The Vermont approach: one of a kind

Dennis Báthory-Kitsz laughs as he recalls the day he became a true Vermonter. The composer and part-time high-tech tinkerer was roused at 6 a.m. one day in the mid-1980s by a pounding on the door of his Roxbury, Vt., home. Then the door - never locked in the five years since he had moved up from New Jersey - burst open. In stomped Stanley, a burly farmer with whom he had a nodding acquaintance.

"He put a paper bag in the center of the floor, whisked the cat off the chair, and sat," says Mr. Báthory-Kitsz, who now lives in Northfield. "I didn't recognize what I saw in the bag - some wire and a beat-up metal box."

Stanley had brought the transformer for his electric fence. "Broke," he explained.

Báthory-Kitsz's know-how ran more to stereos. Still, in a few days he had repaired the device for a neighbor whose own generosity was well-known around town. Stanley had once carried a freezer - on his back - down Báthory-Kitsz's stairs.

One episode of symbiosis between flatlander and taciturn local may be too neat to sum up a state's social character. Indeed, Roxbury is also among the towns whose old and new citizens have clashed in recent years over the number of "parts cars" that can legally sit rusting on a resident's front lawn.

Broadly speaking, interdependence reigns here, coloring everything from neighborly relations to national politics. But while Vermont's national image may be one of laid-back living - organic oases and tie-dyed liberalism - the culture is more complex, observers say, and surprisingly confrontational.

A swirl of factors - including vestiges of 1970s hippiedom and a "little republic" mind-set that dates back to Vermont's founding (and shows up in home-rule rumblings today) - put the state on some lonely roads and contribute to a host of "firsts" and "onlys."

Vermont was first to adopt civil unions and last to let in Wal-Mart. It was first to require labels on genetically modified food. Its towns have pushed state officials to work toward a universal healthcare insurance system.

Vermont alone has made formal drug-importation requests to the US Food and Drug Administration - suing when its request was denied. Its Department of Public Service is the only one to have contested a federally approved boost in output at a nuclear plant.

Some Vermont public utilities use methane from cow manure to make power. The state's agriculture secretary recently flew to Cuba to hammer out a plan to sell Vermont apples, cattle, and powdered milk.

Whether hailed as a hotbed of healthy progressivism or shrugged off as some quasi-socialist statelet, Vermont nurtures an American counterculture so distinctive that it is practically a brand.

In an election season when a reach for town-meeting politics spotlights the power of grass-roots democracy, some experts suggest the rest of the country look at a state where that grass grows particularly green.

"Vermont's electorate is among the most engaged in the country," says Mark Kornbluh, chairman of the history department at Michigan State University and an expert on voter participation. In 2000, Vermont ranked fifth among US states in turnout with 63.7 percent of the voting-age population casting ballots, he says. (About 93 percent of Vermont's voting-age population was registered, second only to Michigan's 93.3 percent, according to the Federal Elections Commission.)

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