Muse of Exit Ramps

One May morning some years ago, the Vermont poet Neil Shepard started at I-89’s Stowe/ Waterbury interchange and headed south, turning off the superhighway at every subsequent exit to observe its cloverleafs, bridges, and underpasses; his project was to “crystallize” his impressions of these “ramplands” into a few poems. The journey, which continued south to the Massachusetts border on I-91 after its intersection with I-89, took three days. The crystallizations took longer—perhaps becoming poetic rest areas as Shepard concentrated on the more extensive journeys of T(ravel)/ Unt(ravel) (2011)—but they eventually appeared in the chapbook Vermont Exit Ramps (2012).

Vermont Exit Ramps II is a continuation of the project, which grew from a three-day lark to a five-year series of reflective trips along 381 Interstate miles. The new collection reprints thirteen of the original twenty-five poems and adds twenty-seven more; it covers all but the Burlington city exits north of Stowe (I-89) and White River Junction (I-91). The poems are enhanced by Anthony Reczek’s photographs of the ramplands’s fragile spring loveliness, and the collaboration, handsomely published by Brattleboro’s Green Writers Press, is a beautiful book.

Readers familiar with Reczek’s style from his unobtrusively spectacular pictures in Vermont Life might expect Vermont Exit Ramps II to extend the image of an “unspoiled Vermont” that the magazine has promoted for seventy years. Be not deceived. The collection is, in Shepard’s words, “a book of post-pastoral poems,” and the couplets of its invocation, “Vermont Exits,” introduce a compromised Arcadia:

Who will claim the kingdom of exit ramps and cloverleafs

on the hillsides of I-89, these realms of birch and pine

Rippling in mountain wind on a spring day, domains of quiet forgetfulness, places ravaged and recovered – Shepard and Reczek’s ramplands are beautiful precisely because they are un-cherished. No longer of interest to the ravaging forces of progress, have become demesnes “no one claims, the heavy machinery / having rattled past and gouged a pasture elsewhere.”

Ostensibly, “I-89, Exit 10: Stowe/Waterbury” begins the sequence of exit poems because it’s the interchange closest to Shepard’s home in Johnson. Thematically, however, it portrays the face of post-pastoral Vermont by describing the geological and cultural metamorphosis brought about by the Interstates’ accommodation of Vermont’s ski industry. Exit 10’s rampland is “Blasted through fifty feet of granite / to make this exit ‘Vermont’/ for tourists.” Tourism, of course, preceded the Interstate; nineteenth-century visitors could see “the Summit / House built as the Civil War broke out,” or take “the Toll Road to the top of Mansfield / finished in 1870.” But “this history” began when Stowe’s residents innocently discovered skiing, thus opening the way to the literal and figurative Iron Age destruction of Vermont’s Arcadian foundations:

This history has a moneyed glide, a schuss through powder, a hottub view and a gold club perched high on a hillside.

Beneath it, loggers felling trees on a ski slope, road crews with sledgehammer, pickaxe, demolition dynamite.

That dynamite exposed a prehistoric past, Granite before you thought of granite. Granite before the dynamite blast, before the tourist-idea: Best Western Café Grill, Blush Hill Country Club, Stowe Street Emporium. ATM.

This is ravage and commercial “renewal” brought about by the worship of progress “that bedevils us in this late-capitalist culture.”

The collection as a whole, however, is no diatribe; for the most part, it juxtaposes despoliation and beauty in the way earlier pastorals juxtaposed Court and Country. The “post-” in its pastoral lies in the witty irony with which the poems portray a “renewed” twenty-first century Vermont in which the Golden Age and the Iron Age share the same landscape. Sometimes the old and new parallel each other: at the end of the Middlesex exit (I-89 #9), for example, “turn right” and you’re headed to ski towns, but

Turn left and meet Through Way Ends...