Rumble Strip

Forrest Foster was loading up the tractor with kindling for deer camp. It was two days before deer season. I was over there visiting and helping him with his night chores. I like Forrest. I like being around him, and I always learn something from him. Like last week he told me that you should always plant your garlic with the long rounded side facing north and the flat side facing south. Anyway, I...

Nick Paley is a writer, editor and director for film and TV, and a co-writer on the recent film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which stars an adorable one-inch tall shell who wears shoes and is looking for his long lost shell family. Nick is from Vermont, and he's working on a new TV series set here, so when he was in town I dragged him to a matinee of Marcel the Shell...the same movie theater w...

Vaughn Hood was a 118-pound barber when he was drafted into the Vietnam War. And in Vaughn’s war, most men didn’t survive their first three-month tour. In honor of Veteran's Day, here is the story of an extraordinary American life. This story is co-produced by Larry Massett and Erica Heilman. It first ran in...I can't remember what year. About five years ago.

Armand Patoine sat with me in his tea house, deep inside his garden, which leads down to a stream. He has been creating this garden for 49 years. We talked about gardening, and what God has to do with his gardening, which it turns out is everything.

My son is leaving for his freshman year of college in a week and I am feeling maudlin. I listened to this show I made years ago and it made me feel better. So before August is really, really over, here are the kids of Hospital Hill. Description: The kids of Randolph, Vermont describe their neighborhood as a place with three purple houses. They tell me there’s a shortcut through the woods down to D...

Leland is my neighbor and for the last seven years, we’ve been getting together in the spring to talk about his year, and things like God and space and pork shortages. This year Leland graduated from high school and I figured it was time to hear pieces from all of the years with Leland, all together, and all at once.

A couple weeks ago on Hardwick's Front Porch Forum, someone called Tiana asked if there was anyone who could help her with her hair and makeup for an important date with her boyfriend. Front Porch Forum is an online, daily community forum, which is like a bulletin board at a local general store. You can find secondhand tires there. Or read complaints about the Selectboard. Every Vermont town’s got...

Ira Karp lives on a farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, surrounded by music, puppets, and a family of incredible storytellers. Over his brief lifetime, he has become a ‘story keeper’ himself, collecting epic tales from his everyday life. This is a story I made for THE BIG PONDER , a podcast series produced by the Goethe-Institut. They work with radio stations and independent producers in the U.S....

This show is a kind of coda to Finn and the Bell.... At long last, the bell is in its tower at Hazen Union High School. The final installation happened right before the Hardwick Memorial Day Parade. I stopped by and recorded some of the volunteers as they constructed the tower, hoisted the bell, and rang in its new life up on the hill over Hardwick.

Tara Wray is a photographer. And a dog person. She takes pictures of dogs which are haunting and beautiful, and every bit as distinctive as pictures of individual people. I interviewed her shortly after the death of her beloved dog, Nighthawk. Then my friend Tobin’s dog died, and he told me that he sometimes felt ashamed for feeling so much about the death of a dog--a dog who had been his only com...

I've been thinking of getting a dog for years but even though I have an eighteen-year-old son, I've never felt mature enough to have a dog. So when my friend Chris told me he and his partner Beth were getting a puppy, I asked if he'd chronicle the event, and for the next seven months, he sent me recordings of what it was like to have a puppy. It was hilarious and weird and harrowing. Here are the...

Forrest Foster is a farmer in Hardwick, Vermont. It’s an organic dairy farm, seventy cows total and about forty milking at any given time. I spent an afternoon following Forrest around the barn, his sugarshack, we took a long ride in his tractor, out past his deer camp. He took me to the place where he cuts cedar and hemlock boughs for deer in the winter, and dispatches his old animals to feed the...

Helena de Groot grew up in Belgium and is now a radio producer living in New York City. When I found out she was about to take her citizenship test, I asked if she’d be willing to record herself talking about what it feels like to become an American…and she agreed. Helena is the host and producer of the Poetry Foundation podcast Poetry Off the Shelf and senior producer of The Paris Review Podcast...

I am home alone on New Years, cleaning and listening to music, and suddenly I remembered Grant Owen, a kid I interviewed at the beginning of the pandemic, and I realized he is exactly the company I needed. So as you’re getting ready for your dinner party or dance party or if you are stuck in a cab or a subway on the interminable trip to The New Years Place, I think you will find that Grant Owen is...

It’s been another challenging year of the pandemic, and families across the nation are trying to figure out how to be together for the holidays. For some, this is hard. Really hard. Welcome to Problems, a series about comfortable, upper middle class people who have a lot to complain about. This year, sisters Andrea and Amanda have managed to get to their childhood home in Massachusetts to spend Ch...

Will Staats worked for both Vermont and New Hampshire for forty years as a wildlife biologist. He’s also a passionate hunter. He knows the back country of the Kingdom right up through Maine and into Labrador. One day in October he took me bird hunting deep in the unorganized town of Ferdinand. We talked about birds. And we talked about the growing divide between traditional hunting culture and peo...

Finn Rooney killed himself on January 3, 2020 in the afternoon after school. No one predicted it. There were no signs. All that can be said for sure is that there was a flash of high emotion that comes with youth, and there was a gun nearby, and bullets. This isn’t a story about suicide. It’s a story about a boy called Finn who loved to fish and play baseball and write poetry and embroider…and wha...

I heard recently that Peter Dunning died.  I want to play this again, in tribute. He was an amazing man. Peter Dunning’s farm was a Vermont hill farm. A hundred and thirty-six acres of forest and orchards and wet spots and steep, rocky pasture, picked over by farmers for hundreds of years. Peter farmed here, mostly alone, for nearly forty years. When he was getting done, we spoke at his kitchen ta...

In cases where a defendant seems unjustly accused, the defense attorney is our hero. But if they seem guilty…or if it’s an especially violent crime, we look at these lawyers and wonder…how can they do that? This is a show about the people who stand with the accused. You’ll hear five perspectives on the art of criminal defense, and you’ll hear some great stories. Which makes sense because telling g...

In cases where a defendant seems unjustly accused, the defense attorney is our hero. But if they seem guilty…or if it’s an especially violent crime, we look at these lawyers and wonder…how can they do that? This is a show about the people who stand with the accused. You’ll hear five perspectives on the art of criminal defense, and you’ll hear some great stories. Which makes sense because telling g...

Susan is a private investigator and I interview her a lot for my show. Last week she hit an owl with her car and it died. She didn’t want to leave it on the side of the road so she took it home and put it in the freezer and started calling around the state to see who could use a dead owl and it turned out the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury could. So she drove up. The owl joined its raptor breth...

At the onset of Covid in March, 2020, the Vermont Supreme Court declared a judicial emergency, suspending all non-essential court hearings. Hearings have resumed, but many are still being held remotely, including arraignments, which are ground zero for all criminal cases.  An arraignment is the first time that defendants appear in front of a judge. They’re informed of their charges and they enter...

Zeno Mountain Farm is a camp for people with and without disabilities, which is a super reductive way to describe it. Most other camps are places where people with disabilities are not. They’re missing. Zeno is a camp where everyone… is .  And a camp that includes everybody is way more fun. Exponentially more fun. At Zeno, everyone is a camper and everyone is a counselor and nobody pays to be ther...

Chris and Beth sing a lot. You’ve heard them before, if you listened to the show Sing your Job. They were the ones singing Game of Thrones, which I could not stop listening to. When I wrote to Chris to say that I couldn’t stop listening to them sing Game of Thrones, he told me that he and Beth sing a lot. They make up songs about whatever they’re doing at the moment, and lucky for us, they record...

Alexis Harte is out biking on a chilly afternoon last November when a new song pops into his head and mesmerizes him. It doesn’t seem strange at first — he’s a musician, after all. But when he discovers what was happening to a cherished relative at the moment the song sprang into his brain, he begins to wonder if he’s the target of a practical joke from the hereafter.  Herschel’s Song is one part...