Crash

We got a wake up call the other day. I’d driven to Roxbury, Vermont to watch my son Callum and some other local boys play tennis at a camp. It was supposed to be a tournament but it was really just kids and chaos. It was a luxury to be there, a break from the madness. I drove to Roxbury with my niece, Christie, visiting from England. I grew up on the other side of Roxbury Mountain, so it was fun to sit in the sun and tell boring stories about childhood.

Christie and I sat in the hot sun on the bleachers. Cal and his buddy played doubles on a far court.  Beyond the court was Route 12A and beyond that a field and then the beginnings of the Dog River. As kids we fished the Dog, and spied on this camp.

Christie is my wife’s niece – her sister’s daughter – and I’ve known her since she was eight. And now she’s thirty. She’s a teacher and I bet a good one. I bet she grades the parents.

We sat in the bleachers and talked away, sat in the sun watching the game, chatted with the sparse crowd, wished we had water. It was my birthday, a nice easy day.

When the tennis ended we collected my boy, made sure no other locals needed rides and headed back toward Montpelier on Route 12, the scenic route. We stopped at a gas station so Cal could get a snack and a drink. We wandered a bit around Northfield, a small college town between the tiny village of Roxbury and Montpelier, the capital of Vermont. I filled the car with gas. Cal came out of the station with a chocolate milk protein drink and a twix bar. We were off.

The three of us talked about tennis and Christie filled us in on her plans to maybe move to the Lake District. The Lake District is in Cumbria, in England, where Beatrix Potter lived and wrote her children’s stories. The Lake District looks about the same as it did when Potter wrote about Peter Rabbit and all the others. It is a beautiful part of England. It is now a national park. It got so crowded a few years ago they closed the county to traffic. Crazy. It would be an interesting place to live. We talked about the Lakes, her plans, what her Mum and Dad thought, where she’d live.

It was a bluebird day, not too hot, bone dry. We planned a cookout that night with a few friends. Nothing could be better.

And then a young woman heading the opposite way on Vermont Route 12 drove right into us. She was turning left into a shopping mall. She was driving a Subaru Impreza. She was right there, not ten feet in front of us. I saw the surprise on her face when she saw us, like we’d just appeared out of thin air. I turned hard right but we were so close. I don’t remember anything after that until I was out of the car.

We hit essentially head on. I saw the girl climb out of her car. She was on her hands and knees. We’d pushed her car many feet away and spun it around. I turned back toward my car, dazed, and looked for my son and niece. I felt a thick, sticky liquid on my face and arms. It was dripping off my forehead.

I turned back to my car and called to Cal. ‘Are you okay!’ I called to Christie.

The viscous stuff was on my lips so I licked it. It was sweet. And chocolaty. I saw Cal. He was out of the car too. He was covered in chocolate milk.

‘Yes, I’m good,’ he said. Christie came up and put her arm around me in the best schoolmarm manner. ‘I’m fine, Uncle David,’ and she steered Callum and me to the curb. I talked with the girl from the other car, sobbing but unhurt.

Cal said softly ‘the car’s on fire.’ Christie yelled firmly ‘the car’s on fire!’ Cal and I walked to the car and reached in to grab some valuables. He grabbed his twix bar. I went to the back and pulled out a tennis racket and a baseball bat. I left my iPhone and passport in the car. Cal left his iPod. Rattled, I guess. Our schoolmarm took us away from the burning wreck.

In a minute it seemed fire and rescue were on scene and the fire was out. A fireman swept the shards off the road. The cars were towed. Traffic flowed again.

 Cal gave the girl from the other car his twix bar, saying he’d heard chocolate was good after a crash. Christie reminded him he’d learned that from Harry Potter movies. Chocolate is good for you after a dementer attack.

The police took statements. I iced my hand. The next day Jackie and I went and cleared our stuff out of the car.

Before that moment life seemed so fast and important. Drive here and there, fit everything in. 

Less than a second. Inches. Anything different at that moment and my boy might be gone, the call to Jackie’s sister might have been the hardest call of my life, a young girl in a Subaru could have suffered more than sorrow at turning at the wrong time.

The girl wasn’t doing anything wrong – not texting or anything – she was just not paying attention. I was not on my phone either but could easily have been. I use my phone in the car like it’s part of me. Not any longer. We were both going slow.

Less than a second. I’m still marveling at it. As one dear friend put it, the best birthday present I ever will get was all of us walking away from that car. The best thing I can take from it is to treat driving like it’s real, like it’s meaningful. A wake up call.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2013 David Rocchio

Spies, Freedom and Unity

             As Edward J. Snowden slinks like an old-school spy through China and Russia to who knows where, and as we all become inured to the fact the National Security Administration knows about each of our impulse Best Buy purchases and how often (or not) we call our mothers, I am reminded of Vermont’s State Motto, Freedom and Unity, and Independence Day.

Vermont’s motto was adopted in 1788. Ira Allen melded it into his design for the Great Seal of the Vermont Republic.  The State Legislature readopted it when Vermont joined the fragile Union in 1791.

It means, of course, finding that balance between individual liberty – the right to do whatever we darn well please, damn the consequences, and the need to act as a whole to protect things like, well, liberty, which sometimes requires us to give up some, uh, freedom. This post is about how we are testing that balance.

The Food Season VI: Some Meals Are Snapshots

Many nights of meals are snapshots rather than portraits.

Vermont, New Year’s Eve, a long time ago.  Maybe 1997.  Ignazio and Tina and their young daughter joined us and other good friends and family for a late night meal. Before coming to visit Ignazio went mushrooming in the woods near Siena and brought his foraged, dried mushrooms to America.  We decided to use them for our New Year’s Eve dinner.  We used the coffee grinder to turn them into a fine dust.  Ignazio made the sauce and the pasta; I cooked the sides and a roast beef stuffed with garlic, parsley, old bread, onion and cilantro.  We were all excited about a sauce made of foraged mushrooms from Italy.

While we cooked, our guests all hung around the kitchen.  Ignazio told about a neighbor near the old farmhouse near Siena, a woman who knew the woods around her home as well as she knew her two children.  The children, a young boy and girl were sweet and polite.  The boy funny, the girl serious.  The mother was a masterly cook and wonderful neighbor.  One day the mother went hunting for mushrooms near her home, the same place Ignazio told us he found the mushrooms for our New Year’s Sauce.  This was a thing the mother did often and had done for years, learning the skill from her mother before her. 

That night, when her children were home from school and had done their chores, when the husband was home from work, everyone finally sat down for dinner.  The mushrooms looked so much like the good ones, the sauce tasted the same, but the mushrooms were not the good ones.  They were poison.  The children died.  Both of the parents were violently ill and recovered, but not really. 

We all stopped talking.  Our celebration ground to dust just like the mushrooms.  After a minute Ignazio broke the silence.  ‘It is okay,’ he said.  ‘We test the mushrooms.’  He told us how he and Fabio and another friend, his best man at his wedding, Antonio, got together before he left Italy and made a meal just like our New Year’s dinner.  ‘The mushrooms are okay,’ he said.  The conversations ramped back up and we left the sad tale behind us.

And then we ate.  My little Sicilian brother-in-law was drunk.  The conversation rolled like surf onto a beach.  The food was good; the pasta sauce was shockingly good.  Deep into the meal, Ignazio started banging on his wine glass with his fork.  I thought he was going to break the glass.  We all stopped and looked his way. 

“I kidding!” he said in his highest, almost falsetto, most animated voice.  He was laughing.  “We not test the mushrooms!”  I could tell he thought this was the funniest thing he had ever said.  He put his head on the table and banged his fist next to his plate.  “We not test,” he cried and laughed and rolled his head back and forth.

Our dear friend Kristina – Swedish, proper, elegant – dropped her fork and gasped.  Her husband Dean, the judge, tossed his napkin down in disgust with a harrumph.  We all looked at each other.  Ignazio was the only one laughing.  But then, what the hell, the food was so good.  Someone made a joke.  We calmed down. We all laughed and ate. 

Late that night I woke up with crippling psychosomatic leg cramps.  I tried to walk to the bathroom.  The cramps dropped me to the floor.  At least I think the cramps were psychosomatic.  Kristina said she did not sleep a wink.  We all had similar stories.  I wonder to this day if Ignazio made up the whole thing.  We survived.

Italy, another meal, sometime in the 1990’s.  This time Tina, Ignazio, Marzia and Fabio and I traveled to a house owned by Marzia’s family in the mountains near Bologna.  She apologized, “It is very old, very rustic, not very nice.”  The drive to the mountains was fantastic.  We drove along dry roads under a bright sun and then, in an instant, would submerge into fog so thick we would need to stop the cars, get out and walk away from the highway, so sure were my friends a Lamborghini driven by a madman, or a truck, or a van full of nuns would drive into the back of one of the cars, causing a calamity.  And then the fog would lift and we’d drive on until we hit another patch of deep mist.

We arrived late in the day.  The old, rustic, ‘not very nice’ house was in fact a four hundred year old farmhouse.  It had no heat but did have three-foot thick stone walls, a fireplace as big as a garage, candelabras and deep, tall medieval windows.  We made a roaring fire; we lit candles throughout the house.  This was the place and the time Ignazio taught me to make the garlic bread in an open fire.  Ignazio and Fabio somehow roasted whole eggs in the coals.  To this day I don’t know how they did it so the eggs did not blow up.  As we breathed thick wood smoke we played cards, ate eggs and garlic bread, drank wine.

Vermont, November 11, 1994.  When Jackie turned thirty, shortly after we were married, we drove to a restaurant on the other side of our mountain.  We live in Stowe, Vermont, on the eastern side of Mt. Mansfield and to the south of the village of Jeffersonville.  Jeffersonville sits at the northern hem of our mountain, the State’s largest.  Another peak, Madonna, works with Mansfield to all but hem us in.  A narrow notch between the two mountains is the only direct way from Stowe to Jeff.  In the winter, once there is any snow on the ground, the road is closed.

The restaurant, ‘Le Cheval D’Or,’ was stuck in a small front on a quiet street in the compact village of Jeff.  Inside, the walls were dark.  In the hall there was an autographed photograph of an Apollo Astronaut, who had found and loved the restaurant.  This was a fancy, romantic and mysterious place.  So on a cold, snowy November night we drove the long way, literally around the mountain, to have dinner at Le Cheval D’Or.

I don’t remember everything we ate but I remember we talked non-stop.  I remember I ordered quail for my main course.  It was stuffed with wild rice and mushrooms.  It was delicious but very hard to eat.  I picked the meat off the tiny bones with my fingers.  I remember my desert – it was a maple crème brulee with a maple crust.  It had a thin maple cookie resting on top.  We drank good, dark coffee and sat by the fire. 

It had been quiet in the restaurant when we arrived and then got quite busy.  It was empty when we finished.  The meal cost an arm and a leg but nothing had ever been better.  When we left the restaurant, drunk, content, full, happy, young, married, in love, I turned toward the Notch Road, feeling empowered to navigate the slippery turns up and over our mountain despite the snow.  I careened up and down that closed road, sliding on the ice, repeatedly nearly losing control. We survived it.  Crazy.  It was thrilling and stupid.  We laughed at it.

Five hours in a restaurant and not noticing the time, not caring when the food might come; feeling when the meal ends it has ended to soon; watching the staff lean against the bar, staring at their hands, bored and wanting to go home; leaving the empty room still talking and laughing.

Ontario, Canada, 1993.  The best diner breakfast ever, somewhere between Niagara Falls, Ontario and Detroit.  We were on a secondary road facing Lake Erie.  The diner was in the narrowest building I’ve ever seen – a trailer wedged between a motel and a house.  The lot must have been a driveway at one point.  There was a counter with stools and behind the counter, along the far wall, was a row of hooks for coats and hats.  With barely enough room to walk between the coats and the people it was an awkward place. 

The only decoration was a framed map of wrecks on Lake Erie.  It hung on the back wall, by the coats.  The people were dour and cold.  No one said hello.  I ordered bacon and eggs with potatoes.  The eggs were fried perfectly with ample salt; the bacon was thick and meaty, well smoked and served half way from raw to crispy; the potatoes were fresh made and crisp, with onion and hot sauce and bits of sausage mixed in.  The coffee was excellent.  Five Canadian dollars passed hands and we were back on the road.  I could not find the place again if I spent a week looking.  I will remember the breakfast my entire life.  I would love to go back there.

            Each place, each time, each memory is nothing less than life.  I will try to write down some of the recipes.  Share life.  But just not right now.

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

March Into Summer: An Atypical Spring In Vermont

            March is usually a predictable month.  Here, in the North it is usually still winter; only a faint harbinger of Spring.  Usually it comes in with fields of cold snow, bright blue skies, lengthening days.  As this photo shows, March typically starts with piles of snow above the windows, like massive waves on a white sea.  But this photo is from last winter.  It is not this March.  
           Typically March brings big storms and worries about barn roofs collapsing and never ending winter; typically March leaves with slight warmth and a big snow pack to make April just miserable.  But not this year.