Earlier this month, the day of "The Simpsons Movie" premiere in Springfield, I overheard a conversation while I was having a maple cookie at Jamie's on Main, a bakery and sandwich shop in the center of Stowe. The exchange occurred between a married couple who were somewhere in their mid-50s. Based on the brochures and the map of Vermont they had spilled like playing cards onto their table before them, it was evident that they were visiting our fair state. The following is a rough transcript of their dialogue.

HE: We could always go to naked town.

SHE: Naked town?

HE: You know, that town around here that lets you walk around naked.

SHE: Brattleboro? We are not going to drive all the way to the southern part of this state so you can look at naked people.

HE: You'd look, too.

SHE: No. We are not driving to Brattleboro.

HE: Then what? We've already been to Ben & Jerry's.

SHE: We could try to find where they're showing "The Simpsons Movie" tonight.

The two of them then turned to me, and the fellow asked if I knew where the film was having it special premiere that evening. They had heard that Vermont was hosting some exclusive preview. Springfield, I told them ... the name of the town in which the Simpsons live. Springfield.

SHE: Isn't that in Massachusetts?

ME: We have one, too.

HE: Is it far from here?

SHE: It can't be any farther than your big idea that we go all the way to naked town.

Sometimes my heart goes out to everyone in Vermont who works to promote travel and tourism. We have a state that is spectacularly beautiful and pretty carefully preserved, but it doesn't have a lot of theme parks. That means it doesn't appeal to everyone. Moreover, Vermont is perceived in some quarters as an idyllic, pastoral throwback: Green mountains, red barns, white church steeples. Cows. Lots of cows.

In others, it is considered an eccentric backwater that spawns hippie ice cream and rusted-out Subarus. A place with something called naked town. (It is probably no coincidence that when Brattleboro isn't receiving media attention for its tolerance of public nudity, it is being featured because of its annual Strolling of the Heifers festival and parade every June.)

We are known far and wide for phantasmagorically beautiful foliage in the autumn, and for maple syrup -- though a sizable percentage of the world hasn't a clue that the sap runs for but weeks a year in the spring, and all that boiling occurs in March and April. (When I was in Los Angeles earlier this year, a completely sincere individual told me she had always thought the sap ran in the fall because the leaves were dying, and they changed color because they no longer had sap in them.)

In any case, I introduced myself to this couple at Jamie's and learned they were from Ohio. They were visiting Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, and this was their first trip to any part of New England other than Boston. I took the liberty of unfolding their map for them and showing them a variety of places they might want to visit on a sunny Saturday in the middle of July. I went as far to the south as the Justin Smith Morrill homestead in Strafford, and as far to the north as the Burlington waterfront and the ECHO Center. I also told them about my favorite places in Stowe.

And, yes, I told them they might enjoy a trip to Brattleboro someday, but not necessarily to see naked people.

The man's response? "Then why? Is 'The Simpsons Movie' premiering there, too?"

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 29.)

Summer is not over yet, despite the cruelty of retailers who are now hanging banners in their windows with four of the scariest words any 8-year-old (or schoolteacher!) has ever read: Back-to-School Sale. We are barely a sixth of the way through August, which means Labor Day is still a month in the distance.

And how long is four weeks? It is four times the life span of some butterflies.

Moreover, August is the very best month of the year if you like fried dough, roller coasters, cows with good dairy quality, and pumpkins the size of Volkswagens. It is county fair season in Vermont, beginning this Tuesday morning when the sugarhouse and children's barnyard open at the Addison County Fair and Field Days.

Even though we are a digital world of iPods and text messages and presidential debates that revolve around Youtube, the county fair still matters in Vermont. The crowds still come; people still quilt; and gardeners still compete. More than 40,000 of our neighbors will visit Field Days in the coming week.

To get a sense of the true importance of the county fair in the digital age, I went to an expert on Field Days: Lincoln's Spencer Prescott. Prescott is 8 and a half years old, and that means he has almost a decade of experience with county fairs -- though, of course, he has spent a sizable part of his time at Field Days in diapers and his memories thus might be a little suspect. Of course, I am in my mid-40s and heaven knows my memories are a little suspect. So, far be it from me to impugn Prescott's wisdom simply because he will only be in the third grade next month.

The point is, Prescott knows what works at the fair, and he knows what he likes. "I wish every day could be Field Days," he told me, before offering a long litany of why he looks forward to this time of year. His favorite part of the fair? "The rides and the games and the maple cotton candy and the horses. I like to see the appaloosas, and why some horses win more awards than others."

That's the thing about Field Days this week or, later this month, the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction: There is a lot going on. Rides and sheep-shearing and food that should come with a warning from the Surgeon General, but is absolutely irresistible in once-a-year-doses. (Exhibit A? The Onion Blossom.) There is something for everyone. My mother-in-law is never going to risk vomiting back a funnel cake on the Tilt-a-Whirl with her granddaughter (that's my job), but she will be hypnotized by the crafts and the quilts. My sister-in-law may not ride horses seriously, but -- like Spencer Prescott -- she can appreciate the majesty of Bill Roleau's magnificent Belgian draft horses. And I will always be awed by a pumpkin so big that it needs a trailer to haul it from the patch to the park, even if pumpkins that big have rinds that look like the skin on a leprous troll.

For most of the two-plus decades I have lived in Vermont, we have worried about the demise of our agrarian heritage. As a people, we have rued the changing landscape. Certainly those fears are founded.

But we should also take comfort in the continued vitality of the county fair, and the way that even now the August sky is alight with the vibrant colors of the midway and the August afternoon is filled with the impressive displays of the 4-H Clubs -- with blue ribbons and yellow corn. It's not merely that the county fair is a celebration of an integral aspect of the Vermont ethos: It's that the county fair is, as Spencer Prescott reminds us, absolutely massive amounts of fun.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 5.)

So, we all know now how the Harry Potter saga has ended. A lot of us do, anyway. I won't spoil it for the seven people in the country who haven't yet heard how the final volume, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," concluded, but suffice to say that it was, more or less, satisfying. Not completely satisfying, in my opinion. I would have ended it on page 704, but clearly J. K. Rowling knows what she's doing. Far be it from me to quibble with her denouement.

Last month The Boston Globe asked me and three other writers to offer our thoughts on how the series might conclude, and I am happy to report that I was wrong in more ways than I was right. In all fairness, I wrote an ending with my tongue in my cheek and played it for laughs.

Nonetheless, Rowling startled me once again.

Yet what I loved most about the arrival of the seventh volume was the enthusiasm with which it was received despite the reality that we in the media did everything possible to engender a serious case of Harry Potter Fatigue. There was so much hoopla surrounding the arrival of the book last month that I feared there might be a Potter backlash.

Not a bit. I was in Stowe on the Saturday the novel came out, a part of the crew of a community theater musical, and I counted nine people reading the book who were involved with the production. There may have been more.

It's not merely that 8.3 million copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" were sold in the first 24 hours; it's that people were diving into the novel right away. Dropping everything. My friend Sue Fox was in the car the Saturday morning it arrived, driving from Connecticut to Vermont with her family, and reading it aloud to everyone for five-plus hours as her husband, Jeffrey, motored north.

"We're on page 171," Jeffrey said by way of a greeting when I saw him late that morning.

Alison Smith, 13, and Elly Valastro, 12, were immovable objects when I saw them sitting outside on that beautiful Saturday afternoon, completely oblivious to me as I walked past them, because they were so completely engrossed in the book.

Still, the jury is out on whether people actually read more because of Harry Potter. On the one hand, a study last year by Scholastic (publisher of Harry Potter in the U.S.) and Yankelovich suggested that the series has had a positive effect on children's attitudes toward books, and on the skills they bring to their schoolwork. More than half the young readers surveyed reported they had not read books for fun prior to discovering Harry Potter, and two-thirds claimed they had done better in school since entering into Rowling's enchanted world.

On the other hand, a study that will be released this autumn by the National Endowment for the Arts will contend that teens aren't reading a whole lot for pleasure other than books in the Harry Potter series. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia has noted in interviews that teens are reading less and thus they do not read particularly well. Apparently, even a witch as gifted as Rowling hasn't the magic to reverse the trend against pulp. Regardless, here is what makes the phenomenon so special: It is multigenerational. The books are not just for children or teens or adults. They are for all of us. Potter is something we have shared as a culture, and regardless of our age we have followed the growth of the young wizard and his friends as they have confronted both the beauty and the evil of our world. Sure, I could have used fewer pages about quidditch over the past decade (happily for me, there were none in the latest book), and Rowling seems to view the adverb the way I view the chocolate chip cookie: You can't have too many.

But Harry Potter is a mighty literary achievement: A fable that has survived the worst that dark magic can offer, and thrived despite the sort of muggle media onslaught that would have laid a killing curse on a lesser wizard.

Bravo.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 12.)

I was driving through a lovely hamlet in Vermont earlier this summer, the name of which I shall take to my grave. (It happens to rhyme with a brand of chocolate syrup, but you didn't hear that from me.) I was motoring along at 40 miles an hour, and I thought I was traveling five miles above the speed limit.

Wrong. I was in a 25-mile-per-hour zone, and thus was speeding 15 miles per hour faster than I should have. Consequently, I was pulled over by a police officer, a very nice fellow who works for the town of (rhymes a bit with the synonym for jail used often on TV shows like "Deadwood" and "Bonanza"). He noted that I was speeding, and my car's inspection sticker had expired. But he had mercy on me, and only busted me for the expired inspection. Total fine? $84.

On this very same stretch of road this summer, two of my friends and my wife were also pulled over for exceeding the speed limit. The results? Barrie Dunsmore was fined for speeding. Emily Day was warned to take it slow. And my wife was encouraged to be a little more careful in the future. Keep a better eye on that speedometer, maybe.

My point? Two men, two fines. Two women, two warnings.

It is interesting to note that my wife and Emily are both very pretty. Emily was wearing a low-cut shirt when she was pulled over, and my wife a short skirt.

But Dunsmore and Bohjalian? Well, we're middle-aged guys. Not so pretty. And, obviously, no skirts -- not that a skirt would have helped either of us in (imagine a city with a complex of buildings that sounds a lot like The Gremlin).

Now, obviously I am not saying that the women were getting preferential treatment on this patch of pavement because they are female and the police officer was male. Even if I thought such a thing, I certainly wouldn't write it because then I would be just asking to get a whopper of a ticket the next time I am driving through (a town with a two-syllable name that would sound surprising in Vermont, if that second syllable weren't reminiscent of our bovine friends). It would be like I was begging to make a contribution to the village coffers of (first syllable is the word for small, flowerless plants that grow on rocks and moist ground, and around the trunks of trees).

Moreover, the experience of my friend Patrick Clow really muddies the water. Clow is male and received a mere warning not far from this particular expanse of asphalt ... but only after the following exchange:

OFFICER: May I see your driver's license and registration, Ma'am?

CLOW: I prefer sir.

OFFICER: Oh.

Did Clow receive just a warning because the officer was abashed for presuming he was female? Or did the officer actually believe he was a woman despite his denial -- a woman, perhaps, whose nickname was "Sir?" Clow does have longish hair with a stylish wave to it, and -- like his 3-year-old son -- a very nice smile.

Still, he is male, and he did not get a ticket.

So, if I am not suggesting that in the town of (rhymes with the German word for housewife) you may be more likely to get a speeding ticket if you are male than female, then what am I saying?

I believe I am saying that it is always best to abide by the speed limit. There is a reason that we are encouraged to drive at certain speeds along certain roads. And, by all means, if you happen to be driving through (rhymes with the American Indian term for a discussion of some importance), proceed at the speed limit -- or, if you must speed, be sure to wear a short skirt.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 19.)

Monday marks day three of the Champlain Valley Fair, northern Vermont's annual 10-day celebration of 18th-century opera, elegant spa cuisine, and reading. Oh, wait: I must be looking at the wrong news release. My bad.

Let's try that again: Monday marks day three of the Champlain Valley Fair, northern Vermont's annual 10-day celebration of massive grandstand concerts with amplifiers the size of Winnebagos, fried food that comes with an angioplasty, and reading.

Yes, reading. Again this year children between kindergarten and the fifth grade who participated in their local library's "Read and Win" program and polished off three books by the middle of August will be admitted to the fair free Monday -- and receive a coupon for a free ride at the midway. This year 45 libraries statewide participated in the program.

That means that a sizable number of the kids you see wandering happily around the fair on Monday understand that there is more to life than Ferris wheels and racing pigs -- though, of course, in the last week of August there is something to be said for both. (Someday, someone will be clever enough to figure out a way to have the pigs race on the Ferris wheel. Now that would be interesting!)

"We're a nonprofit year-round, and it's part of our mission to support education and agriculture," said Steve Mease, communications director for the Champlain Valley Exposition.

I happen to like the "Read and Win" program a lot, and not because it's such a great money saver. The truth is, it's not. A child's admission to the fair is 5 bucks -- 4 bucks with an advance purchase ticket. That's about the cost of a single spin on one of the marquee rides, or an order of fries and a soda. The reality is that parents who take their child to the fair expect to hemorrhage money: Somewhere in the fair there is a great invisible vacuum cleaner that just Hoovers bills from billfolds.

But my adolescent daughter and her friends used to participate in the "Read and Win" program when they were younger, and I saw firsthand that when you're 7 or 8years old you don't make the distinction between free admission to the fair and a free day at the fair. All she and her friends saw was that they read a pile of books and they were rewarded.

Yes, reading is still its own reward: But in the digital age I am not going to complain if someone is going to make a connection between finishing off the tale of a two-dimensional mouse like Lilly in Kevin Henkes's "Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse," and getting to climb aboard a three-dimensional diaper-dirtying roller coaster like the Wild Mouse.

Just for the record, the Wild Mouse is new this year at the fair. The version that arrived this month at Essex Junction also might be called the Vom-a-Tron or the Hurl-and-Whirl because the cars in which you sit actually spin as they race around the tracks of the roller coaster. This means that you are not merely nauseous, you are terrified.

Actually, only adults are both nauseous and terrified. In my experience, children and teenagers are in some cases one or the other, but rarely both and often neither. I have no idea how to explain this.

In any case, the Wild Mouse is a pretty massive ride for the Champlain Valley Fair, and just the ticket after you've consumed a wedge of fried dough the size of a pizza. And after a quiet, cerebral summer spent with the likes of Lemony Snicket and Mary Pope Osborne and (of course) J.K. Rowling, it's nice to see the kids screaming their little heads off at the fair.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 26.)