(HOST) Commentator Alia Stavrand Woolf is a college student in New York City who still feels very connected to her Green Mountain roots. When she heard that Vermont policy-makers are concerned about too many young people leaving the state, it got her thinking.
(STAVRAND WOOLF) It’s hard to believe that Manhattan and Burlington are only a 45-minute plane ride apart. I’ve been living in New York City since starting at Columbia, and I’ve made the trip a couple dozen times. I still marvel at how close, and how distant, my two homes can be.
I call myself an Expat Vermonter. My driver’s license has green mountains in the background. It draws suspicious looks from New York City club bouncers. I vote by absentee ballot. I mail it in.
My cell phone number starts with 802. When I’m trading cell phone numbers with someone, I get asked where the 802 is from. And because I have an 802 number, I get wrong number calls originating in Vermont. I’ll be jaywalking across Broadway on my way to class, when I get a call from a number I don’t recognize. I’ll pick up, and on the other end is a guy with a Vermont accent, surprised, no doubt, to have reached a girl on a Manhattan avenue.
If I stand outside my Manhattan apartment and look down the avenue, I can see more stoplights than there are in my entire Vermont ZIP code. My family lives off a dirt road, though in mud season I’m not sure it deserves to be called a road, and I can count on one hand all of my town’s stoplights, half of which only blink.
Once I heard a gunshot in the city, and when I called it in the security guard was dismissive because he didn’t believe I could tell what a gunshot sounded like. But I’ve heard enough during hunting season in Vermont to know – never mind one of our neighbors, whose year-round target practice involves stop signs and telephone poles.
But this is not to say that Vermont and New York City are not compatible. Many of my old Vermont school friends are now living in New York. When I first realized the extent of the migration from Vermont to New York, I thought Governor Douglas might be right about a youth exodus.
It was an experience in Burlington this January that changed my mind. My friend, Abigail Nessen performed in amateur productions through high school in the Burlington/Middlebury area. Now she lives in New York. Her off-Broadway solo show did well; so she decided to do a hometown production. She sold out FlynnSpace and gave a performance that left me breathless. After the show, I went with her and a bunch of other old friends to a Burlington pub. As we were sitting around reminiscing and talking about our lives, I realized that, while we may not be living in Vermont right now, we haven’t left forever. We come back. And we bring energy and ideas from outside Vermont with us. We return with more than we had when we left, and I hope Vermont will be better for it.