It is the dead of winter at our home in Montpelier, Vt. A nor’easter has blown through. It’s 10 below on many days. For us, in our early 60s, mid-winter is a grim huddle around the wood stove.
So for the fourth year in a row, we came here, to your place, hopping between rentals in Point Reyes Station and Inverness for the cool mornings and the warm sun. We work remotely in the morning, when the East Coast is alive and humming, then hike in the afternoon.
And what did we find when we arrived? A place very similar to the one we left.
A population dedicated to protecting the beauty of a place. You have MALT, we have the Vermont Land Trust and a unique quasi-governmental organization called the Vermont Housing Conservation Board. The V.H.C.B. brings together the housing and farm conservation interests under one roof. We haven’t had the difficulties you have experienced with MALT, but those are temporary. The tension between protecting the crown jewel of open land and connected community from the Tesla people of San Francisco is real. Back east, when Covid hit, it seemed everyone with a weekend ski house in Vermont was suddenly a full-timer with kids in the schools. Real estate prices skyrocketed and tensions mounted.
Both Montpelier and West Marin face the problems of an aging and dwindling population. In Vermont, our small schools, the bedrock of the community, are merging or closing. This leads to hour-long bus rides over the mountain for many, kind of like the ride for ranch kids to Tomales High. At some point, most of the community is on Medicare, not enough are working and paying taxes, and the community begins to erode.
Both communities celebrate local economies and culture. Two bakeries, a great grocery store, Sushi nights on Wednesday, a fabulous bookstore, a surf shop, ubiquitous art, an elementary school in the heart of town and a park to sustain us. I am describing our home as much as Point Reyes. At about 8,000 residents, Montpelier is bigger, so we actually have three bookstores, a coffee shop-bakery that feels like Brooklyn, a 100-acre park above town and a high school that kids can walk to each day. The Saturday farmers market is the best in the state. Of course, there is a vanilla mall outside town with a Wal-Mart, but the downtown is surviving, even prospering. I wish we had a mountain to protect us from the ills of runaway capitalism the way you do.
We both have a local newspaper determined to glue the community together. Our local editor gives out his cell phone number. Of course, he gets death threats, but mostly demands to resign so we can live without his editorial policies. We both have a local radio station that gives us news in a disaster. We both are focusing on the lack of affordable housing. We are one of the whitest states in the union, but we are changing. Afghans are coming and we are welcoming them. The Latino community is here in great numbers in the schools and workplaces, doing the jobs the rest of us won’t do. African immigrants have come and we struggle to integrate them as we should. We are working at it.
We share other struggles, too. Not enough affordable housing, a growing homeless population, dairies going out of business, a widening gap between rich and poor. In Vermont we have kept the Trump insanity out of our politics for the most part. Facts still matter. Yet we have our conspiracists and a healthy anti-vaxx debate. Our legislature is very Democratic, but we have a moderate Republican governor who wakes up early to mountain bike and races a stock car on weekends. He rejects Trump and wins praise for forging a middle ground based on information. We have no statewide mask mandate, but our governor gives two televised press conferences a week that are broadcast live over the public radio station. He wins re-election overwhelmingly. Our Republican Party has rejected him and embraced the crazy side, but Bernie Sanders still wins re-election with 80 percent of votes, many of them from rural conservatives.
Vermont and Point Reyes are also linked by a common family—the Shafter brothers. I’m not sure whether to brag about that or apologize. The Shafter brothers, for good or evil, came here from Vermont to make their fortune, suing to win control of the dairy ranches and eventually winning. I am not here to take over as they did, just to blend in and enjoy the fruits of your community. But the Shafters’ impact is all around us, hard to ignore.
In the end, we hang on, moving ahead, doing the best we can, and knowing it’s not enough. Two places on opposites coasts, united by shared values carved out of granite for us and out of hills and seashore for you.
Kevin Ellis is a communications consultant and writer who lives in Montpelier, Vt. when not in West Marin.