In the thirty-eight miles of railroad between Montpelier and Wells River, there is only one full-length mile of straight track--and that is in Plainfield!

Charles Edward Crane, “Let Me Show You Vermont”

Though Plainfield may have the only “straight” railroad track for miles around, that’s not a word I’d use to describe this town. "Quirky, sleepy, and funky" are more what come to mind when I descend 1500 feet down my hill and roll through the most dangerous intersection in the state (we need a red light, not just blinking orange!) onto Main Street in Plainfield.

Plainfield lies along both sides of Route 2, that busy two-laner that runs across the northern U.S. Even before this major road (for its time, anyway) was paved in the early 1900's, this was an enterprising locale with farms in the hills and valleys, and sawmills and hotels on the ponds and streams. The Winooski River attracted both tourists and small industries, and a rail line shipped milk, butter, wood, and textiles all the way to Boston. Little Plainfield was a town that could take care of itself.

Nowadays things are diferent, and Plainfield has the feel of being a bit of an afterthought along the highway, more of a place to ride through on your way to somewhere else than a destination. When I've stood on the sidewalk in town painting (and you can't help absorbing your surroundings when standing and looking for hours behind an easel ) I've had the thought that Plainfield is a place that could use some good old 19th century industry and tourism.

But--I've also discovered that Plainfield offers plenty to see and do if you get out of your car or out from behind your easel, and explore. There's a handy little natural foods co-op wedged between the river and an old cemetery that has just about anything you discover you’re missing when cooking dinner.

The Country Bookshop, housed in a big white cape on Mill Street, is good for hours of browsing (and had THREE different editions of "The Education of Henry Adams" available when the strange urge to own that book came on me recently.)

Oddly enough, tiny Plainfield used to have two nationally famous restaurants (Chinese and Southern) and then a short-lived tapas cafe that the locals never warmed up to because it didn’t serve breakfast. Now we have Positive Pie as our neighborhood go-to for pizza and beer, the kind of place where you’ll probably run into, sitting at the bar, that guy who did such a good job digging you a new leach field ten years ago.

The town's two blocks also host a law office, yoga studio, and a shop for artisan beer makers—a selection of services that says a lot about life around here. Like everywhere else, we have our stressers, and our decompressers.

If you throw a stick into the woods that surround Plainfield, you’ll probably hit a painter, a poet, a potter, and/or an eccentric. That's probably true of much of Vermont, but in these environs the concentration of non-conformists is especially thick because of Goddard College. Goddard was conceived by its founders in the 1860's as a progressive educational institution that fosters "plain living and hard thinking." By the 1960's it was a free-spirited anti-institution that attracted oddballs from around the country, and those that stuck around are now very interesting and accomplished neighbors.

All in all, Plainfield is a good town to have at the bottom of my hill. If the only thing straight about it is the railroad track--now a bike trail--that's fine with me.