The early 20th century horror writer Lovecraft , who lived in a cottage in Brattleboro for one summer, featured parts of Southern Vermont in one of his best Cuthulu Mythos stores, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” a story set in the small towns in this area, including of course the odd and interesting town of Brattleboro. Probably the most famous, if barely remembered resident of Brattleboro was Rudyard Kipling, the great English poet and novelist who wrote, believe it or not, The Jungle Book right here in Vermont. As I walk the streets of the town, I can’t help but imagine a him in my mind’s eye in jodhpurs, a pith helmet, and a red and black checked hunting coat walking the same sidewalks of long ago. Up until a year or two ago, Brattleboro was a bastion of public nudity, an activity banned finally by the town aldermen (and that can be a good or bad thing, depending on who happens to be naked in public), and is home of a great outdoor clothing store, a decent bbq shack, some good bookstores and art galleries, a peculiar and cozy little riverside marina, and of course the Brattleboro Retreat, an institution that would once have been called an insane asylum that features a majestic bell tower built partially with inmate / patient labor, and purportedly haunted by one of the unlucky souls who fell screaming to his death off a rickety scaffolding.
I don’t know if Lovecraft ever visited the Retreat, but thanks to his visit to this area, Whisperer perhaps may be the only piece of fiction in American letters that mentions my own town of Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Here are the opening paragraphs from another Lovecraft tale, “The Dunwich Horror.” True, the squalid, fictional settlement of Dunwich is set in a different part of New England, but the feeling it evokes matches how I feel driving though this part of Vermont.
“When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
“The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.
“Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
“Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.”
It was a cold morning when my friend Trevor and I arrived in the village, and although it promised to be a partially sunny day with no rain, I was thankful for the wool coat and cap I was wearing. After Trevor and I took some photos of the ruined mill, we drove the 100 yards and visited the old CIC building I worked in as a technical products copywriter. As I had expected, I had that slightly empty, wistful feeling I always get when I visit a place from my past. Maybe you too have had that same feeling when you visited your childhood home, for instance, your old college, or some other location once important to you; these old places from our past feel diminished somehow to me, as much as in size as in the shadows of memory that move and play in the shadows and sunlight by a well loved old tree, or the doorway you once went in and out of, or the parking lot your friends and you used to say goodbye in at the end of each day.
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