August 10, 2009
Monday

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
. . .
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
     — Theodore Roethke, 1908-1963
          American poet

Bread Loaf Inn with Rainbow

I took the long way here from Albany this morning. I put “Middlebury” into my GPS instead of my actual address along Route 125 between Ripton and Hancock. When I was directed to get off Route 4 at Route 30 instead of  Route 7 at Rutland, I complied. This sent me north through picturesque Vermont farm country, hillier than that in Pennsylvania and with smaller spreads than I see at home. Some of the places looked like they were just waiting for a photographer or a poet to come by. “Arriving at destination!” said the cheerful voice that always sounds so excited to deliver me to some new place.

I arrived in the south end of town, driving past the main campus of Middlebury College to Bakery Lane, site of the marvelous Mister Up’s, a restaurant on the waterfront that I frequented as a Bread Loaf School of English student in the early 70s. I haven’t been there in my years at the Writers’ Conference, but I never go down Bakery Lane without thinking of the evenings I spent there and the sweet young man named Upchurch who was my constant companion in those days. “Mr Up’s is not the same without Mr. Upchurch,” I wrote to him the year I returned but he didn’t.

That was 1974, the summer Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Chris Matthews asked on Hardball tonight if people remembered where they were when they heard the news. I was here, in the last days of the School of English term that year. Someone had set up a small television in the Barn, and someone else had gone up on the roof to manipulate an antenna that pulled in a cloudy picture, and we crowded around to witness the event. At least that’s how I remember it, a scene that crept into a snippet of fiction I wrote in a class here thirty years later.

I came back here for the first time since those days in 2002, visiting briefly at the end of a research trip to Boston after a friend remarked almost casually about “roads not taken.” Inspired by that foray, I applied to the Writers’ Conference and came as a participant for the first time in 2003. “I came up late yesterday afternoon,” I wrote in my journal on August 13 that year. “I was going north on Route 7. There’d been little pockets of rain and as I approached the outskirts of Rutland, a mist hung from the hills and across the valley like a veil. And then, suddenly, off to the right, a rainbow, curving out of a cloud and disappearing into the hillside. A sign. A message. You’ve come to the right place.”

A dozen years I’ve come this way, and the first sight of the first ochre-colored building never gets old. I take the lively air again, and learn by going where I have to go.

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