Feature Story

By Geoffrey Norman

In the mid-part of April around here, you begin thinking about yard work and start laying in the necessities.   Once the last scraps of snow have melted away, things happen fast and you can quickly fall way behind the curve.  And the part of the whole equation that requires the greater part of your time and attention is, of course, the least interesting.  That would be the grass.

Everything about a yard is more beguiling than the grass, which doesn’t do anything but grow.  And there are no guarantees on that. 

You have to coax it and baby it and feed it special formulas.

But first you have to rake it.  

Because the grass has been buried under snow and scoured by sheets of ice, it is brown and matted and to bring it back to life, you must scratch it briskly with a metal lawn rake.   This removes the old dead grass and, evidently, invigorates the surviving roots and blades.  It is also tedious work that consumes time you could otherwise spend on the perennial beds or the vegetable garden or the golf course where there is an actual point to grass.

All grass, however, must be attended to.  It is needy, that way. » read more

By Kristin Mcdonald

Photography By Hubert Schriebl
 
The Taft-Pickering Wedding

Their story began on a basketball court. Both were students at Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center, both on the college’s teams, so they saw each other often. Eventually they began playing pick-up together and soon became inseparable. After three years of steady dating, Chris Taft of Springfield asked Amanda Pickering of Arlington to marry him. First getting her father, Fred’s, permission, Chris took her for a walk down a back road in the hollow near Amanda’s family farm. She said yes, and to commemorate their pledge they carved each other’s initials into a large sycamore tree that had split from the original trunk into two separate trees—CCT on one side, AJP on the other. Chris noted the significance: the two trees were joined but separate, and they had grown old together, his plan for the two of them.

But we are jumping ahead. First, they had a wedding to plan. » read more

By Geoffrey Norman

Photography By Hubert Schriebl

You probably can’t find an ox-yoke at the new Williams store. Times do change. But in the essentials, H.N. Williams remains the same.

There was a distinct sense of trepidation and, even, awe about my first visit to the H. N. Williams Department Store (Est. 1840) in Dorset, Vermont, where I had recently moved from a small island in the North Atlantic called Manhattan. It was more a rite of passage or an initiation or something than it was an ordinary shopping trip. Flatlanders such as I didn’t simply waltz into the venerable Williams and just buy something like it was nothing out of the ordinary. No more than a visiting Yank would just drop in on a Saville Row tailor while in London and say, “Howdy. Like to try on a couple of your suits.” » read more

By Kathleen James

Photgraphy By Hubert Schriebl

In East Dorset, the childhood home of AA founder Bill Wilson is a meetinghouse for recovering alcoholics from around the world.

Aldous Huxley called Bill Wilson the greatest social architect of the 20th century. Time magazine named him one of the century’s 100 most important people—a list that includes Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Bill Gates and Albert Einstein. The organization he co-founded in 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous, has reached millions of men and women who struggle with addiction. And today, an estimated two million people worldwide are successfully following Wilson’s example and staying sober one day at a time. » read more

By Ellen Ogden

Photography By Hubert Schriebl

More than just a place to plant lettuce and herbs, a kitchen garden can be a thing of beauty and a work of art

When I planted my first kitchen garden in 1980, I marked the perimeters with four sticks and a ball of twine. Borrowing a sharp edged spade, I removed the layer of turf, double-dug the remaining soil to create a loose pile, and then supplemented with a few shovel fulls of compost. I was fresh out of art school, so instead of making art on a canvas, I began to think of myself as a food artist; building color in the garden with a collage of lettuces blended with dabs of red orach, fronds of emerald green chervil and rosettes of claytonia that elevated the garden—as well as a simple bowl of salad—into a work of art. 

By Betsy Parks

Photography By Hubert Schriebl

Rails, tabletops, boxes and lots of high mountain air for dare devils in all of us. 

Not so long ago, skiing and snowboarding was all about getting from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Sometimes a bump became a jump, or a few adventure seekers took it to the rough trail edges and even sometimes off into the woods. But for the most part we all kept it on the ground. Then came freestyle skiing and the first snowboarding halfpipes, both pushing the boundaries of alpine sports from just going fast and getting to the bottom into exploring midair. These days, Stratton and Bromley area terrain parks are offering more and more of those high-flying experiences for skiers and riders of all abilities. » read more

By Geoffrey Norman
Photography by Hubert Schriebl

It was January and cold the way it can get when a big high pressure system parks itself over New England for three or four days. The temperature never got much above ten degrees in the middle of the day and it dropped like a stone when the sun went down. By two or three in the morning, it was twenty below and still falling. There was no cloud cover and no wind, so there was a kind of epic stillness to the air. At night, the sky was crowded with stars and they seemed unusually close.

I'd taken a late afternoon walk, on snowshoes, and was telling a friend about it.

"You know," I said, ponderously, "there is something different about the woods in winter."

"Could it be they're colder?" my friend said.

"So that's it." » read more

By Susanne Washburn
Photography by Hubert Schriebl

Tradition, in many different guises, is of genuine moment to this pair. Elizabeth and Thomas Torak, husband-and-wife artists, make their home in Pawlet, which, like much of Vermont, has a long lineage of painters. Itinerant portraitists and stencilers of the early and mid-1800s were the first. Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, the area acquired something of an art-colony reputation as visiting painters drew their peers from afar to (literally) greener pastures. In the latter 20th century, the Toraks' home territory lay claim to luminaries like Ogden Pleissner, celebrant of outdoor sporting scenes, and Jay Connaway, creator of large Vermont landscapes.

On their Pawlet hilltop endlessly redecorated by its sky dome, the Toraks have a handsome shake-roof home, built in 1985, which now incorporates separate, adjoining studios-both north-lit from on high. There, each painter labors, sometimes meets with classes and, more unusually, prepares paints and canvases with methods that originated with Jan van Eyck in the 15th century and achieved their apex with Peter Paul Rubens in the 17th. » read more

Emo Henrich 1922-2009

By Kimet Hand
Photography by Hubert Schriebl

Emo Henrich, longtime beloved Ski School Director at Stratton Mountain, died on May 3rd in Igls, Austria surrounded by his loving wife Ann, and his two daughters Mercedes "Benzi" and Tini. Born in Innsbruck, Austria on November 30, 1922 and extremely proud of his Austrian heritage, Emo shared it with thousands of skiers and visitors to Stratton over his 26 years as director of both the Ski School and the Stratton Mountain Boys, a musical group he founded.

A legend in the ski world, Emo came to the United States in the late fifties to teach skiing in California, but relocated to Vermont in 1961 at the request of Stratton founder Frank Snyder. There, Emo directed the Ski School and Annedore managed their cozy and popular ski lodge, The Birkenhaus.

Emo taught thousands of eager skiers by day and at night entertained après ski and for the weekly Tyrolean Evenings, singing, playing guitar, yodeling and dancing the Austrian schuhplatner in Stratton's base lodge.

He had a passion for mountain climbing around the world, often joined by his good friend, Stratton photographer, Hubert Schriebl. They, along a with close circle of Stratton friends, took nighttime hikes up Stratton Mountain, often staying overnight in a snow cave fashioned by Emo's hands, enjoying his songs, some wine and cheese and the camaraderie that came from climbing together. » read more

By Louise Jones
Photography by Hubert Schriebl

At Manchester Music Festival, Ari & Joana Rudiakov are carrying on the family message and mission.

Music is created by people-regular folks who pay the bills, mow the lawn, brush their teeth and yet somehow never stop yearning for those things that are beautiful and inspired. That's why music transcends time and place; it moves through generations and connects across countries and cultures. And it's also why Ariel Rudiakov and his wife, Joana Genova-Rudiakov, are able to make a passable living, raise their two children and create extraordinary classical music in a small town in southern Vermont.

As artistic director of the Manchester Music Festival (MMF), Ari now carries on the work of his father, Michael, who held the same position from 1985 until his death in November 2000. The tradition also has passed to Joana from Judy Rudiakov, Ari's mother and Michael's widow. Each in their time, both women came to share equally in the hard work of managing the festival and in carrying out its mission. » read more