Scene: a pair of middle-aged dads staring into the blue glow of their laptop screens from opposite US coasts. One is in California, the other Connecticut. They’re on Zoom. It’s late in the evening on a cold winter night, early in the second year of the global Covid-19 pandemic. They are plotting…planning…a journey? An escape?…

Cal, I couldn’t agree with you more. President Calvin Coolidge was a native and prodigal son of Vermont, whose affections for the Green Mountain State were as authentic and deep as the granite veins running through Mt. Mansfield. I, too, fell in love with Vermont, though not quite as far back as the Coolidge administration…but…

As an American, and not unlike many other Americans, I have this weird spatial/cognitive relationship with our great northern neighbor. Obviously, and just like any other American, I’m aware of the fact that a half-continent-sized land mass looms north of my own country’s controversial and troubled borders. Rationally, I know that it’s a sovereign state…