{"id":1510,"date":"2009-08-10T11:59:35","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T16:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=1510"},"modified":"2009-08-11T21:15:16","modified_gmt":"2009-08-12T02:15:16","slug":"so-take-the-lively-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=1510","title":{"rendered":"So Take the Lively Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

August 10, 2009
\nMonday<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
\nI feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
\nI learn by going where I have to go.
\n. . .
\nGreat Nature has another thing to do
\nTo you and me, so take the lively air,
\nAnd, lovely, learn by going where to go.
\n<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Theodore Roethke, 1908-1963
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 American poet<\/p>\n

\"innrainbow\"<\/a>

Bread Loaf Inn with Rainbow<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I arrived in the south end of town, driving\u00c2\u00a0past the main campus of Middlebury College to Bakery Lane, site of the marvelous Mister Up’s<\/a>, 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\u00c2\u00a0years at the\u00c2\u00a0Writers’ 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.<\/p>\n

That was 1974, the summer Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Chris Matthews asked on Hardball<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

I came back here for the first time since those days in 2002, visiting briefly at the end of\u00c2\u00a0a\u00c2\u00a0research trip to Boston\u00c2\u00a0after 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.”<\/p>\n

A dozen\u00c2\u00a0years 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.<\/p>\n

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