Goodbye, Vermont

Hello, CrazyLand

I moved to this little town in central Vermont in 2009, after living in or near the San Francisco Bay area for 54 years. Near the end of that California stint, I had been priced out of the real estate market and was living in a tiny mobile home, with a seven foot grand piano monopolizing most of the living room. I had been taking annual pilgrimages to a piano camp in Vermont for a few years, and liked what I saw there: less crowding, cleaner air, beautiful mountains, four seasons (five if you count mud season). I also sensed an independent spirit in Vermonters: a willingness to think differently from the mainstream and travel their own path.

So in June of 2009, I moved myself and that grand piano to this small town, and made a new life for myself. Things seemed pretty good at first: I made new friends, found other musicians, and started volunteering at the local library. A year after the move, I met my future wife, and two years later we started building a house together on her land. The housebuilding project was more satisfying and enduring than anything I’d done in Silicon Valley writing code that would be thrown away in a few short years.

But that marriage turned out to be a kind of trap, where I was increasingly subject to verbal and emotional abuse that worsened over time, despite my efforts to be “good” and not trigger the abuse. Things would be great for a while, and we’d go off on backpacking and biking adventures that were fun and exciting. Then something (typically a visit from a friend or relative) would trigger jealousy and more abuse, and I’d be left feeling shell-shocked and hopeless.

Eventually, after three years of trying to escape, I found the strength to leave that marriage (and the house we’d built), with the help of friends and some counselors who were experts on abusive relationships. This happened in January 2020. I spent the next eight months moving five times, until I ended up back in the house I’d bought when I moved to Vermont in 2009.

Two months into my freedom, the Scamdemic hit. Suddenly I found myself in an abusive relationship with government (and the do-gooders who run this little town) that was eerily similar to the abuse from which I’d recently escaped. These new abusers were telling me to isolate from friends, to not listen to other sources of information, that they knew better than I did, they they were the experts, that I was a Bad Person for not obeying their “rules”.

Because I was already sensitized to abuse, I quickly realized these people did not deserve my obedience, and my idealistic view of Vermonters as tough, independently-minded people was quickly destroyed. It turned out that Vermonters (with few exceptions) were the most obedient, subservient, and compliant of all Americans during the Scamdemic. They were lauded for their willingness to lock themselves up at home, and later for their number one position in the charts of “vaccine” uptake. I remember visiting coastal Maine in the spring of 2021, and being congratulated by a stranger on the beach for being from compliant Vermont. I didn’t have the heart to tell this stranger that I was a Bad Person who felt completely alienated from my adopted home state.

When my divorce finalized in February this year, after four years of delays and obstruction, I immediately set about the task of selling my overly large house and searching for something smaller. But one of the results of the Scamdemic was that Vermont had been invaded by “flatlanders” (wealthy people from areas to the south) who were now afraid of big cities and were buying up houses and land for second homes. Real estate prices zoomed, and the good houses were being snapped up with cash, sight-unseen. My attempts to find something small but not decrepit were frustrating and fruitless.

Back when I had been living in California, I had always loved the Sierra Nevada, and spent as much time as I could up in those beautiful mountains, backpacking or x-c skiing. I had even tried to find a home there just before leaving California, but had gotten discouraged. But now I decided to take a look again and see if I could find some little cabin in the Sierra woods where I could live full time. There are plenty of cabins up in the higher elevations, but most of them are either inaccessible in winter, or are off-grid, or are uninsulated, or very expensive, or otherwise out of reach.

Eventually I did manage to find a cabin at a lower elevation that had been recently renovated and was liveable year round, in a little town that still had some relics of its gold rush history. Better yet, it was not too far down the Sierra slope from places where I used to go backpacking and skiing, and was within a half-day’s driving distance of family in the Bay Area.

So I made the decision to move back to CrazyLand. My feeling now is that California’s crazyness is hardly any worse than Vermont’s, and that this little town I’m moving to might even be more suitable. One of the strange things that happened to me in the Scamdemic is that I suddenly found myself in alignment with more conservative people than ever before, while still regarding the two major political parties as two sides of the same abusive coin. This little town I’m moving to has shown signs of being more compatible with me than my current hometown in Vermont, as exemplified by its overwhelming rejection of California’s governor in the last election.

(You know which governor I’m talking about. He’s the one who told all his subjects to stay at home and wear masks, while he and a bunch of his buddies and family dined maskless at the French Laundry. He’s the one who got the legislature to pass a bill that criminalized doctors who spoke out against the Scamdemic propaganda. He’s the one who’s pushing for an extra-legal “hate” crime social credit score system.)

So I’m hopeful that this move will be better for my psyche than staying stuck in a place where I was forbidden from attending concerts for two years, and where I was censored for writing about PCR tests on Front Porch Forum, and where the piano camp I used to adore has turned against people like me. At the very least, I’ll be back in the mountains I’ve loved since I was a little kid.