Manchester, Vermont
Forty-one degrees out. I’m loving it.
There was a fire pit going behind the Palmer House when I got back from dinner the night before, and a couple of people standing around it. By the time I’d introduced myself, there were thirty or forty out there. A young couple was getting married somewhere nearby — guests had come in from Massachusetts, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin. A woman from upstate New York told me about a place called Thousand Islands on the US-Canada border, islands scattered along the river above New York State, apparently beautiful and entirely off my radar until that moment. It went on the list.
A fall wedding in Vermont. If you’re going to do it, this is the place and the season.
The Morning
Forty-one degrees and I was going to be outside in it. Sun rises around 6:30 this time of year and the light is already going harsh by 8:15, so the real fall color window is narrow. I was already behind on that by the time I was dressed. The plan was laundry first, then drive — Bennington, Brattleboro, back through toward the Green Mountains, and check into the Reluctant Panther in the evening.
I had a brief episode at the hotel trying to check out. The door handle stuck. Not my door — the master key that the staff was using to help me. They were on it, the mechanism was jammed, I was standing outside in 41 degrees watching someone work a door handle with the patience of someone who has done this before. The church bells rang. My laundry was done. I had places to go.
Manchester’s main street is the kind of place you walk slower than you intended. Country store, attorneys at law, a little reflection in a shop window. Then: rescue cats. Someone told me about them the day before — a shop full of cats available for adoption, sunning themselves in the window. I stopped. I photographed them. I watched one clean the other. I may have lingered longer than the schedule warranted. They were very content-looking cats.
Stratton
I took the gondola up at Stratton Mountain, which in October is not a ski resort but is instead one of the better places to see fall color from above. The woman at the bottom said I was there at perfect timing for color, and she was right.
It was about thirty degrees colder at the top. The color stretched out in every direction in a way that is genuinely difficult to photograph well — the scale of it, the depth, the layers of ridge behind ridge going pale with distance. I walked around and tried anyway. The ski runs were empty, the magic carpet lifts sitting idle, and I thought about a trip to Beaver Creek years ago when I’d gone up a similar gondola with some of my crew for a lighting job, talked everyone into renting mountain bikes for the descent, told them all to take it easy, and watched James immediately ignore that advice and end up in the emergency room. I’d start on the smaller carpet. I’d take it easy.
The Reluctant Panther
The Reluctant Panther Inn in Manchester. The Library Room. Books on three walls, a rolling ladder to reach the upper shelves, a propane fireplace I turned on immediately, the kind of room that makes you want to stay in and read something instead of going anywhere at all.
The woman at the front desk asked what I was doing. I told her. She got on the phone with a friend who runs a place called the Wilbertine Inn, which apparently has an art component, a blog about creativity, and a son who started an organic farm after the family traveled the country in a bus. Two potential interview subjects lined up for tomorrow, which is more advance work than I’ve managed in weeks.
I have a feeling about Manchester. Of all the towns on this leg, this is the one where I most want to sit down with someone and actually get the story on camera. Dinner was at the Copper Grouse down the street. It was excellent. The fireplace was going in the library room when I got back. I turned it up.
Tomorrow might be the day I’ve been trying to make happen since Camden.
