Landscape of Happiness

I just got back from Vermont and central New York, where it is ridiculously green and lush and bucolic from a season of non-stop rain. It’s been so long since I’ve been back there in anything but the dead of winter that I’d forgotten how much I miss fields and huge trees and meadows everywhere you look. Lilacs in full bloom and lawns speckled with dandelions. Trees taller than single-story buildings, grass that carpets every square inch of non-paved ground. What a concept! I couldn’t get enough of the silos—old-fashioned dirty-grey silos that tilt recklessly out of cow paddocks and shiny new sapphire blue metal silos that loom up from family dairy farms, large operations that nonetheless seem to belong to the land just as the sugar maples and humpy green hills they call mountains. 

Plus there is water everywhere. I’m a sucker for water of any kind—ponds, rivers, creeks, lakes, oceans—and there is so much water that it is almost embarrassing. It’s positively show-offy with water. In Middlebury, where I’d gone to college 18 years ago, the raging torrent that roars through town is called Otter “Creek.” Here in New Mexico a body of water that size would get full-blown river status, no question. But there, where New England modesty rules the day, it’s just a creek. While I was there, I went for a trail run on Chipman Hill, the little bump out downtown’s back door where Middlebury locals used to ski during the 40s when it was too expensive to drive up to the Snow Bowl, and ran through little rivulets springing up out of nowhere. Ah, to have wet feet! Now I know why the 20-something kid buying beer at 10:30 at night in the convenience store was shellacked, sneakers to knees, in mud.  

crossing Otter Creek

All of this is making think more about what makes a good, liveable town, a question that keeps cropping up as I contemplate how to raise two environmentally conscious, socially responsible girls in our increasingly distracted world. Certainly a sympathetic hometown is a good place to start, and Middlebury flaunts its niceness. From most places in town, you can walk to a grocery store and a movie theater and a creaky-floored Ben Franklin hardware shop and a natural food co-op, coffeehouses, restaurants, and the old-fashioned Vermont Book Store that somehow miraculously still exists. What does it say about America in 2011 that a town like this—with basic necessities and niceties within walking distance of many residents—seems anachronistic? It says something pretty sad.

green roofs are a perk, too

I used to write stories about liveable adventure towns for Outside magazine, and I’d comb the map looking for the elusive Best Place and zeroing in on its best attributes. Silos and the smell of manure carried in on the breeze are optional. Basic services reachable by bike or foot are not. A river—or even a creek—flowing through downtown is nice. A liberal arts college with a serious commitment to sustainability is a plus. Trails and mountains out back? A must. Good schools—definitely. Friendly neighbors who stop to talk outside the corner bakery, yup. Of course there’s more: Affordable housing, childcare, cultural diversity, family and friends and a deep-rooted sense of community. Jobs! 

Some of these are subjective, others more measurable, but the most essential and elusive ingredient of all might be memory: a sense of belonging, of continuity—stretching backwards or looking forward. Once upon a time, I was 17 years old in this town, with shoulder-length hair and cut-off chinos. Now I have two daughters of my own, and I want them to know what it feels like to ride their bikes to the market and walk to school and feel safe on their streets. What will be their landscape of memory and happiness? What kind of places will they be homesick for?

nostalgia = freshman dorm, 21 years later