Rumble Strip

Here is our annual season’s greetings card, this year from Liz and Jerry Danforth. Fair warning…they had a pretty rough year.

Credits

Script by writer Tal McThenia

The show is a co-production of Rumble Strip and Pod Planet.

Music

Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy • United States Navy Band

Clouds Pass Softly Deux • Podington Bear • Free Music Archive

I Am A Man Who Will Fight For Your Honor • Chris Zabriskie • Free Music Archive

Little Drummer Boy • Field recording of Christmas carolers.

My friend Tim Kasten died two weeks ago.

Ever since I met Tim, he’s been preparing for his own death. Partly because he had significant medical issues. But I think mostly he was preparing for his death because he wanted to. Thinking about the impermanence of life gave his life meaning. He was one of the most spiritually curious people I’ve ever met.

In this show, we hear from Tim, on death and dying. And we also chronicle the building of his casket…or his simple pine box…built by family and friends. Vermont style.

This show is sponsored by The Alchemist Brewery in Stowe and Waterbury, Vermont. Some of the world’s best beer. You can click on the logo to check out this stellar brewery, and please crack one for me. You won’t be sorry.

More Tim Music:

I couldn’t figure out how to embed a soundcloud link here, but here’s a link to Tim singing

We Shall Overcome

Lord Lord Lord

Tim doing the crossword.

I’ve been reading the news too much. I read every version of the same story in every news outlet, and sometimes I forget I’ve read them and I read them again. I think a lot of people are feeling concerned and even scared. But I thought it would be good to remember some of the important things that are not the news.

I asked Scott Carrier to tell me about a place in the wilderness, in a high meadow, far, far away from the news.

It’s a musical.

Credits

Willie Tobin provided the nature sound for this show. It was recorded on a September day in a clearing on the southwest side of Gillespie Mountain in Hancock, Vermont. I am so grateful to have these recordings. Thank you Willie!

Thank you Larry Massett and Tobin Anderson.

This fall my friend and I were going for a walk and as we walked past a small barn set down off the Upper Road in Calais, we heard someone from the barn call up to us and say, ‘You wanna come see some pigs?’

Of course we wanted to see some pigs.

John Rowell showed us his new piglets and I went back a few weeks later to hang out with John and his brother Eddie and record a conversation. Here’s a few minutes from that night.

The mission of The Museum of Everyday Life is “a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitude and love for the miniscule and unglamorous experience of daily life in all its forms.”

The museum’s home is in a barn on Route 16 in the Northeast Kingdom. It is my favorite museum. This is a show featuring the museum’s creator, Clare Dolan.

Credits

This show is co-produced by Erica Heilman and Mark Davis. Mark is my friend and a very good journalist at Seven Days. Here are some of my favorite articles from Mark:

Feuding in Victory

Death by opiates in 2016

Final conversations with overdose victims

A fond rembrance of Howard Frank Mosher

Game warden

One of my favorite things in the toothbrush exhibit.

Rob Mermin had a career as a mime clown for forty years, then in 1987 he started a circus company here in Vermont called Circus Smirkus. Three years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.

This is a story about movement, the loss of control of movement…catastrophe and grace.

About Rob

Rob Mermin trained in classical mime with Etienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau and has performed in European circus, theater, TV and film for forty years.  He is an author, director, university lecturer, former Dean of Ringling Bros. Clown College, and founder of the award-winning international company Circus Smirkus (www.smirkus.org).

Rob’s awards include Copenhagen’s Gold Clown; the Bessie Award; Best Director Prize at the former Soviet Union’s International Festival on the Black Sea; the Lund Family Center’s “It Takes A Village Award”;  the Vermont Arts Council Award of Merit, and the 2008 Governor’s Award for Excellence, Vermont’s highest honor in the arts.  Rob lives in central Vermont.

To learn more about Rob Mermin, click here.

Thank you Tobin Anderson for your help.

And here’s a link to a book about Marceau written by an awesome central Vermont author, Leda Schubert!

Peter Dunning’s farm is a Vermont hill farm. It’s a hundred and thirty-six acres of forest and orchards and wet spots and steep, rocky pasture, picked over by farmers for hundreds of years. It’s the kind of place that does not lend itself to the industrial production of anything. Instead it lends itself to the production of…everything.

Peter has farmed here, mostly alone, for nearly forty years. Now he’s getting done. The animals are gone. The farm is growing up around him.

Here’s his story.

Credits

I learned of Peter Dunning from a documentary, Peter and the Farm. It’s stunning. Watch it if you can….

Music for this show by David Schulman and Quiet Life Motel

Thank you Geof Hewitt for your help with the poetry!

This show also features the last verse of a remarkable poem called Marshall Washer, by Vermont poet Hayden Carruth. Here’s the full text.

My mother used to say that everyone should waitress at least once.

So I did. And I failed.

In this program, I talk with some of the finest waitstaff in central Vermont about life in the business of serving your food.

Appreciation:

Thanks to Jay at Sarducci’s and Brian at the Wayside Diner for lining up interviews in these two fine establishments. Additional interviews with Josh Larkin and Jodi DeGuzman.

Mind Windows is a public radio program that gives your mind a chance to open its windows. Open them and then…see what happens!

Our guest today is Morgantha Prentiss, a director with New York’s off Broadway Lynx Throttle Theatre. Last year, she co-created and directed the musical, Lambs and Order, in which actors re-create the classic police procedural but as a musical, and with a cast wearing paper-mache lamb masks. The musical was a hit. It was extended several times, and transferred to New York’s Public Theater where it got was nominated for an OBIE for Best New Musical.

Credits

Mind Windows is written by Sarah Miller. It might become its own podcast but for now it will make periodic appearances on Rumble Strip, and I have no doubt it will open your mind. The part of Morgantha was read by my friend Kate Gleason, an actor and director who lives in Denver Colorado with her dog Emerson. Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in Nevada City California. She has a dog called Merle. Recording studio and technical support by Ms. Tara Falk with the help of her dogs, Trout and Kate.

The music for this show was purchased from a stock music house. It’s called Starlit Landscape.

A few weeks ago I got a call from my friend Susan Randall, the private investigator you might remember from previous shows. She said that ‘T.O.’–a former client in a federal public defender case–had just been released from prison seven days before, after serving a six year bid. He was trying to figure out what to do next and also clearly trying to figure out how to manage the world outside prison. Where people are just walking around.  Susan said she and T.O. were having lunch and she asked me to join them. After lunch, T.O. and I drove down to the waterfront in Burlington to talk in my car.

I wanted to try to understand what it’s like to be seven days out of jail, with no housing, no money, and no family. I wanted to know what it’s like to adjust to freedom after years of confinement.

Here’s what he said.

The first time I learned of Amelia Meath was in an email exchange. She’d written me a nice note about Rumble Strip and at the end she wrote–in rather an understated way–‘P.S. I’m in a band. It’s called Sylvan Esso.’ And because I’m old, I’d never heard of Sylvan Esso.

So I looked her up online and I spent the rest of that night listening to every version of every Sylvan Esso song I could find, really loud and over and over. If there had been an album cover, I would have been clutching it to my breast.

Ever since their first single in 2013, Sylvan Esso has gotten famous pretty fast, and they tour all over he world. Last month they played in Burlington, and I spent a rainy day talking with Amelia and Nick in their tour bus before the show. We talked about their music, touring, and the complexities of success. And there’s a lot of music in the show.

It’s like a musical.

Links

It’s been some time since we’ve heard reports from the police about criminal activity here in Vermont. And I’m sorry to say that so far this summer, it’s been…busy. There’s pretzel-related violence and lawnmower theft. And more trouble at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Here’s your summer report from Vermont police, reported by Scott Carrier, producer of Home of the Brave.

Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo to all federal prosecutors, with new directives for charging and sentencing in criminal cases. He’s directed federal prosecutors to charge defendants with the most severe penalties possible and pursue mandatory minimum sentences where they’re available. We’re headed back into the war on drugs from the 80s and 90s…a war that did not end drug use or make anyone safer. Instead it ripped apart families, packed American prisons and resulted in long sentences for a lot of non violent drug offenders. Everyone seemed to agree that it was a disaster. Hell, even the Koch brothers agreed.  During the Obama administration, there was bipartisan support for sentencing reform. And for the first time in decades, federal inmate numbers were down, and the Justice Dept made plans to stop sending inmates to private prisons.

But last month, Sessions decided to relaunch the war on drugs.

This is a show about a new dawn, a new day…crime and punishment in the Trump era.

Credits

This show is produced in collaboration with Seven Days. Click here for Mark Davis’ article on Jeff Sessions’ new charging directives.

Dan Sedon, Mark Kaplan, and Lisa Shelkrot are some of the smartest, most accomplished attorneys in Vermont. If ever you’re in trouble, I highly recommend calling one of them. You will be in excellent hands. For more information on each of them, click on their names below.

Dan Sedon, Esq., Sedon and Ericson, P.C., Chelsea, Vermont

Lisa Shelkrot, Esq., Langrock Sperry & Wool, Burlington, Vermont

Mark Kaplan, Esq., Kaplan and Kaplan, Burlington, Vermont

Music for this show is from Vermont musicians Peter Cressy, Brian Clark, and Mike Donofrio

Many thanks to Susan Randall, Mark Davis and former U.S. Attorney Charles Tetzlaff for their help on this show.

It’s spring in Vermont, and it’s been a full year since we heard from my friend Leland. When we left him last year, he was just about to graduate from Calais elementary school and move up to the big union middle school.

Leland is my neighbor. And this will be my third year talking with him on tape…about what he’s doing, and what he’s thinking about. He talks about revolutionary war reenactments and friend groups and grief… he takes me around and shows me all the places I forgot about in the thirty years since I was thirteen.

This year we decided to meet down in the valley between our two houses. We crouched in a stand of dead reeds by Pekin Brook, which runs through our town…and Leland gave me some highlights from his year.

The music for this show is by Vermont musicians Brian Clark, Mike Donofrio and Peter Cressy, and was recorded in my living room. I feel so lucky to have such talented and awesome friends.

To hear the other Leland shows, look below for links…!

The Eventide Singers are a volunteer hospice choir based in Greenfield, Massachusetts. They aim to comfort people who are ill, homebound, or actively dying. There are a number of these groups of bedside singers in Vermont and all over the world. They sing to be of service to people who are straddling the edges of life and death, or who are lonely and need a little light. They sing to comfort the caregivers and give them a little break from all they must attend to. They are intimate strangers providing a unique service–temporarily healing the weary through song.

We Are Sending You Light is produced by  Sara Brooke Curtis.

Thanks and Links

For more of Sara’s work, click HERE.

Sarah wishes to thank Barbara Buschner, Alexa Berton, Judith Williams, Joe Toritto, Loren Kramer, Walt Cudnohufsky, Sandra Platt, and Kelsey O’Brien. Thanks also to the Farren Care Center and Poet Seat Nursing Home.

Sara is a fellow member of The Heard, a collective of awesome independent podcast producers around the country.

Robert Ford served as the last U.S. Ambassador to Syria. He arrived in the country right before the protests began there in 2011 and he was witness to the beginnings of the civil war. In 2012 he was pulled out over security concerns, but he continued to work on the crisis in Syria back in DC until 2014, when he left the Foreign Service. Robert Ford now lives with his wife Alison in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, which is about as far from the Middle East as you can get. We met in his living room on a rainy day last week, right after the chemical attack in Syria and right before Trump’s military response. We talked about his personal experience in Syria and the role of diplomacy in the Middle East.

Kudos

Delicious Ingredients: The Best Podcasts for April 15-21, 2017

This is a show about how the charitable food system works and how it’s not working.

The topic of hunger is not very exciting. Stories about problems that have always been problems are generally not very exciting. And since there’s enough food to feed everyone in this country ten times over, hunger is obviously a systems problem. So I think I’ve figured it would get solved any day now. By systems people.

But it’s not getting solved. In fact the lines at food shelves are getting longer while the volunteers running the food pantries are getting older. All over the country, food shelves and food banks are struggling to keep up with growing numbers of people who need them. In 2014, according to the USDA, 14% of all US households were food insecure. And if the federal government makes more cuts to food programs, that number will certainly grow.

So I made a show about it. And and as it turned out, the people I talked with for this story were not boring. They’re tired, but they’re not boring. You’ll hear from Ernie LaRock and Marj Taylor of the Swanton Food Shelf. You’ll hear from Lisa Pitcher, who manages Our Place, the community meal site down in Bellows Falls. And you’ll hear from Judy Stermer, formerly of the Vermont Foodbank, the largest supplier to food shelves and meal sites around the state.

Credits

The music for this show is by Vermont musicians Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio

The picture for this show is from the Heavenly Food Pantry in Essex Junction, Vermont

In the concrete jungle, it all starts out innocently enough: especially if you live in a high-rise.

It was a blustery Tuesday morning, when two pigeons, named Cody and Megan, were house hunting on the balcony of my apartment.

As you’d expect, they put in an offer.

Beyond the holiday turkey or roast chicken here and there, I wasn’t fond of birds.  When Cody and Megan appeared, I shooed them away, closed the balcony door and left for work.

When I came home, I was in for a surprise. Cody was dancing on the railing and Megan was huddled in a shabby nest.

Megan had laid some eggs.  I wanted the birds to leave. I had no idea how difficult this would be.  It was war.

So off to war I went.

Credits

The Wildlife was written and produced by Peter McHugh and Clive Desmond for Pod Planet, a podcast that is so damn good. Here is a logo, which is also a fancy link:

Additional Credits: Lisa Dalbello as City Animal Control Lady, Carter Hayden as Carlo the Civil Servant and Ali Rojas.

Producer Biographies

Pod Planet is written and produced by chronic multi-media experimenters, Peter McHugh and Clive Desmond. It’s the first podcast created by the international team, both of whom have worked across a wide variety of media formats.

Clive Desmond, who has lived in Toronto and New York, also serves as the narrator for Pod Planet. He has produced audio books for Harper Collins Digital, including Bruce McCall’s “Thin Ice”, and the best-selling “Pinkerton Files” by author Bruce Luchuk.

He’s also written and produced numerous syndicated radio documentaries on popular music and is a presently an on-air contributor to Canada’s top-rated talk/news radio show on CFRB in Toronto.

 Peter McHugh, having lived and worked in Chicago, Toronto, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and, now, Minneapolis, has been acclaimed in a wide variety of media formats, as well. Along the way, he’s produced an RIAA-certified, multi-platinum boxed set for Eric Clapton, that also yielded a Grammy-finalist song. Sadly, the song did not win.

Other projects he’s worked on are display in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Le Musée de la Publicité at the Louvre in Paris (France, not Texas.)

He also created the social media-driven, public activism effort, “Book Burning Party”. As a result, the closing of an award-winning library was saved from the clutches of anti-tax activists. The work drew international media acclaim, and was nationally recognized by the American Library Association.

Ed Cashman spent twenty-five years on the bench, presiding over drunk driving cases and murders and everything in between. After a while, he started to question whether the American criminal justice system was actually achieving justice. The kinds of sentences that the public demanded and that lawyers accepted often felt more like vengeance than fairness. Judge Cashman tried to give defendants—even those charged with heinous of crimes—a chance to redeem themselves. It was a philosophy that some people didn’t understand. And Cashman eventually paid a terrible price for it.

The beautiful photo of Judge Cashman is by Matthew Thorsen of Seven Days.

The music for this show was made by Vermont musicians Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio and Peter Cressy.

For the last four and a half years, Victor’s been working on dairy farms in the Northeast. Like 11 million other people in this country, he’s undocumented. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve always assumed I knew this story already…like it was some kind of composite story of the ‘Mexican migrant farm worker experience’. The worst part is, I didn’t even know I was assuming this. I guess I didn’t really have to think about it. The story didn’t have a lot to do with me.

But last week President Trump started making good on his promises to ramp up deportations of undocumented people in this country–people who pay 12 billion dollars in US taxes every year–but don’t have US documents.

Victor’s a friend of a friend of mine, and I won’t say where he works but these friends of friends are my neighbors, and yours. My friend, we’ll call her ‘T’, agreed to do some translating, along with her brand new baby. We visited Victor at his apartment on the dairy farm where he works. This is his story.

Credits

The music for this show was made by the amazing Amelia Meath, and her band Sylvan Esso. Thank you so much Amelia for humming in your bathroom, your car and on the street. Her other group is a trio of women called Mountain Man. Music that will make your hair stand up.

I want to thank all the excellent farm workers I met in making this show. And thanks so much to A and A, and T for her wonderful presence and a memorable drive.

When Marlo Mack’s son was three and just learning to talk, he informed his mother that he was not a boy. He said that something had gone wrong in her tummy that made him come out as a boy instead of a girl.

Today, a guest show from two of my favorite podcasts…

Marlo Mack’s podcast, How to Be a Girl, is a riveting, funny, sometimes heartbreaking account of her life raising a transgender daughter. It has some of the best interviewing with a child I’ve ever heard. It’s also one of the most interesting chronicles of parenting I’ve heard. And the show offers listeners an intimate introduction to what it means to be transgender.

Marlo Mack is not her real name. She has decided to keep their identities secret until her daughter is old enough to decide if she wants to use their real names.

This episode was re-edited and re-mixed by Jeff Emtman, for another podcast called Here Be Monsters, from KCRW. He had help from Bethany Denton and Nick White. Here Be Monsters is a show that explores our fears and all that’s unknown. It’s always surprising and always beautifully made and what I love most is that they’re not afraid to take risks–with their subjects, their format and their exquisite editing.

This show is just two great things that go great together.

The music for the show is by The Black Spot.

It’s really dark here in Vermont this time of year. And every year, by the third week in January, I feel like I’m seeing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. A dirty telescope. I stop wanting to answer the phone. I have a hard time picking out a cereal at the store. Most mornings it just seems easier to wear what I wore to bed.

After Trump’s first week in office, I feel worse than most years. And actually the whole world seems on edge. It seems like no one can decide how to help or what to do. Or how much to look or look away.

Dunkin’ Donuts and the library are the last two public places in most towns around here where everyone’s welcome and no one wonders how long you’ll be there. For about a dollar you can stay at Dunkin’ Donuts as long as you want. I went there to talk with people. Not about Trump necessarily. But about how their lives are going, and whether they fit into the famous middle class we keep hearing so much about. Also I went there because in January in Vermont, it’s good to sit in a bright place with a cup of coffee and talk with strangers.

Credits and Thanks
My thanks to John Dillon and Scott Carrier. The music in the end of this show is by Vermont musician Peter Cressy.

Steve Sheinkin is an award-winning writer of  stories for kids about American history. When he started out, he was a writer of boring textbooks for kids about American history. When he started, he was young and ambitious and he wanted to bring new energy to textbook writing, to mine American history for fresh new details and anecdotes that could capture the interest of fifth graders…!

This is an interview about how he failed.

And he shares stories about the awful push and pull of priorities for teaching our origin stories to American children.

It’s also a story about Benedict Arnold’s leg.

Credits

Steve thinking about history.

Steve Sheinkin is an award-winning author of history books for young adults. You can visit him at http://stevesheinkin.com

Thanks to MT Anderson for introducing me to Steve, and helping me with this show.

Music and sounds for this show were found on freesound.org

Articles

How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us, New York Review of Books, 2012

Texas Textbook Massacre, Huffington Post, 2010

Texans on Review Panel Push for Creationism in Science Textbooks, Huffington Post, 2013

Ho ho ho! It’s time again for the annual seasonal update from the Keen family!

In certain American subcultures, there’s a long holiday tradition of sending out end-of-year family update letters to far-flung relatives, friends and acquaintances. They can be wonderful. They can also be spectacularly bizarre. Could it be that this year the tradition comes to an end? Here is the Keen family report….

The Season Update is written by Tal McThenia. Tal is a writer of books and articles and screenplays. To learn more about Tal, you can visit his website:  talmcthenia.com.

As some of you may remember, last year I did a pledge drive. It was called the Shwag Pledge Drive. I gave away a number of prizes to extremely lucky pledgers. There was a pair of boiled wool mittens that my sister made, a box of kindling that my boyfriend cut up, a VPR pledge drive mug, and one of the prizes was going to be an interview with me in my car in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Montpelier, Vermont. Nicholas won the interview, but he lives in London. So we did the interview by Skype. Nicholas and his wife, Sarah, were just about to have a baby when we spoke, they were looking for the baby trend expedition jogger stroller online for their baby. So today’s show is a CHRISTMAS MIRACLE.

Here is a few minutes from our conversation…the speculations and special anxieties that come with the long wait for a brand new person to arrive.

Thanks to producer Mary Wesley for her remarkable production work on this show!

“That’s the thing about lentils, if they were going to soften, they would have already fucking softened. Honestly, you’d be better off waiting for someone who didn’t find you remotely attractive to fall in love with you.”

This show is from an article by writer Sarah Miller, and it appeared in FoodandWine.com. The title is self explanatory. Welcome.

Sarah Miller lives in Nevada City, California. She’s the author of Inside the mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl. She also has a series called the Nevada City Wine Diaries, in which she does not use the word ‘buttery’ and sometimes only tangentially writes about wine. Here is a link to the full lentils essay in foodandwine.com.

The music for this show is made by David Schulman of Quiet Life Motel, and is from his new album, Anhinga.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Here is hunter Barry Forbes talking about turkey hunting again. I could listen to Barry Forbes talk about turkey hunting all day, but in this case he only talks about it for about three and a half minutes. Welcome.

Credits

I made that show with tape from the Vermont Folklife Center.

Charlie Hunter is a plein air painter, which is a fancy way of saying he paints outside. His paintings of Vermont are stark and evocative and mostly the color of mud (Charlie calls it murk, which I think is a fancy way of saying mud). But his paintings capture the light and the feeling of this place in a way that’s totally uncanny and unique. He has a special love for painting trains and garages and industrial places in decline, and his hometown of Bellows Falls is his favorite subject. It’s an old mill town where the industry pretty much atomized years ago. And like a lot of poor towns that are out of the sight line of tourists, it specializes in Section 8 housing and low income assisted living. Bellows Falls is not a tourist destination. And because it’s not right off the interstate, it sort of feels like an outpost. But outposts are fun. People’s plot lines mix up in interesting ways, and at outposts, people know and consort with other people who are not exactly like them. It really feels like are are somewhere when you’re in Bellows Falls. I checked out a kiosk in the middle of town and there was an event called Swill, Swine and Swing. Which sounds pretty awesome.

I talked with Charlie about how he makes paintings, or actually more about what he thinks about making paintings. We also drove around town and visited places he likes to paint, in a town that he loves.

Credits and Links

Charlie’s website

Information about Charlie’s Roots on the Rails, where awesome musicians and audiences ride around on trains and enjoy great music.

Music by Brian Clark

Thank you Mark Bushnell and Erica Housekeeper for introducing me to Charlie.

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A couple weeks ago my son and I volunteered at the soccer Special Olympics in Northfield, VT. The athletes came from all over the state and the teams were all ages, and both sexes. So there were fifty-five year old women teaming up with thirteen year old boys and seventeen year old girls and you’ve never seen so much team spirit or felt such intense excitement. About all of it. Everything. The games, the cheering, the lunch…it was like the feeling of Christmas and birthdays and Chariots of Fire at all once. All day long.

This show is a sample of that day.

Welcome!

Credits and Stuff

Thanks to Liza Reed at Special Olympics Vermont for her help, and photographer Heather Glenn for letting me use her images on my website.

If you’ve never participated in the Special Olympics or volunteered at an event, I encourage you to check it out. It’s serious fun. Go here to search for events in your area.

Today, an interview with songwriter and Grammy winning record producer Jim Rooney. He and his wife Carol live in an old farmhouse in Sharon, Vermont, but Jim is still back and forth to Nashville, where he spent thirty years playing music, writing songs, and producing some of my all time favorite records with artists like John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Iris Dement, and Townes Van Zandt. Record producers are the people responsible for getting great performances from singers and session musicians in the weird, blank atmosphere of a recording studio. I’ve always wondered how they do that. I also wonder how they know when a record is ‘cooked’…and when to let it go.

I sat with Jim at his kitchen table and we talked about all these things. And more. Welcome.

Credits and Links

Link to Jim’s blog, his books and his music is here.

Additional music for this show by Vermont musician, Brian Clark

More and more Vermonters can’t afford groceries by the end of the month. The paycheck isn’t enough. The food stamps won’t stretch. And they’re looking to community meals and food shelves for regular help. The trouble is, food shelves weren’t designed to provide sustainable food. They were set up for emergencies. For fires, for floods. But every day, an army of volunteers–mostly women between the ages of 55 and 70–hustle food from area stores and local farmers and the Vermont Foodbank….to feed people.

This is a show about what it feels like when you don’t have enough to eat.

“The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Interview with Food Shelf Director Lisa Pitcher

Here is an unedited interview with Lisa Pitcher, the awesome Executive Director of Our Place, a community drop-in center in Bellows Falls, Vermont. She talks about the charitable food system in Vermont…how it works, and how it’s not working.

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Credits

Music for this show was made by the excellent Mike Donofrio

Thanks to Lisa Pitcher, Mark Davis, Judy Stermer, Tobin and Peter, Pam Smart, Sharon Fannon, Robin Bradley, Evie Lovett, and the great people who put on Monday lunches at the Unitarian Church in Montpelier, VT.

Too Much Month at the End of the Money is a country western song by Marty Stuart.

I met Jubal Durivage through my boyfriend, Gordon. Gordon and his two partners, Robby and Hilton, own a small hydroelectric plant way up near the Canadian border. It was pretty rundown when they bought it, and over the years they’ve hired a lot of people to work on it, mostly from the Northeast Kingdom. Crane operators, engineers, and Jubal Durivage, one of the few certified bridge welders in Vermont. I heard a lot about Jubal before I met him from Gordon and Robby. They respect his work and the care he takes in his work. So with a little bit of arm twisting, Jubal agreed to talk with me at his house in Eden, Vermont.

In this show, Jubal talks about an important teacher in his life as a welder, and mostly he talks about hunting–one of the great passions of his life. But in my mind this show isn’t about hunting or welding, and I can’t name what it is exactly. Maybe you can tell me.

Welcome.

Last summer I interviewed my friend Susan Randall, a private investigator. Susan trained me as an investigator, and we’ve spent whole days driving around the state of Vermont, working on cases and talking. We never run out of things to talk about. So I figured it was time to do another show with her. In this conversation, we talked about the criminal justice system more generally than before, and we ended up talking a lot about parenting…single parenting in particular. Come drive around with us.

If you haven’t heard the other interview with Susan, you might want start there. It’s called VT Private Eye.

Here is a picture of Susan and my boy Henry and her girl Lena, a zillion years ago.

It’s hot here in central Vermont, and there’s a whole lot of crime going down. Here’s a sampling of calls to the police, as reported in the Times Argus, the Stowe Reporter, and the Caledonian.

Read by Scott Carrier, producer of my favorite podcast, Home of the Brave.

Music from Joey Truman, a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. His two recent books, Killing the Math and Postal Child, are available from Whiskey Tit Press. His band is called Um, and they rock.

This is a conversation with Bread and Puppet founder and director, Peter Schumann…a conversation in which I ask him over and over again to answer questions that don’t really have answers, about what makes a great performance. And about what is a great performance…

Peter Schumann is a driven, prolific artist who makes huge outdoor theater performances with giant paintings and puppets and sculptures. There is music. There are people making animal sounds. Everything seems to be made of paper mache, twigs, twine and cardboard. The theater company lives in an old farmhouse in Glover, Vermont, when it’s not performing around the country and the world. And what Peter Schumann makes isn’t always good, but it’s always great.  There’s a wild current that runs through all that he does, and it all seems to be alive long after he’s done with it. ((If you haven’t been to the museum, housed in a huge barn behind the house in Glover….I would highly recommend it…))

Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country. To learn more about the company and its strange and illustrious history, I recommend going HERE to read more.

Please leave a comment or a story at the bottom of this page! It’s always good to hear from you….!

Thanks and Other Things and Pictures

The music for this show is Peter on the fiddle, and his grandson, Ira Karp, on the drums. Pictures from their epic session below. Also, the show features Sinfonia number 15 in B Minor,  from the 1955 Goldberg Variations, performed by Glenn Gould.

Thanks to Clare Dolan, Jennifer Miller, Larry Massett, Scott Carrier and Marc Estrin for their help on this show. And to Elka Schumann for her patience.

Thank you Donna Bister for sending me beautiful pictures!#ftg-22 .tile .icon { color:#ffffff; }#ftg-22 .ftg-items .loading-bar i { background:#fff; }#ftg-22 .ftg-items .loading-bar { background:#fff; }#ftg-22 .tile .icon { font-size:12px; }#ftg-22 .tile .icon { margin: -6px 0 0 -6px; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.text { font-size:12px; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.text { font-size:12px; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.title { font-size:14px; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.title { font-size:14px; }#ftg-22 .tile { background-color: transparent; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.text { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.title { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.text { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.title { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-22 .tile .ftg-social a { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-block { transition-timing-function:linear; }#ftg-22 .tile .caption-block { transition-duration:0.25s; }#ftg-22 .tile .tile-inner:before { background-color: #000000; }#ftg-22 .tile .tile-inner:before { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); }#ftg-22 .tile:hover img {-moz-transform: ;-webkit-transform: ;-o-transform: ;-ms-transform: ;transform: ;}jQuery('#ftg-22 img.item').removeAttr('src');jQuery(document).ready(function () {setTimeout(function () {jQuery('#ftg-22').finalTilesGallery({minTileWidth: 100,margin: 10,loadMethod: 'sequential',nonce: '78b426ba1e',galleryId: '2',setupFilters: true,layout: 'final',debug: false,gridSize: 25,disableGridSizeBelow:800,allowEnlargement: true,imageSizeFactor: [ [4000, 0.9],[1024, 0.8],[768, 0.7],[640, 0.6],[320, 0.5]],selectedFilter: 'n-a'});jQuery(function () {(function () {var rel = '';jQuery('#ftg-22 .ftg-lightbox').click(function (e) {rel = jQuery(this).attr('rel');jQuery('#ftg-22 .ftg-current').removeClass('ftg-current');jQuery('#ftg-22 [rel="'+rel+'"]').addClass('ftg-current');});})();});}, 0);});

The kids of Randolph, Vermont describe their neighborhood as a place with three purple houses. They tell me there’s a shortcut through the woods down to Dunkin’ Donuts, and they say it’s pretty close to three graveyards. The kids run in twos and threes and sometimes in one big pack for a game of hide and seek tag.

I spent an afternoon talking with them and following them around. This show is a little taste of that day. It’s a postcard from childhood, a place we remember but can’t visit anymore.

Thanks
Thanks so much to Kelly Green for introducing me to the kids and letting us camp out upstairs for an entire afternoon. Thanks also to Tally Abecassis, Mike Donofrio, John Schak and Larry Massett.

Rob Mermin and Bill Morancy lived in neighboring apartments in Montpelier, Vermont. They were best friends.  And when Bill was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he asked his best friend to help him die.

In 2013, Vermont passed the The Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act, or Act 39…our version of Death with Dignity. The legislation allows eligible Vermonters with terminal diseases the option to be prescribed medication that will hasten the end of their life. In 2015, Bill elected to use Act 39 to end his life, and he asked Rob to help him. This is a story primarily about their friendship–and the months, days and moments leading up to Bill’s death.

To learn more about Rob Mermin and his illustrious career as a mime and the founder of Circus Smirkus, visit here.

The music for this show was made by Vermont musicians Brian Clark and Mike Donofrio. And you heard from the original film soundtracks of South Pacific and Carousel, both by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The piano licks in this show were made by Vermont pianist Marie Helene Belanger

Kudos for Show

The 2019 movie, Paddleton,  from the Duplass Brothers, was based on this episode and story.

Notable podcast, AV Club, June 13, 2016, for Last Chapter

Audible Feast, June 11-17, 2016

Rob Mermin

Last winter I made a show about working for the Department of Children and Families and I’d promised to make a show about what it’s like to be a parent whose had to work with this state agency, which is responsible for the safety of Vermont children. It’s no secret that DCF is currently understaffed and overworked. The opiate epidemic is one major factor in the growing number of kids taken into temporary custody by the state, and the growing number of TPR’S, or terminations of parental rights.

This show offers a close look at what it’s like to be a parent inside the DCF system. To have your choices, your lifestyle, your living circumstances under the microscope of a state agency that’s capable of taking away your children.

DCF is an intensely private agency, and there’s no way to corroborate the details of these cases. The truth about these cases is always elusive and complicated. And I’m not looking for good guys or bad guys here.

This is a show about six parents with six very different stories from all over the state of Vermont.

There is a transcript below, thanks to Jennifer Jorgenson at UVM!!

Credit and Gratitude

Music by Marie Helene Belanger and Isha Love.

My thanks to all the parents who shared their stories with me by phone, email, and in person. Thanks to all the DCF caseworkers who have spoken with me over these months. Thanks to Mark Johnson, Bess O’Brien, Elsa Ingpen, Michael Chorney, Diane Zeigler, Mark Davis, Dillon Burns, the Aldrich Public Library and the Milton Public Library.

Show Reviews:

Kudos from 7 on 7 for 5/28/2016

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1: Having to prove to DCF that you are good enough to be a parent is definitely a very challenging thing.

Erica Heilman: I’m Erica Heilman. This is Rumble Strip, Vermont. Last winter, I made a show about people who work for the Department of Children and Families and I promised to make a show about what it’s like to be a parent [00:00:30] who’s had to work with this state agency, which is responsible for the safety of Vermont children. It’s no secret that DCF is currently understaffed and overworked. The opioid epidemic is one major factor in the growing number of kids taken into temporary custody by the state and the growing number of TPRs or terminations of parental rights. Addiction, multi-generational abuse, lack of education problems with housing, and transportation, and maybe the mother of all problems, [00:01:00] poverty. If you ask any DCF case worker, they’ll tell you the source of the problems is way upstream from where they work and this isn’t a show that’s going to solve any of those problems.

What this show does do, is give you a very close look at what it’s like to be on the wrong side of DCF as a parent, to have your choices, your life of style, your living circumstances under the microscope of a state agency, that’s capable of taking away your children. [00:01:30] DCF is an intensely private agency and there’s no way to corroborate the details of these cases. The truth about these cases is always elusive and always complicated and I’m not looking for good guys or bad guys here. This is a show about six parents with six very different stories from all over the State of Vermont. Fair warning, there’s graphic language and descriptions of violence in this show. Welcome.

Speaker 3: My memories of parenting [00:02:00] Brianna was that, “I’m going to be there for you. I’m going to talk to you. I have an education, so I will be able to teach you things.” Whereas compared to my mother, who was always working and then having a father who liked girls, I’m just going to say. They were both alcoholics, came from a family of alcoholics. Very uneducated, did not graduate high school either one of them. So [00:02:30] my thought was I was not going to put her in that situation, it was going to be, I was going to be the mom that I didn’t have or we’ll have the family that I was supposed to have.

Erica Heilman:What did your home look like? Where? What [crosstalk 00:02:45]-

Speaker 3:It was look like where, what I lived in a trailer park across from what used to be Jennifer’s restaurant. There was a little tiny trailer park there, trailer was very nice, very well maintained and I had one of the very last trailers in the park. So behind [00:03:00] the trailer was a really cute clothes line for clothes to hang out clothes, because it did come with a washer and the previous tenants had left a swing set there and there was a big, large field behind it.

I think she was probably a or old when she knew all of her ABCs, probably at a year and a half was when she was starting to learn Spanish, because we would watch Nickelodeon Dora The Explorer. So she [00:03:30] could say five or six colors in Spanish and count to 10 in Spanish. And I knew it was because of me being there with her and being present with her, not putting her off a playpen, like I used to with my other kids and go outside and smoke pot with my friends. But I started using again. I thought I am a much better parent than what I was the first time around. And I’m like, “So now I know what I can’t do,” and basically it came into me just using when she was sleeping is what [00:04:00] I thought and how I tried to justify it, “I’m only doing it when she’s sleeping.” And then of course addiction, it progresses.

It was her birthday. I wanted to go. I was planning on having a part of the next day for her. So I had brought her to the neighbor’s house where I got my drugs and left her with them. I borrowed their car and I went to the store to buy her birthday stuff. And when I’d come back, she was in this [inaudible 00:04:28] of the trailer and [00:04:30] Brianna had a little baggy in her hand, which I knew was the corner from a cocaine bag, what they sold. So I took her home. It wasn’t into till the next day when they all came over for the party and we had the kids playing in the other room, windows were open and we were smoking drugs and we thought that that was okay. That later on that afternoon, evening she began to get sick, could barely stay awake.

So I brought her to the emergency room and [00:05:00] she tested positive for her cocaine. I knew, I said, “Yeah. It’s bad. I said, “I’m not going to get her back.” I was in a room talking with them, I want to say it was a state trooper. So Brianna was in her room and they said, “Yeah. We’re going to have a foster family come.” So we have that conversation and I go into the room and Brianna was already gone, so I did not get to see her. [00:05:30] Yeah. That was awful to me. So it’s hard.

Speaker 1: Well, when I got pregnant, I found out the night before my high school graduation, it was totally not planned at all. It was a difficult pregnancy. I gained a lot of weight and had a lot of health problems. Everything was good for a little while and then the domestic [00:06:00] happened. It started, I think the week before I had my first child. I was 39 weeks pregnant and my boyfriend at the time called me a fat whore, pushed me down on the bed. That was when it started. And then, we ended up having a child together years later down the road and that is what [00:06:30] now resulted in my DCF case.

Definitely one of the hardest parts of a domestic is the actual act of leaving the domestic. There’s control over what you’re doing, who you’re with, who you’re talking to, where you’ve been, how long you’ve been gone, there can be control issues over money and finances. When a child is involved, it’s not your safety, it’s [00:07:00] your children’s safety. When you leave, a lot of times you leave with none of your belongings, you pretty much escape whenever you feel you have a safe time to get out and then having to deal with DCF after getting up the courage to leave the abusive situation. In a lot of cases, DCF doesn’t understand what it does to [00:07:30] a mother or a parent if they leave a domestic that takes a lot out of them and then to take their child, the whole reason of why they left was to protect the child that they no longer can protect.

Speaker 4: They end up showing up at my door. My living situation wasn’t appropriate, which I knew ahead of time anyways. [00:08:00] But we were living in the camper because the housing that we had ended up being condemned, so we had to move and we had really nowhere to go and it was towards the winter time and whatnot, so we technically shouldn’t have been in the camper with two children. So then they showed up, they said that there was allegations of abuse towards my children. And when they looked into it, it came to be the children’s father. They found out that their father was unsafe [00:08:30] to be around them because he was an alcoholic and abusive towards me verbally and physically, so then they helped me. Basically, they gave me an ultimatum to either lose my children or move with my children.

And I ended up finding housing in Wilder and for me and my children and then I found out in 2009, that I was pregnant again. So then, I ended up with three children and I had their father [00:09:00] move back in with me through the housing unit that I was in and DCF was still involved.

Erica Heilman: Same father for all three?

Speaker 4:Yes. Same father for all four, actually. But we were good for a little while, even though DCF was involved, my daughter then was born in 2011 and I actually filed for a divorce in 2012 and kicked him out. So it took a while, but I ended up divorcing him and whatnot because I mean, beforehand [00:09:30] DCF was telling me, “Oh, you can’t get married. You shouldn’t marry him. You should separate from him. He shouldn’t be around the kids. He’s not safe, he’s not fit.” And it felt like I was being told how to live my life and they weren’t living my life, so that’s why I pretty much was going against them because it just didn’t feel right.

But I understand now because I’ve gone through some counseling with my children and I’ve also had testing done on one of my children [00:10:00] and it opened my eyes the most, because it was based on children with abusive homes and whatnot to see where their brain actually lies and growth. And a lot of stuff that I was doing wrong really affected one of my children and his brain growth, so he’s having a lot of difficulties and behavior issues due to that. He is showing through a violent behaviors, he’s showing through lack [00:10:30] of sleeping, so there’s a lot of different areas that are not where he should be as far as his age.

Erica Heilman: Is that something you feel responsible for?

Speaker 4:Some of it, yes, it does follow me because I didn’t see the wrongs that were occurring in that time.

Speaker 5: I got pregnant very young. I had my kids at 18, so I was young to have children of my own at that age. And [00:11:00] then when my son was 3-months-old, I started hanging out with friends and that’s where my addiction started. I think I was just trying to escape what had gone on between the father of my children and I, and he had ended up going to jail for a domestic on me when I was pregnant with my son. And when the dad got out of jail, I ended up going back. We got back together. No one knew outside of my mom that I had a problem, [00:11:30] but it got to a point that when their father came back from jail, she came over to the house and he had hit me before she had come in, my nose wasn’t broken, but he had hit me in the nose, so I had had my son in my arms and I was hurt, I was injured and she could tell and she had had enough.

And so she took him home and called DCF at that point. [00:12:00] I was very angry. I was so pissed. I drove over to her house and tried to get in. I knew what was coming, but you try to not have that happen and the cops met me when I got there and said, “You need to go to rehab, you need to do something because he’s not coming back.” And [00:12:30] my addiction went from bad to 10 times worse at that point. I had nothing. I felt like I had lost the purpose for getting up. So you go and there’s three judges. You’ve got the state’s attorney, you’ve got DCF, you’ve got a guardian ad litem and my mom and they talk about what brought you in. You’re listening to this woman who [00:13:00] you’ve never met, explain how you’re a drug addict and you can’t care for your child and that there needs to be custody taken. And it’s out of your control, you have no control at this point.

You met your attorney for the first time five minutes ago. He has no idea what’s going on and all you can do is sit and listen, I knew I had a drug problem and it wasn’t affecting my son, that’s how I looked at it because I was still doing what I needed to do to take care of my son. [00:13:30] Not understanding at the time that being abused in front of my child was neglectful, that’s something that you see later on. So the court hearing happened, my mom got temporary guardianship of him at that point and I then met the case worker.

Speaker 6:  DCF has been involved in our life two times and while in both cases, the claims were found not to be [00:14:00] true. That process of having the claims found to be untrue is something that I get the impression and so [inaudible 00:14:07], but I get the impression happens much quicker for certain kinds of families. And in our case, these things were very drawn out and very horrible. I don’t know if there’s a better word, but in public when you’re talking about it with friends or family, it’s your very indignant about it and you know, “Oh my gosh, how could they treat us this way? Or, or think this about us as parents,” but in the moment [00:14:30] when you’re in it, it’s really fucking scary.

This is an agency that can physically take my children away from on me. And that is you’re acting like you’re indignant, but really you’re facing losing the most important thing in your entire universe. And between us as a couple, it was really stressful, but I don’t think either of us really wanted to reveal our fear to the other one because we’re trying to be strong for each other, so that’s just an emotion that I think we each [00:15:00] carried separately knowing the other one had it through the whole thing, just being scared and really sad, really sad that this is happening, that there is this threat, this possibility looming out there.

The moment that I’m most ashamed of as a mother is I remember being on the phone with the case worker when she was needing to get me to agree to the safety plan. [00:15:30] For them, while an investigation is open, they have to have a safety plan in place and I just remember trying to say to her, “Well, I don’t agree with this plan. I don’t think this plan is necessary. This is not a safety plan for my family. This isn’t what’s [inaudible 00:15:45],” because they were asking that that my husband not be alone with the children at all while the investigation was pending, which of course is not logistically feasible for any family, either, for me to have done all the daycare pickups [00:16:00] and drop offs, it just, it wouldn’t have worked for our family, but more importantly, it just, it wasn’t necessary.

And I just remember trying to be assertive and to say, “This isn’t okay. I don’t agree with this,” and saying, “Well, what are my rights? Do I have to agree to this?” And she said, “Well, if you don’t, then we have the right to remove the children from the home.” And that’s when I crumbled and let them put my name on the line and I wish I hadn’t done that. I really wish I had just said, ” [00:16:30] No.”

Speaker 7:I got the impression that they already had me pegged as the abusive stepfather. Mom doesn’t know how to choose a mate that is safe for her family, so she chose me and I’m coming in here and all I do is abuse her, beat the kids and everything else. That’s exactly lead impression I got from the intake supervisor. I felt that once again, because of my size and being in this neighborhood, [00:17:00] in this part of the country and not being of the general makeup of the population up here, that I’m just getting judged unfairly once again. I mean, I’ve been here before and it’s not a good feeling.

Erica Heilman:  Since it’s audio and not video. What is your size? Where are you from?

Speaker 7:I’m a native New Yorker. I lived and grew up in Upper West Side of Manhattan up until I was 41- [00:17:30] years-old. I’m currently 295 pounds, six foot two. Yeah. And I’m brown skinned. My mother is of German descent. My father is from Barbados, so I’m a mixed person. Yeah. I’m not the brownish skinned person on the face of earth, but I’m not the palest skinned person either, some like to call it beige.

Erica Heilman:  I call it caramel.

Speaker 7:Yeah. Caramel. Yeah. And [00:18:00] I learned during this experience, not being the biological father of these children, it’s automatically, “It’s stepdad and yeah, he could only care, but so much for these kids.” Yeah. Which is so far from the truth. But yeah, that’s the impression I got. And I do understand that they have a difficult job and they see a lot of ugly things, but it’s a tough line to walk, to not [00:18:30] come into a household expecting to see certain things that aren’t there and then writing them down on a legal document as such as if they were there. Every family’s different but to look at it as, “Okay. We know this happened now we just have to look for the evidence to point to it,” this is why a lot of people get swept up in the system that really shouldn’t be there.

Then sometimes you have some families that DCF needs to be in their life and then they miss the whole thing entirely. If I ever saw some [00:19:00] of the ugly things they may have seen, I don’t know if I would lose the ability to do that, either. I don’t know. But I think that’s being on the other side of what happened, I can tell you that’s exactly what they came into here. For instance, they tried to say the kids didn’t have access to nutritious food. That was one of the things that were written down. There’s always fruit sitting there, always, the kids are welcome to it at any time. But the case worker wrote down, “They don’t have access to nutritious food.”

Why? Because when they went through the pantries, we don’t have fruit roll ups, [00:19:30] we don’t pizza, bagel bites in the freezer and all that other stuff, we don’t have that. So it’s, you come in here looking for a certain thing and you’ll find it. You’ll find something wrong if you’re going to look hard enough.

Speaker 5: She was young. Yeah. She’s younger than me walking to my house, going to tell me what I’m going to do. Has no kids of her own because I asked and when she said, “No,” I was all over, “You’re going to come into my house and try to tell me about a situation you know nothing about and you’re younger than me. You have no [00:20:00] idea what this is like, you have no idea what I’ve been through.” She didn’t say a whole lot that first visit. I’m sure to this day, I’m sure she probably thinks about that first visit because I was awful. But if you’re going to send somebody out to somebody’s house, that’s going through abuse and addiction, the worst thing you could do is send someone that has no life experience.

I was awful to her for the year and a half that she [00:20:30] was supervising my case. I had given up. I had actually come to the conclusion that my son was going to be adopted by my mom. And as painful as that was, I knew he was going to be okay and you have to change the relationship with a child. I was able to spend time with him, with my mom, but the relationship had changed for me. It’s almost like you have to grieve a loss of [00:21:00] child to break the bond so that you can survive because you know you’re not going to be a parent anymore.

So when (beep) was going to be born, well, when I got pregnant with her, I knew there had to be a change because they were going to take her right from the hospital from me. So I on April 23rd of ’06, packed up my [00:21:30] car and left their dad, not knowing what I was doing or how I was going to do it. But I called the case worker at the time and said, “I’m done. I’m done. I need to figure this out because I don’t want to lose my daughter.”

Speaker 4:I know that every parenting style is going to be different anyways. My parenting styles [00:22:00] are from when I was growing up because that’s what I was shown, that’s what I went through. My pants were pulled down, my underwear down, I had bare hand, bare ass slaps depending on the behaviors. And then I also remember one occurrence where I said that my sister was a bitch, my mouth got slapped. That’s the way I was growing up. My parenting now, I’ve slapped them on the asses and so [00:22:30] what I was shown. And I was also told in one case, “If you kept having a nasty mouth, it was going to get washed out with soap.” So a dab was soap in your mouth, on your tongue. And then of course my second son, he was very vocal once he got his words and would speak and whatnot.

Well, they were inappropriate words, a lot of swear words, a lot of cuss words and so hot sauced, [00:23:00] just not even a raindrop full on his tongue, he would scream at you and then he would stop. And I got yelled at for doing that, the dab of hot sauce on his tongue by DCF saying it was inappropriate. It’s a food item. Yeah. It’s a little hot on the tongue. Yeah. It made him ugly at me, but it got my point across to him, but I can’t do that. [00:23:30] It’s hard for me not to do what was done to me as a kid because now it’s wrong. Nothing happened to my mother when she was doing that to me or my siblings when they got the hand on their asses and whatnot. When I was growing up, if we bit somebody we would get bitten back, so I mean, that’s how I was showed to deal with biting.

And my oldest son did bite me, so I did bite him back, [00:24:00] but not to the point where I left any kind of a mark. So I mean, that’s what I was taught when I was growing up. So therefore that’s the only discipline I knew of as far as with biting, then you have DCF step in the picture, all of a sudden and, “Oh, you’re doing this all wrong.” Here he is kicking me, slapping me, I’ve actually got him to stop swearing at me. I’m telling him to get in the chair, he’s refusing to get in the chair, how am I supposed to get him to do the time out if I can’t get him in the chair?

Erica Heilman:Well, what’s your [00:24:30] instinct?

Speaker 4: I mean, there’s times when he’s gotten me to the point where I would just want to bend him over my knee, slap his ass. But if I do that, it’s going to get reported and then I’m going to get in trouble again. What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what to do.

Speaker 1: So once DCF has been involved with you once, whether it is an assessment, or [00:25:00] an accusation, or an investigation, it’s you’re guilty until proven and innocent, you have to go and jump through hoops. Shortly after my daughter was born, we were still in the hospital and I actually had a visit from DCF, an emergency visit. So I had a 3-day-old daughter. I had DCF in my hospital room and two [00:25:30] cops stationed outside of my door at the hospital. Having to prove to people that you can handle your child is one of the hardest things ever.

One of the nurses called DCF because they said I had gotten upset with her over breastfeeding and [00:26:00] that her father had gotten upset because some poop got on his shoe, which never even happened, she was always changed in her little bassinet thing that the hospital provides you with. Because of my previous involvement with DCF, the anxiety building up to when they actually come and see you is the hardest part, having to impress so to speak someone who doesn’t know you [00:26:30] or your situation. The DCF worker who came out cleared me after my meeting saying that it wasn’t a emergency and that they didn’t need to take my daughter, but I had to follow up with DCF because it was still an assessment. So shortly after we got to leave with my daughter, I had to have a home visit with another DCF worker and then he [00:27:00] was supposed to close the case in 45 to 60 days.

My daughter is almost 3-months-old, so she’s almost 90-days-old. I have been playing phone tag with this person, they are either on vacation, they don’t return your phone calls. You have to sit and wait and wait. They say, they’re going to send you something in the mail, telling you if your case is closed or what you need to do. You sit and you wait [00:27:30] for the mail, you wait for the phone call. And I don’t think that DCF really understands how much control that puts on someone having to find out if other people think that you can handle your child.

Speaker 4:The case worker I have in regards to my second child right now, because I mean, that’s pretty much the only one she’s dealing with. [00:28:00] I can call her three different times in a day, I can’t reach her. I can call her three different times in a day for a week straight and I don’t get no calls back. Contact as far as when you want to get a hold of them is ridiculous. But if they want to get a hold of you, you better return their call within that day, otherwise, they’re going to hunt you down.

Speaker 6:When we first dealt with them, we [00:28:30] thought about getting a lawyer, but knew that realistically, that was not financially possible and went in there on our own. We felt judged, we felt vulnerable, we felt very vulnerable, we felt scared, we felt angry, we felt sad. And going into it the second time with a lawyer, which was not something, I mean, bills didn’t get paid because we hired the lawyer. I mean, it’s not like it was an easy decision, but we just felt we could not risk, we couldn’t put our family at more risk and we did. We were in the position [00:29:00] where we had the money. And when you go in with a lawyer, you feel safer.

There were three people in the room for our interviews because there was the case worker assigned to our case, but then her supervisor was also present for all of it, which I’m sure is because we had a lawyer and she was a younger, newer caseworker, so her supervisor was also there. And the supervisor and the lawyer were shooting the shit beforehand. And he’s like showing her pictures of kids and talking about where they went on vacation [00:29:30] and I’m thinking, “Well, we’re fine because look at this, they’re telling us that we may be harming our children, but obviously they’re not really telling us this, or they wouldn’t be talking about their vacations together.” And you can be well sure that, that would not have had when we went in on our own, they wouldn’t have said, “Oh, how’s the beach this summer.” No way.

Erica Heilman:When you’re in that room and you’re witness to kind of the chit chat between the DCF supervisor and your lawyer who you’ve hired and they’re talking about their kids and their vacation, was that [00:30:00] objectionable to you?

Speaker 6: No.

Erica Heilman:Or was it was comforting to you?

Speaker 6: Yes.

Erica Heilman: Interesting.

Speaker 6:Yeah. Because I’m thinking, if they have this relationship with each other, because they’re obviously, we’re trying to play like we’re middle class and here’s people who are much further beyond than that, and they see each other as peers I felt like, “Okay. That I’m sure this is going to be okay. And I think that it’s not necessarily the lawyer itself [00:30:30] as being seen in a certain light and the stories we were talking about where people have very minor and quick involvements with DCF, because something reported by a jealous neighbor or whoever, and they have to look into it, but then it’s wrapped up very quickly. I think that that maybe because people are seen in a certain way. And because of our past involvement with DCF and our history in general, we had to take [00:31:00] a big step to say, “Hey, we’re not those people, we’re these people.”

Speaker 7: The outcome with DCF is that the kids were removed from the house for approximately nine months and then it was three months until the case was finally closed, so it was almost to a year to the day. What has changed since then, I guess the couple of the kids have access to some of the mental health facilities they may need, but [00:31:30] in getting there, there was a whole lot of trauma, a whole lot of damage was done to this family that we’re still repairing with the children. And within my wife and my relationship behind this, you can’t be angry, you can’t show that you’re angry because then they will say, “Hey, you have an anger issue.” You just have to grin, bare it, and jump through everything they ask you to do and hope that at the end of the day, the kids wind up back home.

Speaker 3: [00:32:00] It was just my lawyer. She was like, “Cindy, so they’re going to push for TPR and they’re probably going to get it. I don’t think you should fight because you can’t beat DCF. And they do have all this information about you, your past, your charges and, the slips that I’d had.” But so, yeah, they’re like, “I mean, I will go to the hearing,” I said, “but I do think I would like to fight.” She’s like, “You’re not going to have a chance. You’re not, you can’t win against DCF. [00:32:30] And then you hear that and you believe it. And maybe I also believe that I wasn’t deserving to be her parent because of what had happened. And even if you would’ve got Brianna back and not come to jail, I can definitely say now that I probably would’ve gone back to using drugs.

And then, I also thought she’s probably to myself, she’s better off there. She’s got a mother and a father. [00:33:00] They’re a very good family and that’s kind of what drove my decision was what was in the best interest of her. I think it was the most unselfish thing I’d ever done in my life.

Speaker 5:So at the point that I gave birth to my daughter, we were at the point where, when I knew that they were going to be trying to take my rights away from my son. At this time, the case worker had become [00:33:30] a support system as well. She saw me doing what I needed to do and the guardian ad litem that I had had for my son, I was in contact with faithfully. And they all collectively the case worker, the Easter Seals worker and the guardian ad litem petitioned the court and said, “No. This needs to stop. She’s doing it.” So they got rid of the TPR. And I just remember looking at my attorney and he was like, “Thank God you figure [00:34:00] it out because you were so close.”

\And I just remember feeling at that point that the case worker had my back, she fought for me, they understood I was ready to do it, to be a mom on my own and I was okay. And I remember the day that we went into the courtroom to have them transfer custody to [inaudible 00:34:24] and the state’s attorney was like, “You [00:34:30] are one of the only ones I have actually seen do this, that I have actually seen get that close to losing your children and you pulled it together. And I’m really happy that I could be the one to get them back to you.” She only had me as a successful case at that point. I was the only one,

Speaker 4:The discussion was brought up saying, “Well, you’re not having contact with him. You’re not staying in contact face-to-face. You’re not doing this, you’re not doing that, [00:35:00] so we’re going to be requesting to go through and terminate parental rights.” And in one of the counseling sessions, before we had talked about where he wanted to live, as far as if he wanted to live with me live where he was, which is the foster placement or live with his father. And by talking to him about that helped me sign away because I was doing what he [00:35:30] wanted.

Erica Heilman: He wanted to stay with the foster family?

Speaker 4:Yes. He wanted to stay there. And I think because of all the fighting back and forth, he didn’t want to choose between his parents. So when we ended up actually going to the court, I signed away my rights, but [00:36:00] he also knows that I am here, he knows that he can write to me and talk to me. We get pictures and letters.

Erica Heilman: Where are things now? What do you see now, when you look forward?

Speaker 1: I had another [00:36:30] child two months ago, a little girl and I’m living with my husband. I see my oldest child every day. At this point, I have decided that in the situation with my middle son that, I really don’t have any control of the situation right now, I have come to the conclusion [00:37:00] that, I just have to wait it out till he’s old enough to come find me.

Erica Heilman:You’ve been listening to Six parents. Six DCF Stories. I want to thank all of the parents who’ve shared their stories with me in writing, on the phone and in person. [00:37:30] These are hard stories to tell and I’m really grateful to all of you. I also want to thank all the case workers at DCF for the hard work they do. If you have a story or a comment on the show, then please write it down at the bottom of the show page at rumblestripvermont.com. Comments are really important, comments are part of the point. Music for this show is by Marie Helene Belanger and Isha Love. There are links to their work on my website, rumblestripvermont.com. This show runs on a kind [00:38:00] of Bernie donation model. So if you like what you’re hearing, please donate and I will send you my thanks and a really sweet bumper sticker. There’s a donate button on the website, in the upper right corner, it’s green. This is Erica Heilman. Thanks for listening.

Here’s another show from my friend Larry Massett’s brain. The story is called Aunties, and it’s from his soon-to-be-released podcast, Lick The Crickets. Lick the Crickets is a podcast that’s been coming soon for quite some time. The problem is, Larry can’t stop making shows for Lick the Crickets long enough to launch Lick the Crickets. But he will. Oh, he will. And it will be found at Lickthecrickets.com, and I will let you know when it’s up.

Aunties is performed by Paul Kiernan.

Art for this show is made by Charles Hope.

Leland Kennedy lives one hill over from me in East Calais, Vermont. I interviewed Leland last year when he was ten, and I’ve received some letters from listeners wondering what he’s up to and what he’s been thinking about since then. Leland’s pretty busy in the afternoons after school. You can usually find him biking up and down the road or working on survival techniques in the woods, or watching television. But he agreed to come over and talk with me about what’s on his mind these days. We talked about building fires, parachutes failing to deploy, and where he has his most interesting thoughts. Here’s an update from Leland.

Music for this show by Noveller and Kai Engel, from the Free Music Archive.

I have been remiss in reporting on calls to the local police. I apologize. Here is a sampling of reports to the Barre and Montpelier police in the last few months. Reported by Scott Carrier.

Music by Peter Cressy of Plainfield, Vermont

Scott Carrier produces the excellent Home of the Brave.

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For most of Jesse’s early childhood, her mother was addicted to crystal meth. She called it her ‘high functioning addict period’. She kept a spotless house, worked a regular job and had four well behaved kids. Then Jesse’s mom started using opiates, and everything changed. She lost the job, lost the money, and it became harder to keep a car.  The eviction notices started coming. For a time, with the help of Suboxone, she got clean. Then in 2010, her youngest son died in a car accident. He was seven at the time. After that she relapsed and everything got a whole lot worse. She never agreed to go to the Knoxville substance abuse treatment center that was suggested numerous times. Things were getting worse faster than we could build up hope.

In this show, Jesse talks about what it was like to grow up at the mercy of her mother’s addictions. Her home life, her school life, and her thoughts about her own future.

Music for this show is by Peter Cressy, of Plainfield, Vermont

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Barry Forbes lives on Route 116, five miles east of Middlebury and eight miles south of Bristol, Vermont. He says if you’re trying to find the place, just slow down and his hounds will let you know where he is. Barry lives in a double wide trailer directly behind the house where he spent his entire childhood, and he’s never been away from this place for longer than thirteen months, when he was in Vietnam. Across the road from his house is a mountain where he’s been fishing and hunting and trapping since he was seven years old.

March is muskrat season in Vermont and Barry took me out and showed me a few muskrat lodges. But the truth is, muskrat season was just an excuse to be around him for awhile, and talk with him about his lifelong passion for hunting.

Music for this show by Peter Cressy of Plainfield, Vermont.

Thank you Mark Davis.

Thank you to The Vermont Folklife Center for introducing me to Barry years ago….

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/249825433″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]Twenty years ago, Ben Hewitt and his wife Penny bought forty acres of land in Cabot, Vermont and started their first homestead. In Vermont, the word ‘homestead’ generally refers to people who build their own houses and live self sufficiently to one degree or another…with varying degrees of success. One of the most important characteristics of the homesteaders I’ve known is a deep affinity for the physical world. Knowing how it works, and how to live in it.

Ben and Penny and their two boys are some of the most committed homesteaders in this state. They run a small hill farm and raise ninety percent of their own food. Ben makes a living writing about this life they’ve made. I visited him at his new homestead in Stannard, and we sat and talked by the woodstove that currently doubles up as the cookstove. And we drank some really good beer.

Welcome.

If any of you out there are homesteaders and you have a picture from your homesteading life, I’d love to feature it at the bottom of this page. My friend Robby sent me a CLASSIC, which you’ll see below…and I’d love to add more…

Credits

Ben Hewitt’s blog is HERE.

Music for this show was made by Brian Clark of Calais, Vermont. You can listen to more of Brian’s music HERE.

Robby Porter, Calais VT 1973. Photo by Alex MacPhail…for bettter resolution, click here.

“Hunting is an important part of putting meat on the table on my homestead.” –Robin Follette

​Shivani Arjuna’s homestead, Coulee Meadow Farm

Doug Welch and his oxen, Buster and Bud, in the northern Adirondack foothills.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/249471566″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]In celebration of the day before Super Tuesday, here’s a story from writer Sarah Miller called Berned in Reno. It’s an account of her deep feelings for Bernie, and canvassing for his campaign in Nevada before the caucus.

Sarah Miller writes for theawl.com, newyorker.com, time.com, thecut.com and others. This story appeared last week on the website, The Awl and you can read the full version here.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/245930720″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]This week, a special guest show from Scott Carrier, producer of Home of the Brave.

Years ago, Scott was hired to conduct interviews for a mental health research project. He drove around Utah administering a test to possible schizophrenics. The test was comprised of 100 questions, and took approximately an hour to complete.  This is the story about it.

It has been a very troubling few years at Vermont’s Department of Children and Families. In 2014 there was a string of child deaths in Vermont–children in families involved with DCF. These deaths prompted intense anger and at least four investigations into the department.

Then on August 7, 2015, Lara Sobel, a caseworker at DCF, was shot as she left the DCF offices in Barre, Vermont. She was shot and killed by a woman who was angry after losing custody of her daughter to DCF the month before.

The Department of Children and Families flares up in the news, then the news subsides. We hear from the governor, from the DCF commissioner, from legislators and journalists and commentators. But the people we never hear from are the people who actually do the work. And this is by design. The work that DCF caseworkers do is intensely private, and in order to protect the privacy of parents and children, caseworkers are not allowed to talk publicly about their cases. In a way, their silence shields us from some of the darkest, most complex, most intractable problems in our state.

In this show you’ll hear from three DCF caseworkers from three different areas of Vermont. For their own safety, I’ve chosen not to use their names. They talk about what it’s like to have a job where the lives of children and families are at stake.

TRANSCRIPT below thanks to Jennifer Jorgenson of UVM!

Credits and Thanks

Music for this show by Brian Clark and Peter Cressy

I would like to thank Luciana at DCF, and all the caseworkers who gave me such generous time in the making of this show.

Thanks also to Tally Abecassis, Mark Davis, Scott Carrier, Kelly Green, and Colin McCaffrey for various and sundry and important support.

TRANSCRIPT

Erica Heilman:               Welcome to Rumble Strip Vermont, I’m Erica Heilman. On the afternoon of Friday, August 7th, 2015, Lara Sobel, caseworker at the Department of Children and Families was shot as she left the DCF offices in Barre, Vermont. She was shot and killed by a woman who was angry after losing custody of her daughter to DCF the month before. In the aftermath of this killing, there was a rash of truly disturbing commentary in social media [00:00:30] from people expressing sympathy with Lara’s killer, people who look on DCF case workers as home wreckers, baby snatchers. But there’s a whole different contingent that believes DCF doesn’t intervene in families enough. In 2014, there was a string of child deaths in Vermont. Children in families involved with DCF. These deaths prompted intense anger and at least four investigations into the department.

[00:01:00] DCF flares up in the news, then the news subsides. We hear from the governor, we hear from the DCF commissioner from legislators and journalists and commentators. But the people we never hear from are the people who actually do the work. And this is by design. The work that DCF case workers do is intensely private. And in order to protect the privacy of parents and children, case workers are not allowed to talk [00:01:30] publicly about their cases. And in a way, their silence shields us from some of the darkest, most complex, most intractable problems in our state. These are the problems and the stories that DCF case workers live with every day. In this show, you’ll hear from three DCF case workers from three different areas of Vermont. For their own safety, I’ve chosen not to use their names. They’ll talk about what it’s [00:02:00] like to have a job where the lives of children and families are at stake. Welcome. I figured we would start just by talking about what does DCF do? Because I don’t know that everybody knows that really what it is, and also what it isn’t.

Speaker 2:                    So family services, our primary role is to ensure the safety [00:02:30] and care of children in the state of Vermont. We are not baby snatchers. We are not police. Our main objective is to work with families that have children and to ensure that their children are safe and working with them, connecting them with different services within the community, and ensuring basically that [00:03:00] the care or the risk that there is for the children in the home is either eliminated or mitigated in some way. When we receive reports of abuse and neglect of children, poverty is pretty much what we see all the time, but that is not to say that child abuse and neglect doesn’t occur in middle class or upper class homes. We just don’t get that many reports from there.

Erica Heilman:               Can you [00:03:30] give people a kind of a… If you can just give people a sense for what kinds of worlds you enter into in this work?

Speaker 3:                    Yes, I can try to answer that. So this work does bring me to all walks of Vermont and even beyond. Our district, the Hartford district is the largest of the 12 district offices. We cover the larger towns of Randolph, Bradford, and White River [00:04:00] Junction. And we also cover all of the rural towns in between that. We do home visits on back dirt roads. Sometimes they’re not even real roads. And we do these visits in the winter in our state cars, and we hope the tires are going to get us to where we need to go. And we’re usually doing these visits alone. We sometimes team if we feel there’s a safety concern, but generally if I’m doing a home visit, I go out and do these home visits alone, [00:04:30] and they can be anywhere from right here in town in White River to sometimes an hour and a half away. I have currently 25 children in custody on my caseload. I also serve, I think, about 10 additional children under conditional custody orders. So I have approximately 35 children that I am assessing safety for on sometimes a daily basis.

Speaker 2:                    Primarily we’re working with families that are really impoverished [00:05:00] and that there’s mental health issues and/or drug related issues. Some families are living with a known untreated sex offender, so we get calls from anybody from the next door neighbor to a doctor to teachers reporting that they have concerns about the kids or the kids have disclosed that they’ve been physically abused or sexually [00:05:30] abused. So we meet with the families and try to sort it out. So this is a mental health issue, so how can we connect a person to a local agency. If it’s a substance misuse issue, again, having them participate in a drug and alcohol assessment, developing safety plans around, “Okay, so if you lapse, then is there somebody that’s clean and sober [00:06:00] that can care for your child while you’re using? And is that person safe to be around children too?”

Erica Heilman:               And how would you characterize most of your relationships with those parents? Are most positive and amicable or how would you describe them?

Speaker 2:                    I would say most are positive. There’s definitely tension in the relationship, because I’m pushing them to follow through with their substance [00:06:30] misuse program or trying to extract them from a relationship that’s not healthy for the children or for them. So there’s tension in those things. But I feel like I’m kind of like a coach, kind of like a life coach pointing in the direction. So there’s this road and this road and this road, and you can take any of these paths you want. You’re the one that’s in control here. [00:07:00] And it’s up to you to do this.

Speaker 4:                    I think one of the hardest parts about this job is that we all have our own set of values, our standards of living, and each of us is very different. And when we meet with families, it’s really important that we not put our own value judgment on these families, because we’re all different. I can’t stand dirt on the floor and all those kind of things, and when I walk into someone’s house and there’s dirt on the floor, [00:07:30] that’s my value. That’s not theirs. And that doesn’t constitute a right for DCF to come in and remove children. And I know I hear that all the time. You’re going to take my kids because I have a dirty house. We’re not the dirt police. We are there because there’s a risk to the children, either from an external source or from something that the parent has done, not based on the fact that you have dirt on your floor.

Do we get involved? Yes. If there’s something on the floor or something that the children can have access to that can cause them harm, absolutely. Dried dog feces [00:08:00] on the floor left all over with a baby crawling is not safe. We are there for imminent risk into concerns about the child’s safety and wellbeing. We are not there to criticize you because you don’t have enough money to pay for your heat.

Erica Heilman:               You’ve been here long enough to see the way that people respond to the work as they come in. Looking at the social workers around you, what do you notice happen happens?

Speaker 3:                    I think what’s most difficult for myself and [00:08:30] for coworkers that I have seen leave, having difficult relationships with our clients is expected. Having difficult relationships with other professionals can be incredibly wearing. I do hear DCF is not doing enough. Why can’t you get involved with this child? And people don’t necessarily understand that DCF is a child protection agency, not a quality of life agency. When teachers contact me because a child has not come to school having breakfast or having [00:09:00] a jacket, those are horrible things, but that’s not necessarily a reason for DCF to become involved with them. And I think that a lot of people don’t know that.

Speaker 2:                    Unless there are objects in the home that are hazardous, then we have no call to pull children out of that. So the condition of the home doesn’t immediately affect the child. [00:09:30] That’s not child abuse. Does it tell you something about how the people in that home are living? Is it a picture of depression? Yeah, absolutely. There is a lot of stuff in people’s houses and it’s filthy, and sometimes a whole family is just living in one room, just mattresses and [00:10:00] beat up couches and just really chaotic and animals, and I didn’t want to sit down and there were just things crowding in, it’s just claustrophobic. It’s almost always dark. There’s always blankets across the windows. And most of the stuff is just broken down, like broken toys and [00:10:30] garbage and debris and clothing.

It is really hard to describe what you go into. I don’t know, it’s… But you don’t want to judge them for that. And we’ve been asked by state’s attorneys, “Well, take pictures.” And I just won’t, because I feel [00:11:00] like that’s such an invasion. I’m already invading and now I’m recording how they are living in their homes. Poverty is just the key issue. I don’t know who said this, but I totally agree with it. They said that poverty is the worst form of violence that there is. And I totally agree with [00:11:30] that.

Erica Heilman:               So if someone is concerned about a child and makes a call to family services, DCF may or may not investigate. We don’t know. Because after that phone call, the case becomes a private matter between DCF and the family. This privacy is endlessly frustrating to the accused, to teachers, to defense attorneys and journalists, really anyone who wants to know [00:12:00] what’s going on and isn’t DCF, and it’s impossible to hold the state accountable for its handling of these cases if we can’t see them. On the other hand, this privacy protects children and can protect people who are falsely accused. And because of this privacy, we don’t really know what these case workers do. In this next segment, case workers talk about some of the problems they work with. And this is not easy to listen to, but in order to understand the nature [00:12:30] of their work, we have to hear about some of the challenging situations they face.

Speaker 3:                    Kids being physically abused because their parents don’t know any other way to parent them. Kids being exposed to substantiated sex offenders. Substance abuse is an epidemic in Vermont right now. That’s not a secret to anybody. How that relates to child safety is [00:13:00] parents not waking up until noon. Three year olds taking care of their six month old baby brother. Children not eating because their parents can’t get out of bed. Children not getting to school because their parents can’t get them there or can’t get them on the bus. Kids are being left outside while the parents are inside doing drugs on a winter day. Situations where children are seeing [00:13:30] their mothers being abused by their mother’s partners. Those are some of the situations that I have come across and what I am experiencing, or what I know about the family is probably the tip of the iceberg that the children are actually being exposed to. The children that I am involved with, this has been their life for years before I have become involved with them.

Speaker 4:                    [00:14:00] I used to have a majority of my investigations or assessments would involve sexual abuse or physical abuse. Now a majority of them involving risk of harm, because these pregnant moms who are using in utero, using while pregnant, and we’re opening assessments before the child’s birth to determine whether or not they’re safe. I mean, that’s the stuff that we here as the office is seeing right now. I mean this explosion of infants who have parents [00:14:30] who are using. The example I could think about is when I was, technically by the legal terms, assaulted by a mother. She spit in my face during a removal of her children. Got information that she was using, and we went to her house and she was completely out of it. She was slurring her words. She was not able to stand appropriately. She was argumentative, combative to the point that the police had to put her in handcuffs.

The house was an absolute disarray compared to what it used to be. [00:15:00] There was dirty diapers all over the floor. The baby was left in a crib with just a diaper on and the feces had exploded out of the diaper and they were caked onto the baby. I mean, she had runny nose that was crusty and was screaming because she was so hungry. And mom had been passed out on the couch, not able to take care of her. She had a sibling there that was trying to get her a bottle who was like three, four years old. And mom was erratic, [00:15:30] combative, aggressive, just out of control.

Speaker 2:                    I’ve seen bruises on children, scratches, welt marks, child pornography. Something you want to kind of just scrub your brain of once you see it. I’ve read an autopsy report on a four month old baby. You just see the fear [00:16:00] in kids’ eyes, their confusion and desperation in parents’ faces. It’s really hard work. You try not to think about it too much or to take it in too much because you couldn’t possibly do your job if you did.

Speaker 3:                    [00:16:30] Some families that I am currently working with I was working with six years ago, and every service under the sun has been into these homes, sometimes on numerous occasions, because more children have been born into these homes that warrant different services coming into place. And there’s not always a positive outcome. There is situations where children are remaining in homes that may not to you or I be a [00:17:00] safe or adequate home, but that’s also how this family is choosing to live, and it’s not unsafe for the child. The ideal would be to have service providers go into the home and work with these families, and they come out and everybody’s happy and everybody’s needs are getting met. But they can not always make the changes that are being recommended because there are incredibly complex issues that we’re working with, especially when children are still placed [00:17:30] at home.

That’s when the agency sits with the highest risk. And that’s when I personally feel like I sit with risk. When children are still in the home of parents that are struggling with substance abuse, unresolved mental health, yet the risk does not warrant the child coming into custody, but does warrant that I remain involved, but changes are not being made, and the family is doing the best that they can. We are going in and saying, “This is [00:18:00] what you need to do. This is what you should do. This is what your child needs you to do.” And sometimes all that mom can do is get up and make sure that her kid has a piece of toast that day.

Speaker 2:                    The other day I was working, and I want to be careful here that I don’t give away too much information so it can be identified. But I was working with these two other service providers, met with this mom and her infant. And we all had [00:18:30] a conversation with her concerned that I’m going to have to make that next move and write an affidavit. If she’s not following through the safety plan. She leaves the room to take a smoke break and me and these two other people are talking, and they’re a like, “God, I just don’t understand her attitude. Why is she using again? She’s only going to use again. You know that, right?”

[00:19:00] Yeah, I know that. But look at their situation. She’s in this motel room, she doesn’t have a partner. She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t even have a car. She’s thousands of dollars in debt for medical bills. Who wouldn’t use? This person, she was a foster child too. She has family, but [00:19:30] they’re involved with us as well. There is no one in her life that she can lean on. No one. She’s got a couple friends that seem to be okay, but they’re struggling too. Very similar situations. What is she going to do is going to go to CCV and ask for an application to go to school and [00:20:00] go out, get a job.

And that’s part of the problem too, is, “Okay, so where does the child go?” Oh, childcare. Well, everybody knows how expensive that is. It’s about $300 a week, with the reach up grant that they’re getting it’s around $1,000 a month. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps? How? How are you going to manage all of that? [00:20:30] You don’t. And you find yourself in a motel using. I understand it, but the child’s still at risk. So work with what we got.

Speaker 3:                    I talked a little about the gray areas of this work and doing home visits, usually [00:21:00] weekly, if it’s a high risk case, and leaving with the feeling that something is just not right. I don’t have facts to write an affidavit, but something doesn’t feel right. And then something happens. For example, a child went to school with bruises and had clearly been physically abused as determined by a medical professional. And I write an affidavit outlining all of my experiences with this family, [00:21:30] and I ask the judge for this child to come out of this home and to come into foster care. And that request is denied. I may have one incident where something happened that shouldn’t have, but the majority of what I’m reporting are things that don’t reach a level of removal. So not a only is this child remaining in this home, but I now have to continue to work with the family that I have just asked a judge to remove their child from their care.

What small amount of safety may [00:22:00] have been created between the relationship of social worker and parent is now completely gone. I still have to go in week after week to make sure that the child is not at imminent risk, and those are the cases that keep me up at night. Those are the cases where I feel like something bad is going to happen to this child. And then something does happen. Then the public says that DCF didn’t do enough. What the public doesn’t know [00:22:30] is that I was in that home every single week, week after week, trying to make things better, even requesting custody and having it been denied. And people say that social worker didn’t do her job, that social worker didn’t do enough, this baby got hurt because DCF didn’t do their job.

Speaker 2:                    You always worry. I’m not alone. We all worry. We all have bad dreams. [00:23:00] There is a tremendous amount of responsibility. And the last two years, it just made it harder. And I’m grateful to be in the current position I am. I’m helping out the Barry district office temporarily, ever since Lara was shot, killed. But honestly, I’ll be glad to be done with this work in mid-November. I’m scared to death [00:23:30] that a child’s going to die on my watch, and I really can’t prevent that. There’s so much outside of our control.

Erica Heilman:               What don’t people understand about that?

Speaker 2:                    I think there’s a misconception that DCF family services is just… They get a report and we’re just going to waltz in and pull that child or the children right out of [00:24:00] the home. And that people think that’s what we should be doing. And that’s the last thing we need to do. We cannot possibly do that. Our resources are tapped out. We cannot do that, and it’s not the right thing to do either. It doesn’t solve the problem. Just a quick illustration. We go in and remove children because they’re unsafe, and then that family has more children. [00:24:30] We’re there in the hospital when they’re giving deliveries sometimes. We’re there a few months after they’re born. And those children come into custody and then another child’s born.

We’re not addressing the problem with the issues. We’re not working with the family as much as we need to, to really address the real causes that’s creating the instability, the safety issues in the home, in the social work, [00:25:00] school, we talked about upstream practice versus downstream. And most of our work is downstream. We’re not looking into the real causes of poverty and how that leads to mental illness or how that leads to substance misuse. And that’s what we need to do more of. And it’s not just up to DCF family services. It’s the community, everybody [00:25:30] to step up to the plate.

Erica Heilman:               I spoke with eight family services case workers while I was making the show, and they all said, not surprisingly, that morale isn’t great. But what they said that did surprise me and even, admittedly, confounds me, is that they really like this job. They like working with families and they believe in what they do, but they said that they don’t have time to do good work. Their caseloads are too big, the opiate epidemic [00:26:00] in Vermont is out of control, and there’s a near Soviet amount of paperwork involved in this job. They said they don’t have to time to do social work anymore.

Speaker 4:                    I have workers right now, ongoing workers who have a caseload of 35 kids. How do effective case work with 35 children? You can’t. And I watch my staff fry. I watch them… And these families deserve better than that. They deserve to have a [00:26:30] social worker who has her wits about her, who has the ability and the time to spend to work with them and to engage rather than a social worker who they can’t get ahold of because she’s jumping from one fire to another. I still have kids from when I started 20 years ago coming to see me and checking in. I have those relationships because I had the time back then to create those relationships. And I just feel sad for the new workers now because they’re not having a… They’re not being able to make those connections with clients.

Speaker 2:                    [00:27:00] The best part of the job is meeting with families and meeting with kids. That’s the enjoyable part, at least it is for me. But it’s amazing how much of the other stuff gets in the way of really doing that face to face work. Spend a lot of time in court and just waiting. Just waiting for the hearing to start and [00:27:30] just trying to track down other service providers who can vouch that the families followed through on X, Y, or Z. Yeah, they’re going to their therapy sessions. Yeah, they got their daily dose every day this week. So children do slip through the cracks and children have died while we were intervening.

Speaker 3:                    Families deserve to have a social [00:28:00] worker that has face time with them on a regular basis, that they’re able to access on the phone, that they need to know what is expected of them, why we’re involved. I’ve had families come to me and say, “I don’t even know why you’re work working with me. I don’t even know why you’re involved with me.” So the families that we work with deserve to know why a state child protection agency is involved with them. And in order for them to feel respected and in order for them to feel like their cases are moving forward, they need to have contact with their social worker. And unfortunately [00:28:30] with the numbers that we have right now, that doesn’t always happen to the degree that I want it to. That’s probably the hardest thing that I sit with personally. When I leave at the end of the day, I think, “Should I have made this extra phone call? Could I have done this extra report? Could I have done this extra check-in.”

And I can speak to the difference from six years ago to now. I was able to do what I would call kitchen table social work six years ago. Sitting with families [00:29:00] at their kitchen table, really laying out, “These are the issues. This is what we got to work on. This is how we’re going to do it. Let’s pull up our sleeves. Let’s get to work. Let’s make things better. Now it’s crisis response to a situation that’s already happened because I haven’t had the time to sit with that family at their kitchen table and to talk about what the issues are. I am then responding after something has happened. So it does feel like triage work at times.

Erica Heilman:               [00:29:30] In cases where a judge believes a child is at imminent risk of harm, she will order that the children be removed from the home and placed in a foster home or kinship home. For most kids in foster care, the initial goal is reunification with their parents. The social workers keep working on their case plans with the parents, and they oversee the kids who are now in foster care. But as soon as kids are removed from the home, a clock starts ticking. The parents have to prove [00:30:00] to the state that they can safely parent the children. And if they can’t do that quickly enough, the state will seek to terminate their parental rights.

Speaker 3:                    So the hardest decision that I have made and that I feel really any social worker can make is that decision that you are going to file, in court, a petition to terminate parental rights. I, as the social worker have made that decision with, with my management team, with our legal team, and I don’t make it alone, [00:30:30] but I am the one that sits at the round table with mom and dad and says, “This is the direction we’re going in.” And that is incredibly difficult. Sometimes it is met with an understanding that the parent says, “You’re right. I haven’t done what I need to do. I’m not surprised you’re doing this. Okay.” That is one example. Another is screaming and yelling and storming out, attacking me personally. [00:31:00] I usually have my supervisor sitting in with me to have these conversations, but working with a family for so long and then having to sit with them and sometimes saying, “You have made some amazing changes for yourself, but that does not equate to your child being able to come back into your home safely.”

And that’s probably the most difficult conversation. Parents who are making changes, parents who have gained sobriety for three months. [00:31:30] That’s incredible. Congratulations to you. But in the permanency timeline for a child, we need to be making those decisions sooner rather than later. So parents that I see starting to make changes, but just not soon enough or just not great enough, those are the difficult conversations. A parent who has completely blown off everything I’ve asked them to do, that conversation is less difficult. A parent who is showing some progress [00:32:00] but still having to make that decision in the best interest of the child. That’s a difficult conversation to have.

And I have had plenty of cases where I have had to go through a termination of parental rights trial, termination was granted, that family has had another child. For continuity of care they come back onto my case and I have to work with that family again. And [00:32:30] I’m the woman that took their first kid away. So I’m going to take their second kid away. Because we want reunification to be our primary goal, that can be very difficult, because in order for reunification to happen, there needs to be a trusting relationship between social worker and parent. They have to trust me this time around, even though I took their first kid away from them.

Speaker 2:                    Even in the worst cases, [00:33:00] cases where there’s just overt abuse physical, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, even in the worst cases you just don’t come away like, “Woohoo, I did my job and we won.” Lawyers feel that way. We don’t. [00:33:30] And sometimes you’re glad. “Oh, good, these children are going to be safe. They’re in a good foster home. And foster parents are going to adopt them.” And you’ve been watching them for the last year or two, just thriving and overcoming all kinds of deficits, from a child that’s three years old, it’s not speaking, or a child that’s not potty trained, [00:34:00] or a child that’s so insular, all of a sudden they’re doing so well and schools are reporting how their behavior has changed and how they’re blossoming and they’re coming into themselves. And all that, of course, feels good, and to see that and to witness that. But there’s real trauma for those kids. They’re separated from their family. I can’t even begin to think of what that might feel [00:34:30] like. That’s real trauma. That’s like death. In some ways worse than death, I think.

One case in particular there were two children involved, pretty dysfunctional family, was a case where mental instability was a major [00:35:00] issue. Really impoverished family. The children are in foster care, sibling group. And the dad was pretty much a sober person. The mom is abusing all kinds of substances, so that’s what brought them into our custody. I became their case worker. We developed a case plan and both the parents needed to do A through Z [00:35:30] of things to ensure the safety and care of their children. And they needed to demonstrate that over a period of time and show us that they could sustain that level of safety. So months go by, and in that time you’re meeting with them, you have a six month case plan review, you’re having treatment team meetings, but by the time their anniversary, in which the children come into custody.

The question comes up for the social worker, [00:36:00] what is the permanent plan for these children? Are they going to be returning home or are they going to be adopted? So with this family, nothing has changed. Things actually got worse. So the parents weren’t pulling it together. So I, through our attorneys, petitioned the court to terminate the parents’ rights to both of their children. [00:36:30] And there’s no doubt in my mind these parents don’t love their children. They absolutely love their children, but they just don’t know how to care for their children. And the parents had split up and the dad, who was sober, but had significant delays, cognitive delays, so neither one of them were addressing issues that were outlined in the case [00:37:00] plan. So I thought we had enough where both of the parental rights should have been terminated so that both of those children could be adopted.

But going through that process is excruciating because you have to testify for a lengthy period of time and justify your opinion, your recommendation for the TPR to go through. [00:37:30] Up until you file that petition for the TPR, you’re coaching that family, you’re supporting them, you want to see them succeed, you’re rooting them on. But then the federal mandate comes in that there has to be a permanency option for this child. And then all of a sudden, you flip everything on the family. And then your relationship is just distraught. [00:38:00] So you have to recount all the agencies and supports you had put in place so that they could be successful, and all of a sudden, they’re your adversaries. And I liked the father. I thought he was a good man, and he really loved his children, but I didn’t think he was competent to raise his children.

And that really hurts. That’s devastating. [00:38:30] And I remember being in that court and seeing him afterwards, and I just felt compelled, I had to say something, because I felt I really betrayed him, just like, “I’m sorry. I had to do my job.” And [00:39:00] he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He stood there for a moment and he brushed past me and I fell apart. I got back from courts and I shared my experience with my coworkers and I just started wailing. It just was [00:39:30] horrible.

Erica Heilman:               Does it feel sometimes like playing God?

Speaker 2:                    Yes. Yes. It feels like… I don’t know the Bible well, but that parable, I think it was king David, with the two women in saying, “This is my child.” “No, it’s my child.” And he’s about to split the baby [00:40:00] in half with a sword. You feel like king David.

Speaker 3:                    I do this work because I see that it’s possible for people to change. And I know if I had a smaller caseload and had more [00:40:30] time to sit with my families, we could be doing better work together. I do still have the cases where real change is being made, despite not having a social worker that can be at their house every week, despite having months of wait lists for a therapist or a substance abuse counselor, they’re making changes. But the job has become in your face more dangerous. So workers have left. Social workers have left our office. [00:41:00] Social workers have left many of the offices because there’s a real fear that something dangerous could happen. I have myself received threats, and what happened to Lara is a tangible thing, and some of the people that I work with defend what happened.

Speaker 4:                    I had a recent incident where I had an old client who happened to be at my child’s daycare. She had been at the daycare previously, bad mouthing me, saying negative things about me. [00:41:30] And then she showed up at my child’s daycare and asked which child was mine. And there was nothing I could do. It didn’t meet stalking requirements, nothing. My kid stood up and said, “This is my mom. That’s my mom.” And there was nothing I could do. I came into this job knowing that I wanted to be a social worker, I wanted to do this work. I knew the risk that it came with this job. My child does not. So how do I keep her safe when I have clients telling me they know where I live? [00:42:00] I mean, how do we keep our family safe?

Speaker 2:                    When Lara was murdered, none of us expected this would ever happen to any one of us in the state of Vermont. And for me, it was like, “Wow, I can’t believe that happened, and I can’t believe that happened to Lara. That doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any [00:42:30] sense.” That seal has been broken and now it’s open for anybody. There’s different points where I thought the Berry district office is just going to just totally break down. It’s strange to work in that office and see those other social workers and just [00:43:00] look into their faces and their expressions are so unique. I don’t know how to describe them. I guess that’s what faces look like after something like that happens.

Erica Heilman:               There have been [00:43:30] 125 death threats at DCF since Lara Sobel’s murder. This show is dedicated to Lara Sobel and to her colleagues at DCF. I’d like to say one last thing. There’s a silence at the heart of this show, and it’s the voices of parents involved with DCF. Over the next few months, I’ll be looking for parents who want to share their perspectives about working with [00:44:00] family services. If you have thoughts about this, you can email me at rumblestripvermont@gmail.com, or if you have thoughts about the show in general, I encourage you to make a comment on the website. The music you heard in the show is by my friends Peter Cressie and Brian Clark. I’m Erica Heilman. Thanks for listening.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/238953388″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /] It’s the day before Christmas, and like a Christmas miracle, I received this report from Scott Carrier on recent police activity here in central Vermont. Here are a selection of calls to local police as reported in the Times Argus and Stowe Reporter.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Music by Hayvanlar Alemi. The song is titled Crossroad Metamorphosis

Photo Credit: This is just a small portion of an inspired murder scene diorama by my friend Colin Dickerman. Here is the whole scene:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/237865316″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”20″ iframe=”true” /]How time flies! The holidays are such a nice time to catch up with friends and family. Here’s a waspy little roundup of highlights from a year in the Becht family. Happy Holidays!

Credits

Seasonal Update was written by Tal McThenia, a writer of books and articles and screenplays. To learn more about Tal, you can visit his website:  talmcthenia.com or check out his book website: www.acaseforsolomon.com

The Music

The Handbell Choir at Memorial Baptist Church in Pulaski, Virginia from their Christmas concert in 2012.

The guy who sings Oh, Holy Night. If you know who this is, please, please write to me at rumblestripvermont@gmail.com

NEWS FLASH: Listener/Investigator Patrick Freebern did some digging and discovered the original singer of the song, Steve Mauldin of Tennessee. On YouTube. (Duh?). And here is a video featuring Steve  of Tennessee, speaking at great length about how he is the original singer on this recording.

The Dogs

M.T. Anderson is the author of Feed, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, which won the National Book Award. Whether it’s crafting a dystopian future, writing vampire fiction, or, in the case of his latest book, Symphony for the City of the Dead, chronicling the life of the composer Dmitri Shostakovitch, his books are meticulously researched and vividly told.

I first met Tobin (his middle name) when he came over with my friend Peter this past September to watch the eclipse…or  the SUPER Moon. The three of us sat and talked in my front yard in an old wicker couch until it collapsed, and the conversation carried on horizontally from there. We talked about astronomy, about words we hate (slacks, homemade) and what we were like in high school. It was the kind of voracious conversation you have with a brand new friend.

We got together recently at my house to talk about his new book Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad.  We also talked about….other things. His writing habits, God, demonic possession, and middle age. A little something for everyone.

Welcome.

Credits:

Music by Noveller, of the Free Music Archive

Thanks to Tally Abecassis for her thoughts on this show. If you haven’t listened to her podcast, First Day Back, I recommend you check it out. Cuz it’s great. Also thanks to Colin Dickerman.

Links to Tobin’s work and articles about his illustrious career:

Click here for Symphony for the City of the Dead

Click here for Feed

Click here for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing

M.T. Anderson’s blog

Profile in The Washington Post

Interview about Feed in Boing Boing