Living Rural, Working Everywhere

            Living and working way North, in central Vermont, or what an old girlfriend’s lovely mother once referred to ‘as the back of beyond,’ as in ‘over my dead body will you move to the back of beyond with that guy,’ means going anywhere can be difficult and working with the outside world can be complex.  Here are some notes on how complicated it all can be.

The best way to describe the difficulty of traveling to anywhere else might be the phrase a doctor used just before he re-broke my nose following a car crash.  The doctor said, before jamming his thumbs into my already hurt proboscis, “This might cause ‘some discomfort’.”  The air quotes are mine, because ‘some discomfort’ proved to be the most searing and ungodly pain I have and hopefully will ever experience.

            As I write this I am sitting at Vermont’s own Burlington International Airport.  I left my house for our lovely airport at four o’clock this morning, in a sleeting snowstorm.  I had to leave at this early hour because I had to make security at five o’clock in the morning.  Word was the weather in Burlington was even worse (it wasn’t) so I built in a cushion and drove like James Bond.  So I was nearly at the airport by the time the first alert came telling me my flight was delayed.

‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘loosen the white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, decelerate to a speed closer to the posted limit (thereby letting the tires touch the slushy interstate for the first time on the drive) and relax.’  Got to the airport in plenty of time. And I have now been at our lovely, safe, clean airport for four hours.  Who knows if I will ever leave.

Flying out of Vermont is usually not this hard, but it is a commitment to get to the airport.  For long-haul flights leaving the house is the start of a marathon of travel – long drives, multiple airports and racing from gate to gate, time changes and, finally, twelve or more hours later, a groggy disgorgement into a usually urban, crowded, hectic and disorienting spot.  We live in Nirvana – anyplace else feels like Hades.

We can, of course, drive to a significant number of places from central Vermont.  If we start, say, at the Harvest Market, a local gem of a food store and coffee shop, where we can load up on caffeine, expensive chocolate and the best cold chicken in the history of the world, we can drive to destinations as disparate as Boston and Bogota; Montreal and Montgomery; Ashland, Maine and Miami, Florida.  It’s a big continent with a vast bucket of alliterat-able destinations to choose from.

Typically the hard call is New York.  Fly, which means drive to Burlington, fly to JFK or LaGuardia or Newark and take a bus, train, cab or friend’s mercy to the City.  Could be easy and relaxing; could be grueling and a nightmare.  Could cause ‘some discomfort.’  Drive, which means load up with caffeine at the Harvest, barrel down into Connecticut and then either have a pretty reasonable and smooth cruise into Manhattan or become frozen in time in a line of cars stretching seemingly across the universe.

Working with the outside world is difficult too.  For many of us the laptop and smart-phone have revolutionized work.  We can meet (virtually), talk, write, read, prepare, present, analyze, study and research from essentially anywhere to anyplace with anyone.  Occasionally, however, we still must travel.  We need to be with the people we work with.  We need to experience how most of America works.

This means a few things.  First, we cannot ‘arrive’ at work as soon as the kids board the bus to school.  Importantly, we cannot ‘arrive’ in our PJs, unshowered, with a mug of hot joe in hand and a calm smile on our face. 

If we are out in the normal world we need to stoically get from home to work, pressed in with all the other people doing the same thing.  We must be presentable not only to the dog but to work colleagues.  We also must be social.  We cannot work, head down, no breaks, no conversation, listening to obscure music and stopping only to refill a coffee mug and working until the work is done.  We cannot then, as soon as possible, go outside with the dog or hop on a bike, or hike, or ski; go to the gym; go get the kids; do some other thing which is important but not work, such as go get another coffee with a friend, weed a garden, split some wood, collect eggs, stoke a fire.  Work means work. 

It means polite conversation, in person meetings, lunch with people, trying to unjam a copier, getting water out of a bubbler, reliving last night’s entertainment, staying in an office until a normal time to leave.  And it means travel.

In the departure lounge for four hours and counting, up since 3:30, and I am not at all sure the people I am supposed to meet – to work with – can still meet.  If that is the case I will leave the airport, drive back to the house, slip into my PJs, pour a cup of coffee, talk to the dog, put on some music and get back to work.

And here’s the take away: for those of you living in urban jungles, jammed together like lunch-meat between toast, fighting the day like salmon swimming up stream, there is one thought to leave you with.  The world is full of rural places, wide open spaces, lap top computers and small airports ….

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio