Rumble Strip

On the one-year anniversary of a 100-year flood, Vermont experienced another devastating flood. This is the story of one Plainfield, Vermont resident, who lost everything. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me run this show on Rumble Strip.

There are about 15 million people in this world having thoughts and ideas that they can't put into words. People who have had had strokes or traumatic brain injuries often live with aphasia, or difficulty talking or using language. Their thoughts are intact, but the language gets stuck. But music mostly originates in the undamaged hemisphere of the brain. People with aphasia can often sing. This is a story about a choir comprised of people with aphasia, and what it's like to struggle for words.The Aphasia Choir of Vermont

This is a follow-up show to Finn and the Bell. If you haven't heard that story, you might want to start there.At Bread and Puppet in Glover, Vermont, there is a magical pine forest full of small homemade buildings and shrines to memorialize dead puppeteers and friends. It’s a place where my friend Tara Reese’s sons Finn and Lyle spent a lot of time when they were little, running around in the woods in the summer. Now there is a memorial here for Finn in the pine forest, built by some of the kids he used to play with here. Finn died by suicide on January 3rd, 2020. In 2021, Tara and I made a story about him called Finn and the Bell. People all over the world listened, and we received hundreds of emails and texts and artwork and poetry. Tara received letters that were addressed to ‘Finn’s Mom, Hardwick’, with no address.But this is a story just about Tara, and about her evolution of grief. About what happens after the worst thing happens.We recorded this conversation on Mother’s Day, at Finn’s memorial in the pine forest. This show ends with a song. The Bell was written by Jim Terry of Napa, California. He plays music with his sons, Graham and Clark and they’re called The Terry Family Band. Jim wrote this song after listening to Finn and the Bell. Thank you so much Jim!

Will Staats worked for both Vermont and New Hampshire for forty years as a wildlife biologist. He’s also a passionate hunter. He knows the back country of the Kingdom right up through Maine and into Labrador. One day in October he took me bird hunting deep in the unorganized town of Ferdinand. We talked about birds. And we talked about the growing divide between traditional hunting culture and people who don't like certain kinds of hunting here in Vermont. But it was more interesting than that...it was also about how people harden against each other then alienate each other...something we do a lot of these days.

I hung out with Forrest Foster in his sugarhouse a few weeks ago. Sugarhouses are the best because they’re full of warm, sweet steam and there’s nothing to do but hang around and make sure the pan doesn’t burn. Also, if sugaring is happening it means that winter is almost over and that is a joyous time for me. I love the hell out of April. So here are a few happy minutes with Forrest in his sugarhouse.

This is a show I made a few years ago that very significantly involves Total Eclipse of the Heart, which is my favorite song. I am playing it again now because it is ECLIPSE WEEK. I hope you enjoy it.

Kasey Phipps is transgender and has always been transgender. But Kasey didn’t grow up in a place where the word transgender was well understood. Or understood at all. It’s only in the last four years that Kasey’s put a name to this lifelong experience of living life in the wrong gender. This is just one story about the experience of being trans. Credits:Linda Young plays the harp in this show, for which I am eternally grateful. Here is a link to her excellent TRIO.There is also a song in the show from one of my favorite artists, Carla Kihlstedt and the Tin Hat Trio. Here is a link to them performing this song, little i.My thanks to Amelia Meath, Tobin Anderson, Chelsea Edgar and Serena Matt.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

Many of you got in touch with me after Isaac's story aired in the first week of What Class Are You. Isaac's on his way to Columbia in the fall, on a full scholarship, and you came up with amazing ideas for how you might be helpful, so I went back up to Newport to discuss it all with Isaac. And it turned into a really interesting conversation on a number of fronts. 

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the series on Rumble Strip.

What Class Are  You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share this series with Rumble Strip. 

What Class is a periodic series I produce for Vermont  Public. Thank you Vermont Public for allowing me to share this series with Rumble Strip. 

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for allowing me to share the stories with Rumble Strip.

What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for allowing me to share these stories with Rumble Strip.

Irfan Sehic and his family fled the war in Bosnia when he was seventeen, and landed in Barre, Vermont. Irfan did a lot of jobs when he got here, then went to college, and now runs an insurance company out of his house. I’ve interviewed Irfan for Rumble Strip before, about the war, which you can find on this site somewhere, but in this story, Irfan talks about the American class system as he sees it, starting with the middle class.This is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Thank you Vermont Public for letting me share the shows with Rumble Strip. 

Isaac lives in Newport, Vermont, which is as far north as you get in Vermont. It’s a town in the Northeast Kingdom with a beautiful lake. It’s also a town with a state prison and a lot of drugs and poverty.I met Isaac at a writers group in town, which meets once a week in town at the amazing Nevermore Bookstore. Isaac is eighteen. He loves to read and write and this spring he’s graduating form Lake Region High School. I asked if he’d be willing to talk with me about class, and he was.What Class Are You is a periodic series I make for Vermont Public, and I want to thank them for letting me share these stories on Rumble Strip.

Today is the first episode of What Class Are You, a periodic series I make for VP. This series started as an experiment a few years ago. I wanted to have conversations with people about the terrible cultural divides that keep growing in our country, without ending up in boring conversations about politics…so I drove around asking strangers ‘what class are you’, which is a kind of stupid and offensive question, but it turns out people have a lot to say…about money, education, opportunity…power. The very first shows I made about class I already ran on RS as a single show…you can find it on my website….but these next episodes in the series I’ll run one at a time, every couple days, for a few weeks. We’re going to start the series with my old friend Susan Randall, the private investigator I interview a lot for Rumble Strip. She talks about what it was like to grow up upper-middle class.