Free Idyll Banter by Chris Bohjalian

here in Lincoln. She is among the neighbors who are helping Vosburgh these days endure a bad patch with her back and her hip.
    â€œI look out for Marjorie,” Cloe says. “She’s a very good friend of mine.”
    Many of the outward trappings of our world indeed have been revolutionized by technology, but the basic generosity that marked Vermont sixty years ago remains unchanged.

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PLENTY
OF CHARMIN
    TOMORROW MORNING, I will join my neighbors from Bristol, Starksboro, and Lincoln and celebrate the birth of our nation, that day in 1776 when a small group of patriots in Philadelphia put their pens to paper and their necks on the line, and declared that their outhouses would no longer be subject to English tyranny.
    As many historians have noted, the Revolutionary War was the last great armed conflict fought over outhouses. It was Thomas Paine himself who wrote that fateful summer of ’76, “Tyranny is the hell that sits on the throne—far from the paper.”
    Even Ethan Allen, an otherwise tireless self-promoter, admits in his account of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga that the British would never have surrendered and come out if they’d had an outhouse inside the fort’s walls.
    In any case, of all the towns in Vermont that accord Independence Day the respect it deserves, it is Bristol alone that understands the crucial role the outhouse played convincing Thomas Jefferson to get off the pot and draft the Declaration of Independence. As it has every Fourth of July for a decade and a half now, Bristol will celebrate the bombs bursting in air with a series of outhouse races, beginning tomorrow morning at 8:30.
    Conceived, managed, and run by the Bristol Rotary Club, the outhouse races are a combination of the great chariot races from
Ben-Hur
and the low-tech wizardry of a Pinewood Derby.
    The outhouses that race are powered by people, and the rules are fairly specific:

    â€¢ As many as four people may pull or push the contraption, but there must be one person sitting inside it in a position that reflects what those in the outhouse race world might describe as anatomic and functional accuracy.

    â€¢ The outhouse must resemble, as this year’s organizer Ted Lylis puts it, “an old-fashioned one-holer.” The sides must be covered, the wheels must be rotating casters, and—for reasons I hate to imagine—the floor must be solid.

    The current outhouse race course is a straight path down Bristol’s Main Street, with the village’s lone stoplight as its finish line. In past years, however, the course has actually wound its way around the Bristol commons, which meant there were the sort of sharp curves that occasionally resulted in accidents between outhouses (versus accidents
in
outhouses, which is a whole other premise I’m not going to touch).
    It’s not surprising that the idea of an outhouse race was conceived at the sort of New Year’s Eve party in which there was rigorous intellectual debate. In the midst of one especially animated discussion of philosopher John Locke’s influence on Jefferson, Rotarian Larry Gile turned to Rotarian Bill Paine, or Paine to Gile (no one’s quite sure who’s to blame), and said, “Hey, let’s have an outhouse race.”
    And while I’ve no doubt that the outhouse races are a fascinating historical re-creation of the Revolutionary War charges and countercharges that occurred on Vermont soil at the breakfast battle of Hubbardton, their real role today is as Rotary fund-raisers.
    Through a combination of race entry fees and spectator wagers, the outhouse races some years raise a sizable sum of money for the Rotary Club to return to the community. This spring, for example, the Bristol Rotary awarded four $500 scholarships to high school seniors. Much of that money was raised from last year’s outhouse race.
    And so tomorrow, in addition to savoring the parades and fireworks and