The Northeast: Part 3

6/22/2013 – Burlington, Vermont

I am unused to mountain roads. Pat recommended I take Spear street north to Burlington, saying I’d avoid the traffic and have a pretty drive. What I did not expect was to cruise into a hill at 2000rpm and then, even with my foot on the gas, see my RPM slowly drop. Whoops! Downshift up hills!

Burlington was muggy and rainy when I came in, like a soft focus film. Everything was swollen with water. It took me a while, but I found my way to the dorms, got my stuff inside, and parked my car. Slowing down now.

The first one of my fellow travelers I met was Rex, my roommate, who was from Denver and had a knack for asking good questions – probably an excellent quality to have if you are in economics, a field which was losing meaning for him as he started to consider the food system and the individual expressions of health within it. He wondered what he could do. There is room for everyone in the food system – especially economists – more on that later.

I brought my bicycle here. It’s nearly 10 years old but still looks good because I keep it out of the rain. I rode into Burlington seeking nothing in particular, having ate pickled vegetables at the base of Mt. Philo. I bought them from a roadside farm store in New York. Cauliflower, zucchini, green beans, carrots and more, with sugar, vinegar, and salt. It was delicious.

Burlington is sliding towards Lake Champlain it seems. It all slopes downhill, and being on wheels, this seemed the path of least resistance. After buying some nice pens (I love nice pens) at Boutiliers, an art supply store, I set about exploring. If you are familiar with Burlington, you probably know Church Street, which is a brick road that has been converted into a pedestrian road with all kinds of shops and restaurants. To those familiar with Ann Arbor, I’ll say Church Street gave me an Art Fair vibe in a way – probably the amount of pedestrians – but also the sense that while the larger attractions might be overwrought, there were smaller secrets to be found.

But the hills were overpowering, and I found my way, as every animal before me, to the water. Lake Champlain is tall and skinny: you can see across her, to the shadows of strangely active Adirondacks, but not up her, to Canada and loons. She fades away into the horizon line, a victim of the sphere.

I found a rails to trails path that went north along the lake, flat and easy. At one point I crossed under a small railbridge, and on either side of me was a rocky gorge, eaten with dripping moss. An abandoned bicycle lay on the road, I do not know why. Maybe given time someone find my bike like a seashell on top of a mountain, and from that finding know that here was a place we used bicycles, and they will try to dive into the meanings and form and function and discover as much about us as they can – it’s too bad we won’t get to see them fail. I’d like to see a museum of myself, through the lens of aliens or other distant progeny. If nothing else, it would make for an interesting afternoon.

I rode back, and stayed on the beach a little while, watching distant clouds stand still, waiting for the light to change.

I ate dinner, hungry, at a sushi restaurant called HJ House. I popped a roll of tuna into my mouth and slurped up curried pork ramen. The ramen came in a big plastic bowl and was full of noodles, bok choy, onions, pork, and a most excellent broth that was hot and flavorful – a rich curry.

I am a big fan of broth. On a purely nutritional level there is little that’s better in terms of good fat soluble vitamins, but on a visceral level I enjoy the idea of melting away the useful bits from the very bones of a creature. It is a sacrament to make good broth – you honor the skeleton, the cartilage, the mysteries trapped in the tissue, and you drink it slowly, not because you want to but because it’s hot; it scalds; it’s life. Makes great poached eggs, too.