RUDIMENTS 27.

RUDIMENTS, pt. 27

(Making Cars)

Another thing about Vermont  -   back

then it was almost another country. A real

enclave, where a person really could just

dissemble and go back to the Earth. Deep,

lush woods, pine forests, running and gurgling

waters. Shacks and cabins. One time, nearly

in the middle of the night, (this time was

Summer), in the way-out middle of nowhere,

I got stopped for a seemingly ten-mile long

freight train just rumbling along. I shut the car

off, and simply got out, to wait. This trainman

guy, with a lantern and the whole bit, comes

slowly walking over to me. I was going to

be real friendly and all, just talk and go with

the flow, and instead of talking right off, he

puts his hand or fingers to his neck, or something

there, and out comes this weird, metallic, robotic

voice! I freaked! I'd never heard that before and

was completely taken aback  -  deep, dark night,

train rumbling by, this weird guy with a lantern,

high atop somewhere some fountain in the wilds

of Vermont. He made the softball-dent-forehead

hotel guy seem normal! As it turned out, some

sort of operation or throat cancer or other illness

had  caused him to lose his voicebox or his larynx,

and they'd fitted him instead with this electronic

voice monitor set-up. Sure was weird. (I never get

these medical things straight very much, and just

hope none of that ever sticks to me. I want, thank

you, my own medical-free death. But, yeah,

I want to be late for it too.

-

There were any number of other cool places there.

Lake Bommoseen, I think it was called. That was

a fairly nifty hangout. Lose and hippie-ish, free

and easy. And then there was, besides Rutland,

these towns, or places anyway (they weren't

much of anything)  called, as I recall, Florence,

and Proctor. Proctor had the Proctor Marble Works.

It was very cool  -  basically a marble-mine, there'd

be these huge slabs of dug-out marble. They'd, I

guess, rip off the first 3 feet or so of earth and soil

on the mountains they mined (pretty terrible actually),

and like a quarry does with rock and stone, they'd

have exposed these mountains of marble  -  talk

about infrastructure. The Earth is a winder like

that. Underneath everything are all these different

rocks, minerals, slabs of granite and marble,

gems and the rest, all depending on location.

This Proctor, Vermont place was smack-dab

atop some massive natural formation of

marble. Someone must have figured it all

out, years and years before. They'd expose it,

cut these huge slabs, and sculptors and

architects and builders, etc., would order, by

the tens of tons, marble for their work. Churches

and post offices, memorials and statues,etc. It

would all, eventually, piece by piece and slab

by slab, get trucked out to whatever the destination

was. Maybe some of it was even on that weird

guy's freight train, going out.

-

It got to be fairly funny to me, and a mental

exercise too, realizing the quite paradoxical

nature of all this. One of the more pristine places

around (Vermont countryside) riddled with the

presence of one of the more brutal forms of

extricating sub-surface, commercial, profitability.

Kind of, also, at the expense of anything Edenic.

Jeez, the way they treated it all it might as well

have been Bayonne. All these crazy hippies bopping

around, all the rich super-hipsters at places like

Bennington College (back then, I think, a real

babe joint), thinking they were re-living their

own Adan and Eve pastoral opera, while the

reality was that 'what they didn't see couldn't

hurt them.' Or wouldn't. The town of, half-baked

city of, Rutland, something like a glorified little

Newark or Plainfield (to my experience), just

sat there as a business center for the accounting

and banking of all this. The local marble-millionaires

lived on the hills. It had slums. I got hired there, by

some printer in Rutland, Tuttle Press, or Tuttle

Printing, but, stupidly but typical I never showed

up for the first day of the job and just blew it all off.

I figured it was just another trap calling my name.

Tuttle Company is still around  -  book publishers

now  -  and they've moved Rutland itself out to

some Rutland Airport Industrial Park. So typical.

Good-bye Eden, for sure.