Where Time Almost Stops

Happy memories and sad discoveries in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom

View toward Mt. Wheeler from the beach at Willoughby Farm in Westmore, Vermont. Photo mine.

I’m on my way home after nine days at my childhood summer paradise—Lake Willoughby, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom (NEK). My visit, after a seven-year absence, was everything I thought it would be: joyful and depressing, relaxing and anxiety-inducing. There’s always risk in returning to a place or state of perceived perfection because the new reality often intrudes on our treasured (sometimes accurate, often embellished) memories. Knowing that, and because I hadn’t flown or left Italy’s confines in nearly four years, I was half dreading the trip, even though I’d be rendezvousing with my sons. Of course it was worth it, as I knew, deep down, it would be. And though my return to the lake didn’t rewrite the past for me, it did show me how present-day Vermont has changed—and in some ways not for the better.

The beach and cottage compound of my childhood summers (now used only by the owners) hasn’t changed too much. I got over the shock, long ago, of seeing the wooden dock replaced with a more practical and durable one made of metal and polymer. (I didn’t like it, but who can blame the owners when the thing has to be broken down and hauled out of the water every autumn before the lake freezes over, then reinstalled each spring.) And the cottage my family stayed in most of those summers, with its roomy screened porch (the setting for dramatic Monopoly games and hours of reading), creaky wooden floors, and fireplace made of river rocks, is also long gone. (Trees have filled in the site now, making it easier to bear, though my brain still screams “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” whenever I return.) The bridge over the brook sports a sturdy bannister now instead of a single rickety handrail, and the platform is solid too, without the thrilling/terrifying bounce it used to have. The lodgepole fence we once dared each other to walk atop from end to end has lost its coat of white paint, but the design is pretty much the same. The horseshoe pits where my friends and I painted ourselves with mud after every rainstorm—those are gone, and so are the crudely carved words, “The Ossolas,” on one of the birches, done more than half a century ago by my dad. Those trees still stand tall, but lichen coats their trunks now, erasing all written proof that the Ossolas were there. But we were, and Willoughby is an indelible part of our family’s history, the magical place that produced the vast majority of my treasured childhood memories.

Most important, the lake is as cold and clear and beautiful as ever, its ring of mostly gentle mountains unchanged. It’s temperamental, which I suppose most lakes are—but Willoughby, long and narrow, cut by a glacier, is as flighty as an unbroken colt. A morning might bring calm, the lake’s shining surface enticing ducks to shore and swimmers into the gasping cold, but by noon a determined wind might kick up in Willoughby Gap—the mountain pass between Pisgah and Hor—and morph that glass into choppy waves, the current underneath racing north. Thunderstorms descend and depart with the abruptness of New York pedestrians, and at times such marvels called microbursts dump rain on parts of the lake, leaving others untouched.

“Ah, Willoughby!” said Robert Frost in 1915 (see this week’s poem). Photo mine.

So there are changes to my little pocket of Vermont, sure, but they’re nothing compared to the distressing decline of the surrounding towns and farmlands. That devolution was visible the last time I was here, in 2015, five years pre-Covid, but now it’s shocking. Ramshackle farmhouses have always dotted Vermont’s slopes and valleys, but now farm after farm is decaying. And some are gone. The huge dairy farm on the hill above Westmore, whose owner used to deliver produce by the truckload to us cottage-dwellers, is one of those, and so is the farm where I learned to ride a horse. And in the towns, many of the lovely clapboard houses with steep roofs and columned front porches that line the streets are not so lovely anymore. Some have flaking paint and rotting woodwork; others, worse off, sagging roofs and few signs of habitation. Businesses have gone under, rusting cars and trucks populate driveways, and a once-excellent grocery has gotten depressingly squalid despite prices that rival New York’s.

It’s not only the farmers that are few in number. Finding a plumber or a builder is increasingly difficult as tradesmen leave for the cities. (It took a year to get someone to install new windows in my friends’ house; my brother tells me of nightmare remodeling scenarios.) Vermont’s young people want more opportunity; staying home to run the farm or logging business is, apparently, no longer the dream it once was. Though sugaring is still a big industry, Maple Grove Farms, one of the best-known producers of Vermont maple syrup, closed the doors on its maple sugar candy factory last year, after 160 years of production. For my sons and me, that was a huge blow. No trip to Vermont was complete without a visit there and the purchase of hard-to-find B-grade maple sugar candy. B grade (an archaic descriptor; the grades are now called Golden, Amber, Dark, and Very Dark) is harvested later in the season and thus has a stronger maple flavor than the delicate, sugary (former) A grade. We used to buy boxes of seconds—rejects only because they were broken or slightly misshapen—at about half price, and I’d hoped to bring some back to my friends in Italy. The loss of that place, with its sweet products and sweeter memories, is nothing less than soul-crushing.

But the people are still there, most of them. Willoughby Farm once was a working dairy farm, purchased in 1907 by the family whose descendants are my friends. Those dairy farmers’ children, the owners of Willoughby Farm when we started going there some 60-odd years ago, left us long ago. They were my parents’ dear friends; now, with the death a year ago of the last of that generation—a vibrant woman and brilliant music teacher, a seemingly immortal (to me) embodiment of Vermont—what’s left are their children (my childhood friends) and, promising continuity, their children and grandchildren. The small beach is crowded now with paddle boards and kayaks instead of the sluggish wooden rowboats I grew up with, proof that it’s still Kid Heaven. Thank god.

Sitting on the beach, I’m at peace, reminiscing with my sons, catching up with now-rarely-seen friends, or in silence, gazing at the lake. I’m grateful for the enduring nature of this place, the family’s commitment to it and determination to pass it down—six generations now, I think. The traditions continue, even if transformed, and new ones are born. During our visit this summer, there was no bonfire on the beach like the ones of my youth, with s’mores consumed to the point of nausea and traditional songs led by a music teacher on guitar (the same woman who led us up mountains and streams, took us blueberry and raspberry picking, and saved me when I bid on an enormous piece of farm equipment at an auction—and won). But there was a good-size blaze in a fire pit, a second-generation music teacher on ukulele, singing his own songs and Beatles standards, marshmallows roasted on freshly cut twigs, and a bald eagle winging toward the sunset. Time skips ahead or slows to a slog, and everything changes. But in some small soul-soothing ways, nothing changes at all.

View toward Willoughby Gap from the north end. Photo mine.

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Book of the week:

• Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (set partly in the NEK)

Poems of the week:

• “A Servant to Servants” by Robert Frost (who stayed near the north end of the lake but also camped out in a field at Willoughby Farm)