This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.
I knew the Airbnb I booked for an overnight reporting trip to Newport would be quirky. The listing, called “Hobbit Home!,” featured photos of a cottage-like house with a round wooden door, plus a selfie of the host wearing elf ears. But I didn’t know just how surreal my visit there and back again would get.
As the paper’s new immigration reporter, I was traveling north to attend a film screening at the Haskell Free Library & Opera House. The building straddles the Vermont-Québec line and had recently become embroiled in tensions around border security and tariffs. I planned to observe how library visitors had been affected by these political changes.
I chose the hobbit house as my home base not because I’m a J.R.R. Tolkien fanatic but for the glowing reviews of its host, Heather. She sounded warm and welcoming, the kind of person who wouldn’t be annoyed by my questions about the area as I poked around for stories and sources.
As I pulled into the driveway, Heather appeared from the woods to welcome me. A baby raccoon, no bigger than a rabbit, waddled along at her heels. Heather struck up a conversation without acknowledging the raccoon crawling onto her booted foot, as if this were totally normal.
I tried my best to maintain eye contact and answer her questions. I wondered if Heather was some kind of elvish animal whisperer. Eventually I couldn’t bear it anymore.
“I’m sorry, I have to stop you,” I said. “I am extremely distracted by the baby raccoon.”
“Oh, yes!” Heather replied. “This is Roly Poly.”
She told me the story: Roly Poly’s mother was killed by a car, leaving the baby raccoon orphaned. Heather took her in and bottle-fed her. Now, she was trying to get Roly Poly to live independently, though the creature still slept in a nearby shed and cried for Heather at the front door every morning.
I promised Heather that I would be careful not to let Roly Poly sneak inside the house behind me, then I drove to the Haskell. There, things took an even stranger turn.
As I explored the outside of the building before the film screening, I accidentally triggered a fleet of Canadian and U.S. border agents who said I had illegally ventured into Canada and back. Moments later, I was on the phone with my new editor, Matthew Roy, telling him that I was about to be arrested.
It thankfully didn’t come to that, and I spent the evening with about a dozen filmgoers watching the movie Sorry, Baby, as planned. But it took a while for my heart rate to settle down. I’d unwittingly experienced the very border tensions I was there to observe, and that became the lede of my story.
The next morning, I woke up at the hobbit house to find Heather outside building teepees from tree branches, Roly Poly in tow. Originally from Montréal, Heather had already returned from her daily bike ride, which follows a path north from Newport, along Lake Memphremagog and across the border into Québec.
She wasn’t part of the story I was there to report, but just as I’d hoped, she helped me understand how ordinary cross-border life is for many Vermonters — and what could be lost if political rhetoric continued to alienate our northern neighbors.
Roly Poly was the cherry on top.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Most Surreal Overnight”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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