Blue Highways: Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen, Vermont

Unfolding the Map

We cross state lines again, and now we are traveling in Vermont.  The Salada Tea signs that William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) notices helps cover for my lack of knowledge of anything in Vermont, and allows me to wax poetic on my love of tea.  Pull up a nice easy chair, pour yourself a cup and don't spill any on the map as you look for Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen!

Book Quote

"...a soft amber light fell over Vermont to give the rise of wet fields deep relief and color.  Through the villages of Orwell, Sudbury, and Goshen Corners, past the old groceries with SALADA TEA lettered in gold on front windows, and into the Green Mountains (which, some say, Vermont means in French despite cynical literalists who insist on 'Worm Mountain')."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 7

Orwell, Vermont skyline. Photo by "origamidon" and hosted at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host page.Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen (Corners), Vermont

Here's a disclaimer.  I've never been to Vermont, or New Hampshire, or Maine.  As you've come to expect, for the purposes of these posts that doesn't mean much, as I simply write about what images and feelings the quotes bring to mind, or what caught my eye or imagination and interested me and which I then explored.

So when it comes to Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen (Corners), I can't really tell you much.  It would be a disservice to try to force a treatise about George Orwell on you simply because the town's name is Orwell or to stretch something out of Sudbury or Goshen.

I was a little curious about why "Vermont" would translate to "Worm Mountain."  After all, I've had enough exposure to Spanish and to Latin that I know that "verde" or "verte" means "green" in those languages.  "Mont" clearly means mountain, such as "montaña" in Spanish, "montagne" in French, "montanha" in Portuguese, or even "munte" in Romanian.  Well, it turns out that "ver" means "worm" in French (it is "verme" in Portuguese and Italian, "vierme" in Romanian but inexplicably "gusano" in Spanish).  Since the Green Mountains are within Vermont, I am pretty sure that Vermont means Green Mountain, but even so, it is pretty interesting to think of a mountain of worms.

But the thing that really catches my eye in this quote is the reference to Salada Tea. For years, my wife has given me a bad time because of my propensity to drink tea.  Her need, one might almost say addiction, is to get up and have a cup of coffee.  Once, when she and I visited El Paso, we drove around one morning with her getting angrier and angrier because we couldn't find a place where she could get a cup of coffee.  If she doesn't have her coffee, then she can't get going and she'll actually get a headache.  It's been this way for years.

I never developed a taste for coffee.  My mom and dad drank it, my father especially.  He drank coffee all day, and Early Times at night.  In high school and college, while my friends became increasingly dependent on coffee, I never took it up.  It didn't taste good to me, no matter how much you masked it with sugar or milk.  When I worked as an overnight security guard at the lumber mill in my home town, I briefly considered it but one pot, brewed badly by me, was enough to convince me that I would never like it.  More on this later, because one should never say never.

What has happened is that I've slowly developed a taste for tea, to the point that it is now my main morning drink.  Like Captain Picard, I prefer "tea, Earl Gray, hot," though I usually mix it up with Irish Breakfast or English Breakfast.  Like most people, I drank tea in the bag.  I started with Lipton and sugar, but as my tea palate became more discriminating, I discovered that Lipton wasn't that good.  It was a whole new world for me when I realized that there were more kinds of tea than the generic white bag that simply said "tea."  "What is orange pekoe?" I wondered, and later began to wonder "just what is Earl Grey and what is the bergamot in it?"  And so on. 

Then I discovered that tea did not have to black.  Another world opened up for me when I discovered green tea.  My tea awareness grew by leaps and bounds as first, I began frequenting stores that weren't supermarkets, such as health food stores.  A visit to the Whole Foods or my local cooperative would often open up new varieties of tea I hadn't heard of, and suddenly, I became aware of green teas.  I also learned that I liked certain types of teas in the mornings (black) and other types in the afternoons (green).  I also became aware of white teas as well, and began trying them.

For a while, like most people, I called anything that steeped in water and made a colored, tasteful drink "tea."  But as my tea wisdom grew, I learned that tea only comes from tea plants.  A lot of the things that are marketed as tea are really not tea, such as the herbal concoctions.  There is no such thing as chamomile tea, though that's what I called it when I was trying to get myself around Rome and see the sights with a bad case of bronchitis.  I really thought that it was the chamomile "tea" that I would find in the shops that helped break up the phlegm and make it easier to breathe.  It was really the hot water, I've learned, but I have a fondness for chamomile to this day.  But it is not a tea.  It and other herbal teas are called tisanes and have different properties than teas.

Another advance in my tea awareness came a few years ago, when I was introduced to an iced tea called "vanilla rooibos" served in a coffee shop near my house in New Orleans.  It was good - I love vanilla too - and I began to read up on rooibos.  A South African bush, rooibos is technically not a tea though they call it "red tea" in its own country.   However, it has some similar properties.  All teas are high in antioxidants, especially green tea, and rooibos also has a number of antioxidants as well.  All I know is that I like it.

Finally, lately I have discovered just how good it is to have fresh, loose leaf teas.  A tea shop, the New Mexico Tea Company, opened in Albuquerque and it has afforded me the opportunity to learn more about teas, how to properly make them, and to try a myriad of different teas from all over the world.  The taste, depending on the type and color of the tea, can be remarkably different.  I still tend toward the Earl Grey, but I also try other teas that can range from delicate flavorings to strong ones, fruity flavors to smoky.  I occasionally love the smokey flavor of a Lapsang Souchong, or the strong over-the-top flavor of an Irish Breakfast to break up my usual Earl Grey fix at times.  I really enjoy the nutty flavor of a good Genmaicha on a rainy afternoon, and I absolutely love jasmine green tea.

It may be that I can't brew a good pot of coffee, but I really think there is more variety and depth in tea.  Coffee is in your face, and people use coffee, in my opinion, to rev themselves up or stay awake.  But tea, to me, is more subtle.  I use tea in the morning to awake, but I also use tea in the afternoon to relax.  Tea seems to me to be very associated with the mood that one is trying to cultivate and, in Asia, serving tea properly has been considered a high art form.  I'm not trying to say that drinking tea makes me better than those "uncouth" coffee drinkers.  It's just that it is different, and I feel good, and a little different from my friends and relatives, in making it my personal drink.

And now my second disclaimer.   Remember my never say never?  I have developed a taste for Turkish coffee.  Now that's some coffee that I can drink!

Musical Interlude

I'm going to give you a double-dose of tea today.  For the first time, I'm going to repost a song I already used in this site, but I think you'll understand why I put Colin Hay's Beautiful World in here when you hear the lyrics.  The second song is fun also.  It's by a Croatian hip hop band named Elemental, who extol the wonders of tea in A Cup of Brown Joy.

If you want to know more about Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen (Corners)

Town of Goshen
Town of Orwell
Virtual Vermont: Goshen
Virtual Vermont: Orwell
Virtual Vermont: Sudbury
Wikipedia: Goshen
Wikipedia: Orwell
Wikipedia: Sudbury

Next up: Woodstock, Vermont

Blue Highways: Walker, Minnesota

Unfolding the Map

Leeches?  Mosquitoes?  What kind of place is this?  Why, it's Walker, Minnesota!  Here a resident warns William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) that riffraff will be chased away by extreme temperatures and the previously mentioned beasties.  I'll write about my own difficulties with bugs.  Buzz on over and latch yourself to the map to see where Walker is located.

Book Quote

"Late spring had been creeping north, and suddenly that day it pounced.  Nobody was ready for the eighty-two degrees.  At Walker on the south shore of Leech Lake, I stopped at the county museum; it was closed, but the handyman, John Day, let me in to fill my water jugs....

"'This could be July,' he said.  'It can hit a hundred and five in July, and forty-five below in January.  One hundred and fifty degrees of temperature is how we keep the riffraff out.  When that doesn't do it, then it's up to the mosquitoes and leeches.  If it wasn't for them, and another thing or two, this piece of God's country would be overrun with people.'"

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 11

Downtown Walker, Minnesota. Photo at City Data. Click on photo to go to host page.

Walker, Minnesota

Mosquitoes.  If there is anything that would keep me from wanting to spend time in a place, it's mosquitoes.

I've always been the one that mosquitoes like.  Whether it's a flawed perception or not, I don't know, but it just seems that if I am in a place that mosquitoes inhabit, even when I'm with a number of other people, I get bitten the most.  I've read that one can take Vitamin B supplements, keep one's feet clean, and wear lighter clothing to thwart them.  I've tried all of those remedies when I'm in mosquito country, and nothing seems to work.  I still get bitten.

I suppose it wouldn't bother me too much, except that when I get bitten I develop large welts.  I've noticed that when some people get bitten, they experience a little bit of itching, and maybe a raised red spot that goes away relatively quickly.  Not me.  I'm left with big welts that itch for at least a half hour if not more, which then shrink into smaller red welts that continue to itch for 2-3 days.  When a mosquito bites me, it tends to stay with me for a while.

Bug sprays and cremes work, but I don't really want to use them that much because I dislike the idea of spreading chemicals all over my body.  But I'm not willing to suffer endless bites for that cause, so I will dutifully spread the chemicals when I have to.

From my days living in Wisconsin, I remember that wandering in wooded areas in the summer meant that one became a walking Happy Meal for the insects.  In my work, we had the occasion to use a retreat center in rural Wisconsin, and on one of my first times out I decided to take a bucolic stroll in the forest near a small stream.  What I remember is getting about a half a mile before running back to the retreat house.  It wasn't just the mosquitoes, which were like clouds around me.  It was also large black flies.  Now, where I grew up, black flies were harmless.  They often landed on you and just sat there, causing a little tickling sensation with their legs.

Not in the Midwest.  The black flies were large, and they bit - hard.  Not only did they bit, but they took a small chunk of flesh with them.  In my supposedly bucolic walk, I felt something on my neck.  I swatted, and a smear of blood came away from my neck, staining my hand with scarlet.  That was when I ran.  I felt that if I stayed out there that eventually my exsanguinated body would be found and I would be one of those unsolved mysteries that is only explained by supernatural or alien forces.  The first kill by a chupacabra in Wisconsin.

When it comes to bugs, I don't know how humans can claim themselves to be at the top of the food chain.  I don't think that there is a food chain.  It's really a food circle, or a food sphere.  Sure, we eat pretty much anything, and we have the intelligence to use weaponry to kill those things that are dangerous to us.  Put us out in the forest, without weapons, and suddenly we become much more equal, if not inferior, to those animals that are bigger and stronger than we are.

All our weaponry and smarts won't allow us to truly defend ourselves against insects.  They pervade our lives.  At best we share space with them, as the constant presence of roaches in people's kitchens will attest.  At worst we share ourselves bodily with them, as in the case of mosquitoes, ticks, lice, fleas and all the other creepy nasties that infest us or feed off our bodies.  And then, for our sacrifice, they often infect us with diseases, some of which have lifetime consequences or even no cure.  Think of Lyme disease, passed on through the bite of a deer tick seeking blood.  Or worse, think of Dengue fever, a painful infection which plagues developing countries and can sometimes lead to death.  Or even worse than that, think of Chagas disease, which is born by a bloodsucking insect with the quaint name of "the kissing bug."  There is no cure once you get it.  Even insects that aren't interested in us usually can put the hurt on us, as anyone who has stumbled on a beehive or stepped in a fire ant mound can attest.

I know that these insects are all part of the chain, or circle, or sphere.  But when I'm around them, I have to wonder why there have to be so damn many of them and why they all have to come after me?  At least I've never had experience with the other creepy thing in LHM's quote - leeches.  I've seen them in places, most recently being sold as health aides in an Istanbul market.  I hope I never run into them.  A scene from the movie Stand By Me, where Wil Wheaton looks into his underwear and finds a leech attached to something down there, has ended any curiosity I might have had with leeches before it could even start.  Since I live in a desert, I am blissfully free of both mosquitoes and leeches.

I'm good with most insects, as long as they leave me alone.  But mosquitoes and other blood suckers angling for my sweet plasma?  When I'm around, I don't care if the place is carpet bombed.  Just keep them away from me.  John Day, I don't think you'll see this piece of riffraff around Walker during mosquito season!

Musical Interlude

I have a friend named Hannes, who was a big Queens of the Stone Age fan for awhile.  He tried to get me to listen to them, but I didn't really listen much.  But as I was looking for a song to accompany this post, I ran across The Mosquito Song.  The song has a Eastern European sound, the lyrics are mysterious and creepy, and there is an occasional set of strings that comes in resembling the sound of mosquitoes on the wing.  Exactly complements how I feel about them.

If you want to know more about Walker

Annual International Eelpout Festival (okay, this needs explanation...eelpout is a fish and apparently the festival is an icefishing festival.  You gotta love that they have an icefishing bikini team!)
City of Walker
Leech Lake Area Chamber of Commerce
The Pilot Independent (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Walker

Next up: Whipholt, Minnesota