A collection of terrifically written essays reflecting on everyday encounters in the Green Mountain State, from the thrall of the tractor to the presence of an Egyptian mummy.

Table of Contents
(1) Introduction (2) Cold Hard Cider (3) Time to a Pig (4) In the Beginning (5) The Sounds of Winter (6) The Edge of the Clearing (7) Crime and Punishment
(8) How to Dress Like a Vermonter (9) The Art Capital of the World (10) The Day After Mud Season (11) The News from Frog City (12) Bullwinkle and the Bucky Agenda (13) The Care and Feeding of John Deere (14) The Long Farewell (15) It Seems Only Fair: A Note on the Index

For author's previous book, Off the Leash: Subversive Journeys Around Vermont (Countryman Press, 1999)

From Library Journal:
It is a very personal account of Vermont and will attract visitors to and residents of Vermont who have time to read before seeking adventure. Buy for public libraries. Library Journal

From Booklist:
Husher is not your usual travel writer. Instead, she looks beyond typical tourist attractions and sees interest in all sorts of off-the-beaten-path places.

From Kirkus Reviews:
A satisfying book of travel throughout the Green Mountain State, mixing guidebook and essay. . . . Husher's entertaining, well-written book is likely to inspire more than one vacation to retrace her steps, and armchair travelers will enjoy it as well.

Yankee Magazine:
Great, great stuff--playful, intelligent, provocative, funny, informative, fill in the blank with your favorite rave.

"Endlessly, joyously inventive, Helen Husher writes with ferocity, grace, and wit about unknown and unappreciated corners of Vermont. Off the Leash is a perfect gift for the intellectually adventurous traveler, or for the connoisseur of fine writing who never leaves the house."
--Tim Clark, Yankee magazine

Helen Husher's stories and articles have appeared throughout New England. Kirkus Reviews praised her previous book, Off the Leash: Subversive Journeys Around Vermont, as "entertaining, well-written . . . [and] likely to inspire more than one vacationer to retrace her steps." She lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

There's a different kind of silence at the Brookfield Ice Harvest, sometimes called the Ice Festival, although there really isn't anything all that festive about it. Instead, there's something religious, or at least ritualistic, about the T-shaped hole cut in the ice of the pond, filled with black, cold water. The January coldness of this water, like the January coldness of the air, is utterly serious, and in truth the whole event has the weighty, freighted quality of a Civil War reenactment. The scene here, though, is curiously medieval--a rough wooden derrick dangling a chain stands nearby, and sharp things and mysterious things sit on tables or in the snow. Clots of children gravitate toward a team of apple-rumped horses straight out of a Brueghel painting, who wait with a terrible equine patience, hitched to thin air. About a hundred people stand in the white winter sunshine, also waiting. If we didn't know this was nothing more than the annual ice harvest, we might be inclined to think this gathering was about witchcraft and dunkings.

This sense of displacement is deliberate and attractive--for 20-plus years, a cadre of interested volunteers has been stage-managing this harvesting demonstration on a modest body of water in Brookfield's Pond Village, and for all those years people have been willing to come and watch the compelling, repetitive ballet of getting ice out of its natural habitat and into a manmade one. It's a reenactment of what New Yorker cartoonist and Brookfield resident Ed Koren calls "a pre-electrical ritual," and his use of the word "ritual" is perfectly accurate. If it were not a ritual, it would be very boring. And there are moments when it is boring, and the small crowd begins to chatter and wander off, but once the ice saw is lifted, once the stroking begins and the brittle skim of papery ice is broken by the passage of a huge, neat cube, tremendously heavy and yet floating with a kind of miraculous convenience, everybody comes back and watches with real attention. The derrick with its black tongs descends, the ice lifts, and there is a moment when it hangs in midair that seems full of rapture. People look at it with a kind of wonder and celebration; someone produces a tape measure and announces that the ice is twenty-two inches thick. This proclamation is met with nods of approval--despite the warming trend of the recent past, there is still ferocity and measurable depth to a Vermont winter.

In A View from Vermont, author Helen Husher examines everyday life in a place noted for its individuality and ingenuity - her home state of Vermont. With deep affection and understated humor, she explores her ongoing obsession: "the erratic heartbeat that propels the Vermont temperament." In this collection of engaging essays, Husher also reflects on issues common across America - the tensions between individual and community, natives and "people from away," tradition and change as seen through the lens of the Green Mountain State. Reaching beyond the cultural shorthand of tractors and plywood cows, she plumbs the complexities and comic depths of her fellow Vermonters. By celebrating her regional culture and its values, Husher sheds new light on this exceptional gift of we call "everyday life."

Imprint: Globe Pequot
Distributor: The Globe Pequot Press
Publication Date: 04-01-2004
Pages: 224
Measurements: 7.00in X 5.00in