Manchester, VT to North Adams, MA
Breakfast arrived at the door in a little basket. Thermos of coffee, chocolate chip scone, bacon egg and cheese sandwich, juice and fruit. This is the correct way to do breakfast at a bed and breakfast in Vermont. I ate it in the library room with the fireplace on and the fog sitting on the hills outside.
I had names from the woman at the front desk — a couple of potential interviews I’d been excited about the night before. What happened instead was I went for a walk, got turned around in a rabbit hole of news and videos about Helene and weather modification that I won’t go too deep into here other than to say the internet is a place where a reasonable person can end up in some strange corners very quickly at 7 in the morning when the world feels unsettled. I don’t trust easy answers in either direction. That’s where I’ll leave it.
The Walk
I came up for air and went for a walk. The Equinox Golf Club and hotel sit up the hill from the main street, and between the church steeple and the maple trees turning every shade between yellow and red, the framing was doing all the work for me. I wandered around with the camera for what I planned to be twenty minutes and turned into an hour.
I met a couple in a van doing what I was doing. Hitting all fifty states. Not in a year — they were taking their time — and they were on state forty-eight when we ran into each other, heading to West Virginia and then South Carolina to finish it out. We compared notes on places we’d been. He’d worked in disaster management, traveled during natural disasters, knew the country in a way most people don’t. We talked a little about Helene without going too far down that road.
Two people in two different vehicles, both trying to see everything. I wished them well on the last two states.
Hildene: Robert Lincoln’s Vermont
I made it to Hildene, the Manchester estate that was built by Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s only son to survive to adulthood. This was the house I’d seen wedding guests heading toward the night before.
Robert Lincoln was, by all accounts, a private man who spent most of his life trying not to be his father’s son in the public eye. He became a lawyer, a corporate executive, eventually president of the Pullman Company. He built Hildene in 1905 and the family used it as a summer retreat for generations.
The house itself is formal and well-appointed without being overwhelming. What caught my attention was the detail: a formal garden laid out in 1908 by Robert’s granddaughter Jesse in the pattern of a stained glass window, the Taconic Mountains on one side, the Green Mountains on the other, and fall color beginning to run through everything.
And then there’s the Pullman railcar. The Sunbeam, a 72-foot private car built in 1903, sits on the property. A guide rattled through its history faster than I could absorb, but a few things stuck: the porters who worked these cars were predominantly Black men who faced years of attempted union organizing before finally succeeding in 1925 with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph. Famous names passed through those porter jobs — Redd Foxx, Malcolm X, and reportedly Michelle Obama’s grandfather. The car that represents Gilded Age wealth also carries a labor history that runs in a completely different direction. That’s worth sitting with.
Mount Equinox and the Road South
I took the Skyline Drive toll road up Mount Equinox before heading out — about five miles, around twenty dollars, winding and quiet, summit views stretching to New York, Massachusetts, and sometimes New Hampshire. The haze was working against the long shots but the drive itself was worth every dollar. Slow and tranquil and entirely worth the detour.
Bennington came next, and I’ll be honest: I expected more. The downtown felt tired rather than timeless, a town that hadn’t quite made the tourist economy work yet, or maybe had decided it didn’t want to. I’ve learned this year that a quick drive-through is an unfair verdict on any place. I gave Bennington about fifteen minutes and drew no real conclusions. Maybe coffee next time. Maybe an afternoon.
What Bennington does have is its monument. A 306-foot stone obelisk rising out of the landscape south of town, marking the 1777 victory that helped turn the tide of the Revolution. The actual battle was fought in New York — the supplies were stored in Bennington, hence the name. The victory helped lead to the British surrender at Saratoga. There’s an elevator to the top and views in every direction. I rode it up, took a bunch of photos, and let the history do the talking.
North Adams, Massachusetts next. The Berkshires.
