Burlington's main street takes the hill straight up, from the craggy extremity of the Green Mountain Range to the weird brick mounds of University buildings at the summit. It is called for the trees that lined it once, gave it shade. Magnificent trees! Three basketball players couldn't link arms around the trunk of even the smallest of them. Now, not the plumb-sawed stumps--not the molded trace of inch-thick tabletops let rotting in fall and break-ice spring when the blight hit. Not one tree standing. But the street is still-called, "Elm."

Across the state, in a place they call the Northeast Kingdom if few know why, a road unmarked until they put the 911 system in leads three miles over hills to the hollow. In the seventies, hippies and the folk who hung with hippies built their cabins there, their shacks and teepees. It was already called Lost Nation then, they didn't name it. Who did, a hundred years before or longer, weren't satisfied to live beyond the line of nowhere, in a place that still records the coldest weather in the lower forty-eight. Often, anyway.They wanted further back Who knows why? They had a church and a schoolhouse and a road--they must have known where they were. I can't help wondering who it was they were lost *to*.

***

Agnes Varda at 72. On the image of her hands:

"I look at these hands, the horror of them.."