Life in Rupert

     I parked my bag at Johnny Seesaw's Wednesday afternoon and set off on an adventure.  It was alleged that Christopher Kimball, founder and author of Cook's Illustrated magazine lived in Rupert, VT.  So I set off to look for his residence there.  He regularly waxes eloquent about life in Vermont, like in his editorial in the recent edition of his magazine even though his test kitchen is in Brookline, MA and the distribution office of his periodicals are located in Iowa.  But I wanted to make sure that Rupert actually existed and wasn't some fictitious place, like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon.
     So I drove down the mountain and into Manchester Center and made my way west on Route 30.  Soon I was in the prim and proper town of Dorset with it's stately Dorset Inn on one corner and the staid Union Market across the street.  About a mile out of town I came across a collection of homes in East Rupert.  So I turned left onto Route 315 and followed a narrow serpentine that soon became the main road through the tiny village of Rupert.  I knew I was there only because of the sign on the post office:

 

     The town was so small that it didn't even have a crossroad, just a T intersection by the Methodist church.  There were only about a dozen homes but one stood out as being very different from the rest.  I drove down to the town garage and spoke to a couple of locals to inquire if Mr. Kimball did really live in Rupert.  They confirmed that was indeed the case and that he did, in fact, own several properties there.  The Rupert town employees then told me that the house I had suspected to be the residence was just back up the road, across the street from the church. 



     The house was strikingly different from the others, mainly because it looked like no one lived there.  There were no cars in the driveway, nothing on the porch and the window shades were all pulled down.  And there was another difference.  I noticed a central air conditioning unit on the side of the house, something a native Vermonter would never have.  The place was just too pristine to have someone actually inhabit it.

     So where is the real Vermont?