Our Little Town

Big Visit

Jacksonville, Vermont is a small town (village?) in rural southern Vermont. Though route 112 that comes into town from the south is a modest 2 lane road, it takes a left turn here and heads 6 or 8 miles north toward Wilmington, Dover and Mount Snow, the closest serious ski mountain for people coming from Boston, NYC, Connecticut. We’re used to seeing increased traffic on weekends. Yet it’s rare to see more than 5 or 6 cars come through at the same time, creating our version of a traffic jam.

Last year a relative newcomer to this area bought a large building that once was a car dealership, then a car repair shop, then vacant for several years. He has fashioned a sort of pizza deli, grocery store in the old car showroom. This year he added an outside deck and brewery.

This seemed to many of us an ambitious undertaking for our village. Over the years people have opened small stores in hopes of attracting people on their way through. They have all be short-lived. Though a fair amount of traffic does come through, people rarely stop. They’re eager to get to their destination.

Yesterday I drove by and was dumbfounded to see

more than 100 motorcycles in the parking lot of the new store.

A new experience for tiny Jacksonville.

Maybe what astonishes me as much as having the town become a magnet for what we would once have called Hells Angels, is the efficiency of the communication system those motorcyclists obviously use to let each other know where the new action is.

Jacksonville (founded 1770) and I (82) are old. We assume that things that are pretty much as they have been for this long, will likely stay that way.

Having the fast paced world find our quiet town could change that assumption pretty fast.

I was headed for a sound studio in Wilmington where I am recording my memoir, I Reserve The Right to be Terrified as an audio book. (More on that later.) Gary, the sound engineer stopped my reading at one point because of background noise.

Gary wondered, “What the hell was that?” I showed him the photo I just showed you. Seems those motorcyclists, having finished their powwow at the brewery, were headed up the road past where we were recording.

Some days it’s as if we’re in a time warp in our idyllic little Jacksonville.