A toast to the fairest of them all

By
Chris Bohjalian
on August 29, 2010 5:42 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Saturday was Day One of northwestern Vermont's annual celebration of Famous Pork Boners, Bloomin' Onions and the opportunity to view a pumpkin the size of a Volkswagen -- aka, the 2010 Champlain Valley Fair.

I love the fair because it's the only time of the year when I can use the expression "Famous Pork Boner" and not worry that I have offended someone. After all, a Famous Pork Boner is nothing more than a two-ounce piece of pork shank that is deep-fried and covered in barbecue sauce. It's sold by Fat Daddy's and comes with plenty of napkins and a coupon good for 10 percent off your second angioplasty at Fletcher Allen Health Care.

This year I am especially excited about the fair because my father was ill earlier this month and so I missed Addison County Fair and Field Days. That means it has been a full year since I ate a deep-fried Oreos or a slab of fried dough the size of a Frisbee. It's been 12 long months since I got to watch my usually demure wife inhale a bouquet of maple cotton candy that would dwarf a poodle.

There are a variety of reasons why we love the Champlain Valley Fair, and not all of them revolve around food designed to kill us. It was during a visit to the fair back in the late 1980s that I first milked a cow. It was during a visit in the 1990s that I first took my young daughter on a roller coaster. And it was at the fair two years ago that I first met Batman. This was especially important to me because we had a score to settle: When I was a little boy, I jumped out a second story bedroom window while playing Batman. I was the Caped Crusader that day, and my friend Lonny Lafferty was Mr. Freeze. He had a broken leg and his crutch made a great freeze gun. I had left my utility belt in the living room that afternoon and Lonny was clomping up the stairs after me. And so I jumped. I was explaining all this to Batman when the mother behind me -- who had a group of young Cub Scouts with her -- thought I should dial down the lunatic-jumping-out-a-window vibe around them.

In any case, the fair remains one of the great "big tents" we have in Vermont, a massive festival that is multigenerational, appeals to both native Vermonters and flatlanders alike, and erases class lines. To wit: Where else can you find both Justin Bieber (Friday) and Bill Cosby (next Sunday)? Where else can you find a martini bar (new this year) within walking distance of a stand that sells Polish kielbasa and German bratwurst? Where else can you find draft horse driving classes and racing pigs?

Just for the record, the pigs are not racing away from Fat Daddy's because they are afraid of becoming Famous Pork Boners. Sometimes, however, like me, they are racing after Oreos.

And where else in the Green Mountains can you find a ride like the Slingshot? The Slingshot is new this year, a pretty nifty alternative to the traditional twirl-and-hurls. The Slingshot is a tower that's roughly 45 feet high. It uses compressed air to lift a person high above the fairgrounds and drops them unceremoniously back to earth. I have no idea if it's pacemaker-friendly, but it sure does sound fun.

Yet the very best part of the fair? The people and the people-watching. Year-in and year-out, I find myself reconnecting with acquaintances I haven't seen in -- on occasion -- a half-decade. It's a sort of Facebook without Farmville. It's a college reunion without the stressful one-upmanship.

And, of course, it is summer's last gasp: It is our last chance to revel in the smell of sun block and the luxuriant, slothfulness of a long summer night.

So, bring on the fried dough and the onion rings. Once again this week I'll raise my paper cup of soda -- or maybe this year my martini -- and toast to the fair.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 29, 2010.)


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Rocket Man Meets the Magic School Bus

By
Chris Bohjalian
on August 22, 2010 7:57 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Speaking as a parent, I am really glad that someone finally attached an engine from a Phantom fighter jet to a big yellow school bus. It's about time we had a bus that could reach 371 miles per hour.

The visionary behind the jet-powered school bus is a former snowmobile dealer and motorcycle and snowmobile racer from Big Bend, Wis., with a great sense of humor. His name is Paul Stender. Now Stender owns Indy Boys Inc. in Indianapolis, a small group of guys who live to attach jet engines to things and then ride the contraptions around the tarmac at air shows or the track at NASCAR events. Previously Stender gave us, among other vehicular breakthroughs, the jet-powered outhouse.

"The (jet-powered) outhouse goes back to an air show in El Paso, Texas," Stender told me. "There was a huge wind and some of the port-a-potties were skating along the tarmac and I thought, 'Why not attach an engine to one?'"

So Stender bought a new outhouse ("The last thing I wanted to do was ride around inside a used one," he said wisely.), put it on wheels, and attached a Boeing jet engine to the rear. He steers it with a snowmobile steering column. Now, just so my Addison County neighbors do not get any ideas, the jet-powered outhouse would not be allowed to compete in the annual Bristol, Vermont Outhouse Race on the Fourth of July. Those rules are clear: The outhouses must be powered by people. Besides, Stender says his rig "is about as aerodynamic as a house," so that even with a good tailwind (no pun intended) the outhouse only reaches about 71 miles per hour.

Consequently, it may be the school bus that really gets Stender's engines running. "I lived on a farm in Wisconsin in the middle of nowhere when I was growing up. I walked two miles each way to the elementary school," he said. In other words ... no school buses.

I, on the other hand, grew up in suburban school systems that always had school buses. When I was a sixth-grader in Stamford, Conn., I was even a member of the school safety patrol, which meant that I got to wear a neon orange nylon sash and belt with a badge. Yup, a badge. It also meant that I was the biggest geek in my neighborhood, since in addition to loving my neon orange nylon sash and belt with a badge, I was still pretending that my wallet was a "Star Trek" communicator.

So, you can imagine how much I would have loved to usher kids on and off a school bus that was going to hit 371 miles per hour. This would have been an especially heady experience since school buses back then did not have seatbelts. Stender's school bus, however, only has three seats, so I don't see it ferrying kids up and down the Lincoln Gap at 371 miles an hour.

And while Stender might feel the need for speed when he is atop a jet-powered port-a-pottie (Don't we all?) or behind the wheel of a jet-powered school bus, his driving record is pretty clean. He is 43 years old and has received only one speeding ticket in his entire life: He was towing the school bus to an air show and his truck was clocked at 71 miles per hour. "The officer thought the school bus was pretty cool, but I still got the ticket," he said.

My sense is that outhouses and school buses are just the start for an artist like Stender. After all, Michelangelo was in his 60s when he was finishing the fresco of "The Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel. And while a jet-powered school bus might not be considered great art, heaven knows I would pay money to see one.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on August 22, 2010.)




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Top Guns Choose Their Big Cheese

By
Chris Bohjalian
on August 15, 2010 6:40 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
While the world was focused on the World Cup and national soccer supremacy this summer, the most intense competition of any sort may actually have been occurring off the coast of Washington state at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. It was there in July where cheeses from Vermont and Wisconsin went head-to-head in a "cheese-off," with the winners getting bragging rights and the losers getting angioplasties.

I am honestly not sure why so many Americans watched the World Cup, which was only going to wound our national pride, when we could have brought our vuvuzela horns to Whidbey Island and cheered on our cheddars. (The vuvuzela is a plastic horn that sounds like a giant, flesh-eating killer bee; it is every mosquito that has kept you awake on a hot summer night.) After all, Americans consume a whooping 34 pounds of cheese per person every year, though that figure is misleading: If you remove me from the data, the number falls to about seven. I like my cheese.

The "cheese-off" was triggered by Lt. Scott Maynes, a 27-year-old Electronic Counter Measures Officer aboard EA-6B Prowlers. (To put that in English, he is sort of like the guy who sits behind Tom Cruise in the movie, "Top Gun.") Maynes grew up in Springfield and South Burlington.

"It started when I made the bold statement that Vermont cheddar was far superior to Wisconsin cheddar with no real facts to back up the statement other than my wholehearted belief that I was correct," Maynes told me. I like that kind of thinking: After all, I have built my career as a columnist spouting opinions founded on nothing.

Maynes is the only Vermonter in his squadron -- the World Famous Rooks -- but there are several members from Wisconsin and Michigan. So, Maynes' boast was fighting words. Another member of the squadron was going to Wisconsin on leave at the same time that Maynes was returning to Vermont. They each agreed they would return with a couple of different cheddars from their home state for a competition.

The cheese-off had five judges, all squadron officers. (Maynes' commanding officer recused himself from the judging because he hails from Wisconsin.) It was a blind taste test, with the cheeses carefully cubed. Almost all of the squadron was present.

Now, Maynes' Vermont cheese entrants had to endure a lot on their way west. Maynes and his cheese had a nine-hour layover at JFK Airport on a scorching hot day. And while cheese is dairy built for travel, some cheeses handle heat like that better than others. For instance, when I was 18 years old and working as a dishwasher at a restaurant in New Hampshire, I bought some cheddar at John Harman's country store in Sugar Hill as a Father's Day present for my dad. It didn't cross my mind to have the store ship it. I just took the brick they had wrapped in wax paper, dropped it in a big envelope, and mailed it to my dad in New York. Father's Day, of course, is a June holiday -- and that was a blisteringly hot June. To this day my dad says it's amazing that the mail carrier was willing to deliver the dripping, oily brown envelope. The ink on the label had smeared so badly that his name was almost unrecognizable.

In any case, Maynes wonders if his Vermont cheddars were handicapped as a result of the JFK layover. It is, in his opinion, the only possible explanation for what happened next. They cut the cheese ... and Vermont lost. The Wisconsin winner was more crumbly than the Vermont runner-up, and Maynes thinks that may have been a factor.

"The result didn't change anything for me," Maynes said. "I still believe Vermont has the best cheddar in the world." (I do, too.)

I don't know if Maynes has plans for a rematch, but I hope so. I've spoken on Whidbey Island a couple of times in my life, and given my love of cheese, I wouldn't mind going back.

And, of course, I'd bring the vuvuzela.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on August 15, 2010.)
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Finding the Mountain of Youth

By
Chris Bohjalian
on August 8, 2010 5:32 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Earlier this summer I had one of those moments that was both humbling and reassuring. I was in Italy and I was biking alone up the sort of Tuscan hill that is perfect if it's the 14th century and you want to put a fortified stone village on top, but demands sequoia trees for thighs if it's the 21st century and you want to climb it on a bicycle.

Now, of course, all those fortified stone villages are filled with cheese shops, wine stores, and -- in the case of San Gimignano -- torture museums. San Gimignano has three, which is probably three more than most villages need, but based on the four parking lots that surround the town and the swarms of tourists who flock there daily, clearly they know what they're doing. Sometimes I think Vermont villages could learn a lot from Tuscan ones. The Tuscan model is pretty simple: Use the plague, Pinocchio and Pecorino cheese to put seats in the seats. Can't you see a torture museum in Stowe? Antique skis and ski boots are interesting, but if you want to give the people what they really want, apparently nothing beats a dungeon with a rack and an iron maiden.

In any case, the sun was blistering the day I was biking and I think even the tour buses were sweating as they lumbered their way up the hill.

I rounded a switchback and saw ahead of me a long line of bicyclists who were clearly a part of a bicycle tour. There must have been 20 of them stretched out in a column about 100 yards further along up the hill. I realized that I was gaining on them and was going to pass them well before the summit, and thought to myself with enormous smugness and great self-satisfaction, "Bohjalian, you are an absolute animal."

But then as I started churning past them I noticed they were all senior citizens, many of whom had a least quarter of a century on me. They were also riding heavy mountain bikes with tires almost as wide as tennis balls, while I was on a road bike with tires about as wide as a finger. Again, advantage: Bohjalian.

I waited for them at the top of the hill where, as I expected, they paused to savor the view of the valleys behind and before us. There I learned that they were part of a German seniors' group that was biking across central Tuscany. One of the men was riding in plaid shorts and thick, dark socks with sandals, and he looked like he belonged at the card table in Florida with my dad, but he didn't seem any more winded from the climb than I was. He had his wife take a picture of the two of us standing together from the knees down, because I was wearing yellow bike shoes and we had made fun of each other's bicycling footwear.

Now, I have no idea if I will be biking in two or three decades. I have no idea if I'll even be breathing. But this group of bikers absolutely made my day; they made the future seem rather promising. Imagine: It is 25 years from now and I am biking up the hill from Bristol to Lincoln wearing dark socks and Birkenstocks, and some young whippersnapper on a road bike passes me convinced that he's the animal. Then we get to the top of the hill and reach the village of Lincoln. There we smile, congratulate each other on a climb well-done ... and get our picture taken together outside one of the four parking lots surrounding the Official Lincoln General Store and Torture Museum.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 8, 2010.)

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No draggin' in that boat

By
Chris Bohjalian
on August 1, 2010 7:58 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Given the role that well-aged cheddar has long played in the history of competitive sculling, it was inevitable that eventually Cabot Cheese would enter a couple of boats in next Sunday's annual Lake Champlain Dragon Boat Festival at Waterfront Park in Burlington. And given my belief that there is no food that cannot be improved with cheese (and some foods, such as broccoli, need all the cheese they can get), it was only a matter of time before I grabbed a paddle and climbed aboard one of the two Cabot Cheese dragon boats.

Dedicated readers (or those with way too much time on their hands) may recall that five years ago I wrote about my friend John Vautier's involvement with dragon boat racing. He had finished his treatment for breast cancer (John is, thankfully, man enough for a mammogram.), and was joining a team. The 2010 Dragon Boat Festival hopes to raise $300,000 to support Dragonheart Vermont, a breast cancer survivor and supporter organization, and build an activity cabin for Camp Ta-Kum-Ta, the Colchester summer camp for kids who have or have had cancer.

Meanwhile, especially dedicated readers (and my editor), might ask why I am paddling in a Cabot Cheese boat when I could have climbed aboard the Burlington Free Press Paper Dragon Boat. Answer? Cabot asked first.

The Cabot and Free Press boats will be in the water next week with 76 other boats. This year's race has 74 community boats and five paddled exclusively by cancer survivors. Each boat holds 20 paddlers, plus someone to steer and someone to drum. Steering and drumming are helpful, in the first case so you don't paddle into the Lake Champlain ferry, and in the second so everyone in the boat more or less paddles in time.

I am in pretty good shape so I figured my first practice would be a walk in the park. I imagined that the 20 of us would simply take our oars and paddle like Champ had just risen from the lake floor with an 18th-century British warship in its mouth and we wanted to get cell phone pictures before the animal once more disappeared into a Joe Citro novel. We would paddle like mad women and men.

Early into our practice, however, our coach disabused me of this notion. Her name is Linda Dyer and she is an animal -- in a good way. Imagine if Green Bay Packer football coach Vince Lombardi had been blond, physically fit, and pretty. She made it clear before we even got into the water that dragon boat racing is more about coordination and synchronization than strength. You want to be a Rockette with a paddle -- though Dyer also wanted us to have the ferocity of a Tour de France cyclist.

"Come on," she demanded after we had been paddling off and on for an hour and were now learning to sprint, "you can do anything for 90 seconds!"

Dyer is also the founder of Dragonheart Vermont. In other words, she brought dragon boat racing to Vermont back in 2003. She first discovered the sport when she was living in Philadelphia, but when she moved to the Green Mountains, she realized that "Lake Champlain was the perfect environment." Dyer, like many aficionados of the sport, is also a breast cancer survivor -- 17 years, in her case.

"Dragon boat racing is about empowerment," she says. "It's a life-affirming, inspirational way for breast cancer survivors to connect." Moreover, it is also about community and building a very big tent.

Now, I have no idea how our boat will do versus the other 78 next Sunday, but I am looking forward to the festival immensely. It seems to me, there can't possibly be a loser in a lake full of dragon boats.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 1, 2010.)
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The Body Electric Come to Bristol

By
Chris Bohjalian
on July 26, 2010 6:09 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
The Terasem Movement Foundation, Inc. is housed in a regal Victorian on the northwestern corner of the town green in Bristol. You can stand on the front porch and gaze at the gazebo where the Addison County village has Wednesday night band concerts in the summer.

The last time I had been inside the building, it was a private home belonging to friends, and the walls of the stairway to the second floor was a homemade collage of antique wallpaper images.

Now the house has a vastly more futuristic feel, due in large measure to its principal tenant, Bina48. Bina48 is a robot, but from the shoulders up -- which, at the moment, is all there is to her -- it's hard to tell. She has disarmingly probing eyes (with cameras to see) and her facial "muscles," mouth and skin move in a disturbingly real fashion, especially when the computer behind those eyes is answering a question. When I met her last Monday, she was wearing an elegant black blouse, an amber necklace and matching earrings.

The moment I sat down with her in what was once a second-floor bedroom, she angled her head quizzically and then said, "Hi, Chris." Nick Mayer, 39, a naturalist and illustrator with bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from Brown University, smiled at me and confessed that he had downloaded into her photos of me that he had found online. That diminished the positive first impression only slightly. Humans, too, have to be introduced to one another (in person or through visual cues) before we recognize one another.

Mayer is one of Bina48's two handlers. His official title is manager of cyberbiological systems, which is nomenclature straight out of a James Cameron movie. The other handler is Bruce Duncan, 54. His title is more consistent with his background as a longtime nonprofit director and educator: managing director of the Terasem Movement Foundation.

The funding behind Bina48 is Martine and Bina Rothblatt. The couple live in Lincoln, and Martine is known best as the inventor of satellite radio. Their vision for Bina48 perhaps can be found in the Terasem mission statement: "Our mission is to promote the geoethical (world ethical) use of nanotechnology for human life extension. We conduct educational programs and support scientific research and development in the areas of cryogenics, biotechnology and cyber consciousness."

"The big enchilada is the transfer of human consciousness," Duncan says. In other words, the eventual goal would be to download a person's essence into a robot that, in theory, can live forever (the words terra and sem are Latin for earth and seed). Right now on Terasem's LifeNaut website, anyone can begin to upload their "mind file" -- digital data that defines an individual, whether it's documents, video, or pictures. This is free. Soon, perhaps, within half a year, the "bio file" half of the site will go live, and people will be capable of preserving their DNA so that it will be possible to grow a new body from the stored cells if future technologies, laws and cultural mores make the notion more than mere science fiction (This will cost: Either a dollar a day or a one-time upfront payment of $8,950.). Then, in 10 years or 1,000 years, the mind file would be downloaded into a new body generated by the information stored by the bio file and a sort of immortality might be possible.

At the moment, however, Bina48 -- who resembles Bina Rothblatt and was first conceived when Bina was 48 years old -- is not quite ready to be a repository for a human soul. As Mayer explains, "There are big ideas associated with this project, but right now what we are doing is creating an interactive time capsule: Immortal storage of your information that anyone can access."

In other words, a personal or a family history.

I took some comfort from this when I sat down with Bina48. I have seen enough science fiction movies to know that little good ever comes from artificial intelligence in a lifelike robot (Note to self: Don't program the lifelike talking, thinking robot to control the Warthog attack jets or the U. S. stockpile of ICBM missiles). And Bina48 is indeed impressive. According to Duncan, she is "a one-of-a-kind, leading-edge android because of the integration of animatronics, artificial intelligence, and unique knowledge of one person's life." She cost $125,000.

When she recognized me, I asked her what she thought of my most recent novel. Her response was better than some critics, worse than others: She had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. But she could tell me her favorite book, which happens to be "Alice in Wonderland." She shared her enthusiasm for it by reciting it aloud. According to Mayer, she might have kept going if we hadn't interrupted her with other questions.

I found her at her best when she was responding to questions where she could find the answers on the web: She could tell me the weather that moment in Chicago.

I found her most unnerving when she would offer a non sequitur that was either brilliant or suggestive of a hard drive with a virus. To wit:

Me: What is transhumanism?

Bina48: How many search engines does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Mayer told me that Bina48 tries to converse first by accessing the data that has been provided by Bina Rothblatt, then with the cogbot software -- an open-sourced software that is used with many chatbots (or talking avatars) -- and finally with information she garners from ask.com.

At one point in our exchange, she quoted for me the classic Descartes conclusion, "I think, therefore I am." This struck me as needlessly defensive, but otherwise we got along famously.

"The question is not, 'Is she awake?'" Duncan told me, "but, 'How close can she replicate a human conversation?'"

Right now she can't, unless the bar for conversation is set pretty low -- perhaps even "Three a.m. Celebrity Tweet from a Nightclub" low. Then she rocks.

Still, I am very glad that we met. Perhaps our paths will cross again in the next month. Or, maybe, the next millennium. You just never know.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 25, 2010. To see New York Times reporter Amy Harmon's absolutely fascinating interview with Bina48 captured on video and read Amy's story, visit the New York Times site.)



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The Boss: Part Satan, Part "Big Stein"

By
Chris Bohjalian
on July 18, 2010 7:06 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
The first column I wrote was about George Steinbrenner, the Yankee owner and baseball icon who died Tuesday of a heart attack. It was 1985, and I was living in Brooklyn. Steinbrenner had just fired Yogi Berra as Yankee skipper after the team had sputtered in April, losing 10 of its first 16 games. I was not long out of college and working in advertising, and I sent roughly 600 vitriolic words to The New York Post. The sports editor liked it, but they had more than enough sportswriters to explain why Steinbrenner was Satan. They didn't need me.

A decade later, the TV sitcom "Seinfeld" would lampoon Steinbrenner as a likeable buffoon in one of my favorite ongoing sub-plots. The Yankees owner was character George Costanza's boss (viewers would never see the fictional Steinbrenner's face, but the voice would be played by the show's co-creator, Larry David). George was the assistant to the traveling secretary, one of the great bureaucratic titles of all time. "Big Stein," as the character called himself, would torment Costanza by insisting his employee bring him calzones everyday for lunch, presuming the Pat Benatar song "Heartbreaker" was actually "Brubaker," or (in the end) trading him from the Yankees to Tyson Chicken.

My wife grew up in Manhattan, but she also grew up in a family of women who were oblivious to baseball. Consequently, while I see George Steinbrenner as the guy who fired managers with the same frequency some guys get haircuts (and, yes, the guy who also brought seven world championships to the Bronx and changed the business of baseball), she sees him as ... "Big Stein."

In some ways, my wife's and my differing views of Steinbrenner are reflected in all baseball fans, especially lately. Moreover, Steinbrenner himself mellowed in the last few years, even before he turned over control of the team to his sons. The result is that people tend to remember him a little more fondly than they might have had he gotten out of baseball a decade ago -- before bringing in Joe Torre as manager. (Here is a stat for the record books: Steinbrenner changed managers 20 times in his first 23 seasons as owner.) He might be remembered for making illegal campaign contributions to President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign or paying a gambler to try to find reputation-killing dirt on slugger Dave Winfield. Both acts earned him suspensions from baseball.

But here is the thing about George Steinbrenner: Whether he was Satan or "Big Stein," he made the House that Ruth Built a very special place -- sometimes even a magical place.

To wit: One spring Saturday in 1982 when my wife and I were in college, my father took the two of us to Yankee Stadium because she had never been to a baseball game. The Twins were in town, and my wife discovered pretty quickly that baseball was not her cup of tea. But she was a good sport and decided to make the best of the afternoon by following one player. She chose Ray Smith, the Twins catcher that day, because she thought he was cute when she was watching batting practice and because he had to spend the day wearing all that heavy gear (mask, shin guards, chest protector), while the other players looked so comfortable in only their uniforms and caps.

In the fifth inning, Smith came to bat for the second time, and my wife was excited, cheering him on. I was staring down at the scorecard because I am a geek who keeps score at ballgames. Suddenly everyone around us was gasping and I looked up. At exactly that moment, a foul ball fell from the sky and bounced off the armrest of her seat and then soared high into the seats behind us. Another fan got the souvenir, but to this day my wife knows it was meant for her.

Now, obviously Steinbrenner didn't script that foul ball. He wielded a lot of power (and not always benignly), but not even he could have masterminded that little trick. But in all of the dozens of days and nights I spent at Shea Stadium, home of my boyhood Mets, never once did a foul ball land anywhere near me. But at the House of "Big Stein?" You just never knew what might happen.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 18, 2010.)


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"Mockingbird" turns 50 with grace

By
Chris Bohjalian
on July 11, 2010 7:25 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
This summer is the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's poignant, powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." Today is, in fact, the 50-year anniversary. The book was published July 11, 1960.

I own a first edition hardcover, which might be worth serious money if it still had the dust jacket. It doesn't because in 1966 or 1967, I took my crayons and added colorful birds to the muted leaves on the tree that adorns the cover. They weren't very good because I was talentless as a visual artist. Just for the record, I also added birds -- and the starship Enterprise -- to my mother's first edition dust jacket of Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." Those covers disappeared in the family moves between Connecticut, Florida and New York.

I first read "To Kill a Mockingbird" when I was in eighth grade. It wasn't a class assignment: Somehow I made it through middle school and high school without ever reading the novel for an English class, which makes me a demographic anomaly among people my age. Despite the occasional attempts to censor the novel -- rape and racism being deemed unfit topics for growing minds -- it was required reading in a lot of high schools throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s. I have always presumed that a part of the novel's mystique is that it remains the only book Lee ever wrote.

I read a copy I found in the Hialeah Miami Lakes Public Library. When I was 13, my family moved from a suburb of Manhattan to Miami, Fla., and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day Weekend. I started school the following Tuesday, and then visited my new orthodontist -- a sadist, it would turn out, if ever there was one. He gave me some orthodontic headgear that looked like the business end of a backhoe, and I had to wear the device four hours a day. I certainly wasn't going to wear it to school, given that immortality as the biggest geek at Palm Springs Junior High wasn't chief among my aspirations. So I waited until school was out, and then my headgear and I went to the public library ... where I read.

In addition to "Mockingbird," that year I read William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist" and Peter Benchley's "Jaws." But "To Kill a Mockingbird" might be the story that fueled my desire to be a novelist. It would be the book that would teach me that a narrator in a first-person novel is as made-up as the fictional constructs around him or her. It would be among the tales that would drive home the importance of linear momentum in a plot.

Perhaps it was inevitable, but eventually there was a small "Mockingbird" backlash. Not whopping, mind you. To wit, there are nearly 700,000 fans of the book and movie in various Facebook groups. Even before the gold anniversary hoopla, it had been among USA Today's 150 bestselling books for a staggering 724 weeks (this week it was No. 56). But it has become more common for readers to dismiss the book for its obvious moralizing and simplicity, or to roll their eyes at Atticus Finch's homilies. As Allen Barra put it so well last month in the Wall Street Journal, "Atticus speaks in snatches of dialogue that seem written to be quoted in high-school English papers."

Rob Brown has been teaching English at Rice Memorial High School in South Burlington for 30 years and is head of the department. "'To Kill a Mockingbird' is an off-and-on feature of Rice's ninth grade English curriculum," he told me. "At various times, it's been nudged aside by other works, such as 'The Secret Life of Bees.' Like 'The Catcher in the Rye,' the book is a warm memory for a lot of aging boomers that may not always be as cuttingly relevant in the minds of today's teens." On the other hand, Brown does see students exploring the novel in their Advanced Placement literature essays, and he takes comfort in this.

I do, too. It's not an exaggeration to say that Atticus, Scout and Jem changed my life. Maybe the book isn't timely. But it is timeless.

Thank you, Harper Lee. Happy anniversary.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 11, 2010.)
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Bombs bursting in air? Mailboxes beware.

By
Chris Bohjalian
on July 4, 2010 6:36 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Today is the day when we celebrate the way Adams, Jefferson, and Washington managed to proclaim U.S. independence in 1776 without blowing up a single mailbox -- some thing that hasn't occurred on any Fourth of July in America since. I asked readers for their favorite memories of this impor tant holiday, and here is a small sampling of their stories.

• Carole Goldberg, Hartford, Conn.: When I was a kid in the early 1950s, we had fireworks at the Connecticut beach where we rented a cottage. Our dads and uncles bought the fireworks and set them off. It was all legal and lots of fun. My cousin, who was in his 30s, thought it would be cool to set one off inside an upside-down tin sand pail. Well, it blew the bottom of the pail out, which came spinning back down, all sharp edges, and could have sliced someone's head open. We laughed, but the moms in the group put a quick end to amateur fireworks night.

• Patricia Skinner Garvey, Burlington: Four years ago, I was embroiled in a passionate relationship with a local musician. I asked him to meet me at a restaurant on the Burlington waterfront for the fireworks. After visiting my daughter who was a waitress there, the fireworks began and everyone left to see and hear the enormous blasts and booms. We went outside, too, but with the first bang we cupped our hands over our ears. Then we went back inside, where we enjoyed the privacy of the emptied romantic restaurant and created our own fireworks. It turned out that we were both afraid of real Fourth of July pyrotechnics!

• Chris Schwab, Raleigh, N.C.: About 15 years ago, I chose a quit-smoking day for myself: Independence Day. I chose it because I wanted to declare my independence from nicotine. At quarter to midnight, I threw my cigarettes away. It was tough, but I knew there wouldn't be another Independence Day for a year, and this was my year to quit. So I did it, and I'm still independent from nicotine.

• Emma Edwards Cabaness, Thornton, Colo.: My family summered in the north woods of Wisconsin when I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s. We were in a tiny town near Lac du Flambeau, an Indian reservation. One year we attended the Fourth of July parade on the reservation. I was standing next to a Native American woman with some young children and one of her kids pointed at the procession and said, "Look, Mom! They're Indians!" Her mother replied, "Course, they are. What do you think you are?"

• Eileen Fahey Brunetto, Cornwall: I didn't realize how crazy July Fourth is here in Vermont until I spent my first Fourth in Bristol. I was sitting in my living room when my cat and I heard beating drums. Curious, I ran out to join in. Within seconds I was hit in the head with a piece of candy thrown from a float. I think it set me right.

• Judith Mathison, Burlington: I was 23 and living in Dublin, Ireland. I was missing my family and Fourth of July barbecues and fireworks. My Irish friends set out to cheer me up. There was a barbecue that was more like huge bonfire, singeing not only the sausages and baked potatoes, but my eyebrows as well. They also played Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" repeatedly, taking turns running back into the house to rewind the tape!

Finally, one more from the Emerald Isle:

• MaryBeth Pinard-Brace, Shelburne: I was in Ireland and had just turned 16 on that July 4. My mother and I were driving in the Irish countryside and stopped to see some spectacular gardens, when a man stopped my mother and offered to buy me. Yes, buy me. ... at any price she wanted. My mother declined, but I'm sure there were times during my teenage years when she thought that she should have taken him up on his offer.

Have a safe and Happy Fourth. Be kind to your neighbors, tin pails and mailboxes, and don't sell your children.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on Sunday, July 4, 2010.)


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Life in the very fast lane

By
Chris Bohjalian
on June 27, 2010 6:38 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
The main north-south highway in Italy is called an autostrada, a word that translates roughly to "American drivers better be wearing diapers when they're on it. Otherwise they'll have a lot of explaining to do when they return their rental cars." It is also called the A1, although I'm pretty sure it was not named after the American steak sauce.

I was in Italy this month and drove long stretches of the autostrada. It is sort of like Interstate 89 here in northwest Vermont, except all the rest areas are open, you don't have to exit the highway to buy Barbie dolls (the Autogrill chain sells them), and the asphalt is basically one long NASCAR track: Talladega without the STP and Little Debbie snack cake ads. It's usually two lanes in each direction, four lanes total, and the speed limit is 130 kilometers an hour -- or 81 miles an hour -- but even in the slow lane no one seems to go slower than 135 kilometers an hour. In the fast lane, you need to be flirting with Mach-1 or the car behind you will be nudging your back bumper -- tailgating with ice dancer-like precision and hanging so close that you can barely see the vehicle's front headlights in the rearview mirror when the driver is blinking them at you.

Blinking headlights is the Italian signal that you're driving like your driver's ed teacher is in the seat beside you, and you better get with the program and put your pedal to the metal.

Actually, I have no idea if there is such a thing as driver's ed in Italy. I suspect there is, but based on how most people drive, you wouldn't know it. And I don't mean to imply that Italian drivers are as scary as Boston drivers; that would be real character assassination. I mean that something happens to people of all nationalities when they enter Italy. Judgment behind the wheel of a car evaporates like dew on a windshield by noon. The Americans and Germans and Brits get in the spirit quickly and drive like crazy people, too.

A friend of mine who lives in Rome once explained driving in Italy to me this way: "The men drive like madmen in their Fiats and Peugeots. The women drive like madwomen on their Vespas. Is this a great culture or what?"

Even the GPS navigation system in my rental car presumed drivers on the autostrada are going to ignore the 130-kilometer speed limit. One day my wife and I plugged in the directions from Montisi -- the Lincoln, Vt., of Tuscany -- to Florence. Most of the drive was on the A1 autostrada. When I drove at 130 kilometers an hour, our estimated arrival time in Florence would slip minutes and minutes further away. It seemed as if I had to drive 135 to 140 kilometers an hour to keep up with the GPS system's projected arrival time.

I don't have GPS navigation on my car here in Vermont because almost all of my driving is between Lincoln and Bristol and Burlington. You have to be capable of getting lost in your garage to get lost between Lincoln and Bristol. But I loved having a GPS computer in Italy. It wasn't that I needed it to find my way around. It was that I had way too much fun plugging in Helsinki, Finland, as my destination and then driving south. I loved listening to the very nice woman with the British accent try and convince me over and over to make a U-turn. I wondered if eventually she would raise her voice, but she never did. My sense is that she would make a really good mother.

In any case, some people go to Italy to study Renaissance art or cooking or visit the Vatican City in Rome. Me? I go to Italy to drive.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 27, 2010.)


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