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: Pit River Gorge, California

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIt's been a long trip.  We've traveled through 154 places and we're at least halfway through the trip, maybe a little more.  It might be time to stop for a moment and enjoy the view.  The canyon of the Pit River might be a good place to put it all in perspective and give us some impetus for the rest of the journey.  Click on the map thumbnail at right to see where you might find the Pit River Gorge, and enjoy a little rest!

Book Quote

"Highway 89 wound among the volcanic dumpings from Lassen that blasted Hat Creek valley about three hundred times between 1914 and 1917.  Scrub covered the ash, cinders, and lava as the wasteland renewed itself; yet even still it looked terribly crippled.  Off the valley floor, California 299 climbed to ride the rim of the Pit River gorge.  I ate a sandwich at the edge of a deep rift that opened like jaws to expose rocks so far below they were several hundred million years older than the ones I sat on.  From the high edge I looked down on the glossy backs of swallows as they glided a thousand feet, closed their wings like folded fans, and plummeted into the abyss.  It was a wild, mad, silent, spectacular descent of green iridescence that left me woozy."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 1

Photo by ohoulihan on Panoramio. Click on photo to go to ohoulihan's Panoramio photos.

Pit River Gorge, California

The first time my wife and I decided to take a drive down the Pacific Coast of California on State Highway 1, she would shout out "Vue Panoramique" every time we came to a sign that read "Vista."  We'd pull over, and we would get out and look at the view, snap a couple of pictures, and move on.

After a while, I found myself getting a little annoyed.  Did we have to stop at every single vista?  I was thinking ahead toward where I wanted to go, and that we had to be there by a certain time, and that every pullout off the road was making us that much later than we ought to be.

At times, that little story has been the metaphor of my life.  I've been in such a rush to get to the endpoint that I don't stop to appreciate the many panoramas that life offers on the way.  On a journey, if one is on a schedule, one can often be given a break for not stopping to look at a beautiful vista, or pulling over to examine some curiosity.  I understand that.

But what is the endpoint of life?  What are we rushing headlong toward?  There's the perspective that we need.  The final point of our lives is death, plain and simple.  It is the point where we leave this world and, depending on your belief, we either cease to exist or we move on.  Either way, this life offers us many beautiful things, many gorgeous vistas, many odd curiosities, for us to see and appreciate.  I don't know how many times, however, in my headlong rush to get someplace else, I have passed them by.  My mom always tells me that I don't take time to "stop and smell the roses."  That's one of her favorite sayings, and sometimes it annoys me.  But she's right.  I don't take enough time to stop and appreciate the beauty in life.

To be certain, there are cheats and frauds. There are places that don't add up to the advertising.  A favorite movie scene of mine is in the film Rat Race, where the character played by Jon Lovitz is trying to get to Silver City, New Mexico to win a contest and his children and wife want to stop at the Barbie Museum.  It turns out that this nice Jewish family has been lured in by the signs into the Klaus Barbie Museum, celebrating the life of the Nazi known as The Butcher of Lyon.  Greek mythology gave us the Lotus Eaters, who entrap people by offering a flower that when ingested causes them apathy and robs them of months, years and even lifetimes.  We run into these traps from time to time with varying degrees of seriousness and we take away from them varying degrees of pain.

But as we grow older, most of us learn how to avoid the charlatans, and to appreciate the best that life has to offer, I believe.  Sure, there will be some that are always rushing headlong toward the end.  There will be others who always get sidetracked into places where they shouldn't be.  But all of us, at some point, will pull over and enjoy the view from time to time.  Like LHM, we'll sit on the edge of a beautiful vista, eat a sandwich, and watch the birds swoop down into the canyon or off the ocean bluffs in amazing acrobatic feats.  We can think awhile, put our trip into the perspective of our lives, and our lives in the perspective of everything.

The faster that we move in life, in my experience, the faster our lives seem to pass by.  I'll explore this theme in the next post, but here's a preview: when I'm doing more, I appreciate less.  I have gone through periods where I've done so much, I can't remember a couple of days later what event I've attended or what movie I've seen.  There's something not quite right and a little sad about that.  It's almost as if I haven't participated in those events at all.

I'm trying hard to slow down.  Given that the speed of my life is measured out through the passage of time and space, I don't need to try to make it faster.  I need to enjoy what the next second, the next minute brings me.  As I round the corners on my life's journey, or as the waypoints I see ahead get larger as they get closer, I want to try to make sure I learn about them if they are interesting, experience them as well as I can, and leave them when it is right.

The next time you are traveling, and you see a historical marker, or an oddity, or a curiosity, or even better, a vista, stop for a moment and enjoy it.  You'll get to your destination eventually; what's a few minutes to savor the mysteries the world has to offer us.  After all, as far as we know, we're only on our life's trip once and when it's over, it truly is over.  So take time to enjoy the "Vue Panoramique" that life offers.

Musical Interlude

My sister introduced me to this Colin Hay song a few years ago.  I'd only known of him because of the Australian band Men at Work, but I learned from her that he had a whole repertoire of solo, acoustic work.  This song, Beautiful World, captures in many ways the theme of this post.  I can picture LHM on the edge of the canyon with this song.  I wanted to get a video with a vista, but I ran across this one and I must say, I enjoy the doodles that accompany it.  See, I took to the time to enjoy a curiosity!  Enjoy life and this world and what they have to offer because this is as good as it gets.

If you want to know more about the Pit River

California Creeks: Pit River
Pit River Tribe Online
Pit River Watershed Alliance
Wikipedia: Pit River
Wikipedia: Pit River Tribe

Next up: Fall River Mills and McArthur, California