Stowe, Vermont: Week Four

August 10-17, 2025

It’s hard to believe that I have been staying at the farmhouse in Stowe for four weeks now! It’s been an eye opener in terms of visualizing the future, in the next year at least, maybe longer. By this I mean, I would continue to wander with my van (Oomba), staying at various parks and enjoying natural wonders. I might alternate that with renting an apartment for a month or two at a time. I would enjoy staying in an environment that facilitates opportunities of familiarity and community. Then back to a few months of campgrounds.

My Porch!

On Sunday, Cindy and I went to Bread and Puppets Theatre in Glover, VT. As I mentioned in the previous post, Cindy and I met while camping at Grand Canyon National Park in September 2024, and she lives nearby in Montpelier.

Bread and Puppets, founded by Peter Schumann, originated in NYC in 1963. It evolved into a politically focused theatre, sometimes depicted as radically so. It moved from NYC to a large farm in Glover in 1974. There was a 2023 New Yort Times article about Mr. Schumann and his work. It provides a good window into Bread and Puppets, much more descriptive and thorough than I could communicate.

Wolves and Sheep ...

More information about Bread and Puppets is available on the Bread & Puppets website as well as Wikipedia. The show we saw is called Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution in Progress Circus. It has been a show running for many years with changing topics annually.

There were around 1,000 people expected for the show. It takes place outdoor in the open air. There is a large hill that provides a natural amphitheater setting of tiered seating. People bring blankets and chairs. It was about a half mile walk from our parking lot to the “stage.”

For each scene, players change into a variety costumes behind a multicolored school bus. There is also band, composed of about fifteen musicians, to the left of the school bus. Each member is dressed in white. Sometimes a band member is integrated into the acting parts.

The show was entertaining, performers and puppets singing and dancing, communicating a range of emotions, at times light-hearted and humorous, more often portraying disturbing events of current times in the United States and the Middle East. The “Circus” utilized a number of scenes drawing attention to the suffering of people of people in Gaza at the hands of Israel and to the unlawful nature of the current Trump administration’s activities related to immigration.

On Monday night I went to the West African Drum and Dance class again. I talked briefly with the instructor, Chimie, as we arrived to the River Arts Center at the same time. There was a choir practice taking place upstairs, as there had been last week, too. This group of singers must have the space Monday nights before the 6:15 drum and dance event.

Just after 6:00 they ended their session and started heading for the door. Chimie and a few others proceeded to bring out his drums. He has about ten drums stored at the building for people to use if they do not have their own drum. You can see the types of drums on his Facebook page. Last week, Chimie taught us some of a rhythm called Sinte. There is a YouTube video I found this week that goes over this. (The video is not Chimie’s). This week Chimie was showing us another rhythm. I cannot recall the name, but it was something like Sora (I think.)

Although this is a drum “class”, it is very informal. We all sit down in a circle and Chimie plays some tones and beats that we all mimic. That part is good. It’s a hands on learning experience. Having a background in education and teaching, in schools and libraries, I would do things a little differently. I would add some initial discussion about what we were going to learn. It seems some, perhaps most, of the participants have been coming to these sessions for a long time, and communication between instructor and students is established. Being new to it, and to drums in general, I just tried to keep up with things following his lead. At times it felt out of synch.

Like the week before, after forty-five minutes of drumming (it went by so fast!) it was time to switch to West African Dance. But this week, rather than have some drummers play while others danced, Chimie turned on some music from his phone played on a speaker that was in the room. My Achillies is still not 100%, so I opted out of dance again and left shortly after they began. I was disappointed to not keep drumming for the dancing.

Somewhat related to my newfound interest in drumming are some singing bowls I recently acquired. Sound is an interesting phenomenon, a variety of vibrations and wavelengths, disturbances in the air, that our ears are able to pick up and interpret. Just as different colors of light have different wavelengths along the visible spectrum, sound has a variety of wavelengths along an auditory spectrum. Singing bowls, when struck with an instrument, provide vibrations in certain wavelengths. Of course, my drums and my flute also provide vibrations, sounds in different wavelengths.

The singing bowls came with a course in using them. It is a twelve-module set of online videos that discusses sound waves, then moves into brainwaves and consciousness, harmony and disharmony, postulating a relationship between sound and health. It draws attention to the types of brainwaves that are predominant under certain mental states, such as when we are busy and analytical, when we are relaxed, when we are stressed, and when we are asleep. There are no good or bad brainwaves, but there is a need for balance among the different types (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma).

The course brings meditation into the discussion as a way to affect the type of brainwave activity we undergo, and sound therapy as another tool in bringing about favorable results.

Thursday I drove down to Montpelier for a second time. I walked around the downtown, checking out a shop called Cosmic Cotton, which was next door to a place called Cool Jewels, a beads and minerals shop. Cosmic Cotton featured a range of products based on tie-dyed fabrics with a Grateful Dead theme. Cool Jewels had a lot of beads, pendants, stones, and minerals for creating necklaces and other jewelry.

From there I crossed the street to another Bear Pond Bookstore (there was one in Stowe, too.) In addition to browsing books, I talked with a woman who had a Rand McNally road atlas in her hands. I asked if she was going on a road trip, and it turns out she was. She was flying out west and renting a camper for a trip through parts of Utah. She told me about some places she planned to go, most of which seemed to be off-grid, driving down dirt roads and camping on BLM lands (Bureau of Land Management.) Although I have been to Utah dozens of times, I was not familiar with the places she mentioned other than knowing the general vicinity of them near Boulder, Utah.

After the bookstore, I went into Onion River Outdoors. It has a variety of equipment related to outdoor activities, and a focus on bicycles occupies much of the store space. I went in to browse and ask some questions about a new bike I am interested in buying, a Surly Disk Trucker. The person I spoke with was helpful and interesting.

I explained I was looking for the Surly and wanted to trade in one of my current bikes. He told me they do not deal with trade-ins. So that nixed the idea. But we talked about why I was looking for the Surly. It’s related to the gearing. I told him my plans to be in Death Valley for a few months later this year, and I wanted better gearing for the mountains there. I said, "I don't know if you are familiar with Death Valley and the climbs there," and to my surprise he was well aware of them! He actually had lived in Pahrump, Nevada for a couple of years. I found that we had connected here about this to be amazing, quite a coincidence.

Death Valley is located about one hundred forty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas. Pahrump is on the route there, the only city on the route. It's sixty miles to Pahrump, then another eighty-five miles to Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park.

The climbs in DVNP range from about ten to twenty-five miles in length with elevation change totaling as much as 5,665 feet. There are some really steep sections, too, over 10% gradient for several miles at a time. I have done these climbs on my current bikes over the last few years, but it would be better to have some lower gears, and the Surly would do the trick.

After Onion River, I sat outside and waited for Cindy to join me. We walked to my van, then drove the short distance to her condo. I had left my white plastic beach chair, cheap and very comfortable 😊, in her van the other day when we went to Bread and Puppets, so I retrieved it. Inside her condo, we had some ice water that hit the spot, and she showed me a photo album she had put together on her trip to Thailand a few years back. She had gone there for six months to teach in a K-12 school. (Cindy is a retired schoolteacher.) Thailand sounded and looked like quite an experience! Fascinating culture, art, architecture, etc.

Next we went to a place called Buddy’s Famous, best burgers and fries in Montpelier! The fries were so delicious. It was good fun. Spending time with Cindy has been great. In person conversations came easy. I meet many people on the road, and in some cases we exchange contact information and stay in touch. That's a good thing, and then in-person time adds quite a lot to communication and learning about others, and in this case learning a little about her path through life. Good stuff.

In the four weeks I have been here I have ridden my bike about 600 miles. It has been good riding on roads lined with farms and wildflowers with occasional cows and horses grazing in green pastures. There are great views on the horizon as some mountain area is always in sight. There is a house I pass by occasionally that has a wonderful garden. The yard is about half the size of a football field. It has multiple rows of flowers and flowering bushes alternating with wide sections of green grass. One day this week, a man was outside not far from the road doing some weeding. I stopped and talked with him. He moved here from Manhattan several years ago and planted the gardens. He told me about the process and how he enjoyed it here. It was a nice stop along my way …

I’ve been walking on my street daily, up and down getting in my steps. I still am hesitant to do hikes on steep trails, but I think my Achilles is doing a great deal better, so I might soon be back hiking the mountains. In the meantime, walking along the road is fine. It has little traffic and is bordered by cornfields and grazing land for some cows. I took my flute up to the fields yesterday, wanting to see if the cows liked it, but they were not around. I saw them earlier today, as I returned on my bike ride, so I’ll wander up there again in a little while and play for them …