My Viva In Vermont

“Dammit, Gene, you gave me the wrong socket head, I need a 13mm, c'mon, man, I've got oil dripping on me.” So you're leaving tomorrow? Gene said, handing me the 13mm. “Yep … there, got it ... finito, mi amigo!” I slid out from under my re-built '57 Buick Special. “Our auditing job for State is done … I'll just owe you more poker and gin rummy money if I stick around.” “You're going to miss the last four days at the track ...” he said. “Yeah. Right. I bet the favorite to show and I still lose money.” We stood there looking at the car that was going to be my home away from home for who knew how long. “I'll miss ya, buddy.” he said. “I'll miss you too … Hell, I'll probably get homesick by New Mexico and turn around. Tell you one thing, pardner, this car's gonna be a lot more comfortable to sleep in than Milner's corvette.

The story I'm about to tell is a kind of love story. In early July, summer of '66, at the age of twenty-four, I sojourned for about a year across America and part of Europe. It wasn't yet a cliché in the sixties to be a lost soul; it was the thing, and I intended to be good at it. I had worked on a brick laying crew in Kinston, North Carolina and the St. Regis Paper Company in Bucksport, Maine, before arriving in the village of Stowe, Vermont, in the middle of November. My intention was to work for a month or so at the Stowe Mountain Ski Resort seven miles up the mountain road from the village. The first thing wrong with that idea was no snow, so I was surprised to be hired for a couple of weeks to do maintenance on the chair lift towers and any other jobs nobody with dependents wanted to do. “Welcome to Stowe! We don't see many Californians!” said the man behind the counter. He appeared to be the pharmacist of the drug store and he appeared genuinely upbeat for so late in the day. I felt like a celebrity or something. “I'm driving around America. My version of the old TV show, Route 66. Just got hired at the mountain, do you know anyone taking in lodgers?” He surprised me by replying, “Yes, matter of fact, I do! She has two now; but I believe she has another room. You're a block and a half away from her house, it's a two story on the corner right across from the elementary school, when you get to that corner, just turn left. Her name is Viva Smith. She'll be happy to see you.” In the six and a half months I lived in Stowe, the man was always genuinely upbeat; it made the vanilla sodas at his fountain that much better. Less than five minutes later I was standing on a large screened porch where this love story begins. She was eighty-one years old; lived alone but for two upstairs boarders who were sophomore college students at a nearby small private college. She did indeed have a third room that she appeared delighted to rent to me. She was tall and slender, stood straight, long white hair pulled back in a combination bun and swirl. She had an open, warm smile, matched by a warm voice and bright warm blue eyes framed in Lennon's granny glasses. I can't emphasize the word 'warm' enough; there aren't many people you meet where 'warmth' takes over your first impression. She would introduce me to her circle of family and friends as, “this is my nice young man all the way from California, he's upstairs with Jim and Frank … in the corner room facing the school.” Viva had lived her entire life in Stowe, almost all of it in the house I was now living in where she and her husband had reared two children. Her husband had died in the house some years back. Her two children had stayed in Stowe, as had her grandchildren and great grandchildren. She spent time with one or more of them every day. Stowe was a small town then, still is, and most of Viva's family lived within walking distance. The two week maintenance job only lasted a week and the snow came very late; didn't show up in sufficient amounts for skiing until Christmas Eve, a longed-for evening that probably challenged more than a few secular-minded residents. So until Christmas day when I went back to work at the resort, I survived by substitute teaching one or two days a week at schools in the village and nearby towns. And thus there was ample time for Viva and I to get to know each other. There are few better things in life than serendipity giving you a chance to get to know someone you want to get to know. There was also plenty of time to get to know her family, which I found out included just about everybody in town. “Oh, you're staying with Viva. How nice! Isn't she wonderful! We all just love her” was the sort of response I would encounter. The village population was about a thousand people and it appeared that she was family to them all. Over the course of her life Viva had taught many of them in the village's elementary school, served on community boards and projects with them, baked a couple thousand cookies for them, prepared lunches and dinners for them when they were sick, and when young couples needed someone, it was she who cared for their children, and eventually for their children's children. One mid December afternoon we were enjoying our usual afternoon together, sipping our usual cup of Oolong tea, and as I distinctly recall, discussing the military craziness in Vietnam and its related political and civil unrest in our country. Needing a change of subject, I nodded toward a small framed photo on her kitchen wall of what looked like an image of the Rocky Mountains, and I asked her if she had taken the photograph. “Heavens no!” she said with a big grin, “I've only been as far away as Montpelier. I've occasionally gone there for an afternoon to visit dear friends in the hospital, Gail most often takes me.”

Viva Smith, reader of National Geographic, Reader's Digest, Newsweek, and The Atlantic, who did not have a television, and could converse about almost anything going on in the world with informed knowledge and opinion, had never been farther from home than twenty-three miles. She had never driven a car. She had an old bike in her garage; mounted on the front was a large basket that was probably used for delivering her famous cookies. Viva had stayed home. She didn't leave to find herself. She simply stayed. Until a day in late March, a few days before I had planned to leave Stowe to continue my sojourn overseas, when the the boys and I came home to an empty house and found a note on the door from Viva's grandson Pete saying that she had been taken earlier that afternoon to a hospital in Burlington. Pete's note said Viva was worried that we'd be upset, and he'd added, “come if you can.” We went both nights she was in the hospital. The first night there were maybe a dozen of Viva's family in her room; the second night's visiting hour her room was filled to capacity and into the corridor with what seemed like half the village. On the third day she insisted on returning home. Her daughter, Gail, said, “I think she was homesick.” She had been home for just a few days, convalescing, getting round the clock care from her family and from us, her boys, when I sold my Buick and reluctantly departed for New York as I had planned for months. But I was torn and brokenhearted. How does a twenty-four year old know where his destiny lies? I'd been on roads less taken before. How long should one travel on the 'road less taken' before deciding to stay? I could have stayed. I could have stayed at the start; never even left, those many months ago, never to have known this road. While on this journey a favorite uncle had died, and my childhood dog who had been my companion on every trail in the Sierra's had died. Why wasn't I there? Now here I was, alone on a Greyhound bus in the middle of the night; having left again. Having left someone that I dearly loved. It had been just a month ago that I was down and out, Viva called it 'the grippe'. Though she no longer went upstairs on her worn out knees, I couldn't talk her out of climbing the stairs multiple times a day for three days to bring me comfort and sustenance when my fever was 103 and I could barely get out of bed. And now, now I had left her with a promise to return; but I feared that I would never see her again.

It was about two weeks later while at the home of my cousin in Germany, when a letter I had written to Viva was returned to me unopened along with a sad note from Pete. It has been fifty-seven years since Viva Smith and I shared warmth and a pot of Oolong tea. I like to imagine that she is still watching over the village of Stowe. Imagining what those who have left are doing is one of the best uses of imagination. I think of Viva from time to time, and each time I tell her what she did not have the chance to read in my letter, that I missed her, that I was lucky to have known her, so grateful for her kind and generous friendship. And I tell her what wasn't in my letter, that I regret not being there when at long last she couldn't stay; regret not holding her hands tightly and wishing her safe journey just as she had done when I didn't stay. And I tell her what I've told myself a thousand times, “I should have been there, Viva, I should have been there to say goodbye. I hope you saw the Rocky mountains on your one and only journey beyond Montpelier.

I doubt there's an entirely satisfying resolution to the existential choice Robert Frost posed in The Road Not Taken. Maybe it doesn't matter what road you take or how far you think you can see down this road or that. Maybe all that matters is to live your best and kindest life wherever you are. That's what Viva Smith did, Bob. Her life was gloriously filled with love. And she was never even on a road.

Epilogue:

In the Summer of 2001 my then twenty-seven year old daughter and I were research interns on a University of Kentucky study on the health of Western Elk that had been imported to the Appalachians. At the end of the study we drove the fourteen hours up to Stowe where I showed my daughter the village and the house I had lived in. Pete took us to Viva's grave. There were fresh, real flowers next to her marker. The inscription on the polished granite stone read: She was loved by all.