Never Enuff VERMONT!!!!!

[mallorys_camera]

I texted Ichabod this picture from the old ramshackle barn:



Is it as impactful as the first time? he asked.

No, I answered.

And it wasn’t.

Part of that, of course, was that the first time was an experience I was sharing with a deeply loved son.

Part of it was that magic, like lightning, seldom hits the same place twice.

Part of it was that now I have actually seen a performance by the Bread & Puppets Theater, and they aren’t very good.

But part of it was the day, unseasonably hot and humid, and the way the day accentuated the deterioration of the puppets, subtly but noticeably more decrepit than they had been the year before. Their amazing Easter Island-ish vitality seems to have seeped away. The smell of mold was very strong.

They were still very beautiful, of course.

These puppets are from a 1971 play the theater did about the My Lai massacre:



These puppets are from a 1980 play about the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador:



This puppet is Uncle Fatso, an all-purpose villain who at various times subbed for Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush:



These puppets are from a morality play that the Theater took on a European tour, a two-hour condensation of both the Old and the New Testaments. (Glad I missed that one!)



This puppet offers sage advice that, sadly, I am wayyyyy too weak-willed to follow:



I visited the puppets twice, once in the late afternoon and once the following morning early. First time, it took 45 minutes for my lungs to fill up with fluid—I have a severe mold allergy; second time, it only took 20.

Seeing them a third time would probably kill you! I thought to myself.



“Northeast Kingdom” is the phrase some resourceful person (possibly associated with the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing) came up with to describe the northeast corner of the state comprised mostly of 2,000 miles of hardwood forest.

Its beauty in the autumntime is something to behold.

Mostly I beheld it from the front seat of a car speeding 70 mph down a completely deserted I-91, a very wide, four-lane highway. That was a distinctly odd experience. One indication that we weren’t in Kansas upstate New York anymore: All the “Look Out for Deer” signs had been replaced by “Look Out for Moose” signs.

The area is very sparsely populated, so I was prepared for gritty towns.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the total desolation and hopelessness of the towns. You’d expect them, at least, to be capitalizing on leaf peeper season with all sorts of boutique hotels, adorable shoppes peddling maple syrup and quilts, and cozy festivals designed to extract maximum dollars from bottomless tourist pockets. That’s the way we do it in upstate New York!

But they weren’t.



I spent the night in Newport, a town on Lake Memphremagog (which I wouldn’t dream of trying to pronounce even if I was very, very drunk.)

Newport has everything necessary to turn it into a tourism Mecca, and God knows, that town needs an economic wellspring, however negatively its stony, self-sufficient, get-the-gub’ment-off-our-backs inhabitants may view tourism.

But two of the biggest businesses along Main Street are the Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, plus there was a long line of people standing outside a nondescript building as I sped out of town early in the morning that—judging from the vigor with which these people were scratching and picking at themselves—I’m fairly sure was a methadone clinic.

I got so curious that I Googled it when I got home:



In 2014, Newport razed a significant portion of its downtown.

Why?

Because the town fathers and civic boosters got sold on an EB-5 urban renewal scheme that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that raised $450 million, $50 million of which got embezzled outright to purchase a condo in Trump Towers.

It was the biggest fraud case in Vermont history. It got nicknamed the Kingdom Con.

Amazingly enough, the chief architect of the scam only got sentenced to 18 months in prison. Bernie Madoff’s ghost wishes it had hired that guy’s lawyer.

The boys throw stones at frogs for sport.
But the frogs die in earnest.

Comments

[bleodswean]

This story. But this is how we pretty much found upstate New York twenty years ago when my folks had lake property. We were told it was because of property taxes - the residents preferred to live in squalor...and perhaps the interiors of their homes were beautiful?

Living in a hippie-run college town and visiting the kids' conservatively-run town, I have seen firsthand the perils of trying to run a city with folks who mean well...but don't have the balls or experience to make the right decisions. This town has run every car dealer, developer, and name brand store out. Their town has a mall with a Macys and a vibrant downtown with a tree lighting and seasonal street parties. These towns are the same size. We got nuthin. Police chief quit because City Council publicly spanked him for trying to clear our only good thing - the park that runs through the middle of town with a beautiful creek and swimming holes. The homeless have destroyed it beyond the imagination's limits. And, of course, this town is prey for cons - long and short - and we have to live with the destruction wrought.

My relatives live in The Kingdom and it rolls off their tongues like some sort directions one is given in a fairytale.

[mallorys_camera]

I get why the locals would prefer not to rely on tourism: Who wants to be a zoo animal?

But absent any other source of economic development opportunities, if you live in a picturesque location, you have to exploit it for tourism if you want the dollars to roll.

Kidling1's town has a lot of economic development opportunities, so doesn't have to court tourists, and that means it can house the businesses and supply the services that residents actually want.

[bleodswean]

But tourism there is sooooooooooooooooooooooo seasonal! Make it fun, like your suggestions! As you would know, having been a zoo animal for a while in Monterey, eh?

And Kidling's town is run by politically conservative folks. Big difference between them and us and we are separated by 40 miles. It's really a textbook compare / contrast.

[smokingboot]

Those puppets remain eerily photogenic.

[mallorys_camera]

Yup. The mana is strong in them.