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NORTH BENNINGTON, VT Sidewalks
I. This morning, as I do nearly every day, I walked to the post office pushing my year-old daughter in her stroller. I love this ritual any time of year, but in summertime when the air is sweet, the trees full green and the sky blue, I feel as if I live in paradise. As we walk up Main Street past the brick library, we stop at the honeysuckle bushes lining Mr. Jones's yard. Their red berries are out, and I pick some for Daisy to hold and squish in her fingers, just as a few months ago I picked their flowers for her. If Mr. Jones is in his yard, he'll raise his hat to us like the old-fashioned gentleman he is and say, "What two beautiful ladies." When we pass Redeemed Repair, Steve Corcoran is showing used cars to customers, and he'll wave casually as we pass. We say good morning to everyone we pass, and everyone says good morning to us. At the P.O. we get our mail, and if there are any checks, we backtrack to the bank where the tellers can be counted on to give Daisy a sticker. Then we head to the playground or the lake, saying good morning to everyone we pass. Ten years ago I chose to live in North Bennington, a little village near the larger town of Bennington in the southwest corner of Vermont. I knew the place from my years at adjacent Bennington College. I chose to return there because it wasn't the suburbs, which I had left at eighteen, and it wasn't New York City, the place I was fleeing. New York had been making me crazy. After being ticketed by a belligerent cop who insisted I'd driven through the bus lane exiting the Williamsburg Bridge (I hadn't), I became so phobic I'd have an anxiety attack whenever I saw a police car or heard a siren. Fortunately, my husband was willing to try life in the country. I cried as we crossed the state line, cried with relief at having escaped New York and joy at arriving home. My first years in North B, I basked in the town's calm and predictability. Like the turning of the seasons from balmy summer to spectacular fall to dark, frigid winter, to spring's slow arrival, the patterns of life in this town are, in their way, beautiful. The broken church bells regularly peal their cacophony. The owners of Powers Market know everyone by name and are relaxed about letting customers run up a charge. Kids bike around town and go fishing at the lake. The houses are close together, built as they were before the automobile, and it is impossible not to know your neighbors and much of their business. Politely chatting with everyone you meet is normal and seemly. Those first years, I vaguely believed that it had always been a quiet country village and that nothing here would -- or could -- ever change. Like a refugee or an expatriate, I wanted to believe my adopted home was perfect, and at first I thought perfect must mean unchangeable. Yes, I saw the old, defunct factories and knew they must have been busy once, yet the village seemed so still, so quiet, it was hard to believe it had ever been different. Over the years, as my sheer relief at coming home relaxed into something more like curiosity, I have gradually reshaped my understanding of the history of this place. On this morning's walk to the P.O. there was something new to see, and I stopped the stroller so Daisy could watch. The men who work for the Village of North Bennington Highway Department (a bit of a misnomer -- we have no highways, just roads) were tearing up the sidewalk opposite us, on the west side of Main Street between the bank and the P.O. The summer of '96, Bank Street got a new sidewalk on the north side, and last summer lower Main Street got one. Change happens slowly in North Bennington. As much work as three men can do in a summer is what gets done. I squatted beside Daisy to explain. Shouting above the racket, I pointed and named what we saw: backhoe, truck, men, dirt, shovels, rakes. See the big machine scooping up the sidewalk? See the rocks falling into the truck? I stopped narrating, marveling at the expertise of the backhoe operator. As cars eased past, he maneuvered the big claw with an athlete's precision and grace: the claw reached low, bit a big bite of rubble from the sidewalk, then swiftly curled itself up to cradle the debris. The operator shifted his levers, and the cab and the crane pivoted in a neat, compact circle, and the claw hovered over the dump truck parked just behind it. Another smooth shift of the levers, and the claw tilted and opened, and pieces of concrete, asphalt, and big rectangular stones fell thudding into the truck. I realized then that those large rectangular stones had made up the cement sidewalk's stone border. They had been set on their sides at the road's edge, more than a foot deep into the ground with just a six-inch portion visible, the early-twentieth-century-version of metal forms. The stones thudding into the dump truck were gray and chipped, probably slate; there is, or used to be, a lot of slate around here. Many of the roofs of the older houses, like the one I live in, are tiled with it. I wondered how long ago those stones had been laid there. Perhaps even before the streets of North Bennington were paved. And who had laid them? Who were the men who seventy or ninety years ago had trucked the stones from the quarries, dug trenches beside the road and positioned the stones in a straight line to make the sidewalk we walked on for decades? I picture them as men who took pride in their work, as the current Highway Department men obviously do. See how they rake the dirt level? I said to Daisy as they shoveled a truckload of dirt into the strip of sidewalk the back hoe had excavated. The sidewalk being torn up this summer definitely needs repair. When the snow melts, it becomes a huge puddle of slush you have to step into the street to avoid (difficult with the stroller) or risk water leaking into your boots. Still, even as I admired the skill of the men ripping it up, I felt a pang for the loss of the old sidewalk. Does anyone remember the men who'd built it? I probably could ask the old men and women who congregate in the post office at ten o'clock when the mail is sorted to tell me those details of the history of this town. But so far I haven't. II. Where I grew up, there was no history. Or rather, what little evidence there was of a history that preceded my lifetime was swiftly, irrevocably obliterated by asphalt roads, housing developments, shopping centers, highways, malls. What's left is not evidence of history but evidence of loss, the loss that surrounds every city in America. My particular losses were the barn, the springhouse, and the woods and fields that once spread out beyond our house. When we first arrived in Copenhaver, it was a new housing development at the edge of the suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C. The other side of Great Falls Road had been developed, but our side, the north side, was still country. Or had been until just before we moved in. The evidence of its rural past stood right across the street: an old red barn. Its doors were always open, and there was no farming equipment there that I remember. The only animals were some cats slinking in and out. Bales of hay filled the loft, and more bales were piled on the barn floor. I was only six, and climbing the ladder to the loft was scary. Jumping off the loft onto the hay bales was even scarier, but I remember doing it, at least once. What the barn might have been used for besides storing hay, I'll never know. Its size and age are even vaguer in my memory -- only its smell remains vivid: hay, rich, woody, green and dusty, all at once. Sometimes in North Bennington I'll be driving behind a tractor pulling a load of hay and the memory of the barn will come wafting over me. The barn burned down a few months after we arrived in Copenhaver because some boys set off firecrackers inside it. Of course, the construction crews we saw daily building house after house would have pulled it down eventually. More clearly I remember the springhouse: a small, whitewashed stone building next to the creek that fed the pond in the park. (Our development was nicer than some in that a substantial piece of land in its center had been set aside as a park.) Inside it was dank and cool but clean. I had no idea what a springhouse was for, or even what a spring was. But I knew its name and that it had belonged to the Copenhavers, the family who, it was said, had once owned and farmed this land. It was obviously old; even at six I could tell that, and I used to wonder about it, wonder who had built it and why. The springhouse was left alone for a few years. Gradually it became dirty. Soda cans accumulated inside, and later beer cans and cigarette butts. And then eventually its door was sealed. By that time, Copenhaver was fully developed. When we had first arrived, there had been only two roads, Cold Spring Road, the entrance to the development, and Over Ridge Road, our street, which turned west off of Cold Spring, up and over the hill. (The houses on Cold Spring were all model homes, furnished versions of the different configurations available, with names like The Talbot, The Baltimore, The Frederick, names meant to connote Maryland's colonial history.) Our house was at the top of the hill, and beyond our driveway the road was still dirt, with construction sites marked off by stakes with orange plastic tags tied to them. Beyond the dirt road were fields and patches of woods here and there. The sight of those fields always made me melancholy and anxious. When we took Sunday drives along gravel roads into the country, the seven of us piled into the hot station wagon, the sun slanting across those fields filled me with an unnamable dread. There was something sad in those fields, some sense of loss, foreboding, a feeling that they had already been abandoned, though to what I could not have said, not then, not at six or seven or eight. By the time I was nine or ten, I could have named it, but by then we no longer took drives in the country because the country was gone. By then I knew what was planned for the land all around us. Riding my bike, I'd explore the new roads carved out in our development and developments springing up beyond it. Where last summer there had been fields, now dirt roads had been bulldozed out of the hills and concrete foundations marked where the next houses would go up. I remember a woody place near a creek where I used to pretend the trees were my house and the acorns were my food. I remember the magic of the dark moss with its bright green spores. It's been thirty years since that land was the edge of country. Now the suburbs go on for miles and miles. The highway routing all those people has expanded from two lanes to twelve. The last time I went back, I got off at the exit I remembered and immediately was lost. I couldn't find my way to Falls Road, though I had driven that route thousands of times. I drove around in confusion, increasingly astounded by the density of the stores and houses, until I realized Falls Road had been moved. That one-time country lane connecting the country towns of Rockville and Potomac had been rerouted to accommodate the highway. It was now four lanes of traffic punctuated by regular traffic lights. The last time I went back to Copenhaver, over ten years ago, its trees and shrubs were grown tall, and the houses had lost the raw, naked look I remember so well. The development looked so settled, it seemed as if it wanted me to believe it had been there for more than its actual thirty years. As if it were the only history of that land. I often dream I am returning to Copenhaver. I'll be headed down Falls Road in a car or a schoolbus or on my bike. At first it will still be a country lane, but as I get closer and closer to home, it will be more and more built up till it is a comic-book nightmare of a city -- a tortuous tangle of highways, malls and skyscrapers, a threatening landscape I may never escape. III. North Bennington is what it is because of accidents of geography and history. Emigrants swelled Vermont's population after the Revolution, but the stony soil could not support abundant farms. Most people moved on to the richer lands of Ohio, but enough stayed to form a generous labor pool for the textile factories then being built along the streams. When the post road to Albany was completed and manufactured goods could be transported to the Hudson and downriver to New York City, North Bennington's industrial age was born. The house I live in was built 200 years ago to house the workers in the textile factory down the street. So many lives lived in this house, on this street. Often when I wake in the morning, I try to imagine what it was like for the people who slept in my room a hundred years ago. What they heard upon waking would have been similar to what I hear -- birdsong or rain or the crunch of feet in snow -- yet so very different. If they were lucky enough to still be in bed at seven in the morning, they'd have heard the streetcar clanging and stopping to discharge the workers making their way down Sage Street -- then called EZ Lane -- to begin their day at the EZ Waist Factory, which made long underwear for children. As they made their way to the outhouse (the municipal water supply wasn't built till 1923), they'd have smelled wood smoke and coal fumes. They'd have heard horses clopping along the roads, the hum of machines from the towns five factories, and the screech of the first train pulling into the station. But they would not have seen the trees that make this town so pretty. A hundred years ago there were comparatively few trees left in Vermont. When the first settlers came to this part of the world in the mid-1700s, they had to cut down the dense woods and root out the stumps to plant their crops. They were so thorough that by the late 1800s most of the trees were gone. The mountainsides had been cleared two-thirds of the way up, and sheep grazed where the woods had been. Settlers used the wood for building their homes and to make charcoal for firing the furnaces that converted ore to iron, and potash, an ingredient in gunpowder. Though the first factories in this town were built beside Paran Creek to harness its water power, later factories were steam powered and needed huge quantities of wood for fuel. Wood fueled the railroad -- a great lumberyard stretched from the depot on Main Street all the way to Shaftsbury, the neighboring village. The depot was once the hub of the town. Ten trains came through daily on the way to New York City and Montreal. North Bennington's economy was strong: the Boot and Shoe (where the library is now), Cushman's furniture, the EZ Waist, and the Radio Flyer factories supplied the jobs. A streetcar ran down Main Street, bringing workers from Bennington and Hoosick Falls to the factories here. The town's hotel (where the gas station is now), three barber shops, three grocery stores, numerous bars and stores provided places to spend money. The town had its own high school, its own jail (where the post office stands now), three churches, a Masonic Temple, and a race track. Now what remains? Paran Creek is nearly choked with dumped scrap metal under its tranquil, sun-dappled surface. A couple of factories still operate. There's National Hanger, which was once Cushman Furniture, and Chemfab, where long ago iron ore was converted to pig iron. Most of the old buildings are used for other purposes. Some have been converted to apartments. Some house producers of small crafts like hand-hooked rugs or organic fabrics. A handful of sculptors and painters rent studio spaces. At the end of my street, the building that was Payne Furniture (built where the first factory in North Bennington stood till it was swept away in the flood of 1878, where the EZ Waist stood till it burned down in 1911) has been converted into a thriving community arts center with spectacular facilities for a village so small. Down Water Street, next to Chemfab, one floor of an old factory is No Bias (North Bennington Independent Artists Space), an art gallery with bi-monthly openings. Besides the remaining factories, there are a few small businesses: Powers Market, Hair'n'Now, Gimme Pizza, TJ's Pub and North Bennington Variety. There's Merchants Bank and a gas station/laundromat. There's Bennington College, which employs, obviously, the professors who live in town, as well as a few who work as maintenance men or secretaries. There are carpenters and landscapers and farmers. But the town's economy is tiny by comparison to its industrial years. It can't provide jobs for even half its population. Most North Bennington residents work in Bennington or Manchester, the tourist town to our north, and a few commute as far as Troy and Albany, the cities to our west. Somehow, though, there always seem to be people, usually but not always the artists, who manage to get by though only marginally or sporadically employed. Once I began learning its history, I had to accept that my North B is just as ephemeral as the industrial one. The North B I love is here because of the economic decline of New England, because of changes its inhabitants had no control over, changes many of them must have mourned. The trees have grown back. The mountainsides are green again in summer, orange and red in fall. Could North Bennington ever become another Copenhaver? On its outskirts, new houses have been built in tiny subdivisions. But though fields were destroyed to build those houses, the change is on so small a scale as to be wholly different. Outside the village there are still fields and woods. Yes, there are more houses on the hilltops, but these changes have not erased the history of the place as it was erased in Copenhaver. When I was teaching Comp 101 at Southern Vermont College in Bennington, as an introduction to research skills, I asked my students to investigate the events that took place on the day they were born. The research was to include national events as well as local ones. One of my students began to tell me how she was born on a farm, where Morrison's Chevrolet is now. Morrison's Chevrolet is on Kocher Drive, a mile north of the center of Bennington. It's opposite a shopping plaza which houses Kmart, the Hallmark Shop, CVS, J. C. Penney and Payless Shoes. There used to be an IGA grocery there, but it closed and left the space vacant for a few years. Last year Staples moved in. Kocher Drive runs along a branch of the Walloomsac River, and on both sides stretch twenty acres of rare flatland that must have been among the best farm land in the area. Behind Morrison's, to the north, is a big soccer field and a steep hill sloping up to a park. Facing south, the hill would have made excellent pasture. As my student told me how her parents had sold the family farm when she was just a little girl, I thought how her experience of Bennington, or that of her parents, must parallel my experience of Copenhaver. For her research paper, I urged her to question her parents about the circumstances that led them to sell the farm, and I hoped I would get some insight into the psychological effect the changes in Bennington had had on them. The next class the student raised her hand. "My parents," she said, "said to tell you it's none of your damn business." This is why I hesitate to question the old timers about the history of North Bennington. Though I've adopted the village as my home, to the real Vermonters, I will always be a newcomer, an immigrant, a colonist. And though the folks are utterly cordial and welcoming, I still feel as though this is their town more than mine. This changes the longer I live here, of course, and perhaps when I am old, when I've lived here fifty years, I will feel more of a right to the town's history. Another change took place in North Bennington this summer: the feds renovated our post office. It used to be that on a summer mornings when I'd go get my mail, the light streaming in the window would illuminate the rows of old brass mail boxes set in their cabinet of golden-grained wood. I'd open my box by turning the two small brass knobs -- my combination was K-3-N. Now those functional old boxes have been replaced by rows of gray steel, cold and ugly. My box is in a newly built alcove that gets no sunlight. Instead of combination locks, these new boxes use keys. This took some getting used to for the many who walk empty-handed to the P.O. each morning to fetch home the mail. (Fortunately, our clerks are kind and reasonable and will hand mail over the counter with a chiding smile if we forget our keys.) It was a shock to realize these changes meant it wasn't, after all, our post office but the property of the federal government, which did not feel obliged to democratically ask us if we wanted the change. Now our post office looks like every other post office in America. But the P.O. is still where people congregate every weekday at ten to wait for the mail to be sorted. It's still where I run into my neighbors and friends, where I stop for a quick hello or a chat that may evolve into a long conversation continued on the way to the woods or the lake. And it's still the place where mail addressed to Kitsey, North Bennington, VT -- no last name, no zip code -- will be delivered to me. 
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