Going Vermont

We called it "Going Vermont."

You'd first see it in their eyes. Eyes that once bored through you with glaring intensity, absorbing, were now averted behind a dull glaze, deflecting, their gaze faraway.

There were other signs -- the shoulder slump, the meandering shuffle, the late lunches, the gradual fade -- but if you paid attention you'd see it first in their eyes. The eyes were the leading indicator that they'd gone Vermont.

Pretty soon you'd get their departure memo, you'd squirm at their last day lunch, you'd promise to stay in touch, knowing you won't. Then they'd disappear from the office, never to return, gone forever from your life.

I don't remember anyone actually leaving for Vermont. "Going Vermont" was figurative, not literal; Vermont was a state of mind, not a state of the union. I thought of it as a handy stand-in for anywhere that wasn't here. And in our cramped cubicles bathed in a flourescent glow staring into our LCD displays high up in a hermetically-sealed climate-controlled Manhattan office building, our lives a habitrail of tiny boxes linked by various tubes and tunnels as we scurried about, racing from deadline to deadline, we needed a Vermont.

I never went Vermont.

Partly that's because no one forced me to. Who knows? If someone had fired me, I might be there today. Instead they rewarded me, enticing me with more and more pellets to run on their wheel, spinning it so fast I couldn't see it.

Soon I found myself speeding along so fast there was no way to stop it, no way to jump off, so I resolved to make the best of it and forge ahead.

Then one day I'm planning a short trip to see the fall foliage and reading guidebooks and my eyes linger on glossy photos of quaint towns time forgot and it occurs to me that people actually live there and I wonder what sort of lives they must be living and before you know it I'm checking real estate prices, comparing property tax rates, evaluating school districts, surveying local job markets and calculating the burn rate on the proceeds from my grossly inflated Los Angeles home.

It's crazy. I know nothing about Vermont. What will happen when Vermont-the-Fantasy yields to Vermont-the-Fact? We'll never survive the cold. I don't ski or ice skate. We'll never meet anyone. And if we do, they'll hate us, damn California carpetbaggers buying up the state. Next thing you know I'll find myself toiling away at a dead-end low wage job in the tourism industry, my savings a distant memory, my problems multiplying as my family blames me for uprooting them from the only city they've ever known to a distant place none of us has ever known. My kids will seethe with resentment, plotting their escape back to the big city. And I'll yearn for all I worked so hard to build before I so carelessly threw it away.

It really is crazy. It makes no sense. My life will totally unravel.

But isn't that the whole point?

So I'm going Vermont.