Chris Bohjalian's Blog - Posts Tagged "champlain-valley"
It's summer! Time to buckle up for redcoats and crummy joints!
Back in the day, we here in the Champlain Valley often made the redcoats’ lives hell – the breakfast brawl at Hubbardton notwithstanding. But my parents always had a soft spot in their hearts for one particular redcoat stationed at Fort Ticonderoga in the 1960s.
Okay, he wasn’t a real redcoat. He was, perhaps, a college kid on summer break earning a little money and sweating off a semester’s worth of keg beer beneath his regulation British Army uniform. But here is, more or less, what happened.
My parents had put my older brother and me in the backseat of the station wagon – a blue woodie – and driven four or five hours north from our home in Westchester County. (I should note that my brother and I probably weren’t always in the backseat. We were just as likely to have been hanging out in the cargo area. Seat belts back then were viewed as a serious inconvenience. The last thing anyone wanted was to be buckled into the seat if you smashed into a tanker truck and had to get out fast. Besides, how could my brother and I wrestle in a moving vehicle if we were strapped into our seats?) It was one of those classic summer vacation car trips, where we went north to Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga, and then west to Niagara Falls.
And while I don’t remember much, I remember two moments: The redcoat. And the brothel. More on the brothel in a moment.
I was three and my brother was eight. Based on the photos from the trip that remain, we looked like we were pulled straight from an episode of “Mad Men:” Crew cuts and short pants. We are always posed in front of Revolutionary War era cannons. Among my annoying habits (and, apparently, I had plenty), was that I used to suck my fingers. Not my thumb, which normal, screwed-up three-year-olds depended on, but fingers. I used to suck the ring and middle fingers. Simultaneously. It drove my parents wild, but they seemed incapable of stopping me.
But one summer afternoon, the redcoat accomplished in nine words what my parents had been trying to make happen for months. For years, for all I know. As we were passing the redcoat at Fort Ticonderoga, he said to me in the voice of a drill sergeant, “Soldier! Get those fingers out of your mouth – now!” According to family lore, I was awed. I listened. And I never put my fingers in my mouth again.
The next day we motored on to Niagara Falls. Just before we arrived there, however, the station wagon’s transmission died. The woodie was towed to a garage near Buffalo and we went to the motel across the street from the garage to spend the night. It was – and here I am being kind – a dump. The fellow behind the counter begged my parents not to stay there when he saw they had their children with them. I weighed in with one of those remarks mothers memorialize in baby books: “What a crummy joint.” And, yes, if it wasn’t actually a brothel, it was what we euphemistically call a “hot sheets motel.” My mother made us sleep in our cloths on the bedspreads. (Given what we now know about motel bedspreads, this may in reality have been the far more disgusting solution. The sheets are at least washed.)
I share these two Wonder Bread memories with you because many of you are finalizing your own summer vacation plans. Your car trips to great destinations. Your roadside adventures for July and August.
My advice? Think big. Expect the unexpected. Be flexible.
And, yes, check your transmission.
Now buckle up and take your fingers out of your mouth. It’s already June and those hot sheets motels fill up fast.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 2. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in five weeks.)
Okay, he wasn’t a real redcoat. He was, perhaps, a college kid on summer break earning a little money and sweating off a semester’s worth of keg beer beneath his regulation British Army uniform. But here is, more or less, what happened.
My parents had put my older brother and me in the backseat of the station wagon – a blue woodie – and driven four or five hours north from our home in Westchester County. (I should note that my brother and I probably weren’t always in the backseat. We were just as likely to have been hanging out in the cargo area. Seat belts back then were viewed as a serious inconvenience. The last thing anyone wanted was to be buckled into the seat if you smashed into a tanker truck and had to get out fast. Besides, how could my brother and I wrestle in a moving vehicle if we were strapped into our seats?) It was one of those classic summer vacation car trips, where we went north to Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga, and then west to Niagara Falls.
And while I don’t remember much, I remember two moments: The redcoat. And the brothel. More on the brothel in a moment.
I was three and my brother was eight. Based on the photos from the trip that remain, we looked like we were pulled straight from an episode of “Mad Men:” Crew cuts and short pants. We are always posed in front of Revolutionary War era cannons. Among my annoying habits (and, apparently, I had plenty), was that I used to suck my fingers. Not my thumb, which normal, screwed-up three-year-olds depended on, but fingers. I used to suck the ring and middle fingers. Simultaneously. It drove my parents wild, but they seemed incapable of stopping me.
But one summer afternoon, the redcoat accomplished in nine words what my parents had been trying to make happen for months. For years, for all I know. As we were passing the redcoat at Fort Ticonderoga, he said to me in the voice of a drill sergeant, “Soldier! Get those fingers out of your mouth – now!” According to family lore, I was awed. I listened. And I never put my fingers in my mouth again.
The next day we motored on to Niagara Falls. Just before we arrived there, however, the station wagon’s transmission died. The woodie was towed to a garage near Buffalo and we went to the motel across the street from the garage to spend the night. It was – and here I am being kind – a dump. The fellow behind the counter begged my parents not to stay there when he saw they had their children with them. I weighed in with one of those remarks mothers memorialize in baby books: “What a crummy joint.” And, yes, if it wasn’t actually a brothel, it was what we euphemistically call a “hot sheets motel.” My mother made us sleep in our cloths on the bedspreads. (Given what we now know about motel bedspreads, this may in reality have been the far more disgusting solution. The sheets are at least washed.)
I share these two Wonder Bread memories with you because many of you are finalizing your own summer vacation plans. Your car trips to great destinations. Your roadside adventures for July and August.
My advice? Think big. Expect the unexpected. Be flexible.
And, yes, check your transmission.
Now buckle up and take your fingers out of your mouth. It’s already June and those hot sheets motels fill up fast.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 2. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in five weeks.)
A Ferris wheel is still food for the soul
A couple of years ago, Chris Ashby, director of operations at the Champlain Valley Exposition, saw three boys peering longingly through a fence at the Champlain Valley Fair. He guessed the kids were 8 or 9 years old. On the other side of fence was the fair’s tractor pull, and Ashby could hear the indefatigable growl of the engines. He gave the kids tickets so they could watch the competition properly. “They didn’t walk into the venue and they didn’t run into the venue,” he recalled. “They bounced.”
That’s what the fair is all about, Ashby told me, adding, “You see an inherent delight on all the kids’ faces when you walk around.”
The fair opens in five days, a 10-day bacchanal to commemorate the end of summer. For some people, the fair is a celebration of agrarian Vermont, with majestic Morgans and Belgians, Holsteins with “good dairy strength,” and pumpkins the size of Mini Coopers. For others, it’s the midway, with rides called Zyklon, Zipper, and Fireball that are designed to terrify us — yet with the presumption that we are nonetheless perfectly safe. And for still others, it’s the food: the fried dough, the maple creemees, and (yes) the pork boners.
I have gone annually since I was a young man, watching my daughter and her friends grow from savoring the classic carousel to standing in line for the centrifugal (and myriad) vomitrons. My wife and I met the Batman there. We watched the dogs that dive and the pigs that race. Every year I consume a bloomin’ onion on my own; she eats all things maple.
And while so much of the fair is predictable by design — we want there to be blue ribbons for tomatoes and cukes, we want carnies assuring us that it’s easy to win a stuffed Pink Panther as tall as a toddler — there are always moments of re-invention. This year there is a home brew contest, with the Best in Show beer getting to brew a “pilot batch” at the 14th Star Brewery in St. Albans. Chefs from the Essex Resort and Spa will be giving cooking demonstrations (although rumor has it they will not be whipping up pork boners). There will even be vegan smoothies.
There is another reason, however, that we gravitate to the Champlain Valley Fair. There is a reason that we love all the fairs that pepper Vermont in August and September. “There’s a certain amount of melancholy because it’s the end of summer,” Ashby said. “The kids are going back to school. We’re all about to change into a whole different set of clothes. Everything changes after the fair.”
In other words, this is summer’s last hurrah. We are not precisely fiddling as the season burns, but we are all cognizant that the days are growing short, there is a chill in the night air, and our tomato plants look like the tentacles from dying man o’ war jellyfish. The fair is the ritualistic point of demarcation our souls crave. We will see people there we may see once a year, returning like barn swallows to that nest they built in the rafters twelve months earlier, drawn inexorably (and magically) back. And we will connect.
Yes, much of what we will eat at the fair is empty calories. I get it. Most of the games we will play at the midway are bait-and-switch. And the rides are never as long as we’d like.
But we all also know this: there is a phosphorescent beauty in a Ferris wheel at night. There is charisma in a miniature horse. There is confidence attached to those 4-H ribbons our children earn.
And there is the bounce in all of our steps when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, someone gives us tickets to the tractor pull.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on August 23, 2015. There are now two Idyll Banter columns remaining. After 23 and a half years, Chris will be filing his last column on Sept. 6. Chris’s new novel, “The Guest Room,” arrives on January 5, 2016.)
That’s what the fair is all about, Ashby told me, adding, “You see an inherent delight on all the kids’ faces when you walk around.”
The fair opens in five days, a 10-day bacchanal to commemorate the end of summer. For some people, the fair is a celebration of agrarian Vermont, with majestic Morgans and Belgians, Holsteins with “good dairy strength,” and pumpkins the size of Mini Coopers. For others, it’s the midway, with rides called Zyklon, Zipper, and Fireball that are designed to terrify us — yet with the presumption that we are nonetheless perfectly safe. And for still others, it’s the food: the fried dough, the maple creemees, and (yes) the pork boners.
I have gone annually since I was a young man, watching my daughter and her friends grow from savoring the classic carousel to standing in line for the centrifugal (and myriad) vomitrons. My wife and I met the Batman there. We watched the dogs that dive and the pigs that race. Every year I consume a bloomin’ onion on my own; she eats all things maple.
And while so much of the fair is predictable by design — we want there to be blue ribbons for tomatoes and cukes, we want carnies assuring us that it’s easy to win a stuffed Pink Panther as tall as a toddler — there are always moments of re-invention. This year there is a home brew contest, with the Best in Show beer getting to brew a “pilot batch” at the 14th Star Brewery in St. Albans. Chefs from the Essex Resort and Spa will be giving cooking demonstrations (although rumor has it they will not be whipping up pork boners). There will even be vegan smoothies.
There is another reason, however, that we gravitate to the Champlain Valley Fair. There is a reason that we love all the fairs that pepper Vermont in August and September. “There’s a certain amount of melancholy because it’s the end of summer,” Ashby said. “The kids are going back to school. We’re all about to change into a whole different set of clothes. Everything changes after the fair.”
In other words, this is summer’s last hurrah. We are not precisely fiddling as the season burns, but we are all cognizant that the days are growing short, there is a chill in the night air, and our tomato plants look like the tentacles from dying man o’ war jellyfish. The fair is the ritualistic point of demarcation our souls crave. We will see people there we may see once a year, returning like barn swallows to that nest they built in the rafters twelve months earlier, drawn inexorably (and magically) back. And we will connect.
Yes, much of what we will eat at the fair is empty calories. I get it. Most of the games we will play at the midway are bait-and-switch. And the rides are never as long as we’d like.
But we all also know this: there is a phosphorescent beauty in a Ferris wheel at night. There is charisma in a miniature horse. There is confidence attached to those 4-H ribbons our children earn.
And there is the bounce in all of our steps when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, someone gives us tickets to the tractor pull.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on August 23, 2015. There are now two Idyll Banter columns remaining. After 23 and a half years, Chris will be filing his last column on Sept. 6. Chris’s new novel, “The Guest Room,” arrives on January 5, 2016.)
