Gardens, Chickens and Summer Projects

The gardens are all in.  Planted the corn yesterday.  The corn seed was the last to go in.  The soil was dry and warm.  I pushed each kernel into the earth with my thumb, driving it deep into the dirt and it felt like summer.  It typically does not feel this way where we live in late May.  The peas are well up, as are the greens.  Tomatoes, eggplant, all the sensitive shoots, they are in the ground too.  Sunflowers are in.  The rhubarb is already cut and will be baked into sweet crisps or pies before the end of May, at least the stalks not just eaten raw.  It is early to be so into what feel like summer.  I'll take it.

Short Film "The Brothers"

This is easier.  No link.  I am learning!

Enjoy the film as we head to summer. You can read about the film on the vimeo site.  You can read the short story here.  I would love to hear what you think.

Thanks,

D




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

Stream of Thoughts of Spring and Coming Summer

Climbing the stair master at our local gym, which is one of the most perfect gyms in the world, way beyond what a small town deserves, I flipped between two movies – Apocalypse Now and Music Man.  The time flew but I had a wicked headache when I got off the machine.

            The stair master is the closest thing there is to walking up a mountain.  Dwight “Dewey” Evans, probably the best right fielder in Red Sox history (with all due respect to Tony Conigliaro – we’ll never know), was an early adapter of this climbing machine.  I remember the controversy in the early-eighties when Dewey made the then-dead Sox drag his Stair Master around the league during the season.  I suppose hotel gyms were not so good back in the day.  At our awesome gym, called the Swimming Hole, an allusion both to rural landscape where we reside as well as the kick-ass Olympic size pool at the place, there are but two of us as far as I can tell who love the machine and we go to the gym at around the same time most days.  Maybe by writing about it the management will take pity and buy another one – or a ski erg.  Another great machine.

            When did our Swimming Hole change from a new sports facility in a rural town to an established, cherished institution in this almost-suburb?  I never knew we needed it but now I cannot imagine the town without it.  I don’t use it anywhere near as much as I should but I am darn glad it is there.

            I am not a diarist.  If I were it’d be easy to check this fact:  April has always been a cold month where we live.  There is typically snow on the ground through the month and the ski area is typically open and aiming for May.  We don’t usually start mowing our lawns until May.  We do not uncover let alone plant a garden until May.

It is not normal to be able to hike our mountains in April without trashing both hiking boots and trails due to wet conditions.  It is not normal to put in peas in March.  It is not normal to be sun burnt in April heading to May.  This all is not normal.

            Having said all that, and as you may remember from an earlier post now the peas are up (as are the lettuces, the collards, the spinach and some others), the sun is out and is bright, the lawn looks, to quote my son, “like the PGA.”  Can’t decide whether this is a good thing or not.  Kind of like watching Apocalypse Now and Music Man at the same time.  Weather as dissonance.

            And I’ll end this stream by quoting Katie Ives, editor at Alpinist magazine, a world class journal of mountaineering, writing, photography, illustration, and life, built with love just on the other side of our great mountain, now reachable by simple serpentine road rather than needing to drive around the edge of the world. 

Katie posted a note on Facebook (and I’ve come to peace with Facebook – it’s a cacophony of the inane but also not unlike, as a good friend put it, a coffee shop where you see familiar faces), commenting on the beauty of late-spring snow: 

Since last night’s storm, a layer of new snow lies across the hilltops, as brief and soft as the apple blossoms in the spring woods a shimmer of green rises from the valleys, with the sounds of water, growing brighter, and louder.

There is a thinness, a delicacy to spring and summer if you live in a cold place.  Katie, a much better writer, captures it.  I try to capture it here and there (take a look at the film I just posted about).  At the end though you cannot capture it; you have to go out and live it.

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

Short Film THE BROTHERS

Here is a short film, The Brothers, to get you in the mood for late-spring/summer.  It's a small film about judgment.  The story is here.  Adapting it for film was interesting.  The story didn't translate exactly and then, shooting it for zero-budget in two days with three other 'crew' (and mostly just one other), an untrained cast of kids and a dog, the shoot didn't translate exactly to the script.

It was not only interesting to make the film.  It was fun.

It was fun to build because of the story, of course.  It was mostly fun because we shot it with local kids and a dog, which is not easy.  My son, Callum, stepped up.  An older boy in town, also a Callum, was great.  He is I believe going to pursue film acting as a career (not just because of this experience).  We met the older Callum when he was my son's 'reading buddy' when our Cal was in kindergarten.  The other 'older boys' are kids I coached in little league and they all took it very seriously, worked hard, had fun on the ski jump and really paid attention and worked.  Young Park Crist plays the younger brother.  He is great.  I never coached him in baseball but wish I did.  He paid attention and did awesome.  It was funny too because he was so serious during the shoot and then became this goofy little kid again.  Actors.  His parents were cool with the script, too, which was nice ("okay, Park, you can say the word while filming but normally you can't! ...").

The crew was terrific.  We shot the film in a few days and needed to drive all over Vermont because I had specific places in mind for each shot.  It was hard work.  Christian Clark, who shot the film, is now a dear friend.  He did a beautiful job.

The festival thing was terrific.  Capalbio was an unforgettable experience where we met such great friends.  Being there with my son, 'the actor,' who was so into the movies at the festival and loved the people we met, was just unbelievable.

Last thing -- I recorded the sound as we shot and feel it colors the piece well.  Maybe listen with headphones ....

There's more descriptor about the film on the Vimeo website but mostly just enjoy the film.  Share it all you'd like and let me know what you think.



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

Peas Are Up

            We came back from vacation to a warm, cloudy sky.  The lawn was long and buds crowded the trees.  The first thing I did was walk over to the garden and see the seedlings.  The peas were up, as were the lettuces.  The collards were only started.  No sign of turnips.  But the peas were up.

            I planted the peas – and the rest – in mid-March, which in Vermont is the same as saying I had Christmas in mid-November.  It’s just not done.  In a normal year, even a good year, I’d be turning the garden and planting the hearty seeds no earlier than now.  Well, it’s not a normal year.

            I weeded, pulling tree shoots and dandelions out of the beds.  I rolled the tractor out of the barn and filled it with gas and mowed.  Ennis and I went for a run, shorts and t-shirts.

            The temperature has dropped – fell like paint off a ladder – and it is now cold and wet.  A steady rain for a day and more now.  The lawn velvet green, beautiful, as close as our yard gets to golf course.  Our lawn, mowed out of primordial hay field and never treated with anything more than dog doo and the occasional back yard pee.

            I spent a rainy Sunday starting seeds inside.  Basil, eggplant, tomatoes (lots of tomatoes), hot peppers.  I negotiated a space in the house for my potted seeds.  I researched the price of screened topsoil.  I sourced some composted manure.

            Although spring came early this year – way early – I still can’t put anything else out because we could – probably will – still have a frost.  I’ll tend the seedlings inside, turn the beds, weed what’s planted and wait for memorial day, when everything else will likely go in.

            We’ll have sugar snap peas in May, though.  I’ll plant a second crop and we’ll have peas through most of the summer.  It is not normal but I could get used to it.

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.

Kids Do Well

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Spring is Springing

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Winter Weather and Wellness in Vermont

Vermont winter storms come from a handful of happenstance.  The weakest and more localized storms are “mountain-induced events.”  This is weather generated by slope and elevation.  Much of the winter we can earn a bounty through lake-effect snow.  Fronts are what brings most of our meaningful weather.  They are typically driven by two massive and antipathetic wind patterns, prevailing westerlies and polar easterlies.  The largest storms are ‘Nor’easters.’  Most winters (but not all winters) at least an inch of snow falls on at least 20 days and as many as 40 days and the ground is covered by snow from November through at least Easter.  

It's almost too complicated for words.  The winter weather in Vermont is deeply affected by elevation, terrain, slope, which direction a slope faces, wind, localized wind, Lake Champlain, the Atlantic Ocean, ice on the Great Lakes (and Lake Champlain), wind currents in the Pacific (and the Atlantic) to name just a handful of an infinite number of factors.  Needless to say then no two winters are alike.  

As we all know it is hard weather to predict.  Meteorologists describe this difficulty as “highly changeable,” which is a terrific euphemism.

            Take a recent Saturday, for example.  The forecast was for a day of rain and freezing rain.  It was sunny, calm and warm – at least at our house.  It was misty on Mount Mansfield in the morning and rained hard for about twenty minutes.  We never would have know it down in the valley.  I skinned up the mountain late that day under a calm and bright blue sky.  Near the top I experienced high winds (surprise surprise) and thunder.  Thunder in March. 

            Thunder in March is not normal.  Wind is always normal.  Beyond localized conditions, Vermont in winter is affected by the “prevailing westerlies,” which are born in the tropics and driven north.  These winds move the way they do because of the rotation of the earth.  North of us are the “polar easterlies,” which are blocks of extremely cold air driven away from the poles to the west.  The polar easterlies and prevailing westerlies slam into each other around here.  In the winter the boundary is typically southern New England.  In the summer the boundary moves north.

This collision zone is called the “polar front”; warmer moist air to the south, dry cold air to the north.  The collision creates winter storms, typically snow but not always, typically the snow falls here but not always, typically it means Vermont has snow cover from fall through spring (but not always).  The jet stream, racing high above us, determines where this boundary sits day-to-day, year-to-year.  It’s too much to even think about understanding how many variables determine where the jet stream sits.

Forecasters up here must be brave because forecasting is a fool’s errand in Northern New England.  It can make people laugh out loud.  Weather can be decidedly different from one town to another, at one elevation or another, on a north-facing slope compared to an easterly slope.

            The prevailing westerlies can bring us lake-effect snow – moist air brought from open water of the Great Lakes – and the collision between the polar easterlies and westerlies can bring tremendous blizzards.  Occasionally (more and more?) the prevailing westerlies collide so quickly with the polar easterlies that the warm air climbs on top of the cold air creating an inversion.  If the collision causes a storm it can be rain above and turn to ice as it falls through the colder air below.  Ice Storm.  We can also be given the gift of a strong Yankee Clipper, which moves from the colds of the Canadian prairies and races east, typically bringing light snow and then massive cold and sometimes a blizzard.

            Another pattern usually striking late in a winter can hit Vermont hard.  Although the westerlies and the polar easterlies mean we are not a maritime climate, the cold water current along the Atlantic Coast can generate massive storms.  The prevailing westerlies draw warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico up the coast.  When the weather hits the cold North Atlantic the pressure becomes cyclonic.  When temperature differences and the size and depth of the collision are strong these colliding patterns generate massive storms – very like hurricanes – driving tremendous amounts of snow (or rain) into Vermont, counter-clockwise from the coast. 

And here’s what we love.  When it’s cold and dry in February and March, a big Nor’easter will bring three feet of snow in a day.  The storms can also reform and cycle through more than once.  A Nor’easter during a cold March can dump as much snow in a day as all of the snow from all of the days of the rest of the winter.  For many it is why we are here.

            We can barely predict the weather.  We have no control over it.  I barely understand it and I am sure there is something metaphoric in writing about it (but like Chance the Gardener I won’t claim to know what it is). 

The only thing certain about the winter weather in our little town is this: nothing we do impacts our collective wellbeing more.  It makes us.  And, to borrow from another film, anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something.  In much of the country it is full on spring.  Here, it is too soon for spring.  We crave more winter.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Before Winter's Done

Big storm two Sunday's ago; hopefully not the last.

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

Sometimes Architecture Works: Boston, Hancock Tower, Clouds, Glass

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

Local Performing Arts Center Potential Home Run

            In our town we have a new performing arts center.  It is a beautiful building.  The acoustics are world class. With room for more than four hundred people, the theater is large enough for most any program.  The seats are comfortable and there is not a bad spot in the house.  The lobby is large, crying out to host parties before and after a show.  The staff and volunteers are terrific.  But it is never full and often audiences are very small.  Why is it not thriving?

Keep School Buses Local (And Other Reasons To Know The People Around You)

           I live in a small town.  And in our town a local story has struck a nerve.  The story is whether it is worth saving money by awarding our school bus contract to a national company or whether it is better to spend more, maybe $50,000 or so, so our school buses are run locally.  Although it’s a local story it is a universal question, but I’ve got to back into it.

We have a new Thai place in town.  It is in the same spot as the old Thai place and has the same staff and décor as the old Thai place.  It’s even run by the same wonderful woman, who works hard.  I don’t know why they have changed their name and said they are new – it might be strategic and it might be personal – but as part of the grand opening they threw an open house.  Free food and a big party.  

The kids and I joined a swarm of neighbors and friends.  We walked in to a warm welcome and were hustled to a long family-style table.  We saw many familiar faces around the place as we elbowed our way to the platters of pad Thai and sushi, aromatic chicken and spicy dumplings.  We looked around at tables crowded with parents and kids, couples out on a free date, lone diners elbow to elbow with big groups, all enjoying the buffet party.  A guitarist belted tunes and hammered away on his axe, like a John Hiatt shouting over the restaurant din.  Ski bums, worker bees, and hangers on at a free feast.  Like a church supper, we all talked and laughed.  We commented on the savory rice, welcoming the new-old Thai place – Hot Spice – to it’s new, well same, home on the Mountain Road.

            And right on the heels of the Thai Place Open House came the rousing annual Christmas party at our local paper, the Stowe Reporter.  Early in the cycle of holiday revels, the Stowe Reporter Party opens the season and is a real throw down.  The party spills from the reception area of the paper’s headquarters – an old clapboard house in town – photo in last post – into the small rabbit warren of offices and up the windy, creaky wooden staircase.  Some years it’s a bender (I didn’t stay long enough this year to say).  The publisher’s palatial penthouse was jammed, elbow-to-elbow, with an entire town, including many faces from the Thai feast. 

Writers, ad guys, managers, business owners, friends, enemies, colleagues, their kids, town officials and at least one dog libated to ring in the season at the town’s weekly broadsheet.  Finding someone to talk with was about as easy as putting off chores.

It’s all a part of being in a small town.  We are living out of each other’s pockets.  We say ‘good morning’ when we drop the kids off at school, share a kind word when we see each other getting coffee ten minutes later at the gas station, nod hello at the grocery store, smile kindly when driving politely through the stop sign in town.  Our accountant’s daughter is our baby sitter. Everything we do is with the people we live around.  It is community and the commonality of each event is we are all at them together.  Well, not all, that would be weird, but the overlap is interesting.  We socialize with each other and see each other regularly.  This is not typical, but it is small-town normal.  There are upsides and downsides to living in close quarters.

            We could easily live where we are anonymous.  Where each event we attend is with a different group of people; where we don’t know the diners around us at a restaurant or the faces at the elementary school in the morning or the coffee shop later in the day.  Urban anonymity is a short drive in any direction.  Sixty million people live within a five-hour drive of our town. 

But we live here, saying hello to the same six people five times on a given day.  More than any reason to be here – where it is cold and dark half the year, the mosquitoes have names and you cannot get take-out – is community.  And this is why the idea of pulling the school bus contract has struck a nerve.  

            Stories about school bus contracts do not make the paper in most places in America.  The big yellow buses move through towns and cities countrywide.  For the most part the drivers are as unknown to the parents as, well, the other parents.  I bet though people crave stories like the bus contract story.  People crave connectivity even if they’d like it with a healthy dose of anonymity (and the availability of take-out).

            With seven billion people on the planet isn’t it nice to know a few of the people around you?  I think it is.

A month ago our kids’ school bus driver came up to us at, yes, the Thai place in Waterbury, a town down the road.  We learned from her our street was going to close and we chatted for a while.  She knew us.  She came up to us.  A friend told me about how her third grader – doing what he was supposed to do – got off the bus at the end of a quiet dirt road.  It would be dark soon.  The driver stopped the bus and called the parent, double-checking the drop-off was right.  Has your child lost a backpack?  It’ll be at the bus barn.  Substitute driver?  Oh that’s Mr. McHugh, a cop and neighbor in town.  At many away sports events the only parents in the room are the bus drivers.

            It is just not worth saving a few dollars by shipping the bus contract out of town.  Being analytical and efficient has its place, but is not everything and can in fact be quite corrosive.  The cold calculus of economics is devastating communities worldwide.  Look at some basic barometers – school quality, neighborhood safety, teen drug use – and we are failing.  Call it commonsense or call it a ‘happiness index.’  What is at stake when we give up some basic connectivity is nothing less than our humanity.

Sounds a stretch but think about it:  regardless of where we live community is all about connectivity.  The buses are true connectors – they take the kids from one life – home – to another, bigger, more anonymous life – driving the kids to school, sport events, the Boston Science Museum, Maine, even New York City.  That connector could be a less expensive one, separate from community.  Or, if we’re up for it, it could be us.  

Why is it important to have connectors?  It makes the world safer; people are more polite, makes it harder to rationalize unethical behavior if you know your victims (right, bankers?); less worry and more help getting through the day; more smiles during the day; peace of mind; less likely to drive like a nut.  The more connectors we have in life - the more we know about what is going on around us - the better is, well, life. 

Here's the question, and in the case of the school bus it is a simple one:  How much is it worth to know who is driving your kids to school?  The answer is a lot.

The harder versions of this question are how much is it worth to know who is growing your food, making your shoes, sewing your clothes, policing your streets, running your bank, running the businesses we rely on?  Calculus might be more complicated but the answer is the same:  Local is better.  

And I don’t think it only works rural.  It might not be the most efficient way to run the world, but it would be the most human way.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Local Paper Throws Holiday Fest

The Stowe Reporter is our local weekly.  It's annual Christmas/Holiday Party gathers the whole town.  See the windows all steamed up?  Great way to start the holiday season.










David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

The Road We Live On

            For where we live, in northern Vermont, our road is a busy street.  It is straight and it is paved - two rare features for our neck of the woods - and therefore it is subject to being treated not as a quiet country byway but as a good old American highway.  This road, Stagecoach Road, was recently closed for two weeks.  This all stems from Irene.  As hurricanes go Irene was not too windy or too violent.  Irene though carried massive amounts of rain. I could stand outside in the downpour and smell the sea air, which is notable only because we live hundreds of miles from the sea.  Irene was a beautiful storm but a dangerous one. No one was hurt, and we escaped with no damage, but the tail end of our road took the brunt of the storm. A neighbor's basement collapsed. The edge of the street near where it meets the main road to town eroded away. 

            For a month or more after the storm the town end of Stagecoach was cut to one lane of traffic.  This change was welcome to anyone living on the road because it slowed traffic for a short stretch.  This slowed the racers.

            We didn’t hear of the plan to close the road.  This doesn’t mean the plan wasn’t discussed publicly; it just means the bad shape of the road simply didn’t register on the scale of things to worry about.  My son did ask one day whether when they fixed the road it would be blocked off; we talked about it on a drive to school one morning.  We concluded, ‘no, the road would be left open.’  We didn’t talk about it again.  And we were wrong.

In fact we only heard the road was going to be cut from the rest of town when we ran into the kids’ school bus driver at the Thai Restaurant in Waterbury, a town near the interstate.  Yikes.  No school bus.  Need to drive north, to the neighboring town in the other direction, Morristown, and then reverse direction, adding time to the day.  Adjustments were called for. We put the planning gears in motion, set the alarm a bit earlier and prepared to learn a new commute to the school, a new plan to get the shopping done, a new pattern to coming home for lunch.

In fact though getting to town was not the big news of the detour.  The big news was the quiet.  Our little straightaway of road is typically not treated like the settled country lane it is.  Our country road is treated like a speedway.  Somehow saving up to one and one half minutes on a drive to Mo’ville justifies pushing the old Buick up to eighty while flying by the old Misty Meadow Herb Farm.  And it is to some even worth passing at breakneck speed, not for a second thinking a family might be pulling out of a driveway on this narrow road.

It's not like we rail against the road.  We are adjusted to it.  We sit on the porch in the summer, drinking our morning coffee, watching the pick up trucks drive by.  Occasionally we swear at a crazy driver thinking this is a Batman Movie but mostly we take it in stride.  But then they blocked the road and everything became quiet.

And the quiet was welcome. Yes, we had peace for two terrific weeks.  We could hear the breeze.  No car noises marred the kids’ band practice.  The hens could graze along the edge of the road.  We could collect the mail without safety goggles, helmet and yellow vests.

The peace wasn’t perfect.  Despite three signs saying, I’d say pretty clearly, “Road Closed,” there were some who drove past the signs, past the barriers and up to the construction site thinking the signs meant road closed “but not for me.”  Picture it: car drives by confidently toward the end of the road, pauses, looking for a cut in the work to sneak through, realizes there is no cut through and then skulks back north with tailpipe between legs.

Road closed. Cut off.  No one calling by.  Deeply quiet.  Forced to change long-settled patterns of behavior.  One big rainstorm and we’re all in turmoil.

Okay, it was little things like we shopped at the big grocery store in Morrisville rather than our own little one in town. It wasn’t big things, like Berlin, August 1961; waking up one morning faced with the Berlin Wall.  But it was a window into how things can change. 

Geography and the vagaries of civil engineers have as much to do with community as what we want to define ourselves. One minute we are a short, straight mile from the edge of town and the next minute we are a looping ride in the wrong direction, by a small golf course and then back into town with the traffic.  Inconvenience, change, busting up of routine; it is always difficult.

            Just before the roadwork was done I drove my little girl down to see the construction site.  The steamrollers were blocking the road so I parked and we walked onto the shiny black macadam, looking down to the new retaining walls and massive piles of moved earth and the huge machines parked, waiting for the new day.  Just across the barriers was the road to town, so close we could taste it.  In a day we’d have our road back, new and improved.  How exciting! 

            My little girl didn’t care.  When I turned to get her reaction she was well into her walk home; already past the vet’s house; not at all interested in the newness and the construction site and the reopening of our artery.  She was striding down the deserted asphalt strip in the gloam of a late fall dusk.  There was no traffic.  It was quiet.  She had adjusted to Stagecoach as cul-de-sac and all was well with her world.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

How To Survive Stick Season

            Stick season is one good windstorm away.  When it comes, when the leaves are all down and the grass finally dead, the forests closed to anyone not wearing a bright orange hat, the firewood either stacked or it’s too late, the clocks fallen back into that incredible gloam, it is time to hunker down.

Baseball and Photography

It seems no one where I live gives a rat's ass about the baseball playoffs.  This fall is terrific baseball, though, and for those of us who grew up with the old division in baseball the idea of a Tigers - Brewers world series is pretty cool.  Texas and St. Louis are good too.

Another great thing about following baseball is reading about the games in the papers and the best thing about the coverage is always the photography.  This shot by David Phillip of the AP is almost perfect.  Everyone is leaning; the image is practically moving; the result -- safe or out -- is in the balance; the crowd forms a perfect backdrop, you can almost make out the beers in the fans' hands tilting with the play, about to be spilled when the umpire makes his call.  Pretty cool shot.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

This photo of my sister Tina, niece Giulia, son Callum and me at Capalbio was so beautifully captured by new friend and photographer Fabio Mazzarella.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Capalbio Cinema International Short Film Festival

The short film festival in Capalbio feels much more like an extraordinary retreat for filmmakers than it does a festival.  I have met filmmakers from everywhere.  A few specific places:  Cairo, Holland, Vladivostock, Portugal, Norway, Taiwan, Palestine, Italy.  Oh, yeah.  Italy.

Not only am I making new friends who share a passion in filmmaking but I am making these friends just north of Rome, where Tuscany begins, in Maremma.  Capalbio itself is an ancient fortified hill town facing the sea.  The festival is in a village between the citadel and the sea.

The cinema is a beautiful old block of a building.  The plush seats face a huge screen and the black ceiling is so high above us I feel I am watching films under the stars.  We move from the cinema to a restaurant.  We can choose from pasta or risotto.  We are given wine.  We talk about film, cameras, actors and extras, permits, shooting without permits, editing, music, sound.  We talk about the films we've seen -- both the films each has made and the others we viewed but did not make.  The films are all good, and different, and interesting.  Some are odd and some are sweet.  Some I like and some are not my cup of tea.  They are all worth seeing.  Seeing.  It is why we are here.

And then we go to the sea.  The Mediterranian is straight ahead.  The interns drive us in the fresh, black Lancia Deltas to the beach.  They drive very fast.  We hold on.  It is windy.  The sand stings our legs.  It is cold but the sea is warm.  We swim, and dive, and talk about film.  "This is like in a movie!"  Of course.

The interns drive us everywhere.  To an artist's lair for lunch.  To the hotel.  To the cinema.  To the beach.  From the airport, from the stazione, from real life.  They are young and interesting.  Interested.

Interested.  How can you not be interested when there is so much?  Films about revolution in the Middle East; photography from the farthest reaches of Russia; film noir, comedy, farce, suspense, animation; conversation at lunch with a Sicilian; a lecture on tweeting revolution.

Whether a retreat or a festival or both, Capalbio has been a touchstone.  It is inviting, chaotic, franetic.  It is rewarding and energizing.  I will take it with me and am glad to have been invited to be here.






David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

End of A Season.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Signs of Fall -- Half Way There

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

History In The Making

           I write a column for my weekly newspaper, the Stowe Reporter.  I wrote for a while for a big Vermont daily and was asked to write for another one.  I didn't, though because there is something very close to life about a local weekly paper.  Local papers are about layers of lives lived in one place.  I had this thought in mind as I read last week's Reporter.

After Irene: A Hometown Tour

            The Green Cup, a coffee shop nestled next to the covered bridge in Waitsfield, Vermont, is gone.  Wiped out by Irene.  It was gutted by the raging flood.  Next to it, the old white clapboard photo studio, lifted off it’s 19^th century foundation, sits slammed into the coffee house.  The two buildings are jammed together like a car wreck.  Just down the street also gone is a wonderful restaurant called Mint and a dozen or more other small businesses next to the Mad River.

I drove through Waitsfield, Fayston and Warren.  Stopping to help mop up a bit, driving all the way to Granville – usually a fifteen minute drive south of my home town of Warren but this day taking an hour over torn-up, patched up and mangled dirt roads (Route 100 through Granville Gulf is washed out).  Talking to people along the way, I found communities that had been slapped hard but not knocked down.

Travel to France: Provence, Grasse, Cabris and the Perfect B&B

Here is a piece about a terrific Inn in the south of France.  But first, a disclaimer:  I am not a travel writer.  Not only am I not a travel writer, I don’t read travel magazines or guides or books or websites dedicated to explaining where people should go and what they should see.  This is because I like to discover, meaning I would prefer to find a place worth seeing by turning down a small road without even a utility line strung alongside, while quite hungry, and it being late, and we not knowing where we are headed, but having an instinct we can find something interesting along the way.  It doesn't always work, of course.  We have suffered some pretty awful nights.  We have also come upon some true and unimaginably extraordinary experiences (and meals and views and places to sleep or hike or swim or rest).  And I don’t think the experience is the same if you haven’t found a place yourself.  And if you go to the places touted in the tour books guess what you find?  People who read tour books.  And I typically take the view, well, that these experiences are interesting in part because they are private and known only to self and those with whom we choose to share such experiences.  So I’ve not written about them.  But I am not sure about my decision to keep exploration so private.

dirt road ride with Cal

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Memorial Day, Loss and Rememberance

In the United States 30 May is Memorial Day.  It is a day for reflection, personal and public.  In the public corner, our little town marks the day well and quietly.  Each year the town hosts a small parade.  It is really just the high school marching band and veterans of wars walking at march pace from the center of the village to the cemetery on the edge of town.  The parade is managed with dignity and just enough fun.  The marching band is always prepared and poised.  The old soldiers, represented by the American Legion, take the responsibility for the day seriously.  The cemetery too is well maintained and ready for its close up.

This past Memorial Day my daughter and I barreled into town from the north just barely in time for the parade, and got firmly stuck in a line of cars just past the grocery store, the police having blocked Maple Street early, giving the marching band plenty of room to maneuver.  Antonia and I parked the car in the dirt along the edge of the pavement and raced toward Cemetery Road, she carrying the camera, me hanging on to my morning coffee.  We first saw the parade in the distance, a small swarm of figures coming our way, up the slight hill from the center of town toward Cemetery Road, band music echoing up the hill toward the blocked traffic.  Antonia began firing pictures.  She took so many they play back like an old-fashioned movie, each frame not capturing quite enough of the action but more than enough to tell the story.

A Short Film for Summer: The Brothers

Here is a link to my short film, The Brothers, which we shot last summer.  It is the film of the story, The Brothers, posted here.  The story and the film are quite different.  Some of the story just could not be told in the same way.  Some of the story could have been shown in the same way but we didn't have any money.

The actors are all local kids in our small town.  Most are from my little league team of last summer.  Great kids and actors.  Oh.  And one is my son!

The dog is our dog, Dexter.  He did a terrific job.

We shot the film on our porch, on a ski jump in Hanover, NH and on the Long Trail in Northern Vermont.  We did all the shooting in two days with a crew of no more than four and at times just two.  All the sounds -- the entire soundtrack -- were recorded live 'on set.'

There are more stories to tell about the story and the making of the film.  I will get to them but not today.

Enjoy.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

A 9/11 Flag and Losing Osama

     I was in my office the morning of 9/11. My secretary came in and said ‘a plane has flown into the World Trade Center.’ I kept working, not wanting to rubberneck. I did not walk down the hall to see what was going on until she came back, in tears, and said ‘a second plane has hit the other tower.’ So that’s how a living, decade-long nightmare starts.

     Two days later, like almost everyone else, we went out and bought a small American flag. We tied it to a fence post along the front of our field. Nearly everyone flew a flag, even those of us who are not the flag waving type. I decided then the flag would fly until the nightmare ended.
     It was a shockingly sad time but we were united in grief and horror. Not just in the US, either. I remember the headline on September 12, 2001 from Le Monde in France: “Nous sommes tous Américains,” or “We are all Americans.” Hundreds of thousands marched in support of the US. In Berlin. That unity obviously faded. Maybe now it is coming back.
     We heard the news bin Laden was dead this past Monday morning. We were getting the kids out the door for school. We were listening to a Canadian radio station so the story was first but not blaring as the CBC began its newscast. Given that understated Canadian way, it took a minute to sink in what the announcer was talking about. Jackie looked at me, and I thought for a second. Commandos, Pakistan, Obama, Osama.

My 9/11 Flag

More later, but this flag went out on 9/12.  I hadn't thought about it much until yesterday.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Winter Never Ending

We live where it is still winter.  Not mild wisps of the end of season winter, but full on two feet of snowpack and blowing winds winter.  We were all recently fooled by a predicted April Fool’s storm.  We were supposed to get two feet of heavy, wet snow.  We didn't.  We got three more inches of light snow.  It did not matter.  The extra layers would have been for bragging right only.  It is still like mid-winter here and absent an Old-Testament style rain we will be avoiding yard work, running baseball practices inside and enjoying skiing the sides of our mountains for a month to come.

Not only is there plenty of snow but people are out and enjoying it.  Yes, there is some grousing but, come on, six months of hard winter is not okay.  Aside from the grousing though there is skiing and boarding to be had and on this past Sunday our local hill was like a community party spread out over 500 acres.  Kids zipped through every nook and cranny.  The ample, fat line at the chair lift was like being in line to buy groceries in our small town – can’t stand there without saying hello to a dozen people.  And the bluebird day made the ride up the lift an “E-ticket,” to borrow from Walt Disney-land, in its own right.  Mountain in high relief; the Notch standing out like an Albert Bierstad painting of Yosemite; the White Mountains to the East hovering like clouds on the horizon; the lift line in front of us a highway for speed, for deep tele-turns, for snowboarders arching their trays like they are in a ballet.  The upper sections on the front of the mountain were snow-filled and bone dry.  This is April in snow country and we might as well enjoy it.

It is hard to write about skiing.  There is a feeling associated with moving downhill, at speed, on skis or I will guess a snowboard, unlike almost any other endeavor.  Surfers probably feel the joy of unfettered motion every now and then.  Maybe ski-diving.  Michael Jordan felt it playing basketball, I’d guess.  There are not though too many sports where mortals can fly.  Skiing is as close as I’ll ever come to Michael Jordan.  That sense of peace is hard to come by in life.  Here?  It is a five-minute walk from any particular point on the compass.

            I have an old pair of skis.  They are Atomic GS, racing stock.  They are 210 cm long.  The bindings crank down until the boot is secured to the ski as if welded.  I use to take them out maybe once a year.  I would take them down a famous trail here -- the Nosedive -- which starts with three hard, steep turns through a shadowy gap on the side of our mountain.  I'd take them out on an early morning late in the winter.  I would point the skis into the turns at the top of the trail.  They’d set like rails.  I leaned them over and was anchored to the ground.  As I leaned the skis accelerated.  I rolled through my turns, taking the shock of the hill in my quads.  Eventually I just straightened out and flew.  The wind roared as I slid downhill.  And then I stopped.  And then would think ‘that was stupid.’  I’m old enough not to break them out any more.  Well, maybe one more time.

            The snow this year just built and built.  It was incremental.  And then it rained.  And then two feet of snow fell in what seemed like an hour.  Where we live it is touristic but also rural.  There is not a lot to do some days.  This year, though, there was lots of snow.  It seemed many days the entire town was on our hill.   There is lots to what makes up a community.  Here, the mountain is a big part of who we are.  This year it seems we used it more, it was kind to us and six months of winter does not feel so bad.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

Time, Life, Watching Sleep.

When days are busy and interesting there is no time to write.  When quiet and settled there is time but nothing really to write about.

Today?  Stacked wood, read Wolf Hall, am now listening to opera on CBC 2.  My son is sleeping on the couch, a late-winter and late-day sun pouring onto him through the back window.  The dog rests by the door, occasionally moans, looks at me with big round eyes.  I eat too many roasted, salted nuts.  I drink a ton of water.

Next I will take the dog out, walking on the crusted top of a foot or more of old, beaten snow; make a shopping list for a dinner to be cooked (fettuccine with hot sausage, kale and cheese; slices of thick steak pan seared in oil and garlic and rosemary and then served on a bed of baby arugula and with a sauce of red wine vinegar and salt; a salad of young greens, olives, artichoke, pecorino cheese); shop; cook; drink; eat.

The past few months are too full to think about let alone write about.  At least not today.  Today I am focusing on as little as possible as well as possible.  I am busy just watching my son sleep.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

A Late Winter Tale, About Backcountry Skiing, Deep Snow, Dogs and Rescue

Brian suggested we go for a backcountry ski; the second time we would be visiting this spot.  The last time we went to the Sterling forest was with a bigger group and at least one person was not up to exploring high on the ridge.  The area is mostly hardwood forest and the snow pack this year is thigh deep or more.  If you step off your skis you disappear.  This makes a back country trip challenging but also easier, if you have the right gear and know what you are doing.

There is no brush to slog through, no marshes or swamps to worry about, no problem being off a trail.  No bugs.  A compass and a map and we could go anywhere.  Brian called and suggested we go further north on this trip, higher on the slope, to an area call Bull Moose Ridge.  We would skin up, and it was steep in places, but once on the ridge we would have an easy time and then could ski back down through steep stands of old beech and maple trees.

The last time we went we did not bring our dogs -- Brian has two and I have one, Dexter, a young Aussie.  We were out for hours and I thought it would be too difficult for the dogs.  And I felt guilty when the trip was done; the dog would have been fine.  So this time we agreed we'd take the dogs.

Yikes

Snowbound.








David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2011 David Rocchio

It's Not Like This Is All I Do.

But some days are better than others.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio