STRIKE ONE: KVETCH KVETCH KVETCH

When the going gets tough, they say, the tough get going.

Not in Vermont, especially rural Vermont. There, when anything changes, the supposedly tough whimper.

The latest example of this phenomenon occurred last week when roughly 100 members of the Champion Land Leaseholders and Traditional Interests Association met in Ferdinand, in the core of the Northeast Kingdom, to talk to Mark Maghini, who is sort of their landlord.

Well, not really talk to him. At least as reported in Orleans County’s Chronicle, it was more like screech at him.

And why? Because…(steel yourself for the horror about to be expressed) everything is not the same.

Oh, and also because weeping and wailing have become the default position in the subculture of some segments of rural Vermont.

To elucidate, for those unfamiliar with the saga of what are still called the Former Champion Land, Maghini is the manager of the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the owner of some 26,000 acres that once belonged to the Champion International Paper Company.

A few hundred people lease small plots of this land on which they have built camps, as they did when Champion owned it. As it happens, the terms of their leases are much more advantageous to them now than in the Champion days (largely because they moaned and groaned, and were immediately placated by a cowardly Vermont State Legislature, but let’s let bygone wails be bygone wails).

What ails them now?

First, under the new rules, they won’t be able to use or possess alcoholic beverages while hunting. What would happen, one of them asked, if he was bringing beer to his camp and a deer cross the road. Would getting out of the vehicle to go after the deer by a violation?

Of course not, Maghini said in a telephone interview.

“Get out of the truck. Go after the deer,” he said, as if any explanation were needed. Clearly this was a crowd looking for something about which to complain ever though there was nothing about which to complain.

Refuge visitors won’t be allowed to hunt from the road any more, either. Nor is anybody else, at least not in this state (see Page 17 of the most recent hunting regulations).

But the problem, as one of the meeting-goers put it, was that “we can’t do what we have been doing for a lifetime.”

Oh, please. There are two things these folks should do up. Grow and shut. The world changes. The land they lease is now owned by the Federal Government, which has designated it a Fish and Wildlife Refuge. The primary mission of the Refuges is “to conserve the abundance and diversity of native plants and animals.” But as a matter of law and policy – oh, and by the way, in the interest of the economy of northeastern Vermont – they also try to attract visitors.

Who are less likely to show up if they worry about getting shot.

Okay, federal regulations can always be dumb, and one of these seems to qualify. If motor vehicles are allowed on the roads, why should bicycles be banned?

Maybe they won’t be for long, Maghiri said, under a “comprehensive conservation plan” now in the works.

The Leaseholders are a small sliver of the body politic, but a somewhat larger sliver of the local cultural mythology. These are (at least so they want us to think) the traditional Vermonters of yore—self-reliant, rugged, adaptable.

Perhaps we’ll have to adapt to the reality; they’re a bunch of crybabies.

STRIKE TWO: SMILE, YOU’RE (MABYE) ON TV

More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realization…But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No, we want to be celebrities—Hilary Mantel

But does the Burlington Free Press have to lead the way.

The Freep routinely goes bananas any time a Vermonter even approaches celebrity, like appearing on a TV reality show. But Sunday, it outdid itself, devoting 50 square inches – 40 percent of the “news” (that is, not advertising) space on the front page to tell us that a guy who used to go to Middlebury would be playing against the New England Patriots that day.

Not that Steven Hauschka is really a celebrity. Or really a Vermonter. He grew up in Massachusetts. But he did start kicking footballs at Middlebury and he is the place-kicker for the Baltimore Ravens who would play (and lose to) the Pats Sunday afternoon.

Meaning he might be (oh, contain the excitement) on TV.

Not that it wasn’t a story. (Sort of) local kid (sort of) makes good. And it was nicely done. But it belonged on the sports page, not all over Page One.

Oh, and is it turned out, Hauschka kicked no field goals Sunday, or even (so it seemed after a quick look at the game account) attempted one. No TV time after all.

STRIKE THREE: LAW? WE DON’T WORRY ABOUT NO STINKIN’ LAW. WE’RE THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The paper of record came to Vermont last week, right up to the Northeast Kingdom, to write about that moose. You know, the one that’s being fed doughnuts in an impoundment in Irasburg.

Cute story by Katie Zezima of the Boston office. Mentioned the doughnuts. Quoted the old farmer who’d brought the moose to the impoundment and the guy who owns it. Got into the chronic wasting disease danger.

Just one little omission. Never mentioned that the rescue, transportation and confinement of the moose are all, undeniably, against the bleepety-blank law.

Actually, a not-so-little omission. Not, at least, in a serious newspaper, which The New York Times is.

Was?