BURLINGTON, Vt. _ Strolling with her son by the lake, she spotted the telltale crown of flyaway hair. Bernie Sanders was sitting at a table with businesspeople, eating an ice cream cone.
Ashley Horton had to say something to the man she calls an inspiration. As a single mother and housekeeper struggling just to pay for food and rent, she felt Sanders gave her bearings in a political universe that seemed abstract and distant before. She knelt next to him and blurted out that she was a huge fan.
Sanders is accustomed to such adulation, and a fair share of grievances, in his adopted hometown, where he navigates without the usual important person's buffers _ no protective entourage or gated, guarded house, not even a hedge in his front yard.
No other presidential contenders have such long, symbiotic relationships with the cities where they live. Burlington shaped Sanders as Sanders shaped Burlington, so much so that it's hard to consider one without the other.
The Unitarian Universalist Church stands at the end of Church Street in downtown Burlington, Vt., home to presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. A four-block pedestrian mall, the Church Street Marketplace is the city's retail hub and the site of festivals throughout the year.
As he drives along North Avenue or College Street in his 10-year-old Chevy Aveo, he sees a city that reflects his worldview, where wealth is modest, public space is cherished, and residents are liberal, engaged and collectively powerful enough to counter big-money interests.
This small city that happens to be Vermont's largest is far closer to Montreal than to any big city in the United States. Its low-rise blocks of old brick storefronts and clapboard homes can be walked end to end in an hour. With a skyline etched mostly by treetops and steeples, it could be mistaken for many a New England mill town but for a youthful energy and streak of quirkiness, sparked in no small part by the students of the University of Vermont. This municipality of about 43,000 has given the world the band Phish, Ben & Jerry's ice cream and a fiery populist who happens to be one of the nation's leading Democratic candidates for president.
Here, Sanders, 78, is less the eminent statesman than the neighbor who talked your ear off for years about a rigged capitalist system _ and somehow got world famous for his views. He's the fervent yet frugal revolutionary you might spot one day at a rally for tenants' rights and the next day at the Ace Hardware store looking for a flange nut.
In 2009, Sanders moved from the working-class South End near downtown to a four-bedroom, vinyl-sided colonial in a more detached, suburban part of the city called the New North End, a neighborhood carved from forest in the 1950s for ranch homes, cul-de-sacs and big backyards.
But he is still seen all over town.
When he shops at Hannaford supermarket near his house, or goes to coffee at the Penny Cluse Cafe on Cherry Street in the city center, he moves with purpose, head down, acknowledging all manner of greetings by throwing out one of his ungainly arms and a thick Brooklyn "hullo."
His annoyance with glad-handing and small talk is legendary. Even his friends call him "abrasive" and concede he'd be the last candidate you'd want to have a beer with. Horton compares him to a "surly uncle you know has a soft spot."
Which was why she was so moved that he not only stopped to listen to her, but got up from his table to watch her 4-year-old son, Calai, skateboard on the sidewalk. She feels he truly understands her predicament.
"I'm as small as it gets," said Horton, 37. "I'm a woman, 100% single parent, below the poverty line. I always feel like he is speaking to me."
Everyone here seems to have a Sanders memory _ and a Sanders impression.
"We talk about six degrees of separation," said C.D. Mattison, a digital designer from Alaska who has lived in Burlington since 1989. "In Vermont, it's one or two degrees. We see Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy and Peter Welch walking around town. They are ever-present and accessible. It's wonderful." (Leahy is the state's senior senator and Welch is its sole congressman.)
Mattison has complicated feelings about Sanders, whom she supports for senator but not president. She says the fanatical following he cultivates has muffled political discourse in Burlington, to the point many Hillary Clinton supporters in 2016 felt they had to keep their views to themselves.
"There was an underground," says Mattison, 54.
While she deeply appreciates how he ignited the progressive movement in Burlington and shepherded that message to the nation, she sees a blind spot that he never reconciled, perhaps because he is grounded in a city that is 83% white (down from 97% from when he was mayor).
"When I hear Bernie talk about race, gender bias and LGBTQ issues, it feels like he's wagging his finger in my face and waving me off," says Mattison, who is black and gay. "Bernie's 'revolution' message is that economic justice is the cure and all the rest, everything that is personal to me, is noise."
