A Vermont woman is facing attempted murder and other charges after she allegedly shot at and struck a man’s vehicle as he attempted to leave her property early Saturday morning.

Around 12:05 a.m. on Saturday, Vermont State Police said they received several 911 calls from a 35-year-old man who reported having been shot at while fleeing a residence in West Glover. The man met with state police at their Derby Barracks a short time later.

State police said their investigation determined that the man and 35-year-old Alaina Bouchard, of West Glover, had recently met and were at Bouchard’s residence when a verbal agreement ensued. While the man was leaving the residence in his vehicle, Bouchard fired a gun multiple times at his vehicle, striking it in several locations.

No injuries were reported.

Troopers responded to Bouchard’s residence and executed a search warrant on the property later Saturday morning. They seized physical evidence and took Bouchard into custody. She was taken to the state police barracks in Derby for processing and held without bail at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport.

She was scheduled to be arraigned Monday afternoon in Vermont Superior Court in Newport on charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, reckless endangerment and criminal threatening.

No additional details were released. State police said the affidavit of probable cause will be made public following Bouchard’s arraignment.

It was around the same time as the pandemic, so the couple decided to take advantage of their remote working arrangements to explore different towns.

“Because our work was remote — we were both working in schools at the time, which shut down — we were able to move around a bit on this sort of spring break trip,” Taylor, 34, told Business Insider.

During their road trip, the couple stumbled onto the Upper Valley area in Vermont and fell in love with the location.

With that, they decided to take the leap and moved out of NYC into a 350-square-foot studio apartment in Hartford, Vermont, near Dartmouth College, which they found online.

“It was probably slated for one person related to the college. But those lists of apartments, that’s public access, so it doesn’t have to be a Dartmouth student who lives there,” Tatum, 30, told BI.

It was a temporary arrangement — and a way to have an official address in Vermont — while they continued looking for proper housing in the area.

A fixer-upper within their budget

When they chanced upon the listing for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom fixer-upper in the small town of Pomfret, it was love at first sight.

“I thought it would be perfect for us,” Taylor, who is an artist, said. “At the time, it wasn’t a house, so I didn’t see it set up in a residential way. It was not lived in for at least, I want to say, about a decade or more.”

The 650-square-foot cottage was being used as an office for a local business, but Taylor saw its potential despite that.

“I saw the beauty of the natural lighting, there was a lot of sunlight. There are a lot of neat details with the wood and the cabinets which I thought were really cute. And then, mostly, the outdoor space was what we wanted,” she said.

The charming house came with 2.6 acres of land. It was initially listed for $225,000, but the price had been steadily decreasing.

“Not very popular on the market as far as a one-bedroom house, but we wanted a small house and it was perfect for when the price was reduced,” Taylor said.

The couple bought the property for $160,000 in March 2021. It took them about three to four months to close on the house, and moving in felt good.

“We packed up and moved a dozen or more times during the summer of 2020, so to be able to do that for the last time and unpack the boxes — knowing that we had no intentions to repack them — was a great relief,” Tatum, who works in parks and recreation, said.

Turning the house into a home

Although Tatum did some of the renovation work himself, the couple also hired a carpenter to assist them with some projects.

The first thing the couple did was fix up the sliding door that leads to their porch. The door was broken, and the wood underneath was rotting.

“With winter fast approaching, we absolutely had to take care of that in the first months of us getting here,” Tatum said. At that point, the couple was also expecting their first child, and that served as another form of motivation to improve things around the house.

While they’re still on the grid, the couple also invested in solar panels for their home.

“I think it’s a good investment since we’ll save a lot of money over time. And I think it’s an indication that we intend to be here for the long run,” Tatum said.

In an effort to be more sustainable, most of the items in the home are either gifted, thrifted, or free.

“I encourage people always to use what’s there, whether it’s salvage or free materials, instead of going out and trying to buy a bunch of stuff to set your home and garden up,” Taylor said.

The couple’s home is located on the main road of their town, which consists of about 1,000 people spread out across miles of mostly farmland. They’re 20 minutes from the nearest hospital and about an hour and a half from the city of Burlington.

While they have neighbors right across the street, the population density in the town is low.

“So our neighbors are right across the street from us. For context, they have about 75 acres, and their neighbors have 500. And we live on about two and a half acres here,” Tatum said.

What the couple loves about their home is the amount of privacy it affords them, without being too secluded.

“Maybe they could hear through the walls in our Brooklyn apartment, but if we needed help and we were to yell loudly here, our neighbors would hear us,” Tatum added.

The couple also manages a small campsite on their land where people can come and enjoy the outdoors. There’s a firepit where guests can start a campfire, and a composting toilet is available. Rates start from $24 a night for a maximum of four guests.

While the campsite is open all year round, Taylor says most people come between April and November.

City versus small-town living

Life in Vermont is quite different from in NYC.

For instance, they drive now, whereas they didn’t before.

“In New York City, I did not drive. I walked to work, I biked to work. If I wanted to visit a friend 90 minutes away, that meant I was on a train and we traveled 10 miles. And here, I drive 10 miles to work every day,” Tatum said.

The way they interact with their community is also very different.

“In New York City, we’re not waving at everyone we pass by because if you did that, you’d go insane. It’s too many people, and not everyone is your friend there,” Tatum said. “But here in Vermont, everyone waves at you, and you learn to wave back. It’s very friendly and very welcoming.”

While it was tough to make friends in Vermont at first — since it was the pandemic — it became easier to get to know new people, especially after they had their son.

“We met other parents and families through playgroups and things like that, and got to know our neighbors more,” Taylor said.

The slower pace of life in Vermont has been refreshing compared to the hustle and bustle of the city, Taylor, who was originally from Pennsylvania, added.

“I lived in New York City for about four years, and it’s something that I knew I wouldn’t be able to sustain long-term in terms of the sensory overwhelm and the pace of life,” she said.

That said, with a two-year-old toddler in tow, the young parents are “still exhausted,” Tatum, who is originally from NYC, said.

“The pace here is slower, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not running around, trying to get him from play date to day care and back to work. I just can’t imagine how we’d pull it off in New York,” he added.

Getting used to life in the country

The Barnes family isn’t alone in their journey.

More and more Americans are being priced out of the city. A single person in NYC would have to make about $140,000 to live comfortably, and this amount jumps to $318,000 for a family of four consisting of two adults and two children.

It comes as no surprise that many lower-earning New Yorkers and even young families are choosing to move to the suburbs or leave the country entirely in order to enjoy a lower cost of living. A December 2023 report from the Fiscal Policy Institute found that 65,242 residents who earned between $32,000 and $65,000 left NYC in 2022, compared to 50,160 of those who earned over $172,000.

However, the couple says that things aren’t as straightforward as it seems.

“Compared to New York City, the mortgage is half that of what we paid for rent,” Tatum said. “And while that may look good on paper, the reality is that being homeowners means that those savings go to the repairs and the projects that allow us to push up our comfort in the space and our enjoyment of the house.”

At the end of the day, everything balances out, he said.

“We’re not suddenly wealthy because we are living in the country,” he added.

The couple has some advice for those who want to move out of the city and into the country: Learn to let your guard down.

Tatum said that living in cities can teach people to be alert and wary of others, but that’s not how things necessarily work in the countryside.

“In small, rural towns, people often have good intentions — and you need to only reach out and ask for help to receive it,” he added. “Your greatest threat is not your fellow man, but the raccoons that are going to find their way into your attic or kill your chickens or the bears that are going to get too curious around your bird feeder. It’s a different set of threats, and it’ll take a little bit of time for your brain to make the switch.”

Have you recently built or renovated your dream home? If you’ve got a story to share, get in touch with me at agoh@businessinsider.com.

SHAFTSBURY — The Shaftsbury Select Board is planning to hold a forum on the emerald ash borer (EAB) in the spring.

Board Chair Naomi Miller brought up the idea at the board’s Aug. 5 meeting.

“What I was envisioning when I suggested that we do this was that we perhaps have some experts come and talk about what towns are doing, not individual citizens, but towns are doing with this enormous impending monstrosity of a dilemma that that’s potentially going to be economically beyond our imagining,” she said.

The intent was to “get people to begin to think about it out loud together as a community. Not so much that we have experts come in and teach us about the ash borer, etc, but that we have people who are expert in thinking about what towns can do and how,” Miller said. “What are the various possibilities for long term management to this so that we’re just thinking about it ahead of time before it comes crashing down on us, literally and figuratively.”

Board Vice Chair Martha Cornwell suggested having it recorded and posted by one of the local public access cable channels. 

“It seems like towns have very wide variety of the ways that they’re going about it, from it’s just a personal landowner’s responsibility all the way up to very expensive kind of tree infusions, for lack of a better word for it,” she said.

“Maybe we want to do it with a couple of other towns,” Miller said. “Wait till the spring, give ourselves time to organize it.”

“Originally from Asia, the emerald ash borer was first discovered in the Detroit area in 2002. It is believed to have entered the country on wooden packing materials,” according to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets. “This beetle feeds on all species of ash trees. Infested trees die within three to five years. As a non-native insect, EAB lacks natural predators to keep it in check. EAB was initially detected in the state in 2018 and has spread and established itself in most of Vermont.”

The insect is responsible for the death and decline of tens of millions of ash trees in North America. The beetle is bright, metallic green, measures about one-half inch long and has a flattened back. Trees infested with EAB may show signs and symptoms including bark splitting and D-shaped exit holes on the bark surface

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “EAB is difficult to detect early when pest populations are small because damage to the trees is hidden under the bark and tree decline is gradual. The beetle is well-suited to our climate, is a good flyer, and spreads naturally. People contribute to the long-distance spread of the beetle when they move EAB-infested ash firewood, logs or nursery stock.”

During a recent visit to a forest site in North Pownal, new Bennington County Forester Tessa McGann, gave an overview of the problem and the response to it.

“It is slowly spreading. We make these maps that show, what’s the 10 mile radius and 20 mile radius for danger zones, and it’s definitely becoming [widespread throughout] the entire state, and in this corner of Vermont,” she said. “And it’s definitely active in Bennington County. And in the coming years, we can definitely expect it will be all over Vermont. We will see ash trees die all over Vermont. That is unavoidable.”

There are several different species of ash trees in Vermont. There are white and black ash, which is also called brown ash, and also green ash. “And we are seeing there’s different levels of resistance to the disease. It’s very, very, very little resistance, but still with white ash, we see a little bit more,” she said.

For that reason, in places where the trees do not pose a safety hazard or where the landowner does not need to cut down the tree to sell before it dies, the recommendation is to leave ash trees standing as much as possible.

“We do have a hope that there will be some amount that are resistant to the beetle, and if they survive, they can help repopulate the forest,” McGann said. “A big mistake we made with chestnut trees 100 years ago is that we cut them all down, and then every once in a while we found one that was resistant, but we didn’t leave enough out there to naturally repopulate. So we’re really trying to avoid that.”

People can use insecticide on select ash trees, but this is expensive and only lasts a couple of years, she said.

The state has begun releasing wasps that are the natural predator to the EAB in hopes of eventually creating a natural balance once the EAB population runs out of food and its population crashes, she said.

“We need ash trees to be on the landscape for that point to be a part of that balance. So right now, people are doing treatments to try to regenerate ash, to encourage seedlings to get established and start growing, because when they’re really, really young, the beetle is not going to kill them,” McGann said. “It’s not going to waste its time on them. So, there’s hope, I guess is what I’m saying.”

The Vermont Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation offers an online Vermont Forest Invasive Pest Status Map. It tracks the presence (by town) of several invasive species, including the EAB on a town-by-town basis. It shows a prevalence of towns with the invasive in the northwest part of the state and in the south. In fact, every town along the Massachusetts border, from Pownal in the west to Vernon in the east has an infestation.

According to the map, Shaftsbury and Bennington have had an infestation since 2020, Stamford since 2018, Rupert since 2021, Pownal since 2022. Manchester and Dorset first reported infestations this year. The map shows no infestation in Arlington, but this does not correspond to observations on the ground.

In response to questions for this article, Arlington Town Manager Nick Zaiac said that “Arlington does indeed have a spreading infestation, and there is evidence of ash borer townwide, but mostly in the central and eastern areas so far. The first documented evidence came from the southeast corner of town. It is not limited to any particular type of landowner.”

The town’s Select Board has discussed ash trees at the town rec park but the issue there isn’t particularly bad, he said.

“We have one small grant for cutting ash trees in the Buck Hill Road area which will take place next spring,” Zaiac said. “The state has reported that there will not be substantial funding for ash removal into the future, so we save a few thousand every year in a Hazardous Tree Fund to be prepared for when they start to die in substantial numbers.

“Ash borer takes a few years to kill trees, so we haven’t seen reports that it alone has killed anything so far,” he said “Ash in the area are also dealing with a fungal ‘ash blight’ that weakens the trees separately. Our plan is to watch the trees and have them cut as they endanger the traveling public.”

Bennington officials are aware of the issue. With the help of Town Communications Director Jonah Spivak, two responded by email.

Director of Buildings and Grounds Paul Dansereau replied that his department is not involved in any ash borer mitigation actions other than in following State of Vermont published guidelines.

RJ Joly, Director of Department of Public Works, said he attended the first class on this topic about seven years ago. “We really somehow have not had a problem as the Town.”

“We have a few in the right of way but they are over power lines, and we can’t remove them if we wanted to,” he said.

When wood lots were logged, the department tried to harvest mature ash trees before the bug killed them, he added.