You can take your morning muffin to the table outside Foothills Bakery, but you might have trouble sustaining a conversation as you sit there.
The sounds of traffic come and go — from ear-splitting 18-wheelers and gravel trucks to the white-gray noise of cars, SUVs and pickups, many of them driven by commuters bound for Burlington or St. Albans. (Burlington is about a 25-mile drive south; St. Albans, 10 miles north). There are interludes of silence along Vermont 104, the main drag through town that passes by the bakery, but they never last long.
A truck passes by the Foothills Bakery on Route 104 in Fairfax on Wednesday. Daria Bishop, for the Free Press.
People who live along 104 will tell you that the traffic never really lets up, 24 hours a day, and lifelong residents remark — with a mixture of amusement and resignation — that sometimes it’s a challenge just to get across the road. It wasn’t like that a generation ago.
The town isn’t what it was, either. Fairfax used to be a farm town. Now it’s a bedroom town, one of the fastest-growing in the state. The transformation accelerated over the last 25 years; it’s still going on.
At the center of this evolution is the automobile. Fairfax has many more cars than in the old days, and they’re being driven more often, and much farther than before.
With these changes, Fairfax typifies Vermont. In the past quarter-century, Vermont has become a state of commuters.
Probability approaching one that the black Subaru Forester is Stef's. The green Outback isn't mine, though--it belongs to the Foothills' proprietor, Amy. And no, the Freep didn't ask me to take the picture, despite my Intersection project. Grrr.
Anyway, we were talking today at FCB about Peak Oil and its impact on Vermont. Obviously it's bad for the nation and many communities, but Vermont probably is in a special situation because it's so rural and has such a small population that really relies on the miracle of the automobile to get to basic services. Or maybe not.
ntodd
PS--Crossposted at Dohiyi Mir.
Heck with peak oil for a minute - what about peak foliage? Y'all are still green up there? What's up with that?
Posted by: Elayne Riggs | October 08, 2005 at 09:56 AM