A raw, cold, blustery day in early April, driving up Route 16 into the heart of the Northeast Kingdom. A band of fresh snow, delicate as a lace collar, unrolls on either side of the road. The hayfields are bleached and sere; remnantsof snowdrifts highlight the hedgerows and forest edge. In this drab landscape, Clark Pond is a luminous circle—snow layered on ice, except on the shoreline, where skim ice outlines a four-inch skirt of open water. The wind bites and cuts.

At Currier’s market in Glover, where a stuffed moose—the whole animal—gawks in front of the postoffice window, I mention that this is God’s Country. A local smiles and says, “A lot of people say that, but they don’t stay through the winter.”

Just off this highway, two miles up Height’s Road, which cannot be locatedon a GPS, is an old farm that, for the past 35 years, has been the nucleus of the Bread & Puppet Theater. Derelict painted buses— not quite as garish as Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster vehicle, but there’s a hint of that—are strewn here and there. Across the road lie a sloping hayfield and a natural amphitheater that was once a sand pit. This is the outdoor stage for Bread & Puppet, whose annual Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant once attracted 30,000 people over an August weekend. Many were young and crazed, and a 1998 death led to its cancellation. Since then, Bread & Puppet has offered small, intimate weekends of puppetry in summer, plus the occasional New England or national tour. The large grey barn houses Bread & Puppet’s monster masks and puppet museum, called “…one of the great sites of Americaart…” by Holland Cotter of the New York Times.

Above the barn and below the sugarbush sits a frame house, unpainted. It’s a bit rough. Chickens primp on the back porch, a garden hangs out below, and the apple trees appear skinny and gaunt in this mud season. Detritus is scattered here and there and a pile of logs sits waiting. Another woodpile is stacked next to the house entrance, in which is tacked a poster of a flower, brilliant green and yellow against white, the only sign of spring. On it is written Resistance to the worthlessness of the machine-operated details of life. I was there for a second time, as somehow I had erased the first interview on my high-tech tape recorder and also forgot a camera…worthlessness.

Peter Schumann created the poster and he and his wife Elka live here. Many Vermonters are not aware that this slight, smiling man with the gray beard and a twinkle in his eye has, for half a century, been alerting America to its dark side, as seen through the art of puppetry—from the decimation of the American Indians to its bigstick foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, wars big and small, idolatry and money-centered self-entitlement, torture, Guantanamo, Iraq and consumerism. On the other side, his puppetry counterpoints the beauty of life: a bird floating over a field, a skit on maple sugaring, funky music and those wonderful, 11-foot-high stilts seen in the summer parades, with Peter riding high in the tallest red-white-and-blue Yankee Doodle costume in America. (He borrowed the stilt idea from shepherds in La Londe, France, who wore six-foot stilts as they watched over the sheep. They also had a seat so they could sit, spin and weave while on guard duty.)

From Vietnam War protests to the historic nuclear-disarmament parade in New York City in 1982, where the puppeteers were pelted with vegetables; from intimate puppetry for small-town audiences to international street-theater spectacles that mix giant puppets with dance, drama, caricature, folk art, nonsense and funny skits—including music with a style of its own, a mix of Klezmer and everything else—that’s what Peter Schumann calls his “sourdough philosophy.”

Peter is 75. When he was a boy, he lived in Silesia, in northern Germany. His family was poor and they existed simply, until the war stomped them. The Russian troops were advancing on land and the Allied forces were bombing them from the sky. His family fled north, to a town on the Baltic bursting with refugees—Pomeranians, Silesians and fugitive soldiers. After the locals harvested the wheat, the children and women (the war had taken the men) would line up in the fields and pick the gleanings. They washed the kernels, ground them in a coffee mill and kneaded dark, rough sourdough. In the morning they took their bread to a local baker, who fired the loaves in an outdoor oven. Each family marked their loaves with a special twist in the crust.

The loaves and the vegetables they grew at home were their sustenance. In this town of refugees, Peter, 10 years old, staged puppet shows for his neighbors with his brother. He used puppets given to him earlier by family friends. And the seeds were sown.