 need to ship those out to the next library speaking. So without further ado, I was going to say because you're saying to one of the people like, well, you have a two-point bill when given to me and two to me, I was mad at you. And he was there fairly early in the week, right? And that was the thing. No, thank you so much all for coming up. And thank you for inviting me to your lovely town. I've never been here much. I've been here to see it in a full light. I've been doing these community conversations around the state. I'm on the number, like, nine. And I have 14 more before November. But the only publisher book was something like eight years. And so you might as well enjoy it. They've been fascinating hearing about all these people's town. So the more of them I do, the more you enjoy it, the more I can trust them there to me. So at a certain point, after about half an hour, and I promise to bring them half an hour, I'm going to ask you to tell me about your community. Because that's really what my book, which I'm happy to hear that some of you might have read, is really trying to get at. And so by the end of this half hour, what I want to do is be able to, in this narrow picture, give you an understanding, perhaps, of why the guy who was appointed to be the chairman of the development commission, Vermont's Development Commission, which is the body that is responsible for promoting growth in Vermont, was a back-to-the-lander who hated growth and development of all kinds and wanted to prevent it, which really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But actually, in the context of 1950s, Vermont kind of made perfect sense. And that's the narrative in that same argument we'll get to in a minute. But the big picture is that when I set out on this project, the thing is I am really fortunate, because there's only two positions in Vermont on the university level of teaching Vermont history full-time. And I have one of them. So people in the Vermont history community know that you teach Vermont history like twice a year. And after a while, they're like, well, whatever you look, do you have anything to offer us? Do you have anything to tell us? And what I've been thinking about over the last bunch of years is the relationship between how Vermontians have thought about and acted upon and conceived the fiscal landscape and how they've thought about and acted upon and conceived the human landscape. And the relationship between those two things and the tension between them. And so in terms of where the story starts, and some of you may have read it, I want to give you an idea where I was coming from, but if you haven't, I want to just give you an idea where the book was going. The book starts really in the 1880s. And at that point, state leaders thought that the human landscape of rural Vermont was incline, was steppant, was dissipated, degenerate. That rural Vermont was full of Yankees who had married their cousins. They were the people who had lacked the ambition in order to actually go out in the world to do something useful. Or even worse, they were French Canadians. And I'm not joking about that. And the result had been that the fiscal landscape was ugly, it was stagnant, it was dull. In addition, it was going forward with huge speeds of progress. Rural Vermont just kept looking the same. And that was bad. And so, state leaders hatched a bunch of plans in order to try to regenerate rural Vermont. And one of them was hatched by this guy who named Alonzo Valentine, who ran a mill in Bennington that made weapons underwear. And he was an expert on rural Vermont, of course. And he knew just what it needed was sweets, was Scandinavians. Because you can take a new set of really tall, blonde-haired Protestants, you know, and you can place them down in rural Vermont and they will edge out the people who you don't want there. And then the result will be that rural Vermont will be regenerated, rural Vermont will end up breaking. And so he launched this program. It had nothing to do with the mandate of his position, which was this one-time commissioner of agriculture position that started in 1988. He just came up with it. And he publicized it to the newspapers that he was going to regenerate rural Vermont by bringing in sweets. And it became this big news story. And he kept referring to Vermont's farms as abandoned farms. And just gave people this picture of rural Vermont being desolate, like this horrible picture. And there are a lot of things that Vermonters found offensive about this. I mean, the one thing he described in rural Vermont was like a nightmarish place full of terrible people. And also, he was trying to bring in these sweets. And a lot of people say, why do you spend all this money bringing in sweets? Why don't you give them money to local boys? They could use the farms. They can't afford farms and they want to stay. But he pressed on. He brought a guy from Nebraska who was a speed who settled the colonies of sweets out in the Midwest. And the guy did a tour of Vermont and then he went off in the winter to Sweden. He went to his hometown. And in the meantime, this became really big news. It became big news around the country because it's kind of a news of the world thing. But one of the real byproducts of this was that the word got out that Vermont farms can be happy super cheap. That they're really cheap. Can you say that again? They're really cheap. They're really affordable. And he began to get these tons of laps, tons of letters around the country. And it was from people not requiring about whether they could have farms for farming or agriculture. They wanted them as second homes, as summer homes. And so he set up a mistake also. He publicized the ability of Vermont farms around the country. He gathered the first comprehensive list of Vermont farms for sale. First one ever to do that. And he established a network of contacts in lots of towns to whom he could forward these letters inquiring about second homes, about summer homes. And he actually did, then, in the summer of 1890, bring over something neighborhood of 55 streets, husbands, wives, children, mostly young families. And he broke them up into three columns, big news. People are following this progress. And he dropped them down into three columns, one in Burshire, one in Wilmington, and the one that I followed, which was supposed to be at Western. But he actually dropped them down just south of Weston, in a town called Land Grove, where there was a lumbering operation that was looking for people to work. Now, this is the question. Has anyone ever heard of Land Grove? You're pretty close to it. Not many people have, but you get up to, like, say, all these people like it. And I spent a lot of the time there last couple years. It's a wonderful work of the place. It was a poor town. It was a town that went bankrupt at one point and had to be built up by the state. It was a town that had about eight residents of the 47 tax payers, 23 of them were delinquent. And it was the wrong side of the tracks with this reputation. So he dropped them down in Land Grove. And then he went to the legislature to have this position renewed in that fall to one town, one vote, like a portion house, which represented mostly rural interest. We're like, absolutely not. This is stupid. So they canceled the program. And everyone at reading Vermont never talked about it again. But what they've done after Valentine was gone was that this of farms for sale, which they kept updating, and the contacts and the publicity. Now, there was a big boom in tourism in the 1890s. Big boom. That was really when Vermont as a vacation place took off. And it happened for a variety of reasons. But Donald Trump's program definitely did a huge amount to push it forward. And after his position, after he went back to Benton and began to make agreements on the wear all over again, he, that list of farms that he had, people didn't know what to do with it. So it fell into the hands of the border agriculture. And then for the next 20 years, suddenly, bizarrely, the border agriculture in Vermont was responsible for promoting Turks in Vermont. They didn't really want to, but they're the ones who had the list, and they kept publishing it. Until finally in 1911, this state established what was called the Bureau of Publicity, which nationwide, it was the first state agency devoted to promoting tourism. And after that, it was located in the Secretary of State's office. And they published all sorts of pamphlets promoting tourism and youth writing. They'd send them to you for free. And they began to do the business. And it was because there was this realization that Vermonters state leaders were having at this point, is that there was a 19th century economy. And it was dependent on small dairy farms, extractive industries, lumbering, and pouring, and small manufacturing firms. And it was clear at that point that all three of those Secretary of State economy were inclined. And what was going to replace it? What? Socket, tourism. Yeah. And it was dawning. And if you follow this story through it in the 1920s, what becomes particularly amazing to me is the extent to which the Board of Academic Bureau of Publicity, its leaders, felt happy, overjoyed about the increasing availability of farms for sale farms. And they would do studies. And they would say, in these five towns in 1900, there were only four farms for sale. But now there's 60. Isn't it great? And the answer is, well, not if you've lost that farm. I mean, every farm that's lost is a tragedy for some family. For parents who thought they would hand that farm down to their kids, and for kids who thought one day they would keep multi-generational farms going. But it's really telling us that there's essentially no recognition of that on the part of the Bureau of Publicity. And what the Bureau of Publicity was selling was the scenic landscape, not the human one. It was the scenic one. And what they would say to Vermont is America, Switzerland, vacation land. They kept talking about Vermont's cushiony gravel roads. Whatever that is, cushiony gravel roads. And if you don't think about what Vermont's roads were like in the 1920s, they were disastrous, but. And meanwhile, the Swedes, who settled land growth, at first, they flourished the colony. In 1900, there were 32 parents and children among these five families that lived there. And if you've walked through the North Carolina road, you would have heard Swedish spoken. And some of these kids who were born in America, all their lives, because I ain't a few descendants, they spoke the Swedish actions, because they grew up in this country. And that's the thing is that they intermarried with local families. I'm sure a lot of Valentine would have been horrified to know how many of them married with people of French, Canadian heritage. It's exactly the opposite of what Vermont and. Oh, and actually, Jenny Westy, married with her cousin Julius Westy, you know. I mean, that was the thing is that they became part of the community in which they were placed. They became indistinguishable from the other people. They inserted themselves into these really strong communities. And the thing about these communities, like any strong community, is that they're not physical. They're not something you can touch. They're building shared experiences. And that's what communities are. It's their long-term shared experiences by people. And that's what forms really strong communities. And, but the Board of Agriculture, if anything, the Europe of Listy, was not really selling that doll in 1929. And it's at that point in 1929, that Sam Hartman arrived on the scene. And he was from New York City, from Elizabeth, New Jersey. His dad sold insurance. So therefore, he was going to sell insurance. It was the life that was planned by him. He was, in World War I, served in trenches and had sort of a really big awakening there. So he came back and he worked in insurance. And he hated it because it's all fake experiences. It's all fake relationships with people, country clubs and cocktail parties. What he wanted was a real life, a personal life. A thing where you can do things with your hands. And the one thing that he found that he really liked doing in New Jersey was buying related houses, fixing them up and selling them off, flipping houses. And so, the best thing that could happen to him in 1926 was that his dad died. So he was like, great. And so he then began to pile up what his life would be. And he decided that he was going to move to Romero. And while driving with his wife, they ended up in Peru, Vermont, at Fairleigh, France. And went down into Langlow because they were told that was the best place to buy cheese. Arriving in the only village in Langlow and of the seven houses and two barns in the village, there was one occupied house. All the others were abandoned. And he was like, how much to buy up the whole village? And that said $4,000. So he bought the village. In early October, 1929. And then the stock market collapsed. And he had nothing left of this village. So they moved up there. And he absolutely loved it. And his idea from the beginning was to renovate these houses and turn them into vacation houses. And he wrote, just a little bit later, he wrote, the thing that endeared Vermont to Mamie and me was the character of her citizens. These were unique human beings, each with his own special stamp, his peculiarities, his crotchets, and his independent individualism. These were people, not stereotypes. Some were peculiar to others, but thank the good Lord, all of them were peculiar. He loved the people in Langlow because they lived the real meaningful lives he was looking for and he was immersed in something. If you want to have food, you grow it yourself. If you want it, if you need the tools, well, then you start foraging, you make it yourself. If you want good schools for your kids, you get involved in the school, make it better. And most of all, if you want to have good governance, if you want to have good politics in your town and Vermont back then had really meaningful politics in the town level, you get engaged in town politics. And he saw that this was the thing. The closer the machinery of government is to the people, the more meaning it has and the more active the participation in the responsibilities of governing the better the citizen. For these reasons, living in the country or in a small world community brings one good better citizenship, good better citizenship. And so in the years that came after that, from 1930 on, he got increasingly involved in the YD Circle of Friends. He became very close friends with Scott Mearn, who was the back of the guy who lived with us. Yeah, who lived, they were really the complete opposites, what's that? It's like Alan and Scott. Alan and Scott, who lived in Jamaica, right next door. He got to know, I mean, a fresh store. He helped to found the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and became its president for like 25 years. He widened the Circle of Friends all the while when he was fixing up his house and selling it to the kind of people that he really wanted to live in there. Artists, musicians, architects. And most of that come to you as those kinds of people. And by the, in 1930s, the village of L.A. wrote in the summer, at least three months out of the year, was this thriving movement place. But then this horrible threat came to his way of life and it was called the Green Mountain Parade, which was this road they were gonna build right through the middle of the state, and it was gonna go right past L.A. Road and ruin his way of life. And so he got himself elected to state legislature in order to help fight it, which isn't hard because there was only like 30 people in town who were registered to vote and most of them in order to serve, who really had no interest in voting. But that was fine, that was the cool thing about it, was that the legislature was dominated by people from towns of land. And every town had a legislature. Newtown had a legislature. Landlord with 80 residents had the same numbers brought. Which was a thing. It depended on how many of you were from, whether you thought that was a good idea or not. So your man, and graphically more and more important in the legislature, he became a member, the chairman of the Committee on Conservation and Development, which is just his name alone, Conservation and Development, does give you an idea about the paradox that mom was already realizing. And he began a, really a single hand he began to battle to what Dan Billboards in Vermont. He introduced the legislation to found the natural, the water resources board. He became hugely in the forestry issue. So he became very involved in conservation as an environmentalist. And this is very important. And one of the things about his generation of people, he became very close to the authority from Fisher, other people is that they went beyond just the physical landscape as the appeal. It was the way of life. The small town, the interpersonal relationships, the involvement in government, that was the great appeal that Vermont had. And so he did all these actions in order to try to save the Vermont that he'd come to love so much. But of course, when he was speaking about trying to preserve Vermont, he was really speaking about changing. He was just, it wasn't, he wanted to keep it the same way it was. He wanted to make it probably what he thought it should look like, which is fine. But what he wanted to look like was that the important things that had to be made, the way of life was dependent on the meaning on a small scale. That was the thing about it. So in 1939, Governor Aiken appointed him to the Development Commission. And he was one, there was a chairman, he was one of the other four members. And he became very involved in promoting skiing as a, I mean, every time I had a ski pass at Stel and I always tried to put my bags down and went to the fireplace that says, has his name on it, Sam Aiken in the Manseh Lodge. He, you know, he actually worked at Big Brown. He installed, personally installed the first chairlift there and then took tickets and things like this. He never became rich. He measured the value just like another, another way. And he became, finally in 1947, the new governor, his name was Gibson, decided that he didn't like the Development Commission the way it was. So he fired four members of the board. The only one he kept was Aiken and he put Aiken as the chair. So now, Sam Aiken bunched himself into trying to do the work of the Development Commission that was trying to sell Vermont as having a very uniquely rural way of life. And there was a book that came out in 1948 which was written by a guy named Earl Newton who at the time was president of the Vermont Historical Society. It's called The Vermont Story. And he said this about Sam Aiken. No booster, Sam Aiken first served as a member of the Vermont Development Commission and in 1947 became its chair. Yet he has no vast plans to lure great industries into the state nor promote a great rate of inscriminent tourist travel. And he said, well, what kind of a development commissioner doesn't want industries in the state? You know, it just kind of sounds like something that the government commissioner knew. But that wasn't what he thought Vermont should be. He didn't think that's what his appeal was. He did not want to see Vermont destroyed. And when they say to promote a great rate of indiscriminate tourist travel, people in the state like him often held other places as examples of how tourists can go wrong. Cape Cod, Florida, which are like sea. Vermont would attract a small number of really elite tourists. People like St. Clair Lewis, you know, people who made their living with their grades and not their parents. And if this has really class-driven view, well, yeah, it was, it certainly was. But that's what they wanted. They thought there was such a thing as too much tourism, too much development. And these are the things that might destroy Vermont. And so, you know, because what makes Vermont special is that people have a chance to participate in the affairs of their community. It must exist on a small scale. Now, the sound is in terrible black, and I can repeat what's said afterwards. But I would like to show you three clips from a movie that was made in 1949 by the Development Commission under the direction of Sam Ogden that were meant to promote the state. He commissioned these movies and was intimately involved in the making of them. And this is Vermont Development Circuit, 1949. So I'll say it's pretty concrete. Vermont, to those who named it, meant a land of friendly green mountains. A land perhaps not easy, but rewarding in its response to those who loved and wanted and made the term Vermont-er a symbol of resourceful and contented independence. To the many who visit Vermont today, its meanings are as varied as their expectations and the pleasures it affords are by no means always measured in money. The waters are open to holiday makers with yachts. They're open to those who like to dive and swim and bask on the hundreds of beaches. Recreation may be as active or as restful as the age and disposition of vacationers may prefer. Although there is ample evidence that in Vermont, years seem to do little to a beta youth possessed in living. Some visitors enjoy the facilities of family resort centers. While others choose the more rural Vermont of apple blossoms signaling spring and hillside orchids. Some prefer summer horseback trips over miles of little traveled roads and woodland trails. Trails which turned to red and gold when autumn shimmers northward through the mountains. And of course, there are the famous mountain slopes where snow lies crisp and deep throughout the winter. What can Vermont mean to you? Well, if you're an artist like William Chaldec, it will mean an infinite variety of subjects for your brush and canvas. To Sam Ogden, it has meant the creative satisfaction of restoring a once abandoned community to vigorous light largely by the work of his own hands. Okay, so three things about this. One, if I was the chair of the government commission and I was just personally one of you for this movie, I would totally want to be in it. I would be like, well, you can't. I want to be in it, you know. Two, nothing sets development on the state like people playing croquet. And three, nothing that involves yachts is not measured in money. Did you hear that one? But I mean, you get the idea though about what they're talking about. I mean, this is not like Vermont's moving forward. Look out, New Hampshire, Vermont's gonna, you know, it's very much so in a specific way with life, which they increasingly are selling. There's a lot of tourism. There's a big deal with Norman Rockwell near the end. And Vermont will mean to you as it has to mean a place to visit, a place to work, and a place to live. It will mean the church on the common or perhaps on the hill. And above all, it will mean a community which is home. And the thing that's really difficult about it that these people face will probably be recognized, I think well known, is that the community isn't the church, it's not the houses, it's the people. And if you take a place like Van Gogh, and I'm not mean to give Sam off in a hard time, but he loved the people who were there when he arrived. And he wanted to turn it into a, he wanted to bring in the people who he thought would benefit from this amazing way of life. Musicians like Nathan Milstein and Vladimir Horowitz used to be regular people who stayed there. And he wanted to, he loved the people who were there, he wanted to bring in people and he wanted to stay the same size. Something has to give, you can. And he loved the landscape when he arrived, which was a crazy landscape. And by the time you get to the 1950s, when there was almost no one left in town except for Sam Ogden's friends, it's a different landscape. It's a recreational landscape. It's a vacation landscape. It's not a working landscape anymore. And meanwhile, the children of the original 1890 Swedes, had, some of them had tried to claim it to hang on in Landgrove and through the 1940s. But the only evidence of the Swedes at that point was two of the original, a married couple, Axel Nielsen and his wife, Hilma, who were now in those 80s. But otherwise, none of the Swedes were left. The children had come to White River Church, Broward, Aurora. They worked in the machine tool industry in Springfield, Rutland, Ireland. They moved to the place where their jobs were. And the jobs they had were sign painters and working in lumber yards and driving cars, you know. What was left for him in Landgrove? There was nothing for him there. And Sam Ogden didn't want to drive him away, but he didn't want it to grow and he wanted new people there and something had to give. Now, interest first through this movie is this running story, it's like four different episodes, of this guy who is this really mean-spirited real estate agent and this young couple from Connecticut come up and they want to buy a Vermont house in Luther, Vermont. And he puts them through all these humiliating exercises to know whether or not they actually will sell them in the house or not. But here's the actual end of the movie because it's the conclusion. You know, sometimes folks call me crotchety and stubborn. Yes, they do, but the way I feel about it, this isn't the big town and we don't have room for those that don't fit in. I think it's a lot weird going on there. Number one, was it a thing for a month before I got here 25 years ago where like real estate agents decided to get to live in a town and that they would make a gatekeeper on a human landscape? And, but, I mean, for a development commission, clearly you'd say some people don't fit in. I tell you, it's not, it doesn't fit in. Black people don't, gate people don't. Catholics don't need to Catholic. You know what I'm saying? I mean, clearly, like what kind of development commission is like, well, we want these people don't, which excludes, we want white Protestant middle class people in school. And, I mean, one thing also, the biggest thing that jumps out about this, to me, and, you know, this home. It will lead up the way that people should be able to do it. Yes, we do. What are the chances that these two kids will be living in this town after they turn 18? And it would be super hypocritical of me to complain too much about heterosexual families of four living in small Vermont towns and buying houses, since that's what I did. And my kids, they loved Vermont when they were six, but I have a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old and they can't leave, oh my God. They're dying to leave. And that's fine, because Vermont constantly needs an influx of new people. And we were desperate for new people right now, for sure. But you need to also cultivate the persistence in the human landscape, because what makes Danville, probably Rochester, and other places, a real community is multi-generational people and who have a sense of the town's history and who have inter-familiar relationships that go back and have shared experiences and know the town's history and not the history like when it was founded, the history of life. You see that tree? There was a dog in that tree. I don't know how he got up there. He fell out and landed on that tiny grandmother making grandfather. That's history. And it's, and we want a ton of benefits from that. And so you need to have that sense of balance. And Sam Hartley, that brought, caught up in all these paradoxes as he moved through life. He thought that small towns, way of life was the best possible way of living. And in order to save that, he became involved in increasingly large bureaucracies. He designed many of them and served many of the other ones that increasingly consolidated power and artillery. And one of the things he really wanted in the 1960s was a statewide-led use law. And you could not get a statewide-led use law through the old one-time law of legislature. And then in 1965, there'd be a portion of the legislature and a couple years later Sam Hartley got the Act 250 that he always wanted. And he thought that the reapportioning of the legislature was the worst thing that had ever happened in the state. And you can't have both. And this is the problem, is Vermont increasingly became trapped in the 20th century between the appeal of two different things. We want preservation, but we want development. We want tradition, but we want progress. We, in order to state the same, we need to be increasingly creative. And the subtitle of my book is about the paradox of Vermont in the 20th century and increasingly, it can be summed up very easily. The paradox in the 20th century of Vermont that came around to was that making Vermont look the same takes a lot of work. Keeping Vermont natural takes a lot of work. It takes them to learn some expertise in increasingly large bureaucracies and people being told what to do with their land and the decline of small towns is a play with the important forces. But that's necessary in order to save a lot of other things that Vermont is really about. And that's the central problem. And so I wrote this book, a first book I wrote, which is not a new or near as good as I've ever written. And it came out in 2006, it's about the 19th century. And it's about team A and team B. It's about the urban people and the rural people and how they deal with each other, right? The conflict between team A and team B. In the 20th century, that's not accurate. In the 20th century, the conflict isn't between people, it's within people. And because everyone in Vermont is attracted to, the attractions are conflicting. And the attractions are conflicting within us. And so this is where we found ourselves, obviously in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present. And that is sort of my understanding of the way that we go through the 20th century. The challenge is to have a creative, growing human landscape while also retaining a really strong sense of community, which is the very thing that people move here for. And if too many people move here, they destroy everything they're searching for. And so this becomes the internal problem that Vermont has. And I think we do a much better job in 2019 than we did in the 1880s of having respect for persistence in human landscape, which is so important to have a strong community. I'd like to think we do a much better job because they say a really horrible job at the beginning of the story. But I'm really interested in what you have to say. I guess the last thing I'll say is, I did a series of five of these programs around the state with the state librarian, Joy, and with Amanda from the first door. Sorry, they always insisted we had to sit in a circle to discuss our community. I think that's a lot of work, but I mean, at this point I really want to hear about your community and how good a job you think you're doing. And where have you been and where you think you're going as far as making it a town that changes in productive ways but still retains the best parts of the way of life that made it a place to be one of the first ones? You know? So tell me about Rochester. Yeah, please. We forestalled a lot of the problems that have been described here by allowing the second home development to happen 20 or 30 years ago. We built it, which boosted our grandness about two years ago at the end of the year. Many years after, it shouldn't happen because of all of the chasing money, the second homes, our tax and the hybrid, and first homes and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We only reevaluate value real estate every so often and new homes that get built are which get higher than the oldest homes with the oldest people in the name. But this town has to face all of the problems that you're describing, even though it looks from the outside like a thriving compact little village, it's dissolving, it's disappearing slowly. And when a house gets sold, like that real estate you've got, it has to be sold so that it can actually live in it. Yeah. And that doesn't always come up for a few weeks or so. And now, like the people in the home development, they get to rent it out easily with the European Union ever before. I understand there's like dozens of Airbnb listings. They're not just their own. It means that there are people in those houses, otherwise in the houses, but they're not citizens. Never have been. The point about the effect of the community of a town become too overburdened with second homes became a really big problem in some places by the 1920s. Dorsey, because it was so close to land growth, was a great interest to me. This woman, Zephyne Confery, who was from there, wrote an article and she said, the effect of the fiscal landscape is terrible because you have farms that turn into pleasure. Landscape may occur at once, but it's the human landscape. And also the town, you walk down the street in the winter and all the houses are dark and it's very dark before voting. So the problem is the human landscape. I mean, how many of the back roads can you go to in order to borrow from the sugar? Would you do that? She said, you don't have to people. And they don't want to talk to you. And the thing about closing schools was a real big thing. Like, you know, when the big wave of consolidation and I was going off and back and you know, on the other hand, on one side was, well, you know, we want to have the kind of high schools that can prepare people to leave and be really successful in the outside world. And there are a lot of people like, well, we don't want to leave. We don't want to have school. And you say it's overdue. I appreciate the problem, it's overdue. I don't know if Daniel's heading that direction, but the high school is so central to the community. Like, people go out to see the basketball games and when you tell you the basketball, it's terrible. I grew up in Philadelphia. I mean, I played good high school basketball, but it doesn't matter, you know? So, I mean, that's a really hard thing is to go to school. That's historically, you know, in the case. Yeah. Actually, my son was the last writer of the high school and I found it very sad. And now this building has to work at school. This building is like a very sad building because it's not going to be reused. You know, the ceiling is falling out because it is not heated enough. So, it's going to be an eyesore and the money has to be put in to maintain it. And plus, we don't see any young people anymore. So, when you were talking about different generations, we stopped almost having this. Like, we are gradually losing young people because they, by the time they come back from Middlebury, you know, so they have been bused all over. Middlebury, Sharon, you know? And South Royaltown, by the time they come back, it's six, seven o'clock at night. You don't see them. And they don't develop that community. We talked about, I've had, you know, a schoolboy for many years and when we first started talking about closing high schools, it's like, oh, the kids will still be socializing. That's not true because they, naturally, they have their own friends, you know, in the new schools and they have no time to socialize with their old friends when they come home so late and on weekends they have games over there, you know, but it's a mountain. So there's nothing left in my son who graduated, like I can relate to what you said. He graduated as the last graduating class part of it. And yeah, he's in Boston College. And he just couldn't wait to, but he's the only one, because we moved here from Massachusetts, he's the only one who was born here and my other kids were in Massachusetts and so they left Bud, D.C., and all of a sudden. But I thought he would be the one and maybe the only one would say no, because he's not mine, there's nobody left. I mean, besides, we want them to go, I believe that we need to have the kids go out to different cities and to colleges and stuff and bring that experience here. But why would they come back? I mean, there's no jobs. There's nothing to come back to. And that's what's lacking, because my son who is in D.C., he's working for the government, and he's like, there's nothing here for me, like he's working for the Department of Defense. And yes, it's fun to come home for a long weekend, vacation, or Christmas, but that's it. I don't know if I was supposed to talk about every question. But I have two points about this one, number one, is that I noticed this dynamic in my kids in kindergarten at Dandle, is that you can look around, once you know the kids, and it's not very long, and you can figure out in kindergarten which ones are gonna stay after the graduation. You know that? Yeah. And the other thing is that I mean to say there's only nice things about Lambert, and Lambert was kind of like in some ways like a wonderful place, and in other ways it's as cautionary to tell everything that can go wrong. And you know Lambert, right? There's one thing that Lambert, there's no kids. There's no kids. Yeah. There's no middle-class, there's no poor people, there's no middle-class people, there's no young families in Lambert. Well, Lambert will work for you both for painting of your own. They don't want people to drive through town. I'm sure. I mean, it's kind of like a secret. Sometimes I've told other people that Lambert will do this, they don't know. If my book appreciably increases traffic from town, they're gonna hit like that, seriously. But there's no kids there. And that is a real problem anyway. Yeah, please. Yeah. So just to find out there's a Rochester population that's around a lot of people and it's aging and shrinking a lot. That's another small town in Vermont. And we're all Americans. So there have been recently the past year a number of community conversations around what we want Rochester to be, what we want to preserve, what needs to change. I think what we're seeing and saying is a lot of what you were describing. There's a tension between, you want to keep the same, but the other state is saying you have to change. Is the change okay or not? So we have this dilemma to deal with it. And we have a period I'll get how best to resolve it, but there have been some very strong statements about we don't want to be like a green speeder. We want to be a real town. It's a real working town. Yes, it has some retirees and some second home owners, but it's a real town too. And when the ski resorts built all the condos out of the mountainside, for those of us who think they might, that was a good thing. I think the helpers of Rochester is a real town. So we're facing a lot of the same questions. But what we've also learned is that there are in some of the towns in central Vermont, people in their 30s are coming back to small towns because it's a choice of the way of life. Young people go away to the big city and have the big city experience, but some not all. And maybe even people who never lived in Vermont because they are seeking a real life experience because of the kind of community interactions you described. It's a great history of space. It's a great history of space. And it's a whole lifestyle. To the age of like 12, I don't know. And it's a significant great because then, but then again, what, you know, if I had, we moved here, but had I known that there's no high school, I would never choose Rochester because I was like, okay, my kid will go to school for six years and then off, you know, so do we need to move because I'm not going to go to his or her games like our practices like travel 40 minutes or longer in the winter time. I'm sorry. As a young person a long time ago, I moved to Vermont for a particular reason because I already had the understanding about the climate emergency. And I think it's really important we have high school. I'm not too worried that we aren't going to reopen the high school because actually today in California, the power company has turned off the power for a few days because of forest fires. You're looking at large populations stressing about a new world that we're living in. And I think in this conversation and so on, we have to start paying attention that in a global situation, Vermont's climate is livable. Yes, definitely. And I'm shocked that Phil Scott started giving people money to come to the state because they're gonna be coming. You know, you start having major problems with grid systems. So what happened in the past that you spoke about was actually setting a foundation for what we're gonna be dealing with now because being able to maintain off the grid is a critical issue. Growing foods is a critical issue. And by the way, in Vermont, we do have a desert most of the year. And actually for a lot of people, I'm in an agriculture grid. And the situation is it's difficult to grow now. It's not the same as it was 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, we're finding it harder to grow food. So if these are real issues, we should be looking at them seriously and how we may be in a situation of dealing with, where are we gonna put anybody? Yeah, this comes up, the climate refugees as a bunch of my talks, for sure. And we should really work out those discussions with docs. And it's always the same thing that's been the case in Vermont for like a hundred years which is, well, hey, both it's fine, but it has to be done right. There's a certain way of doing growth that's the right way, and we don't exactly know what it is, but we know what it's all about. It's one tank of gas from New York City. Yeah, we don't want you to go through the way that just spoils the physical work you've been asking. You know? Yeah, please. So, I don't think much of what you're hearing, but I'm in particular for this one. I feel like Vermont did a modernized, and that was a good thing. And now we're in this kind of post-modern, where because of, we can't sustain our lifestyle, that but mostly lifestyle can now be sustainable. And we're a model for really the small town, living, local, being stopped. Both of you, we look at stop driving too much. And we're a great infrastructure. Rochester is a great model of infrastructure. I actually was part of an international think tank about if the world ended in how we were going to five projects, one of them was studying the style and being sustainable. And it always has been. It's very hard. So during the 30s, when there was a depression, the modeling noticed it was happening because it's always been hard. Yes, we've never been at modernized, and you've never had the thing of the crop kind of thing, but we're hardworking, and we're very sustainable, and we do things ourselves. I think those qualities are what bring people here. And farming in England has grown, but the young people are interested in farming. So I do see that it's going to be growing. I think we're really lower now, but I think if we can see ourselves as a model and market that, that's about designing how we want to grow, but we want to grow so we want to sustain our values. And that's how I've always looked at the model. The model has got all the world values, but also the ambition and thinking. And we're all thinking about world values. That's sustainable model that should be something that other people model. I have a choice. Yeah, instead of mowing down houses, it's more like take those houses and make them multi-family houses, or the redesign that we have, and having some design. New York City holds, New York City holds 16 million people during the workday, and 9 million live there. And it doesn't because it's designed as an infrastructure. Design is good. So being prepared, not being blindsided by what's happening and where designing is a good idea. So I think that's the whole idea of what we're talking about, the individual in Rochester. It's just been us talking about what we want to preserve, what we want to mow. Who are we? That's all good stuff. I'm glad you think you're showing a lot of your mystic. I mean, I've heard a variety. Not everyone is a lot of mystic. Well, you know, we're in a block, so you can be half full or half empty. It's your total person, you know, adding a little bit of it. Yeah. I moved 85, which is, I wouldn't want to live any other place but the Mott. Because I was born in the Bronte, Alaska. And the air here is much cleaner than the air in New York or the other place that I lived in, Tucson, Arizona. Due to the weather, the way the weather changes, it helps me to breathe. The warmth in the summertime, I don't have problems with my rheumatoid arthritis or my fibromyalgia. No thing that I don't like in the gold-ron pop of all. But there's nothing you could do about it. That grows everywhere. But I would never move out of the state of Ramon. I'd love it. You know, they have the most wonderful source of maple syrup, so you can't find that in any other states, in the United States, where they make it the way they make it here. And people love it. I have given it as a gift at Christmastime to my families that are in New York. I have a, you know, I've lived in Connecticut. I got a passport in British Columbia on the West Coast. And everybody said that if they could move, they would move here just to be the beauty of how the season's changed. Yeah. It's a very peaceful way of life. Yeah. Which is dependent on, if you have a small scale, you know. Yeah, but I mean, not the overwhelming, it's not the overwhelmed, but I mean, it's just, you know, why destroy something that's so beautiful? Yeah. By building great big buildings and big factories that's still smoking. Well, I think a lot of people would say the problem is that we are headed towards non-sustainable. It's like, you know, we had a generation of, a large cohort who moved here in the 60s through the 1980s and 70s. And those people had moved mostly out of the tax-paying bracket to the tax, you know, to meeting health care and other things. And we have so few children and that we don't have to, looking forward, you know, it's like unsustainable. We need to have a tax base. We need more people in there. There's very supportive people earning. Because what's going to happen to our roads? Who's going to pay for the bridges, you know. So, like demographically speaking, I mean, there's a lot of people who have some serious concerns about Vermont sustainability, you know. Yeah, because it is wonderful. It almost sounds like utopia. Yeah, this is maple syrup and beautiful trees and I all love it too, like we all love it. But, you know, it's like for people who need to make a living other than like, you know, being already retired or, yes, a lot of people move here and they can work out of home. But that's a limited number of people, you know. They can like, you know, software engineers or something like that. But that's a small percentage. But, you know, other than that, it's like when I moved here, it's like, okay, what do I do? I mean, in Boston, in Massachusetts, I worked as an accountant. And I was like, okay, we're small children. Do I want to travel all the way to Whitewood Rejunction, you know, to get a job or anywhere over the mountain? It's here, like Irene proved to us that it's like we are stuck. Something happens, we are stuck. Yes, we are stuck, you can grow our vegetables. But if we want to attract still middle-class and middle-aged people or young people or families, I mean, it's kind of, you know, it's not possible as the way I see it because it's like, okay, I want to be, I want to volunteer in my child's school, but I can't if I'm like working in Middlebury and I cannot come back for his practice because I'm too far away or if he's sick or something. It's just the distances, we've improved that the distances are so overwhelming. And yeah, I love it too, but, you know, I understand my son would not work here because he could move back here because he couldn't support himself. Even when you talk about taxes, but the taxes are going up. So when we both hear from his assistant, oh yeah, for that money we'll just buy out the house and the pond, you know, we'll get 20 years of land. It's like, but then our taxes here right now, like almost as high as our friends in Massachusetts, so it's- It's a demographic improvement, I mean, some of the crazy people catch us as a team timer, like who's gonna pay for the schools and then- Yes, who's going to pay for those taxes? I'm not going to pay for the people, me, I think. I think, well, what kind of people? I don't know, who are they? Well, look, look, what's in here? I can't really control who comes and not who doesn't come, but this guy has like 2,500 people, if we had 5,000 people, we'd have more stores, we'd have more jobs, you know, and I think that we, Bill Biderman did this whole work, we're gonna be in 2020, almost in 2020, but back then when we were looking at it, researching what we had, we had 200 small businesses back then. That started with people who came here in needs, but they kind of got older and tired and then our small businesses have actually declined. If we had a new way for people who started wanting to rip businesses, we'd have to need more shops, we'd need more this and that, and in the idea of being local is that we'd have more shops that we didn't have the goal that we're not going to. If you had more people, you could just stay here and it'd be okay, and it'd be a job. Yeah, but there's shops, there's like places that are available for rent, yeah, yeah, I don't think. But the people that come here, they usually have music that they wanted to fill in. You guys, this is what the conversation is about here. I love the website, it makes it real, it makes it real, but the whole flip side, the whole flip side, one is if the population is too large to use something in terms of scale, and the interaction occurs in 1,100 people into the market, I think it's twice or two times that, it's gonna change it, maybe that's okay, but I think that's the record now, that proportional change is gonna make it in terms of the interaction. The other thing is infrastructure required for growth, whether it's a sewer system, water system, road systems, all that, no, it's a step function, you can only go so long that you have to step up and invest more in infrastructure. And that's okay too, but I think what I'm saying is that if you recognize it's a very complex question and there are a lot of things that you consider. We can double the triple of population because it's probably not going to be another thing. It's going to get better, absolutely. But everywhere in America, people are getting used to food. Even out, instead of this, oranges in August and strawberries in January, they're still a respected norm who enjoy what's called slow food, nearby, slowly, it takes a while, but it's enjoyed or it's terroir. And I think people would like slow living as well, some of them, and that's what Vermont has to offer. I don't think we can advertise Vermont as a place we can have it all. I don't think we're ever going to have it all. I think people expect to have it all. I'm a little disturbed with this last mile connectivity. We still don't have last mile electricity in Vermont, in Rochester, but we have to have last mile, because it enables people to live isolated lives in isolated settings. When in fact, the future of a place like Rochester is a bigger village, a more populous village, not small. Yeah, absolutely. Which has to do with the Vermont Village, which you can see the country's on all sides, has it with second presidents, it goes back to here in America. When you're speaking about small scale, one of the things about these many conversations people bring up is the local food movement and the arts markets and things like that. And this is a wonderful, and the one concern I have for that is that things that are going well with these arts markets, they're expensive and a lot of people can't afford it. And so Vermont has a long history, like a century one history of engineering in the landscape. It's policies in favor of one's own people and not another. It's generally speaking, been well made. I mean, you need to have to be a democratic society. That's correct. Vermont's farmers can't sustain a farm in competition with Midwestern farmers who are mining the top soil. That's just not possible. The cornflakes are always gonna be cheaper than the corn in the cob. They just stop. Those of us that buy corn for 50 cents a year recognize that. And sometimes, that's who he was, and he could have a medium in his hand slowly. That's gonna get so expensive to get decent meat, meat that you can safely eat that people will eat a lot less of it. We're an organic beef town, so I like to think. We have three farm organizations. We all have a farm in town. We have lots of plants, and we have lots of people with access to local food. So we're lucky. But he has to mark that as, you know, far away. You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? The people who ate it would be less. The people who make, who grow beef locally can't sell it entirely locally. Oh, I know that, I know that. But there's some people that have their own, own tape, their own cow, their own gardeners. I mean, that's, I think that's, if you get it, one collect it. So the state is recognizing that it has to create exceptions for the small, beautiful thing. You know, state made a terrible mistake when they said that, well, all of the ceilings in our classroom have to be 10 feet high. Or we have to close the ice cream and build a new one. 30 years ago, 40 years or whatever it was. Because our ceilings weren't high enough. And when I went into business with a bed and breakfast, the fire marfa came and said that I had to build a separate additional stairway that went from the second floor directly to the outside. And it took us five years to get the state to agree that it was going to be okay for people, in case of fire, to open a window and go out on the porch if I put a ladder. These things do tend to go out of the way. Do you want to give you a one-state answer? Well, I'm probably the person that's been here longer than any of you. But it's the first time I've been here. I read about, I studied about Vermont when I was in college. And believe me, it was horrible because they were telling how the amounts were stripped by the paper companies and the environment was in terrible shape. And then I finally came here in the first time it was 1946 and took for a visit. But this was up into the non-colon. Now the houses all up there had been fires when you were talking about women practicing. And they were sold to college professors, music. Joe Shankman's family, fine musicians, classical musicians came here. This is their summer home. And then they retired and they would stay here, you know, or something. And, but we came back to a house in the hall where my husband's family had grown up from generations. And it was interesting because for one thing just going to Vermont, you know, all my cousins and everybody said I came from the ocean down in Massachusetts. And what are you going up there to be a hick? What are you doing but doing such a dumb thing to go up there and be a hick? You know, that was exactly what they said. Gonna be a hick. So when we get up there, Don is the one who has generations that went back and got my husband. And because some of the neighbors, farmers, I was some damn city person that came up here. I grew up on a farm on the coast of Massachusetts. And anyway, I noticed that there was a big difference between the village and the hills outside of town. If you lived in town, you were a townman. And even now I just came down to live at the park house and somebody said, oh, now you're a townman. And they said that way back when I came down for a while and lived in the condo for three years, you know. And I said, well, what was I before? You know, a hick, you know, what was I, a hillbilly? You know, what did they think? But there was definitely a difference. But I can see how it went back because the people who originally lived in these houses outside of town, up in the mountain, they only could come down to the village in Saturday night and do their shopping. I said, well, they didn't come down to this shopping room. They never came down any other time. And then, not only that, but the high school, there were all the little village schools. There were how many up there in the hollow? I think there were eight, you know. And just that one area because, and each one would have a couple of families in it. And anyway, to go to the high school, they, this was a problem. How did they get their kids to the high school? So our place, actually, is because it got abandoned so they could get the kids to high school, they moved into the village. And it came up to sale, you know. And they came to see my husband's mother who always came back in the summer and stayed with guests, with friends and anything, you know, because this is where they went to school. So they came back for the old girls picnic, what do they call it, I don't know. They didn't have a union of the class. They had the old girls picnic. If you graduate from the school, they had a big picnic every year for all the girls that they graduated from Rochester. So that was, and Don's grandmother had to come back every year to be a mid-stale summer and work on the farm with the Harbees and do things, you know. But I always stayed up there on the hill. And so, and then I noticed there was a big competition between the farmers on the hill and the farmers on the valley. It was the Microsoft and the McCoy, so it was huge. Definitely, you know. And I just couldn't get over this difference between whether you are a hillbilly or a townie, you know. And... Have you resized to have a police officer involved? What? Have you resized to have a police officer involved over those 62 years? Oh, I, you know, I've been very understanding of it. But just your talk made me, it was interesting because now I can see how they felt about me, you know. I've been trying to understand it, but now I can, I can see, you know, these other places. And then it was recently at a memorial for one of the families that up there on the hill were professors, you know. Family had kept the place going for a few generations. And somebody said at the memorial, well, you know, the Rick Shanks and so on and so on. They listed us in with all the other professors and they, you know, when we were the ones that came back with the roots, you know, but nobody else had. You know, it was just interesting. But when I came back also, I mean, when I came here to live around in 63, actually we came up here on a honeymoon and it was in the 40s. And Don had to walk me all around the hollow to see all the old neighbors that were still there, you know, on the farm and introduce his wife, you know. Well, they had just got electricity. They were all excited to show me their toaster or their refrigerator or something, but they didn't get power on the hill until 1948. There wasn't a cement, there wasn't a paved road through Vermont until Route 119, 35 or 32. It was all narrow roads, you know. So who would come here? It was too hard to get into Rochester. They were having Vermont. They protected it. And, but what changed, I mean, the exciting thing to me is if I read about in college about how they were stripping the mountains and the environment was so badly treated, look what it is now. So why should we worry? If we want things to change, if we, our heart is with it, we're open, it's going to happen. Now the interesting thing we can say about the restaurant, I haven't been into Sandys or to the cafe without people saying, I met people in Sandys that had come all the way from her mother was visiting from Alaska. She lived in Connecticut. And she, I can't remember her brother, to come and eat at Sandys drove all the way. I met them there and they said something about, I said, would you want to see the view? Come home with me and I'll take you to the hall of, you know, the view was, and they were just thrilled. But then my son tells me and he's in New Hampshire. He said he's driven up to several times and just to eat at the cafe. That place is packed. Yes, but they don't have any help. They can't hire, they don't have any help. And they want to sell because they don't have no, no, I think it's really cool to see the difference without having this. Because there's no people to work. Yeah. Well, we need. They're trying to sell and they, because they can't have staff, enough staff to run it. I think we have to think about it. Yeah, so it's a little bit of a job. It's a good job. And then I'll show you. I think it's wonderful that you have the envisioning Rochester. I mean, it's not because the Stas Quo is over half the housing stock is summer homes. You're not going to have housing stock available for people to live here because, you know, there's not building going on that's the existing housing stock is what's available. And I was surprised the first time I did a fundraiser for the library. Mailing and doing bulk mail. Over 60% of the envelopes were going out of her mind. That it starts the school of students when it's more than half your houses are vacation houses. And I don't know what legally or otherwise you can do about that. I mean, our society based on a house goes up for sale, anybody can buy it. Is there a way to give preference to a full-time homeowner in a sale process? I think it's more than preference. Maybe there should be a incentive base for people to rent their houses to not just vacationers, not just Airbnb, but some sort of incentive to get a long-term landlord as well. It's probably, you can get any kind of term that has this dynamic is that a couple of new people and a couple of summer homes have fun and the one which is a critical man is the dean. Have a long term attachment with the county for example, and no one wants that. So I think as long as this is the term that is, you know, like a sleepy, like nice, fresh pile with no businesses and stuff, like maybe a couple of cafes and stuff, like a restaurant, maybe if there's people to work there because there's not, it's okay because it's wonderful. It's like fresh, but then if we, thank you, I don't think we can envision it as a town where people can move with families because they can't work, they can't go to high school. So it's like, yeah, it's just like, okay, it's fine. But it's just like kind of a resort which is going back to those times, to those times, you know, that they were talking about. But other than that, you know, like I had, you know, my kids, it's wonderful. I was like, yeah, I've got my youngest and it was wonderful to raise, you know, in this, up on the air because, you know, up in the halls. But after that, there was a time, there was a few years there where we had families moving in and were homeschooling that journey. And I thought that was wonderful. I mean, they brought new people in and they were very receptive of change and, you know. But I'm hearing both of them. There are no jobs and there are no people to fill the jobs that we've had. Yeah. There's jobs that are here, but the kids don't want them. Yeah. Or they're not here to take them because they're going to school. Well, look at this, no waiter or waitress. No one wants to work at the dairy farm. You know, there's opportunities for work, but it's not what the kids want to do. And just my opinion is that, you know, it's a big world out there. Education is everything. You educate the best you can. And they want to use it. They want to see what's on the other side. They want to see where everything's going on. So they want to experience it, you know, but not. I don't fault them for doing that, but it's a hard to make the money here and survive. It's tough. But I don't feel pessimistic at all about the overall picture of Rochester because I think it can be accomplished with a sort of overarching vision and careful planning. I think that's what a lot of the urban planning is about, but we're doing Rochester planning. And I think if you have a vision where you kind of pull together all those pieces, I think you can accomplish what we want to accomplish. Working on that. I think we're on the way here. My neighbor explores 28 years old and just got married. He's been here a couple of years. And, you know, he's interested in homestead. My memory was before me. It was a lot cheaper from where he was to live in Chover. And then, and Falk has moved here for farming, he's been a coach for farming, teaching, teaching, coach for farming. I can see, again, this being an education area for teaching sustainability. You know, it's not school school, but maybe adult education. It's going to shift. I think we're a little bit low and I think we're really feeling sad because the school ended, but maybe an alternate school will grow here. I think you're a transition, but I think, I'm from Connecticut, Stanford, Connecticut. My time is part of the times where it used to be. In science, it's grown five times. The population, the water's polluted, the traffic is crazy. People are just so dense and everything is, I can't afford to live there. And I am so blessed. I feel so blessed to be living here. I've been living here 20 years and I feel like, I still feel like pinching me, I can't believe I'm living here. It's horrible. It's not easy. I think there's a lot of possibilities, all the pieces, all the possibility and then just leaving them together in the right way to encourage and, you know, attract people to this area who will be here permanently. It's a way of life. It's a way of life because I just met a gentleman who was probably 28 years old and he moved up from New Jersey and he loved it here. He just thinks it's great to be in a rural area and communities and yeah, because he worked two jobs, he does, you know, but that's what brings people here. There's a way of life that we appreciate those things. You don't appreciate it and you're not gonna be there or you don't want them. Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity here. It's just a mindset that that's what you want to do. It's a lifestyle choice. I guess I'm one of those refugees, I'm not a climate refugee, but I would say like an urban, a metropolitan area refugee. I'm from Atlanta, I've been here almost two years. The draw was, is the small town, it's a community, it's so vast open spaces, the beautiful mountains, it's the, you know, the air, it's fresh air, you're moving around and you know, yeah. But I would challenge everyone to think that a lot of the things that we're worried about happening in Rochester, we're seeing housing a lot of stock coming out and urban, the issues and all these other issues, like those issues are happening everywhere. Rochester's not unique, you know, in that sense. Like, I'm worried that we would get too hyper focused on, these are our problems, you know, but big cities, Atlanta and San Francisco, they're all having similar housing crises and, you know, different scales, obviously. But there's a lot of challenges in front of all of us that are, they're global challenges, that there's not a, there's not a unique, a totally unique, there's nothing that we could think of that we have an issue with that you can't find somewhere else as well. Yeah. And, but I think that maybe, you know, maybe my hope would be that at some point, I would just worry about sort of the rush of the in the 70s and seeking that alternative lifestyle and, you know, fleeing the cities and stuff like that, the landers and hippies and freaks and whatever the, but maybe, you know, at some point that had to start with just a few people here and there are almost no detectable, right? And then there was kind of this starting to wake up and look for some other type of lifestyle besides the rat race in the last buildings in the middle of a small, infested water, you know, private area. And maybe I'm part of an initial and maybe in the next kind of 15, 20 years, you might see a population trying to take people looking for a different way of life, a different way. Can you imagine? Where connections and community are more important than the outcome and the power. Can you imagine that the population used to be 4,000 year in Rochester with the railroad and the country club was down where the golf course is with the country club? And, but my husband's grandmother used to be able to get on the train, Saturday nights, get on the train and go all the way to where route 12 goes over to where is that part of it. And there was a place where the square dancing was. So she could get on the train and go square dancing every Saturday night. I mean, when we came here, we couldn't do anything like that. And then the population was 900 when we came here. And then it went up to 1200. And now it's dropping down again, yeah. I mean, if you had a service here from Clinton to Montpelier when we even met, trying to imagine 4,000, you don't know, compared to them. So you understand, like this is Central Paradox, which is that Vermont doesn't even need people like him. But, particularly for Vermont, but if Vermont, and so where you find that pretty balanced that sweet spot in the development of the preservation of this bus system. Yeah. Yeah, but the planification is really key. There's so many people, young people, who can't even afford a car, the results, that's it. If you don't have, if you don't have mass transit, you just have a bus system. I know Middlebury put in a bus system too many times. If you had a bus system, or a bus system in there, but if you stayed for that, about a bus system too long, you would get high rates. So just to have thought, we're talking about bus systems. Middlebury sends a bus to Hancock every morning to pick up school kids. I'm just wondering what the law, accommodation, whatever it would be for those people trying to commute to Middlebury to a job would be, to catch a ride on a school bus. I mean, what would be the thresholds of rules, regulation, of laws? They can, because it's like a liability. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't. You can't. You can't. You can't. Well, to the top of the mountain. Right, but if they can set it to all the way to Hancock, it'd be great. And that's a different thing. They're like, how do I work with them? It's what you're doing. It's part of course, and it's part of course. Right, but if Middlebury schools sent, instead of a school bus, if they sent the stagecoach, like Sherrod Academy does, people who are trying to commute to work could also use that same, Right. How much, what would it take for Middlebury schools to contract with stagecoach, instead of the supervisory union bus? Right. I don't think we have to talk about that. Yeah, I mean, there's a way to accomplish almost anything, if you're just creating it. Charles, the page is always like the biggest experience in a budget, supervisory union budget. So yeah, but it would be very expensive. The bus isn't full. It would be very expensive to send those, unless they're full, but. Well. But if the town, this town, contributed to that service, eventually. Right. I mean, I don't know what the deal is with Sherrod Academy, but though all those kids here in Rochester, if parents are paying for it, if Sherrod Academy is paying for it, you know, how the finances run on that. Because the Sherrod Academy started losing kids, and a couple of years ago, they said, there's no way they would even take our children. And we're like, well, they wouldn't even talk about, like, buses. But now they started losing kids. They're like, oh yeah, we'll take your kids. And then we'll also set the bus, you know? So it's like, yeah, that's the question. Those kids, you know, it's like, it's different, different. But the real question is, who's financing the bus? That's what, that's what Jeanette is at. Everybody's supervising it on Instagram. They're like, it should be a state of law question. But the state doesn't have money when it's like, for school lunches and the bar. So it's, it will pay for a bus. Running around with one person and you take it, it's just a matter of logistics. Right. And then we shoot, like, the car share in Burlington, and the car share is, yeah, taxes. Well, yeah, one of the kids was actually taught before we moved here. And it's like, oh my gosh, yeah, this is probably anything. This will take people from the cities and to the, you know, the remote, the New Hampshire, whatever. You know, maybe some moved, you know. And so, you know, this is like, yeah, it will be wonderful. But I'm sorry about the mystic, but it's like, again, I believe it's wonderful to bring people, like the people probably wouldn't want to change it. People who have second homes or people who are retired here, people who can work out at home. Or the few businesses, when we moved here, there was Ultimate Studios, there was in, yeah, in the traditional area, advanced urinations, like, while we moved here. And they are still functioning. But chips and bits. But chips and bits were here, they moved. So, like, out of, like, No, they went out of business. They went out of business. Okay, so what, they are not here. So, out of six businesses, I think we are down to two. And the other, like, most of us, they cannot hire people to work. And also the pay is lower. Advanced urination is still functioning well because we always offer bigger wages than locally, you know, people could afford to pay because they sell, you know, all over the world. And the state's not like, locally. But other businesses, you know, they don't pay well, hardware is a start, you know, work on weekends. So sometimes I see, yeah, parents who, like, don't work, and I'm like, well, there's so many jobs here. Like, what's going on? So, Vermont, yeah, Vermont, each is maximum number of farmers in the system, we can get about 35,000. And that's better, is that, yeah. Yeah. Right? And in 1935, they did this big, the planning commission on the state level did this big thing called the Graphic Survey. And they looked around and they looked at all the sectors of the economy. You know, that one's going down, that one's going down, that one's going down. The only one that has an opportunity to grow is recreation tourism. That's at least a scheme like crazy. And what became right to me in the 20 or 30 years was that those jobs, those people who had been independent farmers that way of life had been replaced by clothing burgers and changing bedrooms and hotels. And that's a fairly different way of negotiating your life. It's not just about the work. And one of the things that got me was that in the 50s, they were built up in all the scusors, right? You know, Kevin Devin, J.P. Wallace, and the same economy that was part of the government which kept wanting to throw money into access points. And the local boys at the highway department kept taking the money and putting the money misappropriated into the years, where it's for local people to use. And then they can optimize, you know? But they kept them attached to that scheme. And the state decided, well, you know, these are the people who are going to put our resources into money these people. Yeah. And I mean, it's a long history. And we're still trying to figure out some of us like how to get ourselves out of that. I'm not sure everyone thinks that putting state resources into well-being before is another important, before is a mistake.