And then there was the incident at Thetford State Park. We’d been driving for more than ten hours. Lucy was hungry and crying loudly, Cosmo was trying a version of canine tai chi in order to quell the ants in his pants. We decided to pull off the highway and drive into a state park so we could feed Lucy and walk the Coz. We saw signs for Thetford State Park. Sounds good, we thought.

Lucy was screaming louder. We raced to find the park. We pulled in and drove up the long unpaved road. We came to a rolling stop at the Stop sign, and drove past the ranger station which also bore sign asking visitors to “check in” before entering the park. Lucy was screeching, Cosmo was twirling around in the back seat next to her saying “get me out of here before she explodes!” We didn’t check in.

We drove up the road looking for a place to park. The entire park was deserted. We pulled up to a picnic area with some covered tables and a few outdoor grills. There wasn’t a soul around and it was a very pretty spot, but we had no time to appreciate either. Jess leapt out of the car and searched through the trunk for Lucy’s baby food. She grabbed some smashed bananas or some such and carried Lucy to one of the benches. Cosmo stayed dutifully by my side. That’s when then Vermont’s version of Bob and Ray showed up, in their matching green T-shirts.

They barreled up the hillside in their Vermont Parks Department buggy, the five horses in their lawnmower engine straining like Ben Hur’s stallions in the final stretch. Grim determination was etched in their flinty Yankee faces. They reigned in their virtual steeds, coming to a jarring stop inches away from the suspects. “Did you see the stop sign back there?!” one of them yelled at me with a tone which made it clear that he already knew the answer – and an accent which, with equal clarity, revealed that he considered Massachusetts to be the “Deep South.”

“Uh no, was there a stop sign?” I asked, a bit disingenuously since I had seen it.

“You’re darn right there was!” The driver then began to chew me out about how people couldn’t just “enter” a state park. His wingman nodded along authoritatively. The man railed about how I was driving dangerously fast, tearing through the park like a bat out of hell (I’d been going about 25 MPH on a straight 15 MPH road). I suspect the men thought that any speed which left their golf cart in the dust was in danger of breaking the sound barrier. Amidst this harangue about how visitors can’t just “visit” a park in Vermont, and how the “public” in Vermont is a priestly caste my wife and I fall well outside of, he stopped dead short and pointed at my trusty sidekick Cosmo … “and that definitely has to stay in the car.”

“That”? Cosmo looked at me with an expression of “what did I do?” bewilderment.

Swallowing bilious rage and furious anger, I apologized about the stop sign, about not acquiescing to a retina scan and for not submitting a stool sample before daring to enter a state park in God’s Own Vermont. I endured the tongue-lashing by Thetford’s Finest, because my baby needed to eat and be changed before we got in the car again. They wheeled their cart back, almost running over my dog, and with a less than dignified nine point turn they scooted back down the trail fifty yards or so. They then waited amidst the trees spying us — in what they surely considered special forces mode — in order to ensure that we did indeed put the bewildered-but-ferocious hellhound back in our dangerously fast VW Passat.

No doubt, Vermont State Park Rangers everywhere will hold their manhood’s cheap for not sharing in the glory of that day in Thetford.

After they finally tore off, in a very small cloud of dust, and once Lucy was sated, we reloaded our baby into the car. But then, it was as if the State of Vermont itself was seeking to punish us. Bees poured into the car. One crawling on Lucy herself. Bee stings can be very dangerous for infants and so, deeply concerned, we did our best to cover Lucy and get driving, in the hope that the creatures would flee out the windows of a moving car. The bees finally did leave the car – no doubt once the Great Spirit of Vermont was sure we were leaving — just as we were passing the ranger station where protocol demanded I leave a kidney as collateral. Instead, we fled flipping them birds and leaving them to their bees.