Cleome's Wedding
This story was the winner of the Sustainable Montpelier "What Comes Next?" writing contest of 2020. I collaborated with Janice Walrafen on this story.
August 14, 2047
I’ve neglected to write a journal entry for a whole five days! Usually I write before bed, but in the evenings I’ve either been too absorbed in fascinating conversation or so physically exhausted that I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to put pen to paper. Tomorrow I’ll be taking the train back to Boston. So much happened in these last five days in Vermont that I couldn’t possibly record it all. It feels like I’ve spent the week in a far away land, in a different era, either 100 years in the past or 50 years in the future—I can’t tell which! To think that I could have such culture shock in a place just 200 miles away!
I took the bullet train from Boston to Montpelier for my cousin Cleome’s wedding. It took about an hour, and once I reached the Vermont border it was all a blur of green. My brother Darren met me at the train station and helped me take the cable car to the center of town. It wasn’t that difficult to figure out, but you know, he still treats me like his baby sister even though I’m 20 now. Apparently, no cars are allowed in the town center, so people travel through by electric cable car, bike, or on foot. Few people seem to own cars at all. Only larger towns have light rail systems, but most towns are connected by a network of electric buses. There are train routes between the major ‘cities’, and that seems to be the preferred method of travel. Darren claims he saw two women driving a horse cart packed with groceries, but I don’t believe him. Though, I’ll admit I did see horse poop on the street. Hmmm.
You wouldn’t believe the variety of bikes they ride here. They’ve got some like pick-up trucks with beds or buckets in front or back, and some like wagons with shelves on the back to fit several kids (I saw one packed with three eight-year-olds in the rear and a toddler strapped to the front!). Most people walk though.
We got off the cable car and walked half a block to the B&B where mom, dad, and Darren were staying. You know what I noticed first? No one here has a lawn. The only grass I saw in town was at the Statehouse (which was thronged with soccer games, frisbees, slack lines, picnickers… did I even see a circus troupe?) and the rec fields. Everyone else uses their yards as edible forest gardens, pollinator gardens, and kitchen gardens. The temperature was in the mid-90’s my whole trip, but under the tree canopy the streets felt 10 degrees cooler. Every street is shaded. I wish Boston had more trees! Nearly every house had photovoltaic panels and a solar hot water system. Some had micro wind turbines, too. I was told that every city and town in Vermont runs its own cooperatively-owned microgrid powered solely by renewable energy. Plus, about a third of Vermont’s houses are off-grid. I bet they avoid the blackouts and brownouts that Boston has every summer, now that we get weeks on end in the high 90’s and 100’s.
Everyone here seems to take energy conservation very seriously because they’ve purposefully designed their grids to have limits. Cleome scolded me many times for my wasteful ‘flat-lander’ habits! “All energy has environmental consequences, even renewable energy, so we use as little as possible,” she said.
The next day was the wedding. Everyone pitched in for the preparations. The neighborhood has an events committee which divided up the tasks. Darren and I were sent to the kitchens to help prepare the potluck feast. I asked many questions of Yuna, the chef we assisted. Nearly everything we ate was locally grown. Yuna gave me a long-winded lecture on sustainable food policy while I chopped the carrots. Apparently, Vermont grows about 75% of the food it consumes and nearly all of it is organic-equivalent. The two whole pigs roasted in a pit for 12 hours were pasture-raised in East Montpelier. The eggs and butter and flour came from Marshfield. The veggies came from Barre and Plainfield and Montpelier kitchen gardens. The apples and berries came from the Champlain valley, and so forth. I asked Yuna if there was anything on the menu not grown in Vermont. She paused, then said, “The sea salt is from Maine. Oh, and of course, the chocolate’s from Guatemala. We have a direct relationship with a worker-owned cooperative there.”
Later, Yuna said something that really struck me: “No one in Vermont goes hungry.” I couldn’t believe it. Ever since the COVID Depression of the 2020’s, Boston and other major cities have been constantly plagued by food shortages. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t seen food lines two blocks long and weekly looting. But Yuna insisted: “Food, healthcare, housing, and climate resilience are the State’s highest priorities. When the Depression first hit, we decided as a people to prioritize social and environmental welfare above all else. Once we made these commitments, we realized they benefit a whole lot of other things. For instance, now that we grow most of our own food, Vermont has tens of thousands of more jobs in the food industry. Many thousands of jobs were added in environmental protection, reforestation, renewable infrastructure, and climate disaster response. Healthcare is universal, affordable, and holistic. And no one is homeless. It’s not as hard as we used to think. Guaranteeing these three things created a ripple effect: we have almost no crime (and no police), our greenhouse gas emissions will soon be net-negative, small businesses are booming, and our economy doesn’t have a seizure when the stock market in New York crashes… what, every other month now? People are more skilled, more cooperative, and more self-sufficient. We have more social stability than ever before, even in the midst of climate chaos.”
In the kitchens I saw how they deal with waste. Vermont claims to be a zero-waste society. I didn’t know what that meant until I saw it for myself. I’d guess about 40% of waste goes into household and municipal compost piles to turn back into soil or to feed livestock. Another 20% is burned in winter wood stoves (paper, cardboard, wood, etc.). And about 30% is reused or recycled—mostly glass, metal, and paper, since non-compostable plastics have been banned for about 10 years. The last 10% is stuff that came from outside Vermont and was not designed with the cradle-to-cradle ethic. Yuna said the Statehouse has been trying to tackle that problem for nearly twenty years.
I’ll admit that I snuck away from the kitchen for a bit to say hi to Cleome. She and Annette had just emerged from a ceremony where they received the blessings of the elders and spiritual leaders of the community. They’d been ritually dressed in their wedding garb, woven from local fibers and dyed purple with a lichen called rock tripe. A circle of weavers and embroiderers had imbued the cloth with prayers and sacred songs over many days.
The wedding ceremony was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, though apparently it’s pretty common in Vermont. The whole neighborhood was invited (and a dozen roving dogs invited themselves!). The service was not of any religion I could identify, but it was clearly Earth-centered. It began with the gift giving. Every family gave the couple a hand-made gift, something they would use in their lives together: pottery, hand-woven cloth, gardening tools, willow baskets, seeds, herbal remedies, books, songs, etc. No money was exchanged. I wondered at this, and Annette explained later. “There is a saying here: ‘Though money is scarce, we are rich in community’. When the Depression first impacted people’s livelihoods, our culture made a shift towards cooperative production and gift-giving. We’re big into barter here. Most things are produced in worker-owned cooperatives—all that pottery we received, all the textiles we make our clothes from, most of our food, even health clinics. In cooperatives, goods and services are higher quality, more affordable, and workers receive fairer wages. Competition and hierarchy are not all they’re cracked up to be.” A non-competitive society… sounds fantastical, but I’ve seen it for myself—and it seems to work well!
After the gift-giving, four grandmothers called in the four directions and the four elements. Another elder at the center invoked the Earth and the Sky, acknowledged Vermont as Abenaki land, then brought Cleome and Annette together in ritual union and vow-giving (a chunky mutt sat beside them for the vows… the dog wasn’t theirs, I asked). There was a lot of singing. Everyone seemed to know the lyrics, so I just mumbled along. I don’t remember all of them, but here’s a few: Rise up O Flame, by thy light glowing, bring to us beauty, wisdom and joy. And: The ocean refuses no river. And: My roots go down, down to the Earth. And as Cleome and Annette kissed: O my beloved, kindness of the heart, breath of Life, I bow to you. Then we all shouted and pelted them with flower petals. The band struck up a folksy tune and the feasting began.
I’m proud to say I’ve now tasted venison. Also woodchuck—that one was in a dish called “Revenge Casserole”. I didn’t really get the joke, but it tasted sweet. The roast pork was by far the best I’ve ever had. I also tried nettle dumplings, lobster mushroom pizza, dandelion fritters, and more zucchini dishes than I ever thought possible (someone snuck a zucchini into my purse when I wasn’t looking. Apparently that’s normal August etiquette here). The dogs vacuumed the picnic grounds with their jowls. There were kegs and kegs of home-brewed cider, kombucha, mead, and beer. Mom got a little tipsy on the mead and started singing “What Does the Fox Say” at the top of her lungs. Darren and I ran as fast as we could in the other direction. We danced late into the night. I think I went to bed around 2am.
Darren woke me up at 7am the next morning (I would’ve knocked his teeth in if it wasn’t for the maple-sweetened coffee he shoved in my face) to jump on the bus to East Montpelier. Haying is a community affair here. Vermont has a lot of livestock that need hay for winter fodder. When the weather is fine, families and neighbors gather together and make a party of it. Annette’s parents have ten acres that they hay every summer, and they thought to take advantage of the wedding-goers’ labor. It sounded fun, so I volunteered. Well, it was fun, but I was sore and sunburned and exhausted by the end of it.
The first day we scythed the hay by hand, singing, and on the second day we turned and collected it. Some folks hay with electric tractors, but that’s fallen out of fashion since tractors are expensive and have high throughput. So instead—get this—they use horses, mules, or oxen to pull wagons and engineless implements that were popular in the Victorian era. Yup. You see what I mean? It’s like traveling to the past and the future at the same time!
“Animal power is the superior power,” said Asa. He drove the wagon pulled by two mules. “No fossil fuels necessary. The original renewable energy. Plus, these fellas shit gold.” I laughed, thinking he was just being funny, but he meant something real by it. Without a constant supply of animal manure, agriculture would be reliant on petroleum-based fertilizers. So their shit was, in fact, worth its weight in gold. Or at least, zucchinis.
It was my first time using a composting toilet, too, and I learned that human manure is also recycled here. I had thought it just a rumor—a thing Bostonians like to joke about those weird hicks up north. I was wary at first, but it turns out to be less weird than I thought. Doesn’t even smell!
“Shitting in potable water is one of the surest signs of insanity,” said Asa, swigging switchel. “We respect our water. Water is sacred.”
We joked and sang silly songs as we worked. There were about thirty of us in total, enough that we could swap in and out when we tired. There were several kids milling about, partly working and partly playing. I asked about that. Was it child labor?
“Of course it is,” said Rowan as they pitched hay up to the bed of the wagon. Their child, Oak, scooped up handfuls of hay, alternately casting it into the wagon and flinging it at her friends. “Children learn best when their knowledge is applied to real-world situations. All children must learn how to grow food and care for animals. It teaches them responsibility, and as they learn they help their communities. They learn mathematics by building structures; they learn ecology by being out in the forest and gathering medicinal herbs. Not much is taught in a classroom these days—it’s a poor learning environment. Once they reach high school, they can choose to be apprenticed in a trade or be tracked for study at a college or university. It’s about fifty-fifty these days, with the trades ever growing in popularity. They’re more important, really. Growing things. Repairing things. Making and building things with our hands… a society cannot be resilient unless people have these skills.”
By the time we finished in the mid-afternoon, we were tired and thirsty and overheated. We took the bus and walked about a mile to a swimming hole. Waterfalls tumbled down boulders and crashed into deep, cold pools. We all stripped off our clothes and dove in shrieking—no one even bothered to bring a bathing suit. Nudity is not taboo here. I was glad to cool my burned shoulders in the water and comb out the itchy hay from my hair.
I laid down on a river stone and took a long, hard think. Experiencing this place, this beautiful, rugged, resilient place, has made me question a lot of things. Life here feels so simple, so natural, so… sacred (geez, now I’m sounding like them!). Why have I been taught to value luxury and high-tech machines so much, when life here proves them unnecessary… and maybe even harmful? People here are healthy and satisfied with their lives, even without luxuries or the latest gadgets. I don’t think I saw one Vermonter check a hand-held device the whole time I was here. Fundamentally, they have everything they need. It seems the opposite in Boston—we have frivolous things but we lack good food, clean air, adequate healthcare, and social equity.
I called my friend Rachel in Boston yesterday. I shared these doubts with her, but she didn’t understand at all. “Come back to the real world, Sura,” she said. But now, I’m confused. This world, in Vermont, is beginning to feel like the real one.
I’ve neglected to write a journal entry for a whole five days! Usually I write before bed, but in the evenings I’ve either been too absorbed in fascinating conversation or so physically exhausted that I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to put pen to paper. Tomorrow I’ll be taking the train back to Boston. So much happened in these last five days in Vermont that I couldn’t possibly record it all. It feels like I’ve spent the week in a far away land, in a different era, either 100 years in the past or 50 years in the future—I can’t tell which! To think that I could have such culture shock in a place just 200 miles away!
I took the bullet train from Boston to Montpelier for my cousin Cleome’s wedding. It took about an hour, and once I reached the Vermont border it was all a blur of green. My brother Darren met me at the train station and helped me take the cable car to the center of town. It wasn’t that difficult to figure out, but you know, he still treats me like his baby sister even though I’m 20 now. Apparently, no cars are allowed in the town center, so people travel through by electric cable car, bike, or on foot. Few people seem to own cars at all. Only larger towns have light rail systems, but most towns are connected by a network of electric buses. There are train routes between the major ‘cities’, and that seems to be the preferred method of travel. Darren claims he saw two women driving a horse cart packed with groceries, but I don’t believe him. Though, I’ll admit I did see horse poop on the street. Hmmm.
You wouldn’t believe the variety of bikes they ride here. They’ve got some like pick-up trucks with beds or buckets in front or back, and some like wagons with shelves on the back to fit several kids (I saw one packed with three eight-year-olds in the rear and a toddler strapped to the front!). Most people walk though.
We got off the cable car and walked half a block to the B&B where mom, dad, and Darren were staying. You know what I noticed first? No one here has a lawn. The only grass I saw in town was at the Statehouse (which was thronged with soccer games, frisbees, slack lines, picnickers… did I even see a circus troupe?) and the rec fields. Everyone else uses their yards as edible forest gardens, pollinator gardens, and kitchen gardens. The temperature was in the mid-90’s my whole trip, but under the tree canopy the streets felt 10 degrees cooler. Every street is shaded. I wish Boston had more trees! Nearly every house had photovoltaic panels and a solar hot water system. Some had micro wind turbines, too. I was told that every city and town in Vermont runs its own cooperatively-owned microgrid powered solely by renewable energy. Plus, about a third of Vermont’s houses are off-grid. I bet they avoid the blackouts and brownouts that Boston has every summer, now that we get weeks on end in the high 90’s and 100’s.
Everyone here seems to take energy conservation very seriously because they’ve purposefully designed their grids to have limits. Cleome scolded me many times for my wasteful ‘flat-lander’ habits! “All energy has environmental consequences, even renewable energy, so we use as little as possible,” she said.
The next day was the wedding. Everyone pitched in for the preparations. The neighborhood has an events committee which divided up the tasks. Darren and I were sent to the kitchens to help prepare the potluck feast. I asked many questions of Yuna, the chef we assisted. Nearly everything we ate was locally grown. Yuna gave me a long-winded lecture on sustainable food policy while I chopped the carrots. Apparently, Vermont grows about 75% of the food it consumes and nearly all of it is organic-equivalent. The two whole pigs roasted in a pit for 12 hours were pasture-raised in East Montpelier. The eggs and butter and flour came from Marshfield. The veggies came from Barre and Plainfield and Montpelier kitchen gardens. The apples and berries came from the Champlain valley, and so forth. I asked Yuna if there was anything on the menu not grown in Vermont. She paused, then said, “The sea salt is from Maine. Oh, and of course, the chocolate’s from Guatemala. We have a direct relationship with a worker-owned cooperative there.”
Later, Yuna said something that really struck me: “No one in Vermont goes hungry.” I couldn’t believe it. Ever since the COVID Depression of the 2020’s, Boston and other major cities have been constantly plagued by food shortages. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t seen food lines two blocks long and weekly looting. But Yuna insisted: “Food, healthcare, housing, and climate resilience are the State’s highest priorities. When the Depression first hit, we decided as a people to prioritize social and environmental welfare above all else. Once we made these commitments, we realized they benefit a whole lot of other things. For instance, now that we grow most of our own food, Vermont has tens of thousands of more jobs in the food industry. Many thousands of jobs were added in environmental protection, reforestation, renewable infrastructure, and climate disaster response. Healthcare is universal, affordable, and holistic. And no one is homeless. It’s not as hard as we used to think. Guaranteeing these three things created a ripple effect: we have almost no crime (and no police), our greenhouse gas emissions will soon be net-negative, small businesses are booming, and our economy doesn’t have a seizure when the stock market in New York crashes… what, every other month now? People are more skilled, more cooperative, and more self-sufficient. We have more social stability than ever before, even in the midst of climate chaos.”
In the kitchens I saw how they deal with waste. Vermont claims to be a zero-waste society. I didn’t know what that meant until I saw it for myself. I’d guess about 40% of waste goes into household and municipal compost piles to turn back into soil or to feed livestock. Another 20% is burned in winter wood stoves (paper, cardboard, wood, etc.). And about 30% is reused or recycled—mostly glass, metal, and paper, since non-compostable plastics have been banned for about 10 years. The last 10% is stuff that came from outside Vermont and was not designed with the cradle-to-cradle ethic. Yuna said the Statehouse has been trying to tackle that problem for nearly twenty years.
I’ll admit that I snuck away from the kitchen for a bit to say hi to Cleome. She and Annette had just emerged from a ceremony where they received the blessings of the elders and spiritual leaders of the community. They’d been ritually dressed in their wedding garb, woven from local fibers and dyed purple with a lichen called rock tripe. A circle of weavers and embroiderers had imbued the cloth with prayers and sacred songs over many days.
The wedding ceremony was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, though apparently it’s pretty common in Vermont. The whole neighborhood was invited (and a dozen roving dogs invited themselves!). The service was not of any religion I could identify, but it was clearly Earth-centered. It began with the gift giving. Every family gave the couple a hand-made gift, something they would use in their lives together: pottery, hand-woven cloth, gardening tools, willow baskets, seeds, herbal remedies, books, songs, etc. No money was exchanged. I wondered at this, and Annette explained later. “There is a saying here: ‘Though money is scarce, we are rich in community’. When the Depression first impacted people’s livelihoods, our culture made a shift towards cooperative production and gift-giving. We’re big into barter here. Most things are produced in worker-owned cooperatives—all that pottery we received, all the textiles we make our clothes from, most of our food, even health clinics. In cooperatives, goods and services are higher quality, more affordable, and workers receive fairer wages. Competition and hierarchy are not all they’re cracked up to be.” A non-competitive society… sounds fantastical, but I’ve seen it for myself—and it seems to work well!
After the gift-giving, four grandmothers called in the four directions and the four elements. Another elder at the center invoked the Earth and the Sky, acknowledged Vermont as Abenaki land, then brought Cleome and Annette together in ritual union and vow-giving (a chunky mutt sat beside them for the vows… the dog wasn’t theirs, I asked). There was a lot of singing. Everyone seemed to know the lyrics, so I just mumbled along. I don’t remember all of them, but here’s a few: Rise up O Flame, by thy light glowing, bring to us beauty, wisdom and joy. And: The ocean refuses no river. And: My roots go down, down to the Earth. And as Cleome and Annette kissed: O my beloved, kindness of the heart, breath of Life, I bow to you. Then we all shouted and pelted them with flower petals. The band struck up a folksy tune and the feasting began.
I’m proud to say I’ve now tasted venison. Also woodchuck—that one was in a dish called “Revenge Casserole”. I didn’t really get the joke, but it tasted sweet. The roast pork was by far the best I’ve ever had. I also tried nettle dumplings, lobster mushroom pizza, dandelion fritters, and more zucchini dishes than I ever thought possible (someone snuck a zucchini into my purse when I wasn’t looking. Apparently that’s normal August etiquette here). The dogs vacuumed the picnic grounds with their jowls. There were kegs and kegs of home-brewed cider, kombucha, mead, and beer. Mom got a little tipsy on the mead and started singing “What Does the Fox Say” at the top of her lungs. Darren and I ran as fast as we could in the other direction. We danced late into the night. I think I went to bed around 2am.
Darren woke me up at 7am the next morning (I would’ve knocked his teeth in if it wasn’t for the maple-sweetened coffee he shoved in my face) to jump on the bus to East Montpelier. Haying is a community affair here. Vermont has a lot of livestock that need hay for winter fodder. When the weather is fine, families and neighbors gather together and make a party of it. Annette’s parents have ten acres that they hay every summer, and they thought to take advantage of the wedding-goers’ labor. It sounded fun, so I volunteered. Well, it was fun, but I was sore and sunburned and exhausted by the end of it.
The first day we scythed the hay by hand, singing, and on the second day we turned and collected it. Some folks hay with electric tractors, but that’s fallen out of fashion since tractors are expensive and have high throughput. So instead—get this—they use horses, mules, or oxen to pull wagons and engineless implements that were popular in the Victorian era. Yup. You see what I mean? It’s like traveling to the past and the future at the same time!
“Animal power is the superior power,” said Asa. He drove the wagon pulled by two mules. “No fossil fuels necessary. The original renewable energy. Plus, these fellas shit gold.” I laughed, thinking he was just being funny, but he meant something real by it. Without a constant supply of animal manure, agriculture would be reliant on petroleum-based fertilizers. So their shit was, in fact, worth its weight in gold. Or at least, zucchinis.
It was my first time using a composting toilet, too, and I learned that human manure is also recycled here. I had thought it just a rumor—a thing Bostonians like to joke about those weird hicks up north. I was wary at first, but it turns out to be less weird than I thought. Doesn’t even smell!
“Shitting in potable water is one of the surest signs of insanity,” said Asa, swigging switchel. “We respect our water. Water is sacred.”
We joked and sang silly songs as we worked. There were about thirty of us in total, enough that we could swap in and out when we tired. There were several kids milling about, partly working and partly playing. I asked about that. Was it child labor?
“Of course it is,” said Rowan as they pitched hay up to the bed of the wagon. Their child, Oak, scooped up handfuls of hay, alternately casting it into the wagon and flinging it at her friends. “Children learn best when their knowledge is applied to real-world situations. All children must learn how to grow food and care for animals. It teaches them responsibility, and as they learn they help their communities. They learn mathematics by building structures; they learn ecology by being out in the forest and gathering medicinal herbs. Not much is taught in a classroom these days—it’s a poor learning environment. Once they reach high school, they can choose to be apprenticed in a trade or be tracked for study at a college or university. It’s about fifty-fifty these days, with the trades ever growing in popularity. They’re more important, really. Growing things. Repairing things. Making and building things with our hands… a society cannot be resilient unless people have these skills.”
By the time we finished in the mid-afternoon, we were tired and thirsty and overheated. We took the bus and walked about a mile to a swimming hole. Waterfalls tumbled down boulders and crashed into deep, cold pools. We all stripped off our clothes and dove in shrieking—no one even bothered to bring a bathing suit. Nudity is not taboo here. I was glad to cool my burned shoulders in the water and comb out the itchy hay from my hair.
I laid down on a river stone and took a long, hard think. Experiencing this place, this beautiful, rugged, resilient place, has made me question a lot of things. Life here feels so simple, so natural, so… sacred (geez, now I’m sounding like them!). Why have I been taught to value luxury and high-tech machines so much, when life here proves them unnecessary… and maybe even harmful? People here are healthy and satisfied with their lives, even without luxuries or the latest gadgets. I don’t think I saw one Vermonter check a hand-held device the whole time I was here. Fundamentally, they have everything they need. It seems the opposite in Boston—we have frivolous things but we lack good food, clean air, adequate healthcare, and social equity.
I called my friend Rachel in Boston yesterday. I shared these doubts with her, but she didn’t understand at all. “Come back to the real world, Sura,” she said. But now, I’m confused. This world, in Vermont, is beginning to feel like the real one.
The Winooski River
