Rumble Strip

Rumble Strip is a podcast. Its home planet is rumblestripvermont.com. On the show, you’ll hear artists and criminals, taxidermists and soccer moms, lawyers and waitresses. Erica Heilman invites herself into people's homes to find out what they know,...

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Shaggs' Own Thing: The Story of the Wiggin Sisters

Shaggs’ Own Thing: The Story of the Wiggin Sisters

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Depending on who you talk to, The Shaggs were either one of the best bands from the ’60s, or one of the worst bands of all time.

Helen, Betty and Dot Wiggin were growing up in Fremont, New Hampshire. They had no interest in music, no natural talent for music, and in the late ’60s, their father forced them to drop out of school and start a rock band. In their living room. And…

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Buying your first motorcycle

Buying your first motorcycle

Motorcycles are one of the pinnacles of manliness. They’re up there with Islay single malt, grass-fed sirloin, and Creed’s Green Irish Tweed aftershave.

Why? Because unlike automobiles, they offer a visceral experience: one that requires skill, mental engagement and risk management. On a motorcycle, you can’t sip coffee, fiddle with your phone, or daydream the minutes away. Your senses are on red…

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Carl. A Different Breed of Cat

Carl. A Different Breed of Cat

[display_podcast] Directions to Carl Blaisdell’s house: Go about seven miles down this road. Then there’s a road that kind of goes up to a Jersery farm on the left and then there’s a pond. But there’s no sign to the pond. So after the pond, drive past the pull-off and Carl’s trailer sits way up in a field at the top of that hill. There’s a lot of pipes. And a lot of cars and trucks. And lots and…

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After the Forgetting...a Tribute to Greg Sharrow

After the Forgetting…a Tribute to Greg Sharrow

[display_podcast] This is a tribute to my friend Greg Sharrow, which I made back in 2008. Greg was one of the first people I met when I came back to Vermont in 2003. I didn’t have many friends, I didn’t have a job or really any plans, and it was the middle of winter. And then I met Greg at his office in the old Vermont Folklife Center building in Middelbury. It was crammed with books, and we sat…

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Driving Around With Susan. Again!

Driving Around With Susan. Again!

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. –Rumi [display_podcast]This winter Susan Randall worked with the defense on a sentencing case for a high profile multiple-murder here in Vermont. A sentencing is the time for considering the pain caused by a crime. It’s also a time to ask, How did we get here? What happened in the life of this person that led…

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Grout and the Contra Dance

Grout and the Contra Dance

  Some of life’s inevitable problems are big and some are quite small. But no problems are too small to complain about. Welcome to the first installment of Problems…conversations between Pam and Joel about surviving in a world full of challenges. In this first episode, we hear about Pam’s daughter, River, whose having a hard time getting her needs met at school. Also, this Friday is the contra…

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Son Lux

  [display_podcast] Son Lux is a band that doesn’t live comfortably in any genre. Their sound is massive, anthemic, but it’s also strangely intimate. The rhythms are incredibly complex, and it’s shot through with these bright details of sound. The project started in Ryan Lott’s brain in Cleveland, and then it grew by two–guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. They’re all composers and…

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Learning the Trade

[display_podcast]The Northeast Kingdom is mostly small towns separated by miles and miles. Sometimes it’s featured in trout fishing magazines. It also has some of the highest unemployment and lowest wages in the state. Its beautiful place. And it’s a hard place to live. I was up at the St. Johnsbury Academy a couple weeks ago, which is one of the gateways to the Kingdom. My sister and brother in…

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Four Jobs and No Money

Beth is from Orange, Vermont. She’s 38, she’s got four jobs, and like a lot of Vermonters, in fact a lot of Americans, she’s not making enough money. There’s not enough money for food, and there’s certainly not enough for her own place. How can a person have four jobs and not enough money? And what does it actually feel like to never have enough? This is a segment produced for a Vermont Public…

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Sound Test and Cop Riff

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Emergency

[display_podcast] For the last few years, there’s been a huge spike in the number of people with mental health crises visiting emergency rooms. People who are suicidal, homicidal, psychotic. But emergency rooms are not equipped to treat mental health problems. ER nurses are not trained to treat mental illnesses and the departments are not designed to comfort, to calm or to keep people safe from…

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Hitchhiker

  [display_podcast]This is another guest show from radio producer Scott Carrier, which he produced when he was twenty-six. He hitchhiked across the United States, interviewed people along the way, and ended up at the door of NPR in Washington, DC with an armful of tape. This is Scott’s first story. Scott produces my favorite podcast. It’s called Home of the Brave.  

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Seasons Greetings From Liz and Jerry!

[display_podcast] 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…

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A Good Death

[display_podcast] 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…

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(Rumble Strip) 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.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.

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(Rumble Strip) Rob Mermin and Bill Morancy lived in neighboring apartments in Montpelier, Vermont. They were best friends. 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 about their friendship, and the months, days and moments leading up to Bill's death.

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(Rumble Strip) 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.