It’s summer 2017. The governor’s radical vision for Vermont’s portion of the interstate highway system, a cornerstone initiative for the new administration, has fallen into place.

Weathered barnboard shacks have gone up at intervals along I-89 and I-91, and existing visitors centers are getting retro-fitted for the purpose. A prolific sugaring season left the state government with ample stores of maple syrup to stock the shelves. And the Department of Transportation has started to auction off much of its mowing equipment. The recently introduced flocks of sheep roaming the medians and margins, as promised, rendered such technology obsolete.

The children, without school until September, have assumed their new summer jobs: Instagram celebrities — boys clad in lederhosen, girls in Little Bo Peep outfits — for tourists who pull over to capture the idyllic scenes.

“And then when we get them on the side,” explains Vermont’s first Liberty Union governor, “we’re going to pick them up — we’ll have a machine that picks them up by the ankles — and shakes all the loose change out of their pockets. That way we don’t have to have toll roads.”

Welcome to Bill Lee’s Vermont.

“It’ll be something like that,” he says through a laugh. “Oh, God, that’ll be fun.”

Bill Lee, Candidate

The paperwork went through in late May.

Between games for the Burlington Cardinals — 38 years since his last appearance for the Boston Red Sox and 34 since his final game with the Montreal Expos — Bill Lee had joined a new team. The Liberty Union party had itself a candidate for governor.

A week later, on June 2, Lee officially launched his campaign in Cabot, around a corner and up the hill from the world-famous creamery. The idealistic opposite of a $500-a-plate fundraiser, the potluck fare at the Headwaters ecovillage included hot dogs, chips, salsa, apples and homemade sweets. Donations were discouraged.

At the center of a circle of two dozen lawn chairs, Lee, the left-handed pitcher dubbed the “Spaceman” in the early 1970s for his free-flowing and wide-ranging opinions, held court. A question about baseball provoked an answer about the tyrannical nature of strikeouts.

“Everybody knows I don’t believe in strikeouts. They’re fascist,” Lee said. “I believe in ground balls, they’re more democratic. Everybody gets to play.”

In a red jersey, gray baseball pants and red sneakers, the southpaw looked ready for a game because he was. He had to hustle back down the hill in an hour to talk with a group of Little Leaguers.

Even at 69 — Lee turns 70 in December — baseball is ever-present for the Craftsbury resident. The Cardinals play every Sunday and he throws more frequently than that.

“I do yoga every day, I do my exhales, because I know a game is going to break out somewhere,” Lee explained later. “And that’s all I do. I live to play and I love to teach — I teach in Cuba, and I’ve been doing that — and that’s kind of it.”

And when it came time to address the assembled crowd, Lee peeled himself off the bench — in this case a molded plastic chair — as he’d done every other half-inning for the last six decades.

He assumed an athlete’s stance, feet just wider than his shoulders, knees bent slightly, the neck of his Sierra Nevada pale ale bottle between his thumb and forefingers, not that unlike the grip on a curveball.

“I didn’t plan on running, I don’t want to run,” Lee said. “I didn’t want to run and then I’m laying in bed and I’m reading Plato’s ‘Republic’ and in there Socrates is talking to the young Plato and says, ‘You know, there’s one thing worse than running and that’s not running when you’re qualified.’“

Getting to that decision, let alone the event in Cabot, took a persistent recruiting effort from Liberty Union member Ralph Iovino in addition to the influence of Greek philosophers. The initial call to the political bullpen went unanswered, but started a back-and-forth between Iovino in East Wallingford and Lee in the Northeast Kingdom.

Iovino, 59, a rural mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, had recently joined Liberty Union and thought the party could use new energy, a new hook with the public at large. He eventually persuaded Lee to attend the group’s March meeting.

“He’d been looking over his schedule with his many appearances he has to make, things he does for progressive and social causes, and he was a little tentative,” Iovino said.

By early May, the Spaceman was on board. More remarkable: He presented a moderate face for the far-left party.

“I wouldn’t call him the most radical of us, but certainly in attitude and approach he sounds a lot like Liberty Union. And he’s got a good wit,” said Peter Diamondstone, 81, one of the founders of Liberty Union and its current secretary. “We do take ourselves awfully seriously, and to bring in someone who said, ‘I didn’t smoke marijuana, I sprinkled it on my pancakes,’ that seemed like something we should hold onto, that touch of levity.

“We’re not going to change the world so we might as well smile a little. We can try but we’re not going to.”

Some of Lee’s key initiatives, after commandeering the state’s two largest highways:

• Clean water: “If you can’t drink it, fish in it or swim in it, it’s no good for you. I swam in Caspian (Lake) in May. How many people swam in Caspian this May?”

• Ridding the state of opioids: “You know how you do that? You take your kindergarten kids, you take your preschool kids, you take your elementary school kids and you run ’em to school … they’ll start secreting their own endorphins, which are stronger than any drug they can buy on the street. You get ’em high on your own drugs, don’t be buying someone else’s drugs.”

• Environmental protection: “The other thing is I’m going to ban Bud Light. I don’t know what it is but it’s on the side of every goddamn Ski-Doo run.”

Lee’s only prior political experience came in 1988, when he was the presidential candidate for the satirical Rhinoceros Party, whose platform included banning guns and butter, and repealing the law of gravity.

But that political itch, stoked over the years with a long and varied reading list, has re-emerged. Anyone who confuses the Spaceman for a space cadet would be missing a big part of who Lee is, according to his catcher for the Cardinals, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger.

“He’s bright, he’s well-read on a lot of subjects,” Weinberger said. “He has strong opinions on a number of things and I think that might surprise people as the race evolves … I do think it’s possible he has an impact on the race over the final months here.”

The humor is still there, too, as if there was any doubt.

“I will work hard for ya. I’ll fight all these other guys,” Lee told the gathering in Cabot. “I think I can beat Phil Scott because he’s a NASCAR guy and he just makes left turns and goes around in circles.”

Bill Lee, Vermonter

Detours are inevitable on the trip from Lee’s front yard to his back porch in Craftsbury, where he’s lived since 1988.

First, he needs to explain the watershed. One side of his ridge drains into Lake Memphremagog, the other into Lake Champlain.

“I picked this spot for the water. Artesian well right behind my house — I have water up the ying-yang and I know it’s not polluted,” Lee said. “That’s why I built here.”

Then there’s what Lee calls “the cathedral of woodsheds in Vermont” with its French stained-glass window. He talks passionately about the chunks of maple and yellow birch waiting their turn to become baseball bats and table legs.

And then there’s the “Shoeless” Joe Jackson sign, which sparks a tangent about Lee getting kicked out of baseball in 1982 for smoking pot, which leads to a story about beating a ticket in Hardwick because the police officer said the traffic sign was 60 feet away when he was pulled over.

“I said, ‘Judge, I don’t know how far it is but I made my living at 60 feet, 6 inches and that was a lot further than that,’” Lee said. “Judge goes, ‘That’s Bill Lee of the Red Sox — case dismissed.’”

Before landing in Craftsbury, where he lives with his wife, Diana, Lee bounced around northern Vermont. He started out in Middlesex Notch, living in a cabin that belonged to sportscaster Ken Squier’s father.

The next stop was Hardwick — and a full-fledged Vermont baptism.

“That was the coldest winter I ever spent,” Lee said. “If it wasn’t for ‘Lonesome Dove,’ (Larry) McMurtry’s book, I would’ve froze to death. Big book. It was all about desert and when you read it you were thirsty — ‘Goddamn it’s hot!’ You read the book and it kind of kept you warm in the 40-below. It was just awesome.”

But once seats are found on the back deck in Craftsbury, beneath a rough-hewn pergola built by a man from Albany, it’s easy to understand why Lee has stayed.

A breeze stirs the wind chimes into song. He pours glasses of a hemp beer called “The Wrong Stuff,” brewed by an Ottawa pub and named after his book. A hummingbird buzzes nearby. Glasses of wine follow; it’s “Earth,” his Spaceman label’s flagship California red.

“As you sit here, the raspberries and blackberries come out of the woods and have their way with you, they grab you and pull you back in,” Lee said. “That’s Vermont.”

Lee talks about the imperative of thinking globally, as well as drinking locally. Neither requires much of a trip.

Books litter his shelves, and floors, and countertops. There’s “The Limits to Growth,” volumes by Carl Sagan, R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.”

Some of the best beer in the world is beyond the ridge to the east, across Vermont 14 and the Black River, though globalization has posed a very Vermont problem for local fans of Hill Farmstead.

“If you go to Shaun Hill’s you’ve got to wait line, take a number,” Lee said. “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

Bill Lee, Spaceman

At the peak of his career, the winner of 17 games for the third season in a row, William Francis Lee took the mound at Fenway for his second start of the 1975 World Series for the Red Sox — Game 7.

Forty-one years later, at the height of summer, his Burlington team locked in a one-run duel with Williston, the same lefty who became a cult hero among Boston fans lasted until the final out of his Vermont Senior Baseball League clash. The fastball is slower, but the craft is still there.

Closing out the fourth inning with a strikeout, a high, hard pitch after coaxing two strikes with breaking balls over the front of the plate, Lee has the opponents — some half his age — shaking their heads.

“He’s an old man,” one spit.

“See those pitches? That’s junk,” said another.

The Spaceman was at it again. Miro Weinberger had seen it before.

One of Lee’s first years with the Cardinals, he gave up a game-tying three-run homer in Essex and responded by holding the other team scoreless for the next eight innings as Burlington won in the 12th.

“I really think, no exaggeration, by this point at 65 years old, Bill has thrown 200 pitches by the 12th inning,” Weinberger said. “Here’s a guy who’s played at the highest levels of the game, Game 7 of a World Series, but he’s such a competitor he was not going to come out of this senior baseball game.”

Baseball gave Lee his fame. His personality earned him his nickname, though it took time for Lee to come around to it.

“I didn’t embrace it but then the more I read and everything else, it’s like being the court jester,” Lee said. “I can tell the king he’s an ass---- and still keep my head. But I’m the only one that can do it.”

A new movie about Lee, “Spaceman,” starring Josh Duhamel, is set to hit theaters next month. Centered on his life after being released by the Montreal Expos, it hits on just a slice of a well-traveled life.

“He certainly is an eccentric character so in that way I think (the nickname) conveys something about him and that’s probably why it stuck like it has,” said Weinberger, Burlington’s mayor since 2012. “But in another way it doesn’t convey how bright an individual he is. He’s someone of tremendous intelligence, really a great teacher of kids in baseball and if you look back at his career he’s been a man of conviction on a lot of issues.”

Before he hopped in his gold Buick to head to the Cabot baseball diamond last month, Lee stepped up to the camera for a quick interview with a local TV station.

His take on the election to come was vintage:

“My competitors will fall by the wayside one by one,” Lee said. “I’m a competitor. I throw strikes. I keep the ball down. I hustle.

“I just want to have a great kumbaya moment in this state because I don’t believe the Republicans and the Democrats are doing the right thing for the state,” he continued. “We march to the left, we march to the right, we don’t go forward. You’ve got to go forward.”

This story was originally published July 21, 2016. Contact Austin Danforth at 651-4851 or edanforth@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/eadanforth

Austin Danforth