Danville
Little villages like Danville were less affected by these rococo raids and still preserve their architectural peace and calm, with their white frame houses, store, school and church fronting on the village common.
Charles Edward Crane, “Let Me Show You Vermont”
I've been thinking about the question of "prettiness" in landscape. Pretty, charming, old-fashioned, quaint, picturesque: these description all fit Vermont—yet also have a bit of a dismissive tone. To say a place, or a painting, or even a girl is “pretty” is damning with faint praise--where's the depth of character, the profundity, in pretty?
Take Danville—how would I describe it, if not by the usual words used about Vermont towns? Driving into the village at sunset on a late winter afternoon, I park my car by the church, and get out and walk around the green. It's very cold and quiet, and the traffic light hanging between two poles at the end of the street glows red, then yellow, and red again.
I look at the shadow on the white church, the dirty snow, the empty street disappearing into an horizon of blue mountain. What I see is more layered with time, more worn and hardened than "pretty"—and what I feel looking at Danville in twilight is related to, but more complicated, than "happy.” I’m not sure what this emotion is, but it’s why this particular flatlander migrated north to Vermont.
Twenty years ago I drove through Vermont for the first time. Coming up Route 7 into a small town, I saw a stream running through the big back yard of a white clapboard house, and in that moment decided I wanted to move here. I had grown up in a Victorian suburb of Washington DC, and in my years there, all the creeks in my neighborhood were buried underground in culverts. The woods were cleared for building sites, and every available inch of grass assigned an owner.
The rural countryside, where I'd sat in a pasture on Sundays watching my father paint watercolors of hedgerows and old barns, vanished in a few years. The landscape of farms, fields, and village centers of my childhood transformed into housing developments, shopping malls, and office buildings. These new suburbs became the outer manifestation of our society’s values: work, buy, eat, sleep, get up, drive, then do it all over again.
After that trip through Vermont where I spotted my dreamed-for future from a car window, it took six years for my husband and me to figure out how to transplant our family to a place where we didn't have jobs and didn't know a soul. But, eventually, through trial and error, asking a lot of questions, and taking some risks, we figured it out.
When I finally left Washington, I was told by some that we take our discontents with us wherever we go. That turned out not to be true for me. Over the years of making a life here, I’ve found that Vermont is far from perfect—but I’m happier here than anywhere else.
Why? I'm not exactly sure about the reason, but I think it has something to do with the rich variety of nature I see here every day, within a landscape that changes so completely with each season. Being happier here also has to do with the small experiences that happen (like wild turkeys crossing my path in the woods) and the little things I see (like how mud can borrow the iridescent color of a cloud) on back roads and in small towns—experiences I now have room for in my slower life.
Like what I feel right now, for instance, as I stand in the cold looking at that traffic light flash red and yellow, and the sun sets and sky glows orange over Hill Street in Danville.