by hatfield13

Whose woods these are, they didn’t care…

I heard something on the radio this afternoon that made me so, so sad. 

Vandals trashed Robert Frost’s summer home in Ripton, Vermont last night.  Underaged kids — police think maybe up to fifty of them — broke into the historic site and had a party there.  They smashed windows.  Broke his furniture and burned it in the fireplace.  Then vomited on the floor.  CNN ran a story with more details here.

Robert Frost is my favorite poet, one of the writers who taught me to love words and the way they go together.  Our family visited that summer house a few years ago and hiked the  Robert Frost Trail nearby.  The building is nothing fancy — a simple two story farmhouse in the Green Mountain National Forest  — but you can feel Frost’s spirit when you step onto the property.  A feeling of simplicity and peace.  What happened there is so ugly and so wrong.

12 Replies on “Whose woods these are, they didn’t care…”

  3. I know Kate, it made me sick when I read it, and it boggles my mind to think that kids would do something like that. I’m sure that most of them don’t even know who Frost was, and what’s worse, don’t even care.

  5. It’s a beautiful spot, isn’t it? I saw that someone posted about this at Verla’s and wondered why there wasn’t more security there. It’s hard to explain, but there’s just such a sense that it wouldn’t be necessary in that place. I hope they find those kids and send them to English class.

  6. I was so, so mad. I’m not usually one for revenge, but I really want those kids to get caught and have to do something to give back some of what they stole from the world by being so stupid.

  7. I know… I was wishing someone had taken them for walks in the woods when they were little and read them poems. I can’t imagine this would have happened.

  12. I saw that on the ‘net today, and was so, so sad. On the plus side, they left the cottage in which he wrote alone. But the damage is devastating, and some of it might have been to period pieces.