JULY 16, 2023 – As is the case with many geographically-challenged people outside of New England, when I was a kid, I had trouble remembering which of the two states sandwiched between Maine and New York was Vermont and which was New Hampshire. For the record, my self-developed mnemonic device was to think of the northern part of the Green Mountain State as the profile of a New England Minuteman’s three-cornered hat, facing off against the Granite State to the east, which was a headless (and therefore, mindless) British Redcoat with a large paunch, also in profile, invading from the British Isles, which, of course, were east, across the ocean. My early confusion between Vermont and New Hampshire was a little ironic, considering how much time I would spend in Vermont, thus gaining full familiarity with its outline, and later in Maine, New Hampshire’s immediate neighbor to the east.
I first heard of Vermont when I was no more than four years old and Mother received a parcel post delivery of pure maple syrup in a half-gallon can, which looked like the can filled with gasoline that Dad stored in the garage, except the syrup can wasn’t red and had a nice winter, woodland scene painted on it. For a number of years, a can of Vermont maple syrup would come every winter, though I noticed that each year the can got smaller, as the commodity it contained became more expensive, until eventually, delivery stopped altogether. Mother told me that these cans of Vermont maple syrup had been sent by Uncle Bruce, and accordingly, I associated Uncle Bruce with the state of Vermont.
Probably my first connection between Uncle Bruce and skiing occurred when I was watching Dad shift stuff around in the large attic of our house in Anoka. In the course of his mission he shoved an old pair of wooden, downhill skis unto a ceiling rack, and with an annoyed tone he muttered something about the skis belonging to “your Uncle Bruce.” Dad had no idea why Uncle Bruce had brought them to Minnesota or how they might have wound up in our attic, and he wasn’t in a mood to speculate.[1] I was fascinated by the old wooden skis with complicated-looking contraptions for bindings.
The connection between Vermont and skiing came during one of Uncle Bruce’s Christmas-time visits. One day he borrowed Mother’s car to go shopping for something, somewhere down around Minneapolis. He took me along, and on the way back, we stopped at a camper-trailer sales lot and inspected a few campers. Since we were in the dead of winter, we were the only non-employees on the lot.
When a salesman eagerly intercepted us, Uncle Bruce told him that we were “just looking”; that he “skied weekends in Vermont and was thinking that it might make sense to buy a small trailer, park it up there and use it for weekend stays.” I remember the salesman raising his eyebrows. (I also remember him letting a chuckle escape, which made it hard for me not to laugh, when Uncle Bruce, who unknowingly and to my considerable embarrassment, had been wearing his brimmed hat on backwards, saw himself in the mirror above a window in one camper, said, “Oh gees!” under his breath and flipped the hat around in a way to suggest he thought no one would notice.) While Uncle Bruce inspected a unit equipped with a little dinette, I wondered how in the world he would take a camping trailer from the lot somewhere between Anoka and Minneapolis and haul it to Vermont, and once he got it to Vermont, where he’d park it and how he’d stay warm in it. Years later, after I was well acquainted with Vermont, Uncle Bruce’s plan for a trailer made even less sense. In any event, it certainly didn’t make sense to me there on the trailer lot in suburban Minneapolis, but at that stage—I was 10—I had trouble picturing any part of the ski scene in Vermont. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] They now decorate a corner of my family’s cabin on Grindstone Lake in Wisconsin, down the shore from the original Nilsson cabin.
