Green Mountain Blues

Yale College has officially adjourned for "spring" break and, relieved for a few weeks of TA duties, I thought it would be well to take a short break from dissertating as well. It was time, I decided at some point last week, for a family vacation. And what better way, I further reflected, to celebrate the return of (modestly) warmer weather than to load the van and drive north toward climes Siberian? Three years ago we took a family trip to a cabin in Vermont. In those pre-GPS, pre-minivan days, that trip was predictably calamitous: we got hopelessly lost and barreled recklessly in our '92 Taurus down muddy unpaved roads. But we loved the cabin once we got there, and a few days ago the time seemed ripe for a return trip, armed this time with satellite technology and four-wheel drive.

I suppose we were asking for it. I called our hostess on Sunday night to make sure the roads would be passable and our cabin accessible for our Monday reservation. She assured me that they would. But in the early hours of Monday morning Vermont was bombarded with twenty-two inches of snow (only six to ten inches had been predicted). Knowing nothing of this, we merrily left New Haven on Monday around noon.

Things started badly. We stopped at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art only to find that it is closed on Mondays. On our way back to the interstate we passed the Amherst home of Emily Dickinson. We stopped, only to learn that the ghost of nineteenth-century America's most brilliant recluse also rests in anticipation of Family Home Evening. We jumped out of the car anyway, and Lia snapped a photo of me in front of the eccentric damsel's domicile (see above).

This was an inauspicious beginning, but since Lia has a preternatural talent, as the saying goes, for being in Paris when the Louvre is closed (actually that really happened to her and her dad and sister), we took this mostly in stride. We continued on our way, happily listening to a CD recording of The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which was fun both because the book is marvelous and because it is set in our home state of five years and many of its characters have surnames now inscribed on our city streets.

We arrived at length in Brookfield, the rustic hamlet that houses our beloved cabins. In no danger of getting lost this time around, we left the security of the well-plowed freeway for the icy anxiety of the Brookfield lanes. To get to the cabins we had to climb a large hill on a road that was almost entirely iced over. After spinning our tires for a while we gave up, but in our effort to back down in reverse we got stuck in a small snow ditch. After some fervent prayers for deliverance, a big-rig grater with a friendly driver came rolling down the hill. He helped push us out and bade us follow him as he cleared the way before us and led us to the cabins by a gentler, more tractable route.

We arrived, only to find that the private property on which the cabins rest was entirely un-plowed and utterly impassable. I tromped parlously over huge mounds of snow, making my way toward a bobcat that was slowly clearing the private lane. Inside I found the cabin owner, who informed me that his wife had tried to call us to warn us not to come and who, without much of an apology, wished us good luck on our journey (he did offer to call the Comfort Inn on our behalf).

So we were off again. We ended up spending the night at Betsy's Bed & Breakfast in Montpelier, our first ever visit to the hardest to remember of American capital cities. It turns out Betsy's husband John, an environmental lawyer, graduated in 1978 from the Yale Law School, where he was a student of Bruce Ackerman, my mentor, and Guido Calabresi, my future employer. Betsy was once a lawyer too, and she and John met as summer associates in the Houston office of Vinson & Elkins (parenthetical shout out to megastar V&E associate Kirk Cheney, perhaps our sole remaining reader). Unfortunately John seemed to have forgotten the blood oath that YLS students swear on the first day of school over the skull and bones of William Howard Taft never to accept money from a YLS alumnus in distress, and they charged us the going rate for the night's lodging.

It was a long night, though, so I suppose we got our money's worth. Julia made a wraith-like appearance in our bedroom every twenty minutes or so for an update on the spirit and content of her dreams. Katharine, liberated at last from the quiet tyranny of the crib, spent much of the night in loud and peripatetic revelry. Eli slept soundly, a fact she made the subject of repeated and pious reminders the following day. "I was good last night," she cooed, "wasn't I?"

After a hearty breakfast we were ready for the fun to begin in earnest. Unfortunately the fun was early marred by signs of car trouble (which mercifully turned out to be nothing more serious than the accumulation of massive amounts of frozen slush around the tires). But we eventually made our way to the mecca that is the Ben & Jerry's factory. Ben & Jerry's--that heartwarming enactment of the American dream, showing how two ordinary blokes with an abysmal business model can become millionaire figureheads by turning operations over to capable management; that paragon of socially responsible enterprise and paradigm of mercantilist greenwashing; that institutional paean to the power of puns and the glory of ice cream.

Katharine was pretty sure, only a few minutes after our arrival, that she actually owned the place. Pictured in her hand is one of the 274 packages of fruit snacks she devoured during our trip.
We got to the factory thirty minutes before it opened, and we passed the time by sledding down the snow mounds in the B&J parking lot.
Julia knew it wasn't real sledding, but she understood the power of her unconquerable smile to warm her father's heart with the thought he was helping her to a good time.
Get it? Infarmation? Julia got it, and she helpfully pointed it out to everyone.
When 10 o'clock finally rolled around, Julia and Eli raced off to be first in line for the tour.
They didn't quite make it. A German youth, animated by a certain Prussian rigor, and his American girlfriend, inspired by the Prussian's good looks, narrowly edged us out. But the Teuton atoned by asking, after hearing me say approximately six words in German, whether I was German too.

The tour was a mild disappointment--an eight-minute propaganda clip followed by a brief explanatory glimpse at only one room of the production apparatus. Still, we got "free" cups of ice cream, and our tour guide was energetic, deep-voiced, and probably as tall as Peter the Great (though with the curious tendency of some tall people to slouch lest they overwhelm the rest of us with their stately grandeur). All in all, it was worth the drive and the price of admission.
As we drove south the temperatures climbed and the snows vanished. We made our way back to the Eric Carle Museum, where we found a large sign announcing an alteration, effective immediately, in their hours of operation. The museum would now be open every Monday and closed every Tuesday, starting today.
Just kidding. Here are the girls, waxing comfortable within the Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Brilliant as was the picture book art in the museum's three galleries, the Collings ladies were more interested in creating art than consuming it. The museum has its own "Art Studio," where today the theme was "outfits." Lia made the arts and crafts table sparkle as she fashioned this fashionable dame.
Julia neither needed nor desired any material more fancy than some pens and markers. Here is her handiwork:
Eli threw a world-historical fit when I made her relinquish her markers and return to the car. Such an epic fit, in fact, that we had to cancel our planned trip to the Dr. Seuss statuary gardens in Springfield. We drove peacefully home, listening to the final chapters of The Witch of Blackbird Pond. But every vacation needs to end with a bang, and fortunately for us an oil tanker had turned over on the freeway outside North Haven and we got to spend a delightful two hours idling between exits 14 and 13 on I-91. All's well that ends well.
The girls are glad to be back home. Here they are cultivating sororal unity by watching Barbie in the Nutcracker together.