Jed Lipsky started cutting timber at 15. Fifty-five years later, at 78, he’s still at it in the woods of Middlesex, Vermont, working alone with a chainsaw and a lifetime of hard-earned caution. Logging gave him broken bones and multiple surgeries, and he openly calls it North America’s most dangerous profession. It never gave him a reason to walk away.
The rest of his résumé reads like three different people. In his early thirties he played professional polo, competing in the All-Ireland Championships, the Dominican Republic, Hawaii, and Texas. Now he serves as an independent legislator representing Stowe, where he believes he’s the only logger in the Vermont statehouse. And on polo days, he’s the sole umpire for the Sugarbush Polo Club in Shelburne.
Lipsky doesn’t romanticize all of it. He describes his polo career as a partly misguided pursuit of glory that strained his marriage and his business. But he also says he’s had a complex and pretty wonderful life, and he feels fortunate to bring that unusual perspective to public service. Here on the Suncoast, where so many of our neighbors are writing their own second and third acts, his story lands a little differently. What would you try if you stopped assuming it was too late?
