It’s official: I loathe Vermont. In fact, it weren’t for a few NRO readers, one old friend of mine, one girl at an ice-cream stand, one guy named Bert, and Calvin Coolidge I would argue that there are no and have been no good Vermonters, ever. Yes, yes, yes, it’s pretty. Very pretty. Damn them, their gorgeous state!

But that’s part of the problem, the whole places gives off that “I Hope you’re not planning to stay here” vibe. It reminds me of that “Seinfeld” where the Maestro (played by that Niedermeyer actor from Animal House), insists there’s no room anywhere in Tuscany for any more visitors.

For example, we stopped in Putney, Vermont to get a bite to eat and put Lucy (our baby) and Cosmo (our canine companion, duh) through their paces. We stopped at “Bert’s Chuck Wagon” a mobile burger stand with picnic tables out front. Some locals were eating there, including a guy who looked like Ned Flanders in Teddy Roosevelt style glasses and was – as best I could glean from his conversation – an administrator at a liberal arts college. He wore a T-shirt which bore an excerpt from a dictionary. I couldn’t make out the whole word being defined, but the suffix was “biblio.” In short, this guy didn’t see the irony in his need to tell the world he was a Serious Reader. Perhaps he thought his persona was better suited for the biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota? Meanwhile, his shorthaired wife looked like her warmest memories could be found in the warm afterglow of the many bra-burnings of her youth. They had several kids with them, most of whom looked normal. But one seemed to be following the old adage, “dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Clearly this kid, with his filthy jeans, facial scrub-brush and old bandana holding back his high THC-content hair was hoping to be spotted and given his dream gig as third-string roadie for Blues Traveler.

They drove a white minivan with an “Impeach Bush” bumper sticker.

Anyway, while waiting for Bert to serve up the vittles, we asked these fine folks if there was a place in or around town we could take our dog to play for a few minutes. The wife paused and then answered, “No, this is it.” She asked her Serious Reader husband if he could think of anyplace. He struck a pondering pose, as if someone asked him his favorite Walt Whitman poem. “Hmmm, no,” he replied. “There’s no place like that around here.” He might as well have said, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

Who would have thought that the small patch of grass surrounding Bert’s Chuck Wagon was the single greatest place in all of middle chunk of the Green Mountain State to throw a tennis ball for a dog.