The Gift of Foliage Season

By Loralee Tester (Executive Director of the NEK Chamber of Commerce)

For a few weeks every fall, the Northeast Kingdom is the most beautiful place in the country, and nearly everyone who has ever seen a calendar photo seems to know it. Tour buses find Peacham. Parking fills up our downtowns. Our small businesses do the kind of volume in October that has to carry them through a lot of quiet Tuesdays.

That's the gift of foliage season. It's also the hard part.

Across Vermont, some 2.5 million fall visitors spend roughly half a billion dollars each year. That's a lot of economy packed into a few weeks of color. Compare it to April, mud season and the slowest month of the tourism year. Our restaurants, inns, galleries and shops learn to make hay while the maples shine. But a business that depends on October is making a bet every year: that the weather cooperates, the color peaks on a weekend, staff can be found, and the money lasts until the next rush. Those are a lot of things to get right, and none of them are fully in the owner's control.

So here is the question I'd put to all of us: what happens on November 1st?

Part of the answer is stretching the season. Stick season doesn't have to be the Kingdom's awkward pause between foliage and snow. It can be the quiet, honest time some visitors actually prefer: fewer crowds, lower rates, woodsmoke, bare hills that show the shape of the land. Holiday shopping starts well before Thanksgiving. Winter brings its own visitors if we give them reasons to come. Every event, package or promotion that fills a room in November or March is worth more to a small business than one more busy Saturday in October.

Part of the answer is people, and here the season shows a problem we can't ignore. Businesses staff their busiest weeks with students, retirees and anyone willing to pick up hours. They can't fill positions they can't house, and they can't hold on to good year-round staff if those workers have no place to live. Housing isn't a separate issue from the foliage economy. It sits underneath it.

The biggest part of the answer is us. Visitors fill the parking lots in October. Residents decide whether the lights stay on in February. Every gift card bought locally, every dinner out on a slow weeknight, every class or appointment booked in the off-season smooths out the swing that makes rural small business so fragile.

Danville figured some of this out years ago. Autumn on the Green began in 2002 because neighbors noticed Route 2 traffic rolling through the village with no reason to stop. Today it draws more than 200 vendors and thousands of people to the town green. Sometimes seasonal commerce is just a matter of giving people a reason to pull over.

And while the visitors are here, every one of us is part of the welcome. When someone asks you at the gas pump where to eat, send them somewhere good and a little off the main road. A visitor who has a great meal, finds a shop they didn't expect and feels welcomed by a stranger is a visitor who comes back, sometimes in a different season, and sometimes for good. More than a few of the people running businesses here today started as someone passing through.

So enjoy this October. Drive the back roads, take the photos, and be patient with the tour buses. Then mark your calendar for November, and make a point of showing up for the businesses that showed up for all those visitors.

The foliage is our region's best advertisement. Keeping the lights on after the leaves fall is up to us.

— Loralee Tester is Executive Director of the Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce, serving Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans counties.