(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange observes that New Hampshire and Vermont are both shaped like wedges, which brings him to the crucial question: is one of them is upside down?
(LANGE) About a year ago I got to banter briefly with Vermont’s governor, Jim Douglas, on stage. I was nervous, and wondered if he would be, too. Would he be cagey? Would there be obvious and embarrassing evasions, followed by pregnant silences?
I needn’t have worried. He does interviews almost every day. I knew he was from Massachusetts, so I asked him if he’d lived here all his life. Naturally, he answered, "Not yet."
That eased things a bit, so I ventured into the fringes of a political question. "What," I asked him, "is the basic difference between New Hampshire and Vermont?"
He never missed a beat. Pointing upward with one hand and downward with the other, he answered with a little smile, "New Hampshire is upside down." Beyond the obvious geographical reference, there were layers of meaning there for which no one could be held politically accountable.
He was good – really good. And he also got me thinking again about a subject that’s lurked at the edge of consciousness ever since we first moved, 39 years ago, to a town on the Connecticut River: What is the basic difference?
Several Connecticut River towns tried to quit New Hampshire during the 1700s and join Vermont, just as Killington, Vermont, is making noises about joining New Hampshire. The efforts failed, but to this day, I would wager, folks along the east bank of the river, and their newspapers, are more interested in affairs in the Green Mountain State than in the Granite State. Why is that?
Yankees have difficulty distinguishing differences between, say, Alabama and Mississippi; but to folks who live there, they’re quite clear. Similarly, folks "from away" usually assume that New Hampshire and Vermont are pretty much alike. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The differences begin with geology. West of the Connecticut River, thanks to the collision of tectonic plates 350 million years ago, the rocks are mostly metamorphic, containing considerable calcium, which makes them sweet. New Hampshire is largely acidic granites that welled up during the same collision. Those differences have lingered in the character of the soil, the landscape, and the people. New Hampshire, though it’s not perceived that way by tourists, is an industrial state; Vermont, for all its second-home McMansions, remains rural. New Hampshire natives migrated north from the contentious Massachusetts Bay colonies, Vermonters up the river from the less fractious colony of Connecticut.
Politically, the two states couldn’t be less alike. Whenever a new idea comes up in the New Hampshire legislature, it’s dead on arrival: "If ’twas a good idea, we’d have had it 200 years ago." In Vermont, its reception seems to be: "Well, sounds like a numb idea. But why don’t we try it? Doesn’t work, we’ll fix it or repeal it."
On the map they’re two wedges lying tip to butt, holding New York and Maine apart, and one is upside down. But which one depends entirely on your point of view.
This is Willem Lange up in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.