View over downtown Burlington to Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks

Photo by David Brussat

STOWE, Vt.

EVEN IN SUMMER, you can’t escape skiing in Vermont. Long scars of green run like all-terrain golf courses up and down the slopes of the Green Mountains. They would never get away with this in states where clear-cutting for coal or timber are serious infractions on the green hit parade. But in the Green Mountain State, it seems, clear-cutting for fun and fitness is fine and dandy.

My wife, Victoria, and I spent a week at Snuggler’s — oops! Smuggler’s — Notch resort courtesy of my sister-in-law, Barbara Somlo. A pretty place, even if you can’t ski the links at this time of year.

Don’t ask me why, but after almost a quarter-century of residence in New England, this was my first visit to Vermont. The state’s bucolic reputation precedes it, so Vermont looked much as I expected. Quaint villages on roads winding through verdant valleys, with mountains everywhere you look.

An architecture critic can have little to say in the elucidation of Nature’s alpine charms. But, jeepers! Those mountains! Heading east out of Burlington on Route 89 late one afternoon, I thought we were driving through a painting. Little did I know how many shades of green could coexist in a—

RrrrEEEErrr! RrrrEEEErrr! RrrrEEEErrr! [Sirens, flashing lights.]

I pull over to the side of the road.

Yes, officer?

You a writer, mister?

Yes, sir.

“Driving through a painting”? That cliché’s going to cost you $20.

Sorry, officer.

Tell the judge you had intended to write “driving through a Thomas Cole.” He might halve your fine.

A Thomas Cole?

Nineteenth Century American landscape painter, sir. A founder of the Hudson River School.

Oh. I see. Thank you, officer.

So let me tell you about the manmade places we visited in Vermont. In general, the smaller the prettier. Most evocative are the dilapidated barns. They seem almost as ubiquitous as barns in good repair. Your half-collapsed barn going to seed melds architecture with nature, even if it tells a sad story of the state of farming in Vermont. We scored goose-eggs in our sighting of cows. Maybe that’s why.

Villages like Jeffersonville and Cambridge are picture postcards of the American Dream (I look over my shoulder for the prose police), although the down-at-the-heels farm infrastructure argues otherwise. Maybe dilapidated barns are a sort of art form, left standing for their aesthetic effect. On the other hand, Victoria shot a barn with an artfully broken spine (part of the aptly named “Downer Farm”) two years ago in Stowe, where her family has vacationed yearly for decades. This year it was gone.

Stowe is a New England version of what may be viewed across the nation: Main Streets tarted up neatly for the tourist trade, featuring brightly colored shops with punny names on signs lettered as if the market were children, as it may well be. In this day and age cutesy shop signs are de rigueur, but in vacation spots they are repainted every year. Don’t get me wrong: Stowe is very pretty and amusing.

For years I’ve wanted to visit Burlington. With a population of about 40,000, it is the largest city in Vermont. It is also the smallest city in the nation that is the largest city in its state. (Montpelier is the smallest state capital in the nation.) The tallest building in Burlington is eight stories, as if the architecture shrinks from competing with the mountains. These facts embody a feeling I had that Burlington must be a sort of Providence in miniature, an even smaller city just as untainted by modern architecture.

Burlington steps down to the edge of Lake Champlain. Every street heading toward the lake affords a view of the Adirondacks beyond. Parallel to the lake but four long blocks uphill is the Church Street pedestrian mall. Historic buildings line the street. Shops and outdoor cafés hummed with activity on a Thursday in the hour after lunch. We did not notice that some shops on Church hid a huge indoor mall, Burlington Town Center. It clomps downhill from Church between Cherry and State toward the lake, naked and ugly in its pomposity. Burlington boasts many fine old buildings mixed in with the obligatory modernist mania to marry utility and “design” without committing the faux-pas of beauty. The result is the usual unsatisfactory hodgepodge of old and new.

Okay, so Burlington was just a bit of a disappointment. For all its lovely lakefront and lively pedestrian street, it’s another typical American city; a more stunning setting than most, but stunted in the development of its civic beauty by modern planning and architecture. The antidote is everywhere else in Vermont — along country roads, in Brattleboro, in the wee twee capital of Montpelier — and, of course, in those larger places, the Green Mountains, kings of the Green Mountain State. Long may they reign!

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).