“It was dark. Very dark,” Isreal Dudley recalls, thinking back almost 10 years to his first visit to Vermont. He was 11 years old at the time, and it was his first real taste of the rural outdoors. Thanks to the Fresh Air Fund, Isreal, also called “Isszy,” had come to spend a couple weeks with our family that summer. It wasn’t his first time out of Brooklyn, the borough of New York City where he had grown up and lived his whole life. The previous year he had spent some time with a family in Pennsylvania, also through the FAF.