Chapter Two #3
Then Olive came crying. The water was so clear, so sweet, she had put her head under and was drinking it, just gulping it down, entranced by the novelty of drinking water in water, but Wesley said it was dirty and she was going to die of parasites.
She was not going to die, Miles explained as Kate dried her off, brushing flecks of river mica from her swimsuit, and beginning the long task of untangling twig from curl and curl from twig.
Tropical Love Candied Papaya would protect her.
But given the chortling, purring upstream baby, maybe it was better to stick to their water bottles.
This put the damper on things, a little, and they were beginning to feel the effects of rising at dawn.
And by then, having been enticed farther and farther by the pleasures of the country, they found themselves eighty miles from Greensbury, and they all agreed that it was time to go; the pile of squash had grown so high that it merited its own seatbelt, and, thus provisioned, they could eat at home.
—
And it passed, their first week in the country.
In the mornings, they rose with the sun and the birdsong, ate freshly baked zucchini bread, and discussed the day’s adventure.
There were of course many websites offering regional recreational suggestions for families with children, but it was quickly clear that most of them were written by computers who stole the information from one another, and sounded suspiciously like an increasing number of Kate’s and Miles’s students’ papers.
Southern Vermont offers a variety of activities that are perfect for children and families.
Vermont is a fantastic destination for families with children, offering a wide array of activities across all seasons.
These activities provide a range of fun, educational, and adventurous options for children visiting Southern Vermont.
Instead, Miles, applying the tenacity he tried to model annually in “Lit 213: Archival Practicum,” had found, in the town library, a guidebook produced by the Greensbury Chamber of Commerce in 1993, in commemoration of the college’s two-hundred-year anniversary.
Certain attractions seemed to have vanished (Mountain Catch Seafood, the Stars Under the Stars Drive-In, the Museum of Our Colonial Forefathers), but the hills and rivers were the same, and a helpful volunteer in the town tourist office practically fainted when a real human entered the penumbral depths of that underappreciated institution, asking for a list of the area’s attractions.
They swam and hiked, ate wild blueberries, found a red newt beneath a purple toadstool, got memberships at the Southern Vermont Train Museum and town library cards without having to renounce their California library memberships, and made steady progress on their ice-cream punch cards, which themselves were a testimony to the simplicity and honesty of the local people, a fact that never failed to astound Wesley and Olive, for the girl at the ice-cream stand used a simple hole punch that anyone could have bought anywhere.
Kate’s friend Miranda was out of town until the start of the school year, and so they didn’t know anyone, but bit by bit some of the faces began to look familiar.
They felt a little homesick for California, and each night the children called their grandparents, reporting on the day.
Miles’s parents, who were originally from Boston and Providence, secretly thought it was insane that a person would willingly return to those summers and those winters, but didn’t say this every time they spoke, while Kate’s mother from Brazil, her dad from Fresno, who had met in what was at the time the world’s largest shopping mall, recalled childhood stories of people eaten by catfish or mountain lions, and worried at night about the coyotes and the bears outside their daughter’s door.
But even they couldn’t help getting caught up in the excitement, and every day, all four loving grandparents received a hodgepodge of photo documentation of the day’s adventures, emailed to a pair of digital photo frames purchased just for this purpose.
O verdurous wall of Paradise! O fruits of golden hue!
By the time the week was over, Kate was fretting over the sunburn and mosquito bites, but Miles couldn’t believe that anything bad could happen from such lovely days.
And clearly the local people weren’t worrying so much about sunscreen, or equine encephalitis, and they had been getting burnt and bitten for generations.
No, it was impossible not to feel the entire country was benign; even the lingering political signs were benign, the flags painted lovingly on wooden pallets, the colossal replica of a former candidate, tall as a barn, black suit, red tie, pink face, red hat, pink finger extended toward the passersby.
Soon, they had survived five swimming holes, and they now passed, without even slowing, the roadside stands that gave out free zucchini, and they came to understand why no one was cheating on the ice-cream punch cards. They were ready for school.