Vermont, snowboarders, and Nancy Cruzan - 28 December 1990

Do you remember the Japanese soldier who was found, not more than ten years ago, in the jungle of an island that American marines had successfully invaded in early 1945?

He was found by some anthropologists, I believe, looking for a tribe that no white man, or for that matter, any other coloured stranger, had ever seen. Evidently it came out, the Japanese soldier trapped there, had been received by the tribe as a wonderful oddity, a charming visitor from another planet. He'd had no intention of settling there, he was in hiding till the war was over.

The anthropologist told him, in 1980, that the war had been over for 35 years. He was much relieved and was shipped home and received, as I recall, a medal and a hero's welcome.

I suppose we all, at some time, feel the itch to, as the phrase used to go, to get away from it all, but the problem, as any good modern travel writer will confirm, is where is it possible today to get away from it?

A colleague on my old paper has spent the last few years encircling the entire rim of what we now call the Pacific Basin or indeed, Pacific Rim. A man with the curiosity and the muscle to penetrate into any bush, jungle, mountain fastness or whatever, that is famously described as impenetrable.

But he finds people of every colour and sort using word processors in every jungle clearing and deep in an unreachable valley, fortified by immense walls of unscalable mountains, he found that 20 years ago, American hippies had settled there in ragged clothes, with grubby children and bewildered dogs.

They were discovered by officials, game wardens, forest rangers or such of the government of Hawaii, which was outraged and immediately ousted them under a swiftly-passed law which forbade and still forbids, strangers to stay in the valley for more than five days.

Well I myself, I have to confess, I've never had the urge to get away from it all, partly because the only times I've tried it, the beautiful simplicity of a primitive life, devoid of all the trappings of civilisation, sets up in me a great immediate yearning for the conveniences I was supposed to be despising. I guess I'm just a corrupt type of 20th-Century civilisation.

But, as old listeners to these talks may have noted, comes the approach of Christmas and I go off into the only retreat I care for, up into New England, into the mountain snows and the dazzling light and the cold, cold zero days of the state of Vermont. It is possible up here to get away from it all by locking yourself in a bedroom, study, stable and make a point of watching no television, hearing no radio, seeing no newspapers. This seems to me to be just plain silly. You can do it anywhere. In a flat overlooking Piccadilly Circus, just don't overlook.

But this time I remained fairly ignorant, what with one thing and another having to do with Christmas, mainly the bubbling or loping kids. The ones that bubble are five, eight and 10, the lopers are lean monsters of respectively 15 and 18 years, and except at mealtimes we don't see much of them.

Indoors they sit in a spectral green light, facing the screen and tapping the fearsome keyboard of their Macintosh Apple. Outdoors, they are gone with their skis, the younger one, much to the derision of his father and the skiing uncle, with his snowboard. Skiers deplore snowboarders, as true golfers deplore carts you ride in.

Indeed, it's only been a year or two since snowboarding was legally forbidden at most of New England's skiing resorts and slopes. The management was afraid of accidents. After all, just look at them, they stand on a single board six feet long and 10 inches wide and they stand strapped in, sideways. All the weight changes re obviously from side to side and they require strong and supple thighs and pretty fluid hips.

The manuals, there are already manuals, say that much more than in skiing, what's required to steer yourself swiftly and safely over the snow is much body English, a phrase still in use in all sports, to describe some small, ingenious or extra movement which, while not strictly illegal, is a crafty way of persuading the board to turn, the ball to go over the net or into the hole. If you hadn't already guessed, you'll gather that it embodies a still current view in this country of the English as being just a touch shifty or should I say, artful, in all sports. Please, no letters. I jest, partly.

Well I should say that if there is a local issue up here in Vermont, I mean one divorced from politics or the environment, it's the art or sin of shredding, another word for snowboarding. The purists are the regular skiers, young and old. but all the purists can do, like puritanical golfers who carry their own bags and walk with great healthful strides, all they can do is sneer.

All the resorts up here offer special weekend packages for snowboarders. At Look Mountain, in neighbouring New Hampshire, there's a beginners' special, $35, 50-minute lesson, rental of board and boots, use of the lower lifts.

To the horror of the old skiers, the town actually promotes a development programme for the young and instruction in all the classical and freestyle manoeuvres or skills, but now done on snowboards. It begins to look as if the ski were going the way of the wooden tennis racquet and the hickory-shafted golf club.

I'm afraid that's as far as I can go with my getting away from it all effort. Though I've seen no television, heard no radio, I did buy a newspaper, the Burlington Free Press and here is the news on the front page. The top four-column heading is "Gorbachev wins new powers". Beneath it, a three-column story, "Environmental enforcers clean up Vermont", a story which, I imagine, could be paralleled in hundreds of local newspapers across the country.

This one's about a man being ordered to pay a fine of £37,000 for dumping contaminated ground water on to a cemetery. The big story at the bottom of the page is the only truly local story, unlikely to be carried anywhere outside the state, "Kunin carries torch for Vermont women".

Madeleine Kunin, the retiring governor of Vermont, she's been re-elected three times but the term of service is only two years, so in all she's been governor for six years and the story is by way of paying tribute to what she's done for women.

She increased the number of women appointees in government from 24 to 40%, appointed the first female state Supreme Court justice. In the state legislature, during her time, the number of females has gone from 34 to 60, which is a record for any of the 50 states and so on. The only dissenters are, naturally, in the Republican opposition.

They say that she brought so many women into government that her policy amounted to reverse discrimination, an inevitable charge, and it's one that we're hearing more and more; that more blacks are appointed to fill posts or jobs in management or a skilled trade, which could have been filled by a white.

However, there is one more story on the front page and I'm pretty certain that's where it is on every front page in the country. It says simply, "Nancy Cruzan dies". A line that must have brought sad relief to perhaps millions of parents or spouses or other close relatives of some hospital patient who has laid for months or years, showing no sign of life, but not dying.

Nancy Cruzan was a 33-year-old woman from Missouri, who almost seven years ago was so badly injured in a car accident that she's been ever since in what the doctors call an irreversible vegetative state. A month after the accident, a feeding tube was put in her stomach.

Three years ago her parents, contending that she would have wanted to die a dignified death, went to court, to ask permission to have the tube removed and a county judge so ordered. But the state of Missouri itself leapt in at once and overturned the judge's ruling, and meanwhile a vigorous opposing lobby had grown up, opponents of abortion and/or euthanasia and argued up and down the state, that even a vegetable life has some meaning.

Eight times these people went to court but in the end were declared to have no legal standing. But all this time the forbidding judgment of the states of Missouri has stood. Well eventually, the parents took the case to the United States Supreme Court. That was in June and in its first right-to-die case, the court ruled that the state of Missouri did constitutionally have the right to prevent the parents withholding food and water, but the court added a proviso, which has sent a wave of relief through the medical and legal professions.

Missouri could prevail, the court said, unless there was clear and convincing evidence that the daughter would have wanted to die. Accordingly, in August, the parents went back to the original judge and put before him testimony from co-workers in the daughter's factory and the opinion of her doctor. The judge was convinced and on 14 December, ordered the tube to be removed. It was so done, Miss Cruzan died early in the morning of Boxing Day.

Riffling once more through the snowboarding story, I came on a familiar name in what you must grant, is an outlandish or should I say, unlikely context. Without comment, it says here, the director of snowboarding at the New Hampshire Loon Lake resort is an old Alpine skier turned shredder. His name, Winston Churchill.

A freakish coincidence? Not at all. I haven't been in touch with him, but he has got to be the grandson, maybe great-grandson of the famous American novelist, who lived all his life in New Hampshire.

Famous enough anyway at the end of the 19th Century, so that some time in the 1890s, a young Englishman, a soldier, who'd written a book, wrote to the eminent novelist in New Hampshire, to assure him that he, the young man, had no intention of battening on the great man's fame and would consequently, in any further books he wrote, sign himself Winston S Churchill.