Vermont is a special place - there can be no doubt.
A place at once backward-viewing, but simultaneously foward-seeing. The catamount landscape has been protected from over-development right down to legislation banning highway billboards. Farms are valued as a matter of tradition, functionality and an all-too immiment future. People shape the land with their hands, and here, the land shapes people. There is an independent spirit, but a sense of neighborly community. There is a movement to secede from the US, but a union of Green Mountain traditions. The seasons are ruggedly extreme, but poetically diverse and beautiful. Perhaps the best summation made was by Vermont native and US President Calvin Coolidge: "Vermont is a state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield, and Equinox, without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride, here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our eternal hills..."
This is Vermont.
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