Gus Speth calls his first novel “my love letter to the Upper Valley.”
“Jericho River” follows the people of a fictional Vermont town as they help each other through fires, floods, illness and loss. Speth, a Strafford author and longtime environmental leader, has lived in the area for 20 years.
“I wanted to give a gift, if I could, to the Upper Valley,” Speth said. “And I couldn’t think of any way to do that better than write a story.”
He talked about the book over coffee at the Tunbridge General Store, a white building with a long front porch on Route 110. The store has been there since 1830, when it opened as A.N. King and Son. It closed in 2019. John and Erica Houston bought it and reopened it in 2022.
The novel centers on a store like it, Patton’s General Store, which the narrator calls “the beating heart of the little town, the center of things.” Throughout the book, the store is where neighbors gather to help each other through trouble. Speth said that the question of what holds a town together is what drew him to write it.
“I’ve always been interested in community,” he said. “What makes a strong community? What do we give to create the kind of community that can help sustain people?”
Speth, 84, has spent most of his career on environmental policy. He was President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute. He led the United Nations’ international development work and was dean of Yale’s environmental school for 10 years. He and his wife, Cece, moved to Strafford 20 years ago, and he taught environmental law at Vermont Law School for five years.
The novel is narrated by Clare Pascal, a woman with a painful bone disease who lives in an apartment above Patton’s General Store in the fictional town of Jericho River. Over 17 years, from 1958 to 1975, she quietly writes down her neighbors’ stories: from floods to teen pregnancy.
Speth said nearly every chapter puts a person or the whole town through something hard, then asks how the community responds.
“I think healing is a prominent theme in the book,” he said. “A lot of the chapters and sections and themes have to do with healing, and the role of community in healing individuals, families, towns.”
Speth has made the book free to read online as an ebook and PDF. Print copies are sold through Amazon, IngramSpark and independent bookstores.
‘A challenge to what we see today’
Speth said he wants readers to take these stories about the past as lessons for today.
“I wanted the book to hold up this picture of community as a challenge to what we see so much of today, which is lack of empathy, lack of caring, a lack of community,” he said.
In the novel, Speth said, the town’s sense of community runs through every chapter.
“It’s always present as kind of a force, a spiritual force,” he said. “It certainly helps each of the situations come to a better conclusion. Not always perfection or anything.”
He said his time at the U.N., traveling to more than 100 countries, deepened his belief in community.
“So much of what happens in a lot of these countries depended on the communities and the way they came together,” he said.
Looking at the country now, Speth said he sees two trends pulling in opposite directions. One is rising loneliness and isolation. The other is a surge of people organizing locally, much of it around the environment and energy.
“We don’t really know how it’s going to happen,” Speth said a week before Election Day.
On Tuesday, Strafford native Amanda Janoo, a Democrat, lost the governor’s race to Republican Gov. Phil Scott, 52% to 46%. Janoo won in her hometown and in several other Upper Valley towns, including Sharon, Hartford and Norwich.
‘Quite a battle we had’
Speth said the book also shows how outside forces reach and affect small towns.
“There’s a lot of tension and conflict between the effort to sustain a community and being buffeted, attacked and challenged by forces from the outside,” he said.
In one chapter, a New York real estate company called the Destiny Group proposes a huge resort where four towns meet. It plans hundreds of houses, condos, a hotel and a golf course. The four towns join forces, work with landowners to protect the land and lobby the legislature until the company leaves.
Speth said that chapter draws on a real fight he was part of. In 2016, word got out that Utah engineer David Hall’s NewVistas Foundation had been buying land in Strafford, Sharon, Royalton and Tunbridge. Hall envisioned a community of 20,000 people on 5,000 acres. He dropped the plan in 2018 after the National Trust for Historic Preservation put the area on its watch list.
“It would have destroyed really all the four towns, because the number of people that were envisioned would just dominate local politics and other things,” Speth said. “So it was quite a battle we had, and eventually we won.”
He said the fictional development “was very different” from NewVistas.
“But the idea that the towns would come together and fight off this invasion from the outside was very much on my mind,” he said, “because I was involved.”
In the book, the four towns’ fight ends with nearly 1,000 acres protected from development. In real life, the Alliance for Vermont Communities, the group formed to oppose NewVistas, helped conserve nearly 1,000 acres of connected land near the Sharon-Strafford line. That includes a 218-acre town forest it raised about $293,000 to buy.
The fight played out as Vermont’s housing shortage continues to grow. The state’s 2025-2029 Housing Needs Assessment estimates Vermont needs 24,000 to 36,000 more year-round homes by 2029. It calls the state’s 3% rental vacancy rate “among the lowest in the country.” Under regional housing targets the state set in 2025, the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee region, which includes Strafford and Tunbridge, has a goal of 2,424 to 3,640 new homes by 2030.
Saying goodbye
Speth is leaving soon. He and Cece are moving back to South Carolina, to the small town where they both grew up, near their daughter and his sister. He said he started the novel long before they decided to go.
“When you get to be in the mid-80s, you realize that any damn thing could happen any day,” Speth said. “We wanted to go home. And we love the beach.”
He said they have spent the past few weeks at Lions Club dinners, barn concerts and goodbyes with friends.
“We are realizing every day, as our departure time becomes closer, how much we are going to miss Vermont,” he said.
Speth will discuss “Jericho River” at the Norwich Bookstore on Monday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m.
