(HOST) Commentator Tom Slayton has been thinking about cultural diversity – Vermont style.
(SLAYTON) Jeb is a real Vermonter. Unlike a lot of middle-class Vermonters – including journalists like myself – Jeb does honest-to-God work for a living. He knows how to do things.
He drives big trucks to Maine and Boston and also puts in a few hours a week at a local gas station, fixing cars and rescuing tourists from Vermont’s snowy highways. He can put a dead car onto a flatbed truck in 10 minutes without any help from anybody.
But what Jeb really likes to do is hunt. He takes his pack of blue-tick hounds hunting coons regularly. And he’s an expert deer hunter. He’s careful, and he plays by the rules.
He’s no road hunter. Just last week he tracked a deer through the snowy back country for nearly four miles. And when the big buck finally jumped up, almost in front of him, Jeb saw it was a spikehorn – and therefore not legal game for his muzzle loader. So he held his fire, and watched the deer – a big buck that probably would have gone 160 pounds at least – bound away through the snow-laden woods.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Jeb could have shot that deer. He can put four four bullets in a tight group at 300 yards. That’s a long way with any rifle, and really remarkable with a muzzle-loader. But the current rule is that a deer has to have at least three antler points if you’re going to take it during Vermont’s nine-day muzzle-loading rifle season.
So Jeb shrugged, let the deer go, and walked back out of the woods. He’d get his deer another day.
Jeb uses a Global Positioning System – a GPS – while tracking game. That’s how he knew he’d gone almost four miles following the big buck’s tracks when it finally jumped up. It’s an interesting mix of old and new technology – intuitive deer-tracking smarts, a muzzle-loading rifle, and a satellite-driven global positioning device.
And though Vermont is changing and people like Jeb are fewer in number than they used to be, I really hope Vermont is wise enough never to outgrow them. That’s not nostalgia – that’s part of our cultural heritage, and just plain old common sense.
For one thing, we need them – not only to help us do the things we’re too dumb or too lazy to do ourselves, but also to teach us and help us keep our hands-on Vermont skills intact.
What I’d like to see is a political alliance between people like me – birdwatchers, hikers, and the like – and people like Jeb – the hunting and fishing crowd. If those two groups could ever learn to trust one another, they could do an awful lot of good for the environment, because there’s really no better environmentlist than a good careful hunter. And because we’re really all one people, all Vermonters.
And that’s the final reason we need Jeb and his hunting, fishing, snowmobiling buddies – to remind us of our roots, and that we’re all in the same boat, the same state, together.
Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.