office building, our lives a habitrail of tiny boxes linked by various tubes and tunnels as we scurried about, racing from deadline to deadline, we needed a Vermont.

     I never went Vermont.

     Partly that's because no one forced me to.  Who knows?  If someone had fired me, I might be there today.  Instead they rewarded me, enticing me with more and more pellets to run on their wheel, spinning it so fast I couldn't see it. 

     Soon I found myself speeding along so fast there was no way to stop it, no way to jump off, so I resolved to make the best of it and forge ahead. 

     Then one day I'm planning a short trip to see the fall foliage and reading guidebooks and my eyes linger on glossy photos of quaint towns time forgot and it occurs to me that people actually live there and I wonder what sort of lives they must be living and before you know it I'm checking real estate prices, comparing property tax rates, evaluating school districts, surveying local job markets and calculating the burn rate on the proceeds from my grossly inflated Los Angeles home.

     It's crazy.  I know nothing about Vermont.  What will happen when Vermont-the-Fantasy yields to Vermont-the-Fact?  We'll never survive the cold.  I don't ski or ice skate.  We'll never meet anyone.  And if we do, they'll hate us, damn California carpetbaggers buying up the state.  Next thing you know I'll find myself toiling away at a dead-end low wage job in the tourism industry, my savings a distant memory, my problems multiplying as my family blames me for uprooting them from the only city they've ever known to a distant place none of us has ever known.  My kids will seethe with resentment, plotting their escape back to the big city. And I'll yearn for all I worked so hard to build before I so carelessly threw it away. 

      It really is crazy.  It makes no sense.  My life will totally unravel.

      But isn't that the whole point?

      So I'm going Vermont.

Comments

[robert]

Good luck. Vermont is fantastic. It's full of lifestyle-driven refugees from New York and Boston, so you won't feel all that out of place. There's even a convenient cultural alternative next door in New Hampshire, if Vermont's Starbucky retro-cutesieness gets to you.

[R J Keefe]

Go to New Hampshire! That's where you need to be! Just as pretty, but "lifestyle-driven refugees" are not tolerated, so you won't be tempted to take a junk job that doesn't exist anyway.

[Waterfall]

Good for you. I love Vermont--it was my favorite state when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. I loved it so much that I went back two years later and hiked the Long Trail from the Mass border to the Canada border.

Your life may unravel, sure, but sometimes tightly-wound things need unraveling. Good luck.

[DarkoV]

In reading the comments, I may be missing the point of your Own Private Vermont entry, i.e., the figurative move to another "state of the union" rather than a literal move to Vermont, as the commenters seem to be thinking. Whether your move is literal or figurative, I'm hoping your writing stays within the confines of the Land of the Lotus-Eaters.

Where Richard Russo has his upstate NY villages and Peter deVries has his suburban Connecticut boiling pots, you have Southern Cal as the backdrop for your character observations. You've got that locale down tight and your signature is well-established. Why give it up?

[robert]

I hear you, DarkoV. Hard to tell in what sense Mr Life is going Vermont. Maybe the preposition "to" goes in if it's literal.Then again, maybe not. Maybe blurring the line between figurative and literal is the essence of going Vermont.

For my part, I went Vermont about five years ago, though it has been at least a decade since I've been to Vermont.

[MindSpin]

I've been to neither Vermont nor Shady Glen, but from what little I know of each, Vermont seems much the better choice. This is for certain, I'm ready for this Vermont adventure, exquisitely rendered, post by post. We're all off to Vermont now.

Congratulations, Outer Life, on this new venture. I do not think you will miss so much what you had to leave behind. And your children will acclimate much more quickly than they might expect.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[communicatrix]

I Went Vermont in 1992 when I moved to Los Angeles. (I guess I actually went a year earlier when I told my high-paying ad job "no, thanks.")

I have never regretted the decision. For awhile, I kept vestiges of that past life--my portfolio, my reel, my business clothes--but as time went on, I let those go, too. Once I stopped needing to define success on their terms, I no longer feared alt.life. I will get "the mail guy" job if I need to; I will live in one room with a library card and a toothbrush if I need to.

One word of caution: it takes awhile to decompress and acclimate. But you and your loved ones will be fine. Or you will do the next thing.

I greatly look forward to your output from Vermont, or just "Vermont".

[Waterhot]

Though I once took a 15 month sabbatical, and would do it again given half the chance, I've always been too much of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it kind of guy to go Vermont. I remain convinced it is still possible to have the best of both worlds - you just need to be very, very lucky. I think I'm pretty close now - I have a great employer and a good salary, but own no house, don't have any investments, don't - and actually, this may be the clincher - have a family around me (not that that was my choice). Basically, I have no obligations that would stop me from getting up and walking away tomorrow if I decided that's what I wanted to do. I recognise that I'm incredibly privileged, but I'm glad I kept looking for long enough to find it.
That said, I sincerely hope you find what you're looking for in your Own Private Vermont.

[LM]

Just a few words of advice from my window-less cube in Portland, Maine. My husband and I moved here in search of a similar lifestyle shift and have found it to be rewarding in terms of people, attitude and real estate prices... but not quite as devoid of window-less cubes as we had hoped.