STRUGGLES

Our valley, from Buck Mountain

On some days, well, many days really, everywhere here looks perfect.  It’s not just the lake with the blue-green Adirondack peaks behind, but the bright green valleys and gentle hills, the neat alternating rectangles of meadow and corn, the winding river, and the hidden places, the swimming holes, the beguiling roads that disappear and reappear behind trees and curves, and the narrow ones that lead to who-knows-where.   

Like most places, lovely or unlovely, it contains a lot more than scenic calendar material.  There are reasons, after all, that the local police blotters (Vergennes, Middlebury, Bristol) in the bi-weekly newspaper, the Addison Independent (Addison being our county), shows that about 75% of their weekly calls have to do with drugs or drinking, or both, not infrequently with driving thrown in.  In urban areas I suppose you can do the drugs and the drinking and stay indoors enough of the time to escape official notice.  But here you’re likely to have to drive someplace to get what you want or to meet someone, and then you’ve got to get back home somehow.  You’re exposed.

There are more than addiction problems.  In cities we read about the homeless, and we can often see people who are homeless.  They’re right there, on the street.  Maybe even bothering you, asking you for something.  Obviously, where it’s more densely populated, there are bound to be more homeless people.  But in Vermont, well, I hadn’t considered it.  Poor, yes, but not homeless.  Homeless people here don’t live on the street.  What street could support you?  Homeless people here are more likely to hole up in a camper, or maybe in a car, or squeeze in with relatives, more likely than not in substandard housing.  If you look more closely you can figure out where these places might be, but still, the homeless here are not really visible. 

The John Graham Shelter, Vergennes

Vergennes is unusual because it's such a small town and yet, since 1980, it has had a homeless shelter, a pleasant looking yellow clapboard house on a corner on Main Street.  Freshly painted and repaired, in fact, but with an ominously high wall newly erected by its next door neighbors.  In Vermont overall there are 31 homeless shelters (according to HomelessShelterDirectory.org), and, remarkably, the one in Vergennes is included among the top six, the other five located in the state’s largest towns (Burlington, Brattleboro, etc.).  The Graham Shelter is not a big place, yet it manages to house up to 25 people at one time.  It’s usually full.  Except for the kitchen, recently enlarged, the rooms are small, claustrophobic.  But there is a small play area outside for children, a picnic table, and a small pleasant garden.  It’s Vermont, after all.  Lucky residents who have found jobs and seem capable of getting their lives together are often able to move into transitional housing, a couple of nearby apartments.  I haven’t seen any of those, but I hear they’re nice.  However there aren’t nearly enough of them.

The odds of being poor in rural areas are between about 1 to 2 times higher than for people in metropolitan areas.*  And, as has been heard and written about elsewhere, the percentage of people in state of poverty is growing.  Rural poverty isn’t mentioned as often.  In 2005, 15 percent of rural Americans were living in poverty compared with 12 percent of non-rural Americans, rural homelessness being the most pronounced in agricultural regions, areas whose economies are based on declining industries such as mining (not an issue here, but see my February 10, 2012 “Of Meat and Mines,” about New York across the lake), timber or fishing, and regions experiencing the kind of economic growth that attracts more workers than there are jobs, or that attracts higher income residents, thereby driving up taxes and living expenses.   Some of all these factors probably play a role. There’s clearly not a lot of industry here.  

The major employer in Vergennes––located as to be almost invisible to Main Street––the Goodrich plant with some 800 employees, houses environmental test laboratories and presumably hires primarily the technologically skilled, although even that company will have some low-level jobs that at least a few of the unskilled will fill.  It happens that Vergennes also has Northlands, a Job Corps site administered by the US Department of Labor offering no-cost vocational education to underserved youth; it occupies that from 1874 on housed the Weeks School or “Vermont Industrial School” that served as orphanage and juvenile delinquent home––both simultaneously, sad to say––until the late 1970’s, and also played a role supplying human data to the unsavory eugenics research of the 1920’s.**  

Part of Northlands Job Corps center

As for housing, costs are lower in rural areas, but then so are incomes, with the result that a disproportionate share of low earners’ incomes often ends up being spent on rent.  Then there’s the geographical distance between low cost housing and job opportunities, the dearth of transportation, and so on and on.  There are plenty of trailers (read low-cost housing) around on sites where land is cheaper, some of these low-lying and susceptible to flooding.  Health care costs and mental health factors in here, too, somewhere or everywhere.  When you lose your job you lose much more than your job.  If you don’t have much to start with, where do you go from there?

Some low-cost housing; actually this trailer is one of several unoccupied homes
in Vergennes' only–and now defunct–trailer park.

I’ve been impressed by the local support system for the very poor and homeless.  At least what I have been able to see.  The people who run the shelter are enormously caring and thoughtful.  Others who work in service organizations like CVOEO (a fun acronym if you say it quickly; stands for Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity) seem open-hearted albeit business-like.  Maybe this is because they’re not pressed as hard, not as jaded, as people who work in urban centers.  In general, people are softer here.  Anyway, the food pantry has less on the shelves than they should (note to self:  buy more than you need at the supermarket and put it in the food pantry box by the door!) and, I was told, they carry less than in past years.  Their non-paying customers are accompanied past the shelves of canned goods, the boxes of fresh produce, and gently told “You can take one of these, you can pick two of those,” and so on.  There are a lot of canned peas.  This being Vermont, and summer, there are also a lot of fresh-looking vegetables. You can sift through a pile of used clothing and take anything you find for free.  There’s not much to choose from. 

This can’t help but bring to mind our current Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s comment, quoted in the New York Times, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”  Some hammock.  Don’t get me started.

***

First bite:  the toad and the garter snake

There are struggles and struggles.  We witnessed one in the natural world last week.  We were surprised to see a common garter snake, genus thamnophis sirtalis,  a small one at that, lying almost fully extended in the open next to the shrubs by the front porch, its mouth firmly attached to the left rear leg of a large toad.   I have never heard a toad make sounds before, but this toad was, in toad language, screaming.  The sound was one you might think was made by a bird.  There was nothing to be done.  The toad was doomed.  It took at least five hours, into the early evening, for the snake to completely engorge the toad.  For at least the first hour, maybe longer, the toad was alive.  When we last looked just before dark, the snake had only the tip of its head to go.   In the morning it looked as if nothing had happened.  The snake was gone.

Midway through, the toad either dead or in shock.

Apparently garter snakes are capable of eating any creature they can overpower.  That can include slugs, earthworms, leeches, lizards, ants, frog eggs, rodents and toads.

***

  

*This statement and much of what follows, mostly paraphrased, is taken from the National Coalition for the Homeless, August, 2007, by way of the Graham Shelter Mentor Training book, 2012. Thank you!

**A brief but interesting explanation of this can be found at http://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/vis.html