Travels to the Kingdom

Saturday, Wayne’s Camper

I thought I’d be back in Middlebury by Saturday. But there I was, ready to pee into a bucket outside of a camper in North Troy, two miles from the Canadian border.

For the first time in the trip, a sense of doubt crept over me. I had ignored all the signs. The red, beat-up wagon littered with empty cans and coils of rope. A man so high he could barely hold a conversation. And a proposition too good to be true – “My sister’s boyfriend will drive you to Stowe tomorrow morning,” he had promised.

I walked back inside and yanked the door closed behind me. The latch had frozen, leaving a gap that drew a steady stream of icy air into the cramped space. Wayne, my host for the night, was sitting on the couch and stuffing his pipe with fresh weed. “Do you smoke?” he asked, sticking the pipe towards me. A self-proclaimed horticulturist specializing in organic marijuana, he had filled his cupboards with jars of weed – oils, buds, the works.

He took a puff. “Do you drink?” I asked, desperate to continue the conversation. Curious, also, to see if he fit my stereotype, a 37-year-old living behind his sister’s house in a camper. “I don’t really, sometimes. You know what I mean?” he muttered, shifting his shoulders and crossing his leg. He pulled out a blowtorch and lit his pipe. “What do you like to drink Ken?” he quickly responded. “Beer, I guess,” I replied. It felt like we were boxing with words, short jabs keeping each other at an arm’s length. Not really talking and not really listening.

We sat side by side for what seemed like ages, the silence punctuated by the occasional rattle of the thin aluminum walls. He continued to pass the pipe to me, and I continued to drink. At one point his friend came over, a man in a t-shirt and a red Budweiser jacket. “I work in construction,” he said, placing a can of natty on a stool as he sat, hunched forward, staring at the TV screen. “I hope I’m painting tomorrow. I really hope I’m painting,” he said. He then put his cigarette out, leaned back, watched a show and left. I think his name was Byron.

“I’m going to the store,” Wayne announced sometime later. I was suddenly left alone with his dog, ruminating on the strange experience. How did I get here?

Friday, ADK to Ripton – ACTR

It was 7:30AM on Friday, and I was waiting at ADK circle with a recorder in hand. Earlier that month, I had decided to travel around the state on buses. My goal was to learn about the real Vermont, to connect with the people and places we don’t come across up on the secluded hill of our Middlebury Campus. I had picked a town in the Northeast Kingdom, Newark, as my first destination, and planned to record myself embarking on the journey.

So there I stood, pacing around the bus stop. I pulled out my recorder, only to put it back in my pocket. What was I going to say? It was my first time travelling alone deep into the state where I’d lived for almost three years, and I was clueless.

My unease only grew as I walked onto a bus packed with elementary-school students. They filled the space with excitement and laughter. I wanted to ask them where they were heading, but I couldn’t muster up the courage to do so. Instead, I pointed my video camera to the window, capturing scenes of the fogged landscape and eavesdropping on their conversations.

“You’re so dumb, you’re sodium!” One boy exclaimed.

“I dare you to pull the stop cord,” said another. “What if we made an electromagnetic zapper to spam the cable,” he continued, barely catching his breath.

His voice reminded me of my childhood in Tokyo, when I rode the public bus home from school. My friends and I would run inside, race to the back, and ramble in English, always greeted by scowls or befuddled stares. But we didn’t care. Our imaginations fueled by the mundane around us, we created our own worlds, shaping everyday items until they gave us meaning. I suppose it was the same creative innocence that drove these kids’ conversations, vestiges of a time when we embraced boredom.

Friday, Ripton Country Store

My first stop was Ripton, eight miles up Route 125, a winding path that climbs into the Green Mountains. I wanted to see the new owners of the Ripton Country Store, an age-old institution whose prominence skyrocketed after an appearance in the opinion section of the New York Times last year by Middlebury’s own Bill McKibben, a native of the town.

I walked in holding my camera in my left hand and my hat in the right, not knowing what I wanted to accomplish. One of the owners, a woman with short dark hair and a lazy eye, greeted me at the door. She was carrying a pile of cardboard boxes. Her husband sat behind the counter doing the books, never looking up as he joked with her. A puppy wagged its tail and dragged its bed around the aisle.

“I’m doing a project for class,” I began, stuttering. “I’d love to talk to you and film, if that’s okay.” She agreed, and I brought my camera up.

“How’s it been so far,” I asked.

“Things are good, we’re finally settling down,” she replied. We talked for a while – I don’t remember much, but they were decent folks; interesting, sure, and definitely kind. But it was my first stop, and I was getting impatient.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” I said a few minutes later. “Leaving already?” She asked in surprise.

I walked out of the door with my cup of watery coffee.

Friday, Hancock

I waited for my next bus at Hancock, a small town on the intersection of Route 100 and Route 125. I had arrived at around 9:30AM, hitching a ride from two Middlebury students heading for the Snow Bowl.

A baker greeted me at Hubbard’s Country Store. “I’ll call the Stagecoach for you,” she earnestly offered as I explained my trip. She slid her tray of blueberry muffins in the oven and walked over to the phone, patting her hands free of flour.

“Yes, I have one passenger here and his name is …” She turned to look at me. “What’s your name?” She mouthed. “Ken,” I replied. “I’m Elissa,” she said with a wide grin.

For the next three hours, I sat at a small table by the kitchen, chatting to Elissa. “I finished most of my work for the week,” she said as she pulled up a chair across from me. She recounted the time she visited the Galapagos with her son’s school trip, commented on the debate around school consolidation in the neighboring town of Rochester, and gushed about her love for food. At points, she seemed almost to be talking to herself – her sentences the products of disconnected thoughts strung together. I wondered if all the people I meet would be as kind as her.

Three hours passed. No bus. I was getting anxious. I walked in and out of the store, paced around the stream, and swung my head back and forth like a lost dog looking for its owner.

“Imagine taking the bus to go to the doctor’s,” I said to Elissa as I walked back inside.

“Forget it, you’ll miss your appointment. And the next,” she laughed.

Finally, as I gave up my hopes and dove into another discussion about language, I caught a glimpse of the orange bus in the window speeding past the store. Throwing my hat and notepad into the bag, I sprinted outside, barely managing a wave to a person I had just spent hours getting to know.

Friday, Ripton to Randolph – Stagecoach

I caught the bus at the town hall three doors down. The driver, Pedro, was walking out of the building, helping an elderly woman, Joyce, towards the door. She moved in a slow, measured pace, a few steps ahead of her friends – a slightly younger woman, in her 60s perhaps, and an old man of similar age. An aura of authority surrounded Joyce. The scene looked almost like a queen’s procession, complete with a royal entourage and chauffeur. And as she took her first careful steps up the bus, Pedro folded the walker with a startling quickness, dashed up the side of the bus and hooked it behind the backdoor. The movements seemed almost choreographed, a display of ease and precision that could only have come with repeated practice.

I was already inside the bus by then, fumbling around with my camera, unsure whether I should film or help Joyce walk up the steps. I extended my arms. She waved her hands as if to pat it away and I quickly retracted it, afraid that I had offended her. She stopped moving half a step in, and continued motioning. Finally, she reached out her hand, gripped my wrist and pulled my arm towards her. I clambered down and slowly guided her to her throne.

We sped past rolling hills, swaths of farmland carved out of the wooded landscape. Every so often, Joyce would point to a spot outside the window and throw me a nugget from the past.

“A blind lawyer used to live right here,” she said, as we passed a row of trees at the edge of a valley. “I used to know every single person in this area. And now, look at this.” Outside, a single fire-station lay between a row of flimsy wooden homes.

I heard Louise’s voice across the bus. “We’re getting to be a rare breed up in Vermont. We’re natives. Six generations.” She grinned for a second and turned to face me. She spoke with a thick New England accent, her sentences short, snappy, and often snarky.

Louise flashed a smile again. “It’s home.”

“Home,” Joyce repeated, nodding. “I came close to leaving once, you know,” she continued. “When I was 19, I thought of joining the Navy. I spoke to a recruiter, right here in Bethel,” she said. “But I love it here. I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

About an hour later, we pulled up next to a brown house built on a downward sloping hill up against the road. “Is this Bethel?” I asked. “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” Louise chuckled and walked down the steps, giving a thumbs up to Joyce.

We dropped off Joyce a few minutes later, and Pedro and I were left alone on the bus, now heading to the Stagecoach Depot in Randolph – the home base for the Stagecoach buses servicing north-central Vermont. We began talking.

“What’s it like being, you know… Hispanic here,” I asked timidly. It was on my mind ever since getting on the bus. He was the first minority I’d met outside of Burlington or Middlebury, and I was curious.

“It’s tough. It is,” he answered. “But we live our lives. We work. We pay for everything we have to pay, so everything’s fine,” he laughed cautiously. “We’re the only Mexicans in town, so everyone knows us. This place is civilized,” he continued.

I thought of my dad, who immigrated from China to Japan in the late 1980s. People like him and Pedro kept their heads down, proud of their heritage but never speaking ill about their adopted homes.

Friday, Randolph to Montpelier – Stagecoach

I met Paul on the bus from Randolph to Montpelier. “Call me Dr. Smooth.” He chuckled. His soft, soothing voice was just loud enough to hear over the noise of the bus. He talked with his hands resting on his round belly, tucked into wide trousers hiked up and held with suspenders. His white beard stood out against his dark ensemble, a shiny black cane, black hat, grey t-shirt, and dark pants. If he had on a hat and a red costume, I’d have mistaken him for Santa Claus.

“I’ve been taking the bus ever since I stopped being able to drive,” he explained to me. For a moment, I thought I saw a pang of sadness in his eye. “I perform at the Honky Tonk in Montpelier every Friday. I’m a drummer, you see. But I can’t sit or stand for more than an hour.” He fidgeted in his seat

As we talked, the soft careful speech turned quicker and louder, emitting a youthful exuberance that belied his age. His eyes widened as he recounted stories of his college days, dropping out of school in Tennessee and bumming from garage to garage, finally hitchhiking back up to Vermont. “My parents moved while I was down there,” he laughed. “So the first night back, I knocked on the door of my high school English teacher’s home.” He shifted in his seat again and leaned towards the aisle. “I used to play all over. New York, Maine,” he began.

I pushed my backpack against the window and moved to the next seat. Until then, I had prodded him with questions that he answered reluctantly, but he was getting into a rhythm now, and I was hooked. It was as though he relived his youth through our conversation, his feet tapping on the ground with excitement. And with that I shed the last of my misgivings about my trip.

Oh, and I also made a mental note to contact my math teacher. He was moving to the Philippines in retirement, and I had a standing invitation to visit him there.

Friday, Montpelier to St. Johnsbury – Rural Community Transit

The Stagecoach rolled to a stop outside of a Shaw’s supermarket in Montpelier. A line of people waited underneath the small wooden shelter that doubled as a bus stop. I’d arrived at a city, at least for Vermont standards, and plenty of people seemed to be riding buses. I couldn’t wait to interview passengers on my next ride, a commuter bus to St. Johnsbury.

When I boarded the big red bus from Montpelier to St. Johnsbury though, I felt a coldness wash over the air, a feeling of detachment that I hadn’t experienced since leaving central Tokyo for Middlebury, Vermont.

I was confused. The bus driver seemed friendly enough, greeting people on a first-name basis. Outside of a bank office, the bus driver opened the door to a college-aged woman shivering with her beige coat pulled tight across her waist.

“Where are the girls? Did they leave you here?” He asked Jackie.

“Just me today,” she said with a shrug and a smile.

“Just leave them right here Shannon,” he motioned to a lady with a hunched back wearing a grey down carrying plastic shopping bags. She tilted her neck up, thanked him, and placed them into a nook underneath the dashboard.

But as the passengers continued past the driver’s seat and into the bus, their smiling faces turned sullen and they fanned out to distant seats, leaving a silence that permeated through the air.

“Hi, how are you,” I asked Jackie. She gave me a look of surprise, as if I had broken a sort of public code. The friendliness at the entrance now seemed manufactured, a way to make the best of forced encounters rather than a display of genuine affection. Or maybe I was simply an intruder in a group of regulars, upsetting the fragile balance between pleasantness and privacy.

The lights inside the bus shut off some miles after leaving Montpelier, killing off what little social interaction that still lingered – no more passenger pickups, no inadvertent eye contact. All I saw was the seat in front of me and the white glow of the occasional smartphone screen.

I fell asleep, only to be woken an hour later by the call of the driver. “I’ll drop you off by the motel. You’ll freeze to death if you don’t get a place,” he warned. I agreed. I got off the bus, made my way to the motel, and called it a night.

Saturday, 1st Hitchhiking, St. Johnsbury

When I woke up the next day, I considered calling a friend to pick me up. It turned out that buses didn’t run on weekends in much of Vermont, which meant I could either get a ride back to school, wait out the weekend in St. Johnsbury, or find a new adventure. And I was bored. I could not envision another day of conversations, or even sitting in silence for that matter. But I didn’t want to quit – it was my adventure, a chance to prove myself. After leafing through my bus schedules again, I found one bus in the Northeast Kingdom that was still running – a short loop from Newport, the largest town in the area, to Derby Line, a small town on the Canadian border. I decided to find a way there.

I walked across the motel to a freeway heading north. My first real hitchhiking. I’d read online somewhere that I should pick a spot with enough space for a car to pull over, and on a straight road so that a driver would see me from far away, so that’s what I did.

For the next hour, cars flew past me – each one slowing down just for a second, enough for the driver to squint inquisitively and drive away. It became a pattern: I would smile, the driver would squint, I would smile again, and the driver would speed up. Some would even gesture an excuse – pointing to some direction to the side or shrugging their shoulders, even returning a thumbs up. When I first saw that, I worried that I was pointing my thumb wrong, that they mistook me for a crazy guy greeting drivers, not a hitchhiker.

Eventually, a driver pulled over. He had passed me earlier, he explained, one of the mystery gesturers waving towards the gas station. I assumed he was like the others, making an excuse for why he couldn’t pick me up. But he held in his hand a barbeque sandwich neatly wrapped in foil and a steaming cup of hot chocolate. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said.

As I climbed into the car, I noticed he looked like John Bolton. Not the older Trump Bolton, but the Bush Bolton – younger, less wrinkle and more hair, but with the same round glasses and a thick white mustache. He said he was an engineer, designing energy-efficient homes in Newport.

Half an hour into the drive, he stopped the conversation to answer a call from his wife. “Don’t forget the garlic,” she said. He turned to me with an embarrassed grin. “I’m a little forgetful sometimes,” he admitted. We talked about his love for whole roasted garlic, his aspirations to become an Olympic swimmer in his college days, and his work in Vermont.

Hitchhiking wasn’t so bad after all.

Saturday, Newport to Derby Line – Rural Community Transport

Three passengers rode the bus from Newport to Derby Line. The first woman sat in the second row. She wore a baggy black hoodie with CUTE written in pink embroidery. Her mouth gaped open and her lower lips were pulsating. A hairy man with wide eyes and a US Army hat sat in the back. “I ride the bus round and round till 1:30. Then I go home,” he chortled, as I asked him where he was heading. Across from him sat a woman with a blue bandanna and sunglasses. She was quiet, carrying two plastic bags on her lap.

As we passed by the hospital, the man in the Army hat began to talk. “They didn’t tell me I had cancer ‘till 2014. They knew since 2012!” The woman in the hoodie replied. “Who did you have? I had Patrick, he’s pretty good.” “I had Bourgeois,” said the man.

On my way back from Derby Line, I sat behind the driver, Steve, and asked him about the buses in the area. “The guy I’m picking up at the next stop is a double amputee. Lost both his legs,” Steve explained. “Most of the people we get are those who can’t drive. Seniors, disabled, suspended licenses.” As he talked, the bus pulled into a trailer park. A few minutes later, it stopped at the Human-Services office. Then a Walmart, a senior home, and a hospital.

When I stepped off the bus at Newport center, the cold air of the Kingdom felt just a few degrees cooler.

Saturday, 2nd Hitchhiking, Newport

Having taken all the buses I could, I decided to find my way home. I began walking along Route 105 in northern Vermont, hoping to catch a ride onto Route 100, which I would then follow down south.

For about half an hour, I trudged along a narrow freeway, cars kicking up muddy slush onto my jeans. I walked until I heard a car coming, turned, stuck my hand out, and continued walking backwards. Just as I reached the peak of a small hill, a red, beat up wagon screeched passed me, came to a stop, and crept towards me in reverse. Wayne rolled down the passenger side window.

“Where you heading?” He asked. “I want to get to Route 100,” I answered. “Come on in, we’re going that way,” he said beckoning me over.

“I have a spare bed in my camper. Why don’t you stay the night?” He offered. Why the hell not.

Saturday, back in Wayne’s camper, North Troy

Wayne returned from the store carrying a 30-pack of bud light. “I’m a people pleaser, you know what I mean?” he said, shifting his shoulders and crossing his legs.

He opened a can and handed it over to me. We were sitting side by side again, sipping on our drinks as awkward as before.

Sunday morning, Wayne’s camper

I woke up at 5:00AM shivering under the tattered blanket. I had fallen asleep while writing, with the lights still on and my backpack by my side. Wayne was snoring on the couch, the TV remote still in his hand and the History Channel playing on the screen – it happened to be airing an episode on Christian conspiracies, its ominous narration providing a fitting soundtrack for my unsettling circumstance. I walked over to him and called out his name. No reaction.

I shook him. He stirred from his sleep, mumbling incoherently. “When’s the boyfriend coming?” I asked. “He’ll come by the camper,” he said, turning his head towards the wall. I looked at the door. A heavy blanket covered the gaps, pinned to the walls with thumb tacks. I paced around and shook him again.

This time, he sat up and reached for his phone. He called somebody. No answer. He stood, opened the cupboard, pulled out a pinch of weed, and began rolling a joint. “Sorry, he’s not answering,” he said as he took two puffs. “I’ll have my friend drive you later when he wakes up,” he said and went back to sleep.

I tried going back to sleep, to see whether I could wake up later and talk to Wayne some more. But I couldn’t.

I had to leave. I was angry and restless, feeling trapped in his camper. I peeled off the blanket and walked out the door with my mostly unused equipment.

I had come to learn, to explore Vermont through its people. And here I was, face to face with a real person, in all his complexity, and I was choosing to run away. I suppose that’s the real struggle – the challenge of putting my own comfort aside to fully empathize with people. No matter how inconvenient. But I’d reached a limit of patience with Wayne.

Epilogue: Going Home

After leaving Wayne’s camper, I walked along Route 100, hitching rides from six interesting people along the way. I shared laughter, received gifts, and even went to church. But that’s another story.  For now, I wanted to see if I’d captured anything on tape worth capturing and I had classes to get back to.