"Moose and Madness: Non-Googleable Reasons I Love Vermont"

By: Brett Stanciu

One:

A single mother, I live on the edge of Hardwick Village, Vermont (pop. 1,300) in a house built a century ago for psilosis-plagued granite workers. The house upstairs boasts one decent-sized bedroom and two teeny rooms and a vegetable garden in the side yard I dug. I moved from a dirt road a half dozen miles away when my ex-husband joined an antigovernment militia.

            The village has the usual accoutrements: two auto parts stores, five churches, an elementary and high school, an empty masonic hall with daycare for poor kids in the basement, a community garden more weeds than carrots or kale, a House of Pizza that sells creemees in the summer, a chic and overpriced coffee shop, a Dollar General. The suspension footbridge over the Lamoille River has been broken and closed for years. The grocery store’s floor needs revamping. The food co-op is friendly and predictably weird.

            Forged from the granite boom 150 years ago, Hardwick is still flinty and hardscrabble. Two weeks after we moved in, someone walked into our barn and stole four studded winter snow tires. I phoned the local PD. An officer sighed. “People should install security cameras. This doesn’t work.”

(Insert warning: terrible things have happened to my daughters and me. These things are not google-able.)

Two:

            Just before the new year, in dismal and gray December’s end, my daughters beg me to take a trip over the border to Montreal. Before light, I pet my housecats goodbye, checked the dampers on my woodstove, and got in my Subaru. As I drive north, the rising sun shoots crimson lines through the clouds in my rearview mirror.

            I’m afraid to drive in city traffic, but I do it anyway .

            We stay in old Montreal and wander through underground malls, enormous electric-lit spaces crammed with clothing sewn by people on distant parts of the globe. Room after room is filled with new clothing and cosmetics and hundreds of shoes, with alcohol and cigars. Music hums. The salespeople are unhappy and want to go home.

            We might as well be in Plato’s cave.

            I want to feel rain on my face.

            The hotel room stinks of mold.

            My oldest spends her money and my money and is miserable, walking around snapchatting and staring at Instagram, because who could not be miserable in this place, feasting on cane sugar when a body craves kimchi.

            I am nearly twice as old as my young woman daughter. I’ve wandered my journey, sowed my seeds, made my irredeemable mistakes, and I’ll pay those consequences as she pays mine, too, as I’m paying my mother’s.

            My oldest insists on driving me back to where I’ve parked my car in a lot at the metro. My youngest, our navigator, uses Google, and the oldest snarks about her phone bill. I sit stonily in the backseat, determined not to argue, and of course none of us knows where this lot is. In what seems like fate’s nastiness, I can’t manage to get onto the interstate and end up in a giant strip through endless shopping for cars and health care offices and fastfood restaurants. It’s raining. The world is washed empty of color.

            A terrible, horrific war rages overseas, in families’ backyards and children’s bedrooms. My mother despises me for reasons I’ll never understand. My sister wants me to cut off my brother. My oldest wants me to make her father’s mind loving and whole again. I want to go home and feed my cats.

            When I finally find Autoroute 10 and veer on the ramp, a wild animal lunges down the center of the interstate. Stunned, I’m sure I’m hallucinating, freaked out by my own fraught mind. But no. A moose, long-legged on the pavement, its eyes rolled back in a fearful where the fuck am I? lunges down the interstate bordered by Jersey barriers, its hooves not suited to asphalt.

            Traffic slows behind me. There’s nothing I can do for this creature. I drive out of the city and through the utterly flat industrial farm fields, metal silos scraping the sky in the distance. I’ve no map, no cell service, no one knows which route I’m traveling. Navigating by the sun, I veer south.

Three:

            I moved to Hardwick because genetics and bad habits scrambled my ex-husband’s marbles. He cut off his daughters. When I had divorce papers served, I feared he would sink his knife in my back, slice right down between my ribs. In the fury that possessed him in those crazy days, a blue vein throbbed furiously in his forehead while he screamed. Before the profound craziness set in, I hadn’t seen the vein that marked his face, like Cain’s scar that appeared only in the throes of madness.

Had he lain dying in a bed of pancreatic cancer, friends would have gifted me childcare, chicken stirfry, impromptu home repairs. I am not a female foil to my ex’s madness, collateral damage to his agenda. As I ran backwards, trying desperately to get out of a life where cement barriers suddenly appeared everywhere, people hustled out of my way.

I drive back over the international border alone. The snow is mostly melted, the mountains more gray than blue. In Belvidere, I pull over and stand on a turn-out along a road where no one else seems to be traveling this late afternoon. The air is cold and wet, nasty like November before snow flies, but the lake there lies still, utterly unbroken, filled with darkness and yet so very much living: the fish swimming below the icing-over surface, the weeds along the edges, the promise of spring frogs and summer kayaking. I wait for a sign of a crow, a hawk dipping one wing, a passing motorist. Nothing, and no one. I follow a little path down to the shoreline and then crouch down: woman, writer, mother. This, too, is non-googleable.