Act 1, Scene 3
(Setting: The Parker Country Store, with register and counter to the left. Tables and chairs in the center of the room; shelves with modest local produce cover the walls. A few stand-alone shelves are situated strategically. Rusty Dewees Parker mans the register. As this scene opens, Rusty is reading the newspaper at the counter; Rodger Pion is to right center stage, intently performing a Tai Chi routine. Enter Boomer)
Boomer (to Rusty D Parker): Hey, what’s he doin’?
Rusty: Tai Chi.
Boomer: God Bless you! So, what’s Rodger doin’?
RP (discontinuing Tai Chi, frustrated): He told you, Boomer! It’s Tai Chi. It’s part of “the Way.” It’s from China… Man, now you’ve totally destroyed my energy flow.
Boomer: Sorry, didn’t mean to ignite your New Age fuse…. Whew. Rusty, does that stuff help you relax, ‘cause it sure has him worked up? Looks like you bottled your flow, Rodgey (mocks Tai Chi moves). Have a beer, it’ll uncork ya’.
RP (diffident): I don’t consume alcoholic beverages…. Bad energy.
Boomer: I just said have a beer… Now you’re talkin’ like you need a bucket a prunes! Mr Swami Lama Al Paca, or whatever.
Rusty: Hey Boomer, don’t let him bother ya’. He’s just kinda’ like a porcupine stuck in a lit woodstove pipe, don’t know whether to go up or down -- in big trouble both ways…
RP: I am not in trouble any way -- as I have averred, I am now following “the way.” As to stovepipe, did I tell you guys I saw John Malkovich when I was returning a piece of leftover stovepipe?….
Boomer and Rusty (together interrupting): Yeah, yeah, you told us Rodger.
Rusty: So how’s things, Boomer? You and Barb are divorced now I hear….
Boomer: Yeah, so I’m back in the game! Get the word out, Rusty -- you’re the hub of the wheel here, you know all the goin’s on, and who’s available…
Rusty: Oh I guess I’ll keep my eye out -- got myself to fend for too, you know. You already had your go -- give someone else a try!
Boomer: Plenty for all, Rusty. Though your name implies you may be somewhat unpracticed in the wooing game? (inflecting)
RP: How ‘bout it Rusty? Are you “rusty”? Ha!
Rusty: Go on now, you know I’m just a bit particular….
RP: Isn’t there a single girl in Vermont yet who achieves your highness’ lofty requisites?
Boomer: Ha ha. No lassie who makes the wolf in you howl?
Rusty: Well, there may be. I’m just not sure yet…
Boomer: Sure yet?! You mean she doesn’t know -- who is it buddy? I won’t move in on your turf, Rusty. Of course, if you didn’t tell us who she was I might sweep her off her feet and you out from under yours in one debonaire swoop, so you’d better fess up before all is lost.
Rodger: Before all is lost…
Rusty (pausing reluctantly, then blurting): That Berry girl is the nicest young lady I ever met!… but, I can’t imagine she would ever take a shine to a common storeowner….
Boomer: Oh, I bet you can imagine a lot more than that! I sure can!
Rodger (slapping Boomer in the chest): Quit that! Rusty, you sell yourself ten bales short! A lot of girls could do worse than Parker blood…. You must tell her! Ask her for a date.
Rusty: Oh, I don’t know: she might say “no.”
Boomer: Nothin’ to lose, buddy. Just have a couple beers first to get your courage up, and go for it. Then,…
Rodger: Yeah, then you’ll smell like a drunk and you’re not a drunk Rusty -- right? -- and beer is bad, right Rusty? You’ll scare her off if you listen to Don Juan Souliere there….Let’s focus now. No beer. How about if you write her a letter? No public embarrassment -- she’ll just write you back yes or no, or blow you off. Either way, she’s not the kind of girl to go runnin’ ya’ down if she declines your very chivalrous advance.
Rusty: A letter… That might be OK. I really do think she’s a very nice girl!
Boomer: Of course you do, Rusty.
Rodger: Sure you do! Now look, I happen to know she’s on her way over with her mom to deliver some cheese so why don’t you write that note right now so you don’t chicken out? Boomer and I will back you up -- we’re right here. Nothin’ to lose. You don’t want to wait and find out some other guy is seein’ her, and then it’s too late, do you?
Rusty: Of course not, Rodger. That would be awful.
Rodger: Alright then, get writin’….So Boomer, you been spreadin’ lately?
Boomer: Choppin.’ Almost constant. ANTO has no end of corn to chop. I dream rows of corn, mud, hills; more rows. But it’s decent pay.. And I always liked drivin’ stuff, you know that.
Rodger: Sure. You were born to the bucket seat.
( a young couple enters the store, clearly from down south -- the woman makes an awkward effort at “Hell-o”, phony and half-hearted. They are wearing sunglasses and flatlander garb. They browse for a while as the others are quiet and Rusty writes intently. Eventually, they settle on a small fancy bottle of maple syrup, and approach the counter).
Rusty: Excellent choice! That syrup was made just up the road. Vermont makes almost half of all the syrup in the world -- real maple syrup that is -- and it’s the best too! We have the best syrup because we have the worst weather! Ha ha.
Boomer: That’s why we have the best people too! Wonderful old characters, frozen in time. Ha ha.
Flatlander man: I got the syrup for my Mom, actually. She always talks about how she went to Vermont as a child, and had real maple syrup.
Flatlander woman: We prefer the Aunt Jemima ourselves. Real syrup is too sweet, and just tastes weird to me.
(Rodger is incredulous, visible to audience but not flatlanders. He is flustered and disgusted, but must express it non-verbally from behind the customers)
Rusty: Well, maybe you should try it again with your Mom. It’s bound to grow on you…
A lotta’ folks up here sip it like wine or spirits.
Flatlander woman: Gross! Really? How sickening!
Rodger (containing himself, barely): Well, some people up here also drink raw milk right from the cow.
Flatlander woman: You’re kidding, right? That sounds so strange -- don’t they get sick? Won’t the bacteria kill you? (shudders).
Rodger: You’re more likely to die from a lack of bacteria -- you need them to digest your food.
Flatlander woman: Yuck! No bacteria for me, thank you. We’ll just take the syrup….
Rodger: You sure there aren’t any evil bacteria in that syrup?
Rusty: Hey, don’t scare off my customers, buddy.
Flatlander woman: Really? Is there bacteria in there? Isn’t it sterilized with preservatives or something to make it safe?
Rodger: As long as they boiled it proper after the hotdogs and eggs…!
Flatlander man (politely ignoring Rodger): It’s OK, honey, it’s for my Mom -- she won’t care.
Flatlander woman: Well, she’s a strange one alright. Doesn’t even surprise me….
Rodger: She’d like sugar-on-snow!
Flatlander man, to Rusty: Do you have any of that here?
Rusty: Well, yes and no. We don’t make it -- it’s just maple syrup that is boiled extra so it gets like caramel, and then you pour it over fresh snow and it hardens up kinda’ like taffy.
Boomer (expressing a love for syrup): Mm-mm.
Flatlander woman: You mean, like, on actual snow from the ground -- from outside?
Rodger: No, we buy snow in a bag from the snowman who drives by on Tuesdays.
Rusty: Rodger…
Boomer: It doesn’t have to come from off the ground -- you can scoop it off your car hood just as well! Just don’t you eat that yellow snow! Ha!
Flatlander woman: Off a car? More like grey snow! Gross!
Rodger: Old man Cosset made us some one time he musta’ over-cooked: stuck my teeth so bad my Ma thought I had lock-jaw! Black stuff -- still sweet though!
Boomer: That’s not so bad. I drank a plastic gallon jug of water with a two-day dead mouse floating in it -- got four gulps down before I comprehended the vermination!
Flatlander woman: Oh my God! Didn’t it kill you?
(Rusty, Boomer and Rodger all pause and look at each other incredulously. Boomer continues…)
Boomer: Killed him! If there’d been a’ inch less water the little feller coulda’ walked around. But nope, it were too deep. He treaded for a while, you could tell -- water was all grey and gooey like he’d sorta’ pooped himself, you know what I mean? That’s how I knew the water weren’t right -- the strange sensation of the par-tic-u-late matter. Laughed so hard I had mouse-water come out my nose!
Flatlander: Oh my… OK, let’s go hon.
(exit flatlanders)
Rusty: Thanks a lot, Boomer -- maybe you should buy something now.
Boomer (feigning incredulity): What?! I was just trying to get her to buy some Alka-Seltzer or Pepto Bismol or something -- value added, you know.
(Rodger snickers)
Rodger: Wow, Rusty -- how do you do it? You’re like a prostitute, whorin’ yourself out to such clueless people. There are actually more of them, aren’t there?
Rusty: Not only are there more of them Rodger, but most small businesses in Vermont can’t make do without ‘em. Vermont is totally dependent on tourism now that farming is gone. There’s skiin’, leaf-peepin’, shopping in Burlington, mountain biking….
Rodger: That’s why growing weed is a revolutionary and patriotic Vermonter’s duty!
Boomer: Oh stupid hippies, your mommas raised you in the commune. Get with the program, and get a job.
Rodger: There aren’t jobs for everybody, Boomer. And not all of us want to work for a corporation -- we want to keep our souls.
Boomer: Dreamers! You can starve or go on food stamps then. Progress won’t wait for you.
Rodger: Progress! I should hope not. As far as I can see, we are in regress -- everything we create with our technology has a muddy lining we try to ignore. When we run out of oil we’ll be done for.
Boomer: Ha! Like we’ll ever run out of oil! Science has fracking now. There is an infinite supply of energy!
Rusty: That’s a fantasy, Boomer. And such things have costs.
Boomer: Costs! Who cares? A man’s got to make a living. You want people to starve, and freeze?
Rodger: You make a living, a few fat cats make billions, and all our kids have to inherit the mess. Fertilizer run-off, air pollution, global warming -- fracking creates millions of gallons of toxic polluted water that seeps into the water table. Long-term that’s more of a cost than an income.
Boomer: Ah, global warming! You believe that crap?
Rodger: It is obvious Boomer that we are polluting the planet -- we seem to have stopped worrying about that completely while we bicker over whether we’re warming it.
Rusty: Yeah, Boomer -- Vermont’s trout are all contaminated with mercury, and some streams and ponds are empty of fish because of acid rain. Let’s just wait and see if we can boil them in their streams too, before we care!
Boomer: You can’t stop progress, boys -- what do you propose to do, all live like Wendell?
Rusty: “Almost everyone now agrees that progress – in its utopian form at least – is a “superstition” that is “nearly worn out,”…and that the hope of some final state of earthly perfection, in short, is the “deadest of dead ideas.””
Boomer: So you embrace total despair?
Rusty: I embrace reality, Boomer. And you living in a fantasy world makes my reality bleak. Americans don’t seem able to fully comprehend that oil -- and other forms of energy -- have limits. We don’t seem capable of looking past our immediate consumptive needs. “The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call “the American way of life” will prove somehow indestructible….It is now and forevermore too late to use thriftily the first half of the world’s supply of petroleum. In the art of living we can only start again with what remains….Whichever way we turn, from now on, we are going to find a limit beyond which there will be no more. To hit these limits at top speed is not a rational choice. To start slowing down, with an idea to avoid catastrophe, is a rational choice, and a viable one if we can recover the necessary political sanity.”
Boomer: Political sanity! Sounds like suicide to me! No one will join you, even if they’d listen.
Rodger: But Boomer, what we are doing now is what is insane, and suicidal. You’ve seen all the farms disappear in our brief lifetimes. What would your grandfather say?
Boomer: He’d say a man’s got to make a living.
Rodger: But by destroying others? “[T]he more dependent we become on the industries of eating and drinking, the more waste we are going to produce. The mess that surrounds us, then, must be understood not just as a problem in itself but as a symptom of a greater and graver problem: the centralization of our economy, the gathering of the productive property and power into fewer and fewer hands, and the consequent destruction, everywhere, of the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community.” “The higher aims of “technological progress” are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in “the future.” We do as we do, we say, “for the sake of the future,” or “to make a better future for our children.” How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say.”
Rusty: “More than anything else, we would like to “control the forces of nature,” refusing at the same time to impose any limit on human nature. We assume that such control and such freedom are our “rights,” which seems to ensure that our means of control (of nature and of all else that we see as alien) will be violent.…[I]n our vaunted war against nature, nature fights back…. Many of the occurrences that we call “acts of God” or “accidents of nature” are simply forthright natural responses to human provocations….[B]y living in opposition to nature, we can cause natural calamities of which we would otherwise be free.”
Boomer: I still don’t see what alternative we have.
Rodger: What!? No alternative to destroying our children’s future? You can’t be serious! Rusty, this is what I’m always talkin’ about. People can’t figure out they’re being enslaved for money, and if they start to figure it out they throw their hands in the air like they are helpless! Take the blue pill -- run back into the Matrix where things are fake OK, not really OK. This is the modern human industrial mind, Rusty.
Boomer: Huh. I take care of myself -- that’s the American way. It’s a free country…
Rodger: But is it, Boomer? Are we really free when a few people have good “jobs” but increasing numbers of people have no jobs, or very low-paying ones?
Boomer: Works for me.
Rusty: “Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent on affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”
Rodger: I’d think you’d know this, Boomer -- you’re a Vermonter! People like those flatlanders, I understand why they don’t have a clue -- but you? They think of you as a stupid farm boy, Boomer.
Boomer: Let ‘em think what they like…
Rodger: But it can’t go on, Boom. “Equally important is the question of the sustainability of the urban food supply….the productivity of American agriculture is, at present, enormous. But this is a productivity based on the ruin of the producers and of the source of production. City people are unworried about this, apparently, only because they do not know anything about farming. People who know about farming, who know what the farmland requires to remain productive, are worried.”
Boomer: Well, too bad for the city people. Flatlanders are nuts!
Rodger: They believe much as you do, Boomer.
Boomer: Watch it now! Them’s fightin’ words!
Rodger: Ha ha! Flatlanders aren’t all so bad, Boomer.
(Sings song: Flatlanders)
In Vermont we have Green Mountains in abundance
Long winters, maple syrup and blue skies.
People from southern suburbs come to visit,
With flatlander ways they try to hide but can’t disguise.
You see a flatlander can’t tell he’s out of water,
When his gills are choked with air so far from home:
His Hummer cost more than most local houses,
And he’s in shock when he can’t use his cell-phone.
It’s not that Vermonters are perfect
In fact everyone has their flaws
It’s just that those sad flatlanders
Don’t even know what it means to be un-thawed.
Now you don’t have to chaw on old coy-dog,
Or pull fence in a black-fly filled bog,
to know that common sense matters,
and that to consume more than one needs makes a hog.
There’s something about the fast lane,
That causes this strange effect,
Common sense goes out the window,
With the flatlander birth defect.
They spend a dollar to get a quarter,
Throw perfectly good empties away,
Scratch their heads to change a flat tire,
Drive in snow as if licensed today.
Don’t understand the value of manure,
Or why hard work pays its own wage,
They think money is the only thing sure
Work in offices in high-rises like cages.
The suburbs are prisons with carpet,
The cities are toxic and grey
The arteries of multi-lane highways,
Take you between the two each day
Fancy clothes and shopping malls
Will never rival dirty overalls.
You may chuckle at my backwoods life
But I don’t breathe fresh air just on vacation,
And I know that land is not a commodity,
And I know where my food comes from…
You can tell when they’re around by their car alarm beepers
Or when your life’s on hold for pokey leaf peepers.
But I really liked one who was none the wiser,
When I sold him twelve tons of poor man’s fertilizer.
Up here when a cow gives a heifer we thank it,
And the solution to no insulation is the electric blanket
You don’t need electricity if the water flows downhill
And venison is cube steak when peeled off your car grill.
We may not have modern stuff or new technology
We may not value Ralph Lauren or dental care or teeth
But we set our chins and smile when it’s 35 below,
And log, milk or syrup, however deep the snow.
But even if from New Jersey, or Mass or further south,
You will find this harsh land’s people to be very kind;
And they will pull your leg for talkin’ funny-mouthed,
But bein’ a flatlander’s really a state of mind…
(enter Shannon Berry, Tanya Berry, and Michelle Brown)
Tanya: Hey fellas! Beautiful day! Rusty, we brought you some more cheeses… Did the others sell?
Rusty: Like hotcakes, darlin’. Like hotcakes!
Rodger (a little too eager): I’ll take four! Right now, cash!
Rusty (nervously): Chill, Rodger. There will be plenty… So Tanya, how’s that pretty cow Gwen?
Tanya: Oh, she’s got the best temperament of any cow we ever had! I’ve milked Ayshires and Holsteins, Jerseys and Shorthorns …. even had a Brown Swiss -- what a hellish troublemaker she was! Nope, Gwen’s gentle and patient. A real sweetie!
Rusty: There aren’t many Guernseys left anymore. And what rich, tasty cheese she makes!
Shannon: And all from one cow -- not some 40,000-gallon industrial vat. Mom’s cheeses are the best!
Rodger: I’ll take four, right now!
Rusty (who by now has received the cheeses from Tanya): Fine, take ‘em! Pay me later!
(gives Rodger four cheeses, which he stows in a backpack. The others look at him like he’s odd.)
Boomer: Boy, Rodger, you sure like cheese all of a sudden. I haven’t seen you so cheesed up since we drank too much Old Duke in back of the town dance and you ate two whole cans of Cheese Whiz plain cause that’s all you could find and then you couldn’t keep it down… ! Somethin’ fancy with the girls you were! Ha!
Rodger (riling): Boomer….
Rusty: Now boys not in here! Don’t start!
Tanya (changing subject): So, I can bring you some more of those tartenais cheeses next week -- they weren’t quite ready…
Rusty (gives her an envelope): Here’s what I owe ya‘.
Tanya: Thanks, Rusty.
Boomer: Hey Mrs. Berry, do you and Wendell like Nas-Car? I’ze thinkin’a goin’ at’ Louden next week. Have you folks ever been?
Tanya: No, Boomer -- we have animals. Don’t get away much.
Boomer: That’s why I like something I can turn the key on: and when it’s in the shed, it don’t need feed to sit there. Can’t figure why anybody’d farm anymore, when life can be so much easier.
Tanya: Easier ain’t necessarily better, Boomer. What I do every day is nothin’ compared to what some have had to do. And I work for myself. Yes, Wendell and I work every single day. But this is natural to farmers. “We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works…only to be able to quit -- a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.”
Boomer: Weekends are awesome! Party!
Tanya: But by its very nature -- and by what you are saying right there -- the modern “weekend” is viewed as an escape from something that farmers learn to enjoy -- most times. Work is life. I just count myself fortunate -- my grandfather Alexander lost an arm in a hunting accident. Tough way to milk cows, in days before machines…
Boomer: Aw, but machines have improved everything. Even a one-armed man could milk cows today! Or hire Mexicans! Ha!
(during this exchange, Rusty Dewees Parker passes a somewhat startled Shannon Berry a note, unseen by Tanya Berry but visible to the others -- Rusty gets a grinning thumbs-up from Rodger while Shannon and Tanya are distracted)
Michelle: But Boomer, industrialization and corporations are what have destroyed the family farm and small towns like ours. “In our foolish insistence on substituting technology for vision, …” we are running ourselves out of town. Our young people move away….
Boomer: Now you sound like these two hippies!
Rusty: Don’t have to be a hippie to like local food!
Tanya: Hair style isn’t the issue, Boomer. We in “…the United States ha[ve] chosen (if that is the right word) to become an import-dependent society rather than to live principally from [our…] own land and the work of [our…] own people. Our great modern powers of science, technology, and industry are always offering themselves to us with the suggestion that we know enough to use them well, that we are intelligent enough to act without limit in our own behalf. But the evidence is now rapidly mounting against us. By living as we do, in our ignorance and our pride, we are diminishing our world and the possibility of life.” Look at Fukushima!
Boomer: Science has done magnificent things! It can’t all be roses. They’ll figure it out.
Michelle: “You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough.” The costs of pollution and resource depletion affect us all, Boomer. No one is allocating resources for scientific research to remove the mercury from ocean fish…or from Vermont’s trout, for that matter. Once you take certain steps, you can’t go back.
Boomer: All right ladies, you know I love farming. I’m just not all educated and stuff. I drive tractor -- I don’t understand why things are the way they are.
Rusty: It’s not really that complicated. Small farms get eaten by big farms, like little fish get eaten by big fish. Technologies hurt little farms and help big farms. Corporations profit and people lose their way of life. It’s been happenin’ a while.
(Sings song: Old Farmer)
1890 the sky was darkened, the wind laid grass to ground
An old farmer watched as the sharp rain pelted, his dog sought shelter from the sound.
But the cows were out in back pasture grazing, ‘fore the tempest broke from the west
Best to draw them from harm’s way, lest they not stand nature’s test
Chorus:
Look to the sky, old farmer,
Call your cows to the barn, storm’s comin’
Your way of life is threatened, but it’s rhythm keeps on strummin’
1920 and the ground’s torn by the wonder of the modern tractor
90% of farmers were made unemployed for ever after
A few tenacious dairy farmers clung to the indifferent land
At least those mighty tractors couldn’t milk a cow by hand
Look to the sky, old farmer,
Call your cows to the barn, storm’s comin’
Your way of life is threatened, but it’s rhythm keeps on strummin’
1940, city-dwellers decide how farmers will produce their food
They’re now required to pasteurize but to unionize would be rude
The cows are disappearing and the fields are growing fallow
The cities grow yet larger while the countryside grows shallow
Look to the sky, old farmer,
Call your cows to the barn, storm’s comin’
Your way of life is threatened, but it’s rhythm keeps on strummin’
1960 and farming has become all but a joke
Who would give up weekends to wear the farmer’s yoke?
Commuting is so easy -- you can sit upon your ass
And what kind of money is paid to watch smelly cows eat grass?
Look to the sky, old farmer,
Call your cows to the barn, storm’s comin’
Your way of life is threatened, but it’s rhythm keeps on strummin’
1980 and debt has become the modern American value
Even if you want to farm the banks will not allow you
Farm-Aid asked for hand-outs while consumers turned away
To cheap Japanese autos, but you still kept bailin’ hay
Look to the sky, old farmer,
Call your cows to the barn, storm’s comin’
Your way of life is threatened, but it’s rhythm keeps on strummin’
2000 and the New Age Industrial schism
Between sustainable food supplies and false techno-mysticism
The post-and-beam barns have long rotted to perdition
And confinement dairies have decimated the small-farm competition
Look to the sky, old farmer,
Call your cows to the barn, storm’s comin’
Your way of life is threatened, but it’s rhythm keeps on strummin’
2010 and those city folk have not yet got a clue
That their illusory easy life is coming fast unglued
They’ve abandoned farming in disdain for good hard work
Putting faith in future pensions or governmental perqs
They’ve never learned how to bring food into their own homes
(They think that meat is bred shrink-wrapped in Styrofoam)
Sitting like slaves, demanding government jobs
As their currency fails, becoming gun-toting mobs
As they begin to starve they’ll come looking for you
And like the Little Red Hen, you know what to do
Look to the sky, old farmer,
Call your cows to the barn, storm’s comin’
Your way of life is threatened, but it’s rhythm keeps on strummin’
(End of Act 1)