At any given moment there may be as many people walking, working, eating and talking in the vicinity of Broadway in Manhattan as there are in the whole state of Vermont. Only Wyoming has a slimmer population than this outlier, which, after shirking territory claims from both New York and New Hampshire, formed its own republic for more than a decade before deigning to become the fourteenth state.
Vermont's very first press, by which I mean the actual, physical printing press, was brought over from England in 1638. Hauled from one place to another, it was installed in a shop in Westminster in 1781 where it promptly spat out the first issue of The Vermont Gazette or Green Mountain Post Boy whose prolix, poetic motto was: Pliant as Reeds, where Streams of Freedom glide; firm as the Hills, to stem Oppression's Tide.
A century later, literally hundreds of newspapers had sprung from the firm hills of Vermont--the Morning Ray, Farmer's Library, Tablet of the Times, even one called The Scourge of Aristocracy-- many as ephemeral as the news itself, expiring in a matter of months. Yet 225+ years on, Vermont still hosts about fifty independently owned newspapers, which, for the price of 75 cents to one dollar, will reveal to any visitor or resident the content of its community's character.
Inordinately curious, voracious for information, a sucker if there ever was one for the lure of the local-- I have read at least 25 of my adopted state's array of newspapers, and at times I've subscribed to papers based in towns three hours away from mine. I guess this makes me a busy body, a nosy parker, but here are some gleanings from the court report from Stowe Reporter, and tell me if your imagination is immune to hints of larger scripts provided by summaries such as:
"July 27 at 5:25 p.m., police helped rescue a set of car keys from a storm drain"
and
"July 27 at 8:48 p.m., a suspicious-looking person was skulking about the Swimming Hole on Weeks Hill Road"
I want to know everything about the key dropper-- what had her day been like up until the moment her keys slipped from her grasp and were swallowed (glug) by the storm drain. And the suspicious person? What errand brought him to Weeks Hill Road? What was he hoping for at that moment someone noticed him? And where was he by morning?
"August 8 at 8:55 p.m., a sharp-eyed officer walking the Main Street beat noticed a door on the Akeley Memorial Building was ajar, and he turned it into a closed door."
This detail, I'm pretty sure, is the beginning of a crime novel I am not inclined to write lacking both talent and stamina for the genre, but nevertheless enjoy for its evocative banality.
Yet lest you think Stowe is Mayberry, allow me to disabuse you with a final juicy (albeit concerning) entry:
"July 30 at 4:04p.m., a man who felt slighted by a Stowe Reporter article called 911 to say the newspaper's staff had threatened him. The call was made after the man lambasted the reporter for more than twenty minutes on his cellphone; he then visited the newspaper's office and yelled at the publisher"
Thanks to portable electronic devices we can instantly tap into stories that, back in the 1700s, took months to travel into this territory, yet more often, maybe? it's the local newspaper, oft times published just once a week, that gets right up in our kool aide, ahem, burrows into the strange terrain of our most intimate issues.
When I first moved to Vermont in 1997, I read the local paper as a means to understand where I lived, what went on in my new neighborhood, over time I grew more interested in this intersection of First Amendments rights with flawed human life, the logical meeting and serving the emotional, the stories and reports--this beautiful endeavor ever complicated by the fact that often times publishers, editors and writers are inextricably bound up in their communities they serve.
