I had known I needed the trip to Vermont because of the rate at which I’d been lying this past month. Lies of all sizes and modalities, all kingdoms and phylla, to everyone: to my therapist, to my husband, to my mother about my tax burden, and to my twelve-step group and my Gen Z manager, and the customers at work, who asked me why I was crying and whom I told that my horse or my dog or my grandfather or my baby had died. That’s why I was weeping over the cash register.

When the lying gets to this state, I know there’s only one thing for it and that’s to get at least five hours from the city for ideally around a hundred bucks roundtrip, to a place with at least one bookstore, one bar, and one café where I can get a vegetarian sandwich and not see anyone with a fine line tattoo—a place where the white people wear horrible things like insulated snowboots deep into March, and there’s a season known as mud season. A place where they also have a robust microbrewery that might be unlicensed and is open on Sundays.

I told my husband my therapist told me I needed him to watch our child for the weekend, because it was integral—integral!—to my mental health that I have a weekend away, and I booked a train to the middle of the northern part of Vermont, underneath what they call the Northeast Kingdom. Apparently, this part is not as majestic nor as economically depressed as that region, though you could have fooled me. The train took eight hours but it was only $40, which left me $60 to devote to the finest brews offered by this lesser unnamed state just abutting the NEK. 

Now, with the sun setting and an hour to go, the train cleaving through dark forests where there lay still little virginal patches of melting snow, I felt the thrill of an interior part of me unclenching.  Just looking out into this forest, it seemed green and damp and real, just like the Temperate North American Forest exhibit at the Omaha Zoo that I used to visit when I was a kid. I couldn’t smell it from here, but I could imagine the smell, mossy and bitter and moist, but without the Omaha Zoo’s undertone of chlorine. The smell of a place with real secrets, the kind of unpeopled place where the concept of a lie had no traction at all.

I’d booked myself a taxi to drive the two miles from the station into town. This part of Vermont was not so much hostile to rideshare apps as it was in the middle of fucking nowhere, and a detailed Reddit search informed me that I’d be better served hitching than trying to get a car that hadn’t been prebooked. When I’d first looked at the area on a map online and saw that it was only two miles from the train station itself, I thought, two miles, why that’s nothing. How many miles do I hump in a single day in this city with a small tank of a stroller and a backpack and a child, two miles is nothing for a spry urban woman like me. But then I made the mistake of telling my husband how appreciative I was to be able to take this trip, how important it was for the feminine and nurturing part of me to be immersed in nature, not to mention what it would of course do for my mental peace and general inner well-being—all the while emphasizing how quaint and dull and reasonably priced the town was, the kind of place where I could certainly not get into any trouble—and he saw me looking at Google Maps, and he said “Please don’t tell me you’re planning to walk two miles in the middle of the night in nowhere Vermont,” and I said, uhhhhhhhhh.

I found a local service operated by a guy named Mike who had pictures of his kids on the taxi website. He was nice and pretty good at using WhatsApp. He messaged me half an hour before arrival and told me that my driver, Flamingo, would be in a purple Tesla out front, which I appreciated because there were several Teslas there, and how embarrassing would it be to go to each one and ask for Flamingo? 

Flamingo’s real name was Dan, and he had lived in this part of Vermont his whole life.  When I heard that, I got excited immediately. Here was an opportunity to leverage the knowledge of a local for the kind of information omitted from raving public square of Google Maps. A valuable opportunity, and I only had two miles to execute on it, only two miles to work past the pleasantries and the inevitable What brings you to our corner of the not-quite Northeast Kingdom and then the review of local cuisines, Thai being surprisingly represented, but Italian also not to be overlooked. And then, just as we pulled up to my inn and he’d just wrapped up an anecdote about his kid, I said to him, “Flamingo,” I said, “Flamingo, where can a girl get a decent beer around here?”