Rumble Strip

[Uhm…..satire. In case that wasn’t evident….] Some of life’s inevitable problems are big and some are quite small. But no problems are too small to complain about. Welcome to the first installment of Problems …a periodic radio drama about…problems. Joel and Pam’s problems. Pam and Joel, who you’ll hear from in this show, are old friends and they support each other through their problems, and even...

Son Lux is a band that doesn’t live comfortably in any genre. Their sound is massive, anthemic, but it’s also strangely intimate. The rhythms are incredibly complex, and it’s shot through with these bright details of sound. The project started in Ryan Lott’s brain in Cleveland, and then it grew by two–guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. They’re all composers and producers and improvisers...

The Northeast Kingdom is mostly small towns separated by miles and miles. Sometimes it’s featured in trout fishing magazines. It also has some of the highest unemployment and lowest wages in the state. Its beautiful place. And it’s a hard place to live. I was up at the St. Johnsbury Academy a couple weeks ago, which is one of the gateways to the Kingdom. My sister and brother in law both work ther...

People having mental health crises are visiting emergency rooms in record numbers. But emergency room nurses are not trained to treat mental illnesses. This problem isn’t unique to Vermont. In fact it’s an acute problem all over the country. For this show I interviewed nine nurses and one sheriff, in three settings around the state. This isn’t a show that explores where the problem came from, or w...

This is another guest show from radio producer Scott Carrier, which he produced when he was twenty-six. He hitchhiked across the United States, interviewed people along the way, and ended up at the door of NPR in Washington, DC with an armful of tape. This is Scott’s first story. Scott produces my favorite podcast. It’s called Home of the Brave .

Here is our annual season’s greetings card, this year from Liz and Jerry Danforth. Fair warning…they had a pretty rough year. Credits Script by writer Tal McThenia The show is a co-production of Rumble Strip and Pod Planet. Music Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy • United States Navy Band Clouds Pass Softly Deux • Podington Bear • Free Music Archive I Am A Man Who Will Fight For Your Honor • Chris Zab...

My friend Tim Kasten died two weeks ago. Ever since I met Tim, he’s been preparing for his own death. Partly because he had significant medical issues. But I think mostly he was preparing for his death because he wanted to. Thinking about the impermanence of life gave his life meaning. He was one of the most spiritually curious people I’ve ever met. In this show, we hear from Tim, on death and dyi...

I’ve been reading the news too much. I read every version of the same story in every news outlet, and sometimes I forget I’ve read them and I read them again. I think a lot of people are feeling concerned and even scared. But I thought it would be good to remember some of the important things that are not the news. I asked Scott Carrier to tell me about a place in the wilderness, in a high meadow,...

This fall my friend and I were going for a walk and as we walked past a small barn set down off the Upper Road in Calais, we heard someone from the barn call up to us and say, ‘You wanna come see some pigs?’ Of course we wanted to see some pigs. John Rowell showed us his new piglets and I went back a few weeks later to hang out with John and his brother Eddie and record a conversation. Here’s a fe...

The mission of The Museum of Everyday Life is “a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitude and love for the miniscule and unglamorous experience of daily life in all its forms.” The museum’s home is in a barn on Route 16 in the Northeast Kingdom. It is my favorite museum. This is a show featuring the museum’s creator, Clare Dolan. Credits This...

Rob Mermin had a career as a mime clown for forty years, then in 1987 he started a circus company here in Vermont called Circus Smirkus. Three years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. This is a story about movement, the loss of control of movement…catastrophe and grace. About Rob Rob Mermin trained in classical mime with Etienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau and has performed in European...

Peter Dunning’s farm is a Vermont hill farm. It’s 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. It’s the kind of place that does not lend itself to the industrial production of anything. Instead it lends itself to the production of…everything. Peter has farmed here, mostly alone, for nearly forty years. N...

My mother used to say that everyone should waitress at least once. So I did. And I failed. In this program, I talk with some of the finest waitstaff in central Vermont about life in the business of serving your food. Appreciation: Thanks to Jay at Sarducci’s and Brian at the Wayside Diner for lining up interviews in these two fine establishments. Additional interviews with Josh Larkin and Jodi DeG...

Mind Windows is a public radio program that gives your mind a chance to open its windows. Open them and then… see what happens! Our guest today is Morgantha Prentiss , a director with New York’s off Broadway Lynx Throttle Theatre. Last year, she co-created and directed the musical, Lambs and Order, in which actors re-create the classic police procedural but as a musical, and with a cast wearing pa...

A few weeks ago I got a call from my friend Susan Randall, the private investigator you might remember from previous shows. She said that ‘T.O.’–a former client in a federal public defender case–had just been released from prison seven days before, after serving a six year bid. He was trying to figure out what to do next and also clearly trying to figure out how to manage the world outside prison....

The first time I learned of Amelia Meath was in an email exchange. She’d written me a nice note about Rumble Strip and at the end she wrote–in rather an understated way–‘P.S. I’m in a band. It’s called Sylvan Esso.’ And because I’m old, I’d never heard of Sylvan Esso. So I looked her up online and I spent the rest of that night listening to every version of every Sylvan Esso song I could find, rea...

It’s been some time since we’ve heard reports from the police about criminal activity here in Vermont. And I’m sorry to say that so far this summer, it’s been…busy. There’s pretzel-related violence and lawnmower theft. And more trouble at Dunkin’ Donuts. Here’s your summer report from Vermont police, reported by Scott Carrier, producer of Home of the Brave .

Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo to all federal prosecutors, with new directives for charging and sentencing in criminal cases. He’s directed federal prosecutors to charge defendants with the most severe penalties possible and pursue mandatory minimum sentences where they’re available. We’re headed back into the war on drugs from the 80s and 90s…a war that did not end drug us...

It’s spring in Vermont, and it’s been a full year since we heard from my friend Leland. When we left him last year, he was just about to graduate from Calais elementary school and move up to the big union middle school. Leland is my neighbor. And this will be my third year talking with him on tape…about what he’s doing, and what he’s thinking about. He talks about revolutionary war reenactments an...

The Eventide Singers are a volunteer hospice choir based in Greenfield, Massachusetts. They aim to comfort people who are ill, homebound, or actively dying. There are a number of these groups of bedside singers in Vermont and all over the world. They sing to be of service to people who are straddling the edges of life and death, or who are lonely and need a little light. They sing to comfort the c...

Robert Ford served as the last U.S. Ambassador to Syria. He arrived in the country right before the protests began there in 2011 and he was witness to the beginnings of the civil war. In 2012 he was pulled out over security concerns, but he continued to work on the crisis in Syria back in DC until 2014, when he left the Foreign Service. Robert Ford now lives with his wife Alison in the Northeast K...

This is a show about how the charitable food system works and how it’s not working. The topic of hunger is not very exciting. Stories about problems that have always been problems are generally not very exciting. And since there’s enough food to feed everyone in this country ten times over, hunger is obviously a systems problem. So I think I’ve figured it would get solved any day now. By systems p...

In the concrete jungle, it all starts out innocently enough: especially if you live in a high-rise. It was a blustery Tuesday morning, when two pigeons, named Cody and Megan, were house hunting on the balcony of my apartment. As you’d expect, they put in an offer. Beyond the holiday turkey or roast chicken here and there, I wasn’t fond of birds.  When Cody and Megan appeared, I shooed them away, c...

Ed Cashman spent twenty-five years on the bench, presiding over drunk driving cases and murders and everything in between. After a while, he started to question whether the American criminal justice system was actually achieving justice. The kinds of sentences that the public demanded and that lawyers accepted often felt more like vengeance than fairness. Judge Cashman tried to give defendants—eve...

For the last four and a half years, Victor’s been working on dairy farms in the Northeast. Like 11 million other people in this country, he’s undocumented. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve always assumed I knew this story already…like it was some kind of composite story of the ‘Mexican migrant farm worker experience’. The worst part is, I didn’t even know I was assuming this. I guess I didn’t real...