Image credits: Wyatt Moyer
This article was originally written for and posted to Good Faith Media on March 5, 2024.
A friend told me maple sugaring in Vermont is a way of life. He said this as we were installing new sap runs and tapping a new section of his 150+ acre sugarbush. I have to agree with him.
Chris Bohjalian, author and fellow small-towner, has written that steam from a sugarhouse on a March day is like a “neon sign in Las Vegas. It’s a sort of G-rated ‘come hither’ glance.”
This, too, I would agree with.
You may not see people all year, but when they find that steam rising into a deep blue sky, they are sure to drop by. Some stay for a few minutes, in and out quickly to get their gallon of syrup and they go.
Others stay longer. They chit-chat, talk local lore, embrace the sweet aroma of boiling maple syrup and bathe in the hot, humid air stuck inside the uninsulated sugarhouse.
Everyone is welcome in a sugarhouse. It doesn’t matter if you are black, white, gay, straight, Democrat or Republican — you can come to the sugarhouse.
Folks come from far and wide: all across the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This is what makes the sugarhouse such a staple of Vermont. Inside is a good mixture of folks working and observing.
The jolly laugh and hearty “welcome” you get when you enter the sugarhouse hooks you. The free sample of syrup hot off the pans nets you. Before you know it, you have bought more maple syrup than you know what to do with. In most cases, that is a good thing.
It wasn’t too long ago that famous country singer Jason Aldean released a music video for his hit single, “Try That In A Small Town”. The video capitalized on fears that the song was intentionally promoting violence. It presented robberies, arson, riots and altercations between law enforcement and civilians in city settings.
This is all backdropped by images of the Maury County Courthouse, a location where, in 1946, a race riot erupted. Just twenty years prior, an 18-year-old black teenager named Henry Choate was brutally lynched at the hands of a mob.
For someone who lives in a small town, I find this very disturbing. Aldean and the songwriters perpetuate false ideas about small towns, conflating them with violence.
Some of the lyrics read:
“Well, try that in a small town.
See how far ya make it down the road.
Around here, we take care of our own.
You cross that line, it won’t take long.
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town.”
In short, if we don’t like what you did, you get hurt. It pains me that this is what some believe about small towns.
Real small towns are not marked by the ever-present fear of violence from “Bible-believing good Christian men,” but rather are those that embody the spirit of the sugarhouse.
Anyone can come; anyone can go.
Sure, we take care of our own in the small towns I frequent, but we also take care of those we don’t know. “Riff-raff,” as my grandfather calls it, is welcomed in a true small town.
Rather than facing violence and danger as they carry out their “riff-raffy” ways, we love them to death. Local artist Reed Prescott always says, “You’re not welcomed – you’re adopted.”
Just as with the sugarhouse, anyone is welcome. No one should be scared for their life in a small town. But, as long as ideologies like those spread by Aldean and his songwriters are perpetuated, there will be cause for fear.
It is time for violence to end and love to overcome. And it starts in small towns.
Sorry, Jason. You got us wrong.