It was like someone snuck up behind me and yelled “boom!” in my ear. Despite being a human for several decades, I had never heard thunder like this, let alone been ricocheted out of bed by it at 2:45 in the morning. Disoriented, I took in the gauzy curtains surrounding my king bed, a hanging gas fireplace, the wall-to-wall wood. Oh, right: I’m in a treehouse. Actually, one of the eight new Treehouses at Twin Farms, a Relais & Chateaux retreat in Vermont’s Green Mountains. It’s a sturdy and absurdly comfortable spot to be stuck in a summer storm that might possibly become a tornado. The sky had been a hazy yellow, the same shade as the tint in my sunglasses, on my drive up to Barnard, Vermont, just east of Killington. Signs for “severe weather tonight” had been warning—in all caps—along the highway ever since I crossed into the Green Mountain State. Now I was getting to see how the state defined “severe weather.”
Though safely ensconced in a high-end treehouse, nature is very much knocking on my front door—Twin Farms occupies 300 acres of private land, a mix of pine forest, fish-filled ponds, and grassy meadows, and the treehouses sit 14 to 20 feet above the ground, accessible by bridge. We are, as they say, remote. The five-hour journey here had been an exercise in winnowing: the width of the roads, the number of fellow drivers, the types of homes until they’re all uniformly wooden slats in shades of brown, like any practical alpine community. Hand-chalked signs advertise maple syrup by the quart ($15) and duck eggs off the front porch ($6). I follow Highway 12 into Woodstock (not that Woodstock), then back out to State Road for 10 miles of farmland and giant clusters of solar panels.
