Rumble Strip: A Podcast for Our Time

In traffic engineering, a rumble strip keeps us from going out of our lane or off the side of the road while we inadvertently catch a few winks. Newer cars have ‘virtual’ rumble strips, beeping loudly at our various driving mishaps like crossing a double yellow line or getting too close to another car. But unlike roadway rumble strips, Erica Heilman, producer of the Vermont-based podcast Rumble Strip, relishes getting up close and personal with the people she interviews. In a talk sponsored by VT Humanities that Erica gave at the Norwich Public Library last fall to a standing-room-only crowd, she shared her insights about the journey we humans are on together as we navigate life’s ups and downs, sometimes with guardrails on our emotions, but more often without. A fitting analogy, as it turns out, to the many alternative names for a rumble strip, and come to think of it, the ebb and flow of small town life – “sleepy bumps”, “wake up calls”, “growlers”, and “waker-uppers”.

Recognized as one of the top podcasts in the country by the New York Times and The New Yorker, and winner of a prestigious Peabody Award for “excellence in quality storytelling,” Erica has found a way for Rumble Strip stories to resonate with both listeners and reviewers. Erica explained her ultimate goal to the Norwich Public Library audience: “I want to make shows that remind us of this really natural capacity that we have to fall in love with each other and to join with something that’s bigger than ourselves,” she says. “I think if we bring this attention, openness, curiosity, and levity to our interactions with people, our communities will be stronger.” This sentiment was echoed by a Norwich resident who responded to a survey about the event. “Erica is my favorite podcaster and she is an inspiration to be curious and thoughtful about interacting with others in town. She is also an inspiration to become more involved in town.” And ‘becoming more involved in town’, whether in governance work, community events, supporting schools, or even just buying local first, all have a place in helping a community thrive.

Erica Heilman recording an interview for her podcast,
Rumble-Strip, after Vermont’s flooding last summer.

In a follow-up interview after the event, Erica calls out the concept of Town Meeting day in Vermont, with its broad cross section of residents coming together to make decisions. “Town meeting is one of the last places where you gather together with people who are not like you. There are people you like and people you don’t like,” she says. “I am amazed every year at the civility of those meetings. There’s a kind of mutual respect that happens.” Town Meeting in Norwich is generally a civil affair, according to Selectboard member Mary Layton. “We vote by Australian ballot and have an information meeting the night before the Town Meeting. People come because it’s a town ritual, kind of marking the year like making maple syrup or planting your seeds,” she says. Mary observes that Norwich has a lot of voter participation, and that people pay attention to Town government. The Selectboard is discussing how to reshape the information meeting to include pie or maybe lunch so people can just talk among themselves about a particular issue. “People feel comfortable talking with the Selectboard members at community gatherings,” Mary says. “If they have something to say, they say it. Most of them say it respectfully, sometimes not.”

In listening to some of the more than 200 episodes of the Rumble Strip podcast, love and levity emerge as common themes, but heartache and tragedy have their place as well, often centered around the idea of building community. Erica continues, “Now that I’m old, I realize that the quality of my interactions with other people is a huge part of the quality of my life.” Erica’s warm and compassionate interviewing style clearly puts the people she speaks with at ease. But she is also a refreshingly bold questioner, tackling difficult topics like suicide, drug addiction, and other impactful life experiences that threaten to shatter us to the core, alongside uplifting topics like gardening, whale songs, little league, and puppies.

In playing back one episode, Erica spoke with a victim of last summer’s floods who lost her home in Plainfield, VT, and invites the woman to tell her story of being rescued. The recording was a vivid description of the rocks and water banging against the door, watching the water rise in the house, and the heart-wrenching moment when she had to choose between her own life and going back for her cat. Yet when the woman shared a personal viewpoint on the housing crisis in Vermont, one listener took exception to it, despite the tragedy of the woman’s circumstances. Erica points to this exchange as an example of people experiencing each other as ideologies and not as people, which is one of the more challenging aspects of humanity she’s working to shine a light on in her podcast.

Another survey respondent from White River Junction reflected on Erica’s talk: “We want to be heard, but do we want to hear? Maybe hearing and being heard are closer than we think. I was inspired to continue to hope to find a sense of authenticity and community, two concepts that join together in tandem with how people connect.” Erica laments there is a lot of life that doesn’t happen in-person anymore, especially with the decline in small general stores, local schools becoming regionalized, and fewer community gathering events. “There are fewer and fewer excuses to get together with people who are unlike ourselves – school plays, pie suppers,” she says. “We need places to run into each other to grow social capital and familiarity with each other and have a good time in town.”

Norwich Library director, Lucinda Walker, notes that Norwich has many important annual events that provide an access point for meeting people. “Norwich has a robust recreation department and a historical society that collaborates with the school on programs,” she says. The annual Lions Club Fair and Christmas pageant attract diverse crowds as well, and Norwich residents view activities for people to gather as a high priority. Lucinda sees the library serving as a “third space” – not work, not school, but a place where people of all ages can access information and see other people. Lucinda says that it’s taken a long time for people to return following the pandemic, but now they are back in droves, and the library remains a place where people can connect with their community.

The first episode of Erica’s independent podcast aired in 2013, before the word ‘podcast’ was mainstream. “Colin McCaffrey Talks Shop” was an engaging piece featuring the prolific Vermont-born singer/songwriter. In her introduction, Erica explains that on the show, she’ll be talking with “central Vermonters who are artists, road commissioners, waitresses, parole officers, teachers, and parolees,”  and that it will “feature what I hope is some good conversation, as well as what I hope will be some good conversational experiments.”

As the show has evolved over more than a decade, so has Erica’s understanding and appreciation for what it brings to her world and the world at large. “At a certain point, this show became something that marks time for me,” she says. “It’s the way that I understand and make sense of things, and make sense of this place where I live.”

As to the production aspects of the show, Erica speaks to the unique nature of an audio recording versus a written piece. “Audio is content but also dynamic and sound. What you can capture in audio is silence and tone. You don’t have to describe it because you can hear it,” she says. Erica goes into each episode entirely without a plan, preferring to allow the recording to dictate the final outcome. “Every single time I make a show, I don’t know what I’m doing or what it’s going to become. That’s another benefit of being independent and downwardly mobile. I just wanted to get going and get started. It has become what it is over the years, but each story dictates its format.” For a show with virtually no rules, there is one thing Erica is committed to in producing the podcast: “If I had a rule, it would be that I’d never want to put out a show where we were looking at someone rather than climbing in with them.”

Author Jeff Sharlet, of Norwich, attended Erica’s talk and knows her personally. “She’s a podcaster’s podcaster, a documentary artist’s documentary artist – someone to whom other practitioners tune in to hear how it’s done, how it could be done. And the great thing is, lots of everyday people do tune in as well,” he says. “I think listening to Rumble Strip makes us all practitioners. When we listen, we linger with other people in their lives. Listening makes us think like a documentary artist; it makes us listen to our own lives, too, and the other people with whom we share them, for better and worse.”

To decide on topics for the show, Erica looks to her own questions about life and living as well as getting ideas from listeners and friends. “Sometimes, I have a selfish and burning question about my age or dying, and then I’ll figure out how I will answer it or who I should talk to,” she says. “When you have a show that is a container that you can put anything in, it gives you a sense of freedom to explore.” Topics that come up frequently include death, love, hunting, farming, and lately questions of class and cultural blindness in Vermont. “I think we’re getting better at talking about race and gender, but not socioeconomic and cultural diversity. That’s a blind spot in both the media and in people’s minds,” Erica says. Lucinda appreciates the unfiltered view of Vermont life in Erica’s podcasts. “The thing I love about Erica and Rumble Strip is that she is giving us access to an authentic view of Vermont – the people who are populating our state and their experiences of living here, which counteracts the image of life here being bucolic all the time. We suffer like people do in other places,” she says.

“We have a lot of people coming to Vermont now, and that’s great, but it’s happening at a time that the nature of the towns are changing,” Erica says. “There are a lot of people doing good work in Vermont and there are cultural traditions here that are fading because of the changes in the way that we work and live.”

Erica likes to talk with people who are passionate about something rather than those who think they are certain about what’s right or wrong. “I don’t trust people who think they have a fix on the truth. I’m more interested in first person experience and what someone might be confused about,” she says. Erica has interviewed experts on childhood, a biologist who researches whale language (definitely worth listening to), and musicians, felons, taxidermists, teachers, and poets. “What surprises me after doing this for a while is how easy it is to fall in love with strangers. We are good at that, that’s our nature. It’s an important skill that we have as humans. It’s the best job in the world to be reminded of that daily. You don’t have to like everybody, but loving people is what we’re good at.”

Erica hopes Rumble Strip encourages listeners to fall in love with strangers and to find themselves in the lives of people who are unlike themselves. “It’s really important to show how extraordinary our tiny, ordinary lives really are,” she says. In the meantime, we’ll all just keep trying to stay on the road.

To explore the Rumble Strip podcast, visit rumblestripvermont.com.