They’re like brothers who, as only the family knows, couldn’t be more different. With a landscape of open, rolling farmland and small villages with white-steepled churches, Vermont is the most rural state in the Union, according to Census Bureau statistics. From an environmental point of view, it’s also the most politically liberal. New Hampshire, so heavily forested that it was once described by Vermont’s Richard Ketchum as looking “like a summer camp that’s been closed for the winter,” is the nation’s fourth most industrialized state and as politically conservative as any you can name.

Geographically separated by the Connecticut River, they lie next to each other in reverse, with each calling the other an upside-down version of itself. New Hampshire, the forty-fourth largest state in area, with about a million in population, is fattest at its bottom, which borders Massachusetts and, for eighteen miles, the sea. Land-bound Vermont, half as big in population but slightly larger in area (ranking forty-third), is fattest at its top, which borders Canada. Surely no two brothers could grow up the same with such different hereditary characteristics.

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