East Montpelier

Every state is a state of mind. There are intangibles which make Vermont peculiarly such a state...Charles Edward Crane


For my Art of Action proposal I've been working on a series of studies that explore Vermont's landscape elements, features that I've identified as fundamental to our state's character: mountain, field, water, forest, farm, home, road and town. Vermonters care deeply about the working and natural landscape, and want to preserve our rural and small town environment (see surveys conducted by the "Council on the Future of Vermont") . So I've been thinking and reading about the components of this landscape, those elements that we live among and love, but also often take for granted. And I believe that we have to recognize the parts that make up the whole of Vermont before we can protect what we have here.

As I was driving today down Route 14 from East Montpelier towards home, I had a bit of an epiphany. I suddenly realized that the scene in front of me held a variety of landscape elements (road, home, mountain, field, forest, water). Each element conjured up associations and memories. This is a visually rich landscape.

That got me thinking about the opposite of this rich landscape, a "mono-element" landscape of housing development (only "home" element) or freeway (only "road" element). I can think of rural places I've been that are "mono-element": parts of Iowa that are only "field" element, or parts of Colorado that are only "mountain" element. For me, those places don't offer the complexity of features, that composition of emotional resonances that makes Vermont what it is: a unique "state of mind."

Cabot

A long and amazing story could be told about Zarah Colburn, a boy born on a farm in Cabot, who astonished the world with his uncanny capacity for calculating numbers...He was taken abroad and exhibited in London and Paris, always accompanied by his father, who was just an ordinary farmer and utterly unable to account for the uncanny genius of his son...Charles Edward Crane


I took the left fork on Route 2 coming out of Marshfield through the Cabot flats (a short, narrow stretch of valley that despite being an especially cold microclimate hosts excellent greenhouse businesses, favorite haunts of mine during the gardening season). But today was the first day of hunting season, and a light snow blew across the road as I drove north towards the village.


Cabot is probably the most recognizable place name in Vermont. The cheese factory that's the source of its fame (located prominently on the main drag and painted a jaunty, Willy Wonkish red and white) looks surprisingly small given its prominence in the national food consciousness and importance as a local employer. Cabot Cheese began eighty years ago as one of many local creameries, co-op operations run by area farmers as a way to make a profitable product out of an abundance of milk that would otherwise quickly sour (this was before refrigerated bulk tanks forever changed the economies of dairy farming, and took Cabot and its farmers from a small community operation to absorption by the huge co-op Agrimark.)


The town of Cabot has a busy, compact center that includes its tiny multi-grade school, known for good academics and a thriving music program. Its campus just gained a performing arts center, built in true Vermont fashion: an idea cooked up by enthusiastic parents, a construction bond turned down by town vote, then the vision reborn with fundraising and volunteer effort.

It's a bit hard to believe today, driving past stately homes and a four-square church on the village green, that (according to my friend Martin Johnson, who knows about these things) Cabot was called "little Chicago" in the days of prohibition because of its gambling and moonshine liquor--or at least, that was the rumor in Martin"s hometown of Plainfield about the village of iniquity up the road.

Cabot facts and figures