Jay Wrote

  Son of Vermont’s Forests, Reflections After Reading: When the Trees Came Back. The Great Battle to Save Vermont’s Forests. Robert Mello. Vermont Historical Society, 2026. I am a son of Vermont’s forests.  This book tells of the denuding and reforestation of Vermont. The people, places and decisions described in it created a landscape and experience which has had profound effects on me  This essay reflects on this impact and adds just one of the many necessarily-missing biographies which could have appeared in When the Trees Came Back. My father, Jim Wilkinson, was hired by Perry Merrill (head of Vermont forestry from 1930 to 1966) soon after his return from flying 32 B-17 bomber missions out of England. A native of New Jersey and graduate of Penn State forestry school, before enlisting Jim had worked loading logs at a company town lumber operation in the hills of West Virginia. Merrill hired him via the Postal Service to supervise the fire lookout stations in the south...

  Clouds Followed His Every Move       All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.     Nabokov, Symbols and Signs In 1980 my brother moved from Vermont to live with us in St. Paul after a falling out with co-workers. David believed they were drug dealers and plotting to harm him. Six weeks later he was on the street under hot summer skies. I put him there. He was twenty four years old. He could have become one of the lost chronic homeless, like Sam, my friend's brother, who sank into the muck of life on the street and disappeared.  David’s childhood was hard. He was born with developmental troubles. He may have been hit by a flu virus during gestation. No...