Travelling Light: Bags and Baggage

In Quechee, respiratory therapist Kerrie Ramsey faces a difficult decision concerning her family's future. Across the Connecticut River in West Lebanon, Kate Wood and her family are on the move again.

Chapter Seven

Tucked away in the wooded hills above Quechee village, the Ottauquechee School after six years still has not lost its freshness.

Classrooms in the two-story, red brick building are spacious and airy, with the morning sunlight filtering through walls of windows. The tile floors gleam and the smell of microwaved popcorn drifts through the hallways.

Principal Cheryl Hooper greets visitors at the front office and invites them to look around. She points the way to Carol Kelton's morning kindergarten classroom.

Inside the room, 21 kids sit in a circle on the floor. Her legs crossed, Kelton sits with them, a U.S. flag hanging above her head.

"So, what do you want to be when you grow up?" she asks.

After 13 years of teaching kindergarten, Kelton knows this is one question that every 6-year-old will have an answer for.

"A vet," says the first girl.

"A game warden," responds the boy next to her.

"An artist," answers another.

Kelton turns to Sam next. Without hesitation, the boy, dressed in jeans and a short sleeve shirt, looks directly at his teacher. "Police officer."

Sam, who turned 6 last month, is Kerrie Ramsey's youngest child. Kerrie, a respiratory therapist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, found a small house to rent in Quechee after spending the summer and fall at a Hartford campground.

The Ottauquechee School is the primary reason Kerrie stuck it out at the campground until October, putting up with cold outdoor shower stalls, sleeping in a camper and boiling water over a campfire to wash supper dishes.

She was determined Sam would go to Ottauquechee. His older brother, Chris, went to Ottauquechee and Kerrie believed it would be a good place for Sam, too. Ottauquechee is considered one of the Upper Valley's best elementary schools and the caring but firm style of its teachers impressed her.

She could have found an apartment or rental house sooner if she had been willing to move 30 miles outside Hartford, but that would have meant changing school districts. She considered an apartment near downtown White River Junction, but it would have meant putting Sam in a school that the state placed on its list of "at-risk" schools a couple of years ago.

Kerrie is adamant that Sam will get a good education. From her own experience, she knows how important it is.

Going to high school in South Carolina, Kerrie ranked 25th in her 1984 graduating class of 262. She was planning to study speech pathology in college, but everything changed the summer after she finished high school. She started dating a sailor from the nearby Navy base and ended up pregnant.

Instead of going away to college, she enrolled at a small South Carolina school, wriggling into her seat for final exams when she was nine months pregnant. After the baby, Matt, was born, she landed on welfare.

She wanted to continue working on her college degree. A social worker at the welfare office told her that wasn't such a good idea. It would take too long. Instead, the social worker urged Kerrie to sign up for a 10-week course in meat cutting. Supermarkets always need meat cutters.

No thank you, Kerrie said. And she took her $108 monthly welfare check to a daycare center that would watch her baby while she finished earning a two-year degree in respiratory therapy.

AFTER ASKING ALL 21 of her students what they want to be when they grow up, Kelton moves on to number writing. She stands at the easel set up in the front of the room, a marker in her hand.

"Remember," she says, "the number five has a short neck, fat tummy and wears a hat."

Sam bears down on a piece of paper. Quickly, he tires of the exercise and decides to go in another direction. He draws two vertical lines through the number, turning the five into a dollar sign.

Making the rounds of the classroom, Kelton stops at Sam's table. "Can I see a five?" she asks.

This time, he leaves out the dollar sign.

"That's a nice five, Sam," she says, patting him on the shoulder.

The blue 1986 Toyota, with its busted muffler and rusted fenders, sputters up the hill toward the Lebanon airport. On an overcast winter afternoon, the car is carrying three generations of Kate Wood's family and the trunk is stuffed with plastic bags containing many of their belongings.

Two-thirds of the way up the hill, Kate's mother steers the Toyota into the parking lot of the Airport Economy Inn. Kate unbuckles her daughter Olivia's seatbelt while her mother and sister unload the trunk.

In the small lobby, they pile the bags onto a luggage cart.

The three women and small girl take the elevator to the third floor. They enter room 301, their new home overlooking the motel's rear entrance road.

The motel has offered them a deal of $50 per night -- the same price they were paying a half-mile down the road at the Fireside Inn, where the manager had told them a week earlier that they had to leave to make way for the tourists.

It is their third pay-by-the-week residence in a year.

Kate, who works with her sister at McDonald's in West Lebanon, feels as though she has no other choice. The 24-year-old single mom looks at the classified ads nearly every day, but affordable apartments are scarce in the Upper Valley's core communities of Lebanon, Hanover and Hartford. In addition to the first month's rent, most landlords want a sizable security deposit, bringing upfront costs to roughly $2,000.

Kate, who earns $8.45 per hour, does not have that kind of cash -- a common problem among the Upper Valley's working-class families.

So, Kate and her family travel light -- a lesson they have learned from hotel living -- and keep many of their belongings in storage.

Kate also checks her family's post office box regularly for a reply from Upper Valley Habitat for Humanity. Before Christmas, Kate applied for a house that Habitat is planning to build for a low-income family in the spring. So far, she has not received a reply.

Inside their room at the Airport Economy Inn, Kate dumps a bag onto one of the two double beds and begins sorting through her daughter's clothes.

Turning to her sister Margrette, Kate asks, "Are tights underwear or socks?"

Margrette giggles at her sister's humor. "Good question. You decide."

THE GEO PRIZM, showing the wear and tear of 135,000 miles, climbs the long, and so far this winter, unplowed driveway.

Having reached his destination, the driver stops a few feet from the front door of Kerrie's two-bedroom ranch and climbs out from behind the wheel. Rick stands 6-foot-4 and weighs in the neighborhood of 350 pounds. He has a thin, scruffy beard and wears a baseball cap.

Juggling two pizza boxes in his arms, Rick waits as Sam's school bus stops at the bottom of the driveway. Until yesterday, Sam hadn't seen his father in nearly two years.

The boy hops off the bus and runs up the hill, his sneakers slipping and sliding in the snow.

"Hi, Sam," says Rick.

Head bowed, Sam gazes at the snow.

"What did you study in school today, Sam?"

"Egypt."

"I hope you're hungry. We've got pizza"

Sam doesn't answer.

Cradling the pizzas in one arm, Rick holds open the warped, wooden front door, allowing Sam to slip inside ahead of him. The boy heads for the living room, immediately reaching for the control pad of his electronic game.

Rick sits down at the end of the living room couch. Sam, his back to his father, squats on the floor, staring at the TV set and working the controls of the Nintendo.

Rick removes round, wire-rimmed glasses to rub his eyes. The 1,500-mile drive from Arkansas to Vermont took 30 hours. When he pulled into Quechee last night it was the first time he'd seen Kerrie and the three boys since April 1999. Despite the long separation, neither Kerrie nor Rick have spent the time or money to file for divorce.

After Rick arrived, Kerrie cooked baked chicken and green beans for supper and afterward gave him the name of a Quechee motel. He returned this morning to take the boys to school and again to have lunch with Kerrie and Sam.

Kerrie hands a paper plate with two slices of pizza to her husband.

"Thank you," Rick says.

From the night they met at the Radar Club, an Air Force bar in Charleston, S.C., during the summer of 1986, Kerrie has always been charmed by Rick's polite ways. She was sitting alone at the bar when the young sailor from small-town Arkansas approached.

"Care to dance?" he asked.

"Sorry," she replied. "I'm waiting for someone."

With her mother home taking care of her son, Matt, Kerrie had gone to the Radar Club to meet a friend. Thirty minutes later, Rick noticed that Kerrie, with her long, curly hair, was still by herself.

This time, she accepted his invitation. When the song ended, Rick escorted her back to the bar.

"Thank you," he said.

After they danced, he invited her to come swimming at his apartment complex the next day.

"I don't know," Kerrie said. "I'll have to see if my mother can watch my son."

"How old is he?"

"Three."

They dated for nearly a year when Rick, stationed on a submarine, received his orders for Europe. Taking a line from a country song, Rick proposed. He said, "Kiss me now or forget me forever."

They made plans for an outdoor ceremony at a park in Charlestown for July 3, 1987. That morning, Rick called Kerrie at her mother's house to say he was out of cash. "We need money to pay the justice of the peace," he said.

Kerrie drove herself to the park in the rain. On the way, dressed in her wedding gown, she stopped at an ATM.

THE FAMILY REUNION in Quechee was Kerrie's doing.

Two weeks earlier, as she was getting ready for work, she was drawn from the bathroom by shouting and the sound of shattering glass.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Chris did it," Sam replied.

Broken picture frames littered the floor. Chris, her 12-year-old, had erupted in rage after seeing Sam accidentally break one of his toys. Chris retaliated by smashing a child's computer that Kerrie had bought Sam a few days earlier. Still angry, Chris moved to the hallway pictures.

With Chris in his bedroom, the door shut, Kerrie reached for a broom and dust pan in the kitchen. After tossing the pieces of Sam's broken computer into the trash, she left for work. On the way out of the driveway, tears trickled down her cheeks.

This is it, she told herself, I need to call Rick. I can't handle Chris on my own any more. Not the way things were going. Not only was he fighting with his brothers at home, he was having trouble in school.

Chris, who was reading before he entered first grade and learned to play the clarinet while in elementary school, had always been a decent student. Now, in sixth grade, he was suddenly flunking most of his classes at Hartford Middle School. Early in the school year, Kerrie signed him up for an after-school homework club, only to learn that he had attended the first session and never gone back.

The next morning when she returned home from her shift at the hospital, Sam was already awake, watching cartoons. Later, she picked up the phone and called Rick.

"The soonest I can get there is next weekend," Rick said.

"That's fine," she replied.

One day after arriving in Quechee, Rick could tell Kerrie was having second thoughts about sending Chris to Arkansas. I need to get on the road before she changes her mind, he told himself.

He glanced across the couch at Kerrie. "We'll leave after supper."

ALTHOUGH SHE IS FINISHED with the unpacking, Kate doesn't want to leave their room at the Airport Economy Inn to get something to eat.

"They're supposed to call today," she tells her mother.

A few days earlier, Kate had interviewed for an entry-level job with Geographic Data Technology in Lebanon. They'd tested her basic map-reading and computer-programming skills.

"We'll get back to you by the end of the week," the company's human resources officer said.

Starting pay for the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift was $12 an hour, the company said. Kate would earn at least $120 more a week than she's making at McDonald's. She would also receive health care benefits for herself and Olivia. Plus, the company pays a monthly $100 bonus to employees who car pool to work. For once, Kate is glad she doesn't have a driver's license.

GDT is an Upper Valley high-tech success story, starting out with three employees in 1980 and growing into one of the area's largest businesses. The company, Kate has learned through a friend, is looking to hire 400 more employees, doubling the company's size. Kate hopes to be one of them.

Kate knows she can handle the job. She was smart enough to get accepted at Smith College, so creating computerized versions of street maps for Microsoft and other big companies shouldn't be a problem.

If she gets the job, Kate is also confident she will finally be able to afford an apartment. After more than a year of living at a campground and hotel rooms, she would finally have a stove to cook on and Olivia would have her own bedroom.

If only the telephone would ring.