Travel Reference
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ulation of just 37,000. Outside Groton I stopped at a roadside cafe for coffee and listened
along with the other three customers to a fat young woman with a pair of illkempt children
moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems to the woman behind the counter. “I
still only get four dollars an hour,” she was saying. “Harvey, he's been at Fibberts for three
years and he's only just got his first raise. You know what he gets now? Four dollars and
sixty-five cents an hour. Isn't that pathetic? I told him, I said, 'Harvey, they're just walkin
alloveryou.'Buthewon'tdonothin'aboutit.”Shebrokeoffheretorearrangethefeatures
on one of her children's faces with the back of her hand. “HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I
TOLD YOU NOT TO INNARUP ME WHEN I'M TALKING?” she inquired rhetorically
of the little fellow, and then in a calmer voice turned back to the cafe lady and launched
into a candid list of Harvey's other shortcomings, which were manifold.
Only the day before in Maine I had seen a sign in a McDonald's offering a starting wage
of five dollars an hour. Harvey must have been immensely moronic and unskilled-doubt-
less both not to be able to keep pace with a sixteen-year-old burger jockey at McDonald's.
Poorguy!Andontopofthat here hewas married toawoman whowas slovenly andindis-
creet,andhadabuttlikeabarndoor.IhopedoldHarveyhadsenseenoughtoappreciateall
the incredible natural beauty with which God had blessed his native state because it didn't
sound as if He had blessed Harvey very much. Even his kids were ugly as sin. I was half
temptedtogiveoneofthemacloutmyselfasIwentoutthedoor.Therewasjustsomething
about his nasty little face that made you itch to smack him.
I drove on, thinking what an ironic thing it was that the really beautiful places in America-
the Smoky Mountains, Appalachia, and now Vermont-were always inhabited by the
poorest, most undereducated people. And then I hit Stowe and realized that when it comes
to making shrewd generalizations, I am a cretin. Stowe was anything but poor. It was a
rich little town, full of chichi boutiques and expensive ski lodges. In fact, for most of the
rest of the day, as I wandered around and through the Green Mountain ski resorts, I saw
almostnothingbutwealthandbeauty-richpeople,richhouses,richcars,richresorts,beau-
tiful scenery. I drove around quite struck by it all, wandered over to Lake Champlain-also
immenselybeautiful-andidleddownthewesternsideofthestate,justovertheborderfrom
New York State.
Below Lake Champlain the landscape became more open, more rolling, as if the hills had
been flattened out from the edges, like someone pulling a crease out of a bedspread. Some
of the towns and villages were staggeringly pretty. Dorset, for instance, was an exquisite
little place, standing around an oval green, full of,beautiful white clapboard houses, with
a summer playhouse and an old church and an enormous inn. And yet. And yet there was
something about these places. They were too perfect, too rich, too yuppified. At Dorset
