June 13-15, Rutland, Vermont
Staying in a private campground that we have all to ourselves. An open field in the middle of the Green Mountains. No mistaking how they got that name. Arrived yesterday late, ate some salted pecans, dug some winter clothes out of the truck because it was rather cold. Today though is bright and warm and we went to the Vermont Marble Museum. Brenda thought it was going to be a museum about little round marbles. She was glad it was not but wasn’t particularly elated about its real subject matter. The fortunes of the marble industry of Vermont, of which the Rutland area is the center, have risen and fallen since 1840. They rose spectacularly under the ownership of a man named Proctor. Among other accomplishments he was US Senator and during his tenure much of imperial Washington was built, and much of it was built with, coincidentally, Vermont marble. In 1900 the Vermont Marble Company was the largest commercial enterprise in the US, with quarries and operations across the country. Now the quarries are owned by a Japanese firm Omya that grinds up the marble into powder which is calcium carbonate and used in everything. We were stopped at two railroad crossings for the same long train hauling limestone slurry which is their product.
Vermont Marble supplied the block that is the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. It is solid marble, in case you were wondering–I always wondered. At the museum we watched a short film just about the creation of that memorial. Having run out of anything else to say the film went on at length about the exceptional qualities of the soldiers who are given the privilege to stand guard at the monument 24/7. I mean it laid it on thick about the guards, at one point claiming they were “bearing the eternal flame of American manhood.” It really was convincing that these members of the Old Guard are a special breed, but there must have been an old stonemasons trowel laying around when they wrote the script.
Also stopped at the New England Maple Syrup museum which is daft—some dummies that move almost imperceptibly while they tell you nothing of interest, some artifacts of syrup making, a short film. It is possible to leave the museum knowing nothing about maple syrup that you didn’t already know or suspect. They did have a little tasting room that I was taking advantage of until Brenda said, “They didn’t advertise lunch.” Mostly it is a shop, and out of politeness we bought smallest quantities of the product available, packaged in miniature liquor bottles.
When we got back from the museums we were sitting outside the Scamp when an unexpected gust of wind lifted our awning completely off the ground and over the camper. Took a while to wrestle it back to normal position and the ends of a couple of the aluminum struts were bent or broken. I went into town and bought some bits of bracket metal and screws and might have cobbled it back together; won’t know until we unfurl it again which might be next week. Our first real mishap.
We have crossed the Appalachian Trail, or the Long Trail as the locals here call it, probably a half-dozen times on our trip. This morning from our campsite on a near mountainside where the trail goes I saw a little column of smoke rise from the forest that I imagine was from a hiker making a hearty breakfast. What a brilliant contribution to our nation, the Long Trail.