It turns out we moved right into the middle of a hameau, which is a hamlet, in English (Mark and use the word). The realization sneaked up on us because the houses are spread out in various directions. But we see them, and they see us, it turns out. Very different from Harvard. And neighbors, here, mean more than they did in our other life, because there is an assumed network of need with some of them—the tradition still lives. So, all unknowing, we landed in a neighborhood.

We’ve got some salient characters in this neighborhood. Premier among all stands Trapper John, all four-feet-eleven inches of him, whom many of you (who have visited) have met because he shows up here all the time. He is so significant he deserves a blog entry all to himself. And that won’t be this one.

There is Jerry Driscoll, across Route 14, the race car driver. He lives in a fixed-up double-wide that replaced, apparently, an old farm house because he’s got a nice old barn and shed. He builds his own race cars right here and earns awards for his exploits. This year, for example, he won the record for the fastest drive of the Mount Washington access road—110 mph. He is 69 years old, his wife died in his arms of Lou Gherig’s disease five years ago, and he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, so he can drive Mt. Washington like that. He is a sweet man. He has an artistically-arrayed collection of hub caps on his shed. I need to drop in on him again. (People, by the way, still drop in on other people here. At any time someone may show up. The law of hospitality says you've got to chat for about 15 minutes, then you can claim you are busy if you need to get free.)

Just south of Jerry lives the array at the Faith Walk community. They describe themselves as “sort of like Anabaptists,” referring to a sixteenth-century Protestant sect that abjured participation in governments and killing, among other practices. “Other religions try to do what Jesus said,” a man there told Mark, “while we try to do what Jesus did.” Other local people call them Mennonites. I still don’t know if they are just one family in that tall, awkward, somewhat Shaker-looking house, with some hangers-on in an apartment in there, or I have heard that there may be some special needs young adults up there, too. Anyway some of them have a sawmill right out front. Last summer, I finally decided that the sawmill noise was disturbing my tranquility too much and went over there to ask for some mitigation if they could. How very kind and hospitable they were, a man and a boy standing in a sea of sawdust at the big saw. Pronto they built a wall on one side of the mill, which really helped, saying I shouldn’t have waited so long to ask. Mark buys lumber from them, and the very best barn-builder in the region is part of their scene. Here’s what they donate to the neighborhood culture: The mother and daughters wear long skirts and dresses, and the daughters wear bonnets or kerchiefs, too. (The mother, Denise, has recently taken to showing her hair. I don’t know what this actually means, but if I had that thick golden brown mane, I would, too.) They are amazingly pleasant and radiate a goodness that luckily does not include that vapid and constant smile that some religious have.

One of the daughters, named Katie, walks through our land, right past this library window, on her way up to Laughing Waters Way to take care of CJ’s horses. Our place is the through-the-fields, non-road short cut. She strides through, skirt flaring, on her way at various times of day; of course she is home-schooled. Mark had a special moment one day this September when the ordinary became extraordinary, because of her. We had been making hay by hand, as you might recall, and on this day Mark was alone at the task in a golden sunny afternoon, pitchforking hay into the wagon. Katie and maybe four like-minded friends walked through the field, skirts billowing and voices chipper, and then passed out of sight. Mark felt slipped out of time as he held the wooden handle of the old old pitchfork in his hand, felt the hay beneath his feet and beheld those girls like an apparition out of the past. Nothing modern was in view.

Veronica and Ernie live on our side of Route 14 (more romantic is its old name, the Montreal Turnpike), a honeymoon couple in their seventies, still brisk and lively, she a very short former nurse with snapping brown eyes and strong opinions, and he a very tall, rangy Swede, still working as an arborist. He used to farm this land as a hired hand in the 1960’s when the land was leased to the big farm to the south of us. Ernie is the man who, when we asked where he was from, said, “No, I’m not from around here, I’m from Tunbridge. [Tunbridge begins on top of the hill we look at to the east.] I moved over here in 1963.” With that record, we sure would have said we’re from here! Veronica and Ernie might be my favorites in the hameau, though our paths don’t cross very much. We have done a little borrowing and visiting, just showing up.

The Gilderdales live in a double-wide to the south of us, tucked in against the western ridge and right across the fields. They started out friendly but have turned cool; I don’t know why and want to find out sometime. I think I should be able to warm them up again, and, if not, so be it. Sandy runs the school lunch program in nearby Bethel—she purchases and cooks all the food, buying quite a bit from local farmers. She’s not part of any hip localvore movement, she just applied her common sense. I’d love to talk with her more about it all. Dave works for the state on roads and such. We found some holes at the edge of a field above their house where it looks like marijuana was grown. We wonder about it!

Swinging around to the north of us, if taking the vantage point of the pavement, we have moved a half-mile north and turn left onto Braley Covered Bridge Road, a small dirt road that dips down steeply to the Middle Branch, crossing the little red covered bridge that is just out of sight beyond our fields. That’s where Laughing Waters Way begins, an agonizingly cute name for a row of four houses on a steep and picturesque incline, artfully developed by our friend David Shepler. He showed up in this valley from Brookline, Massachusetts about 40-odd years ago, camped up on the ridge for at least a year, and finally with a friend named Rick bought all the land in this section of the valley. Ultimately, Rick bought him out for most of the land, leaving David with about 30 acres. David is a tender and idealistic artist-who-makes-houses. Houses are his medium. A graduate of the Yale School of Architecture, he definitely did not pursue the status-laden trail of his classmates. He crafted these four houses with his hands, and two of them are some of the most extraordinary houses ever: his first house, an M.C. Escher masterpiece, now owned and inhabited by CJ of the horses, and his second house, that he is now living in and building at the same time, as people will do here. He had a dream similar to co-housing, whereby the people who would live in his houses would together steward the land around them in a conscious way. He sold his houses on the open market though, since he needed to make the money, and pretty strange people bought them. Not all David’s dreams came true. He has a 28-year-old brain-damaged son who lives with them and is an incredible trial. However, he and his partner, whom I call Leeney, have a lot of pluck and carry on and love much about their lives. They live high at the tippy top of the ridge in their beautiful Faberge egg of a house, small, oval, and intricately detailed. We see them frequently. I am going to borrow their vacuum cleaner again if ours is not fixed in the next day or so.

I have promised these entries to be short so that's all for now. But there are more people, so present in our lives--Therefore I shall carry this on into a Part II, in which you will meet CJ, the techie who tames killer horses, and the Armstrong bachelor farmers who just bought the store, big news around here.

Here’s wishing those of you who love the holiday a wonderful Christmas of love and the counting of blessings! And Happy Hannuka and ditto about the love and blessings to some more of you, and the rest of you regardless of your stance on holidays...

Love,

Josie

A Trap, and How I Got Out of It; or, The Treacherous Shortcut

Snow came on November 22^nd, in the middle of the night. I had gone down to Massachusetts to my mother’s to pick her up to take her up here for Thanksgiving, though she did not come. That is another story. Perhaps because I didn’t experience the snow falling, I didn’t take it seriously.

“I think I’ll take us back via Christian Hill Road,” I say unnecessarily to my passenger Saturday, a UNH sophomore and Thanksgiving weekend guest named Ugo, who can’t care less which route we take home from our errand, it being his first visit to Vermont. He’s from urban Michigan. I want to show him more of the beauty of the landscape and so swing left out of Bethel and proceed merrily up onto Christian Hill. The slope is gradual, and smooth for a dirt road, and we spin along through lovely views. We pass a bare apple tree decked with gorgeous round red apples that glow in the dim November light, and Ugo begs out of the car to go grab some. I take some pictures so his mother can see how wholesome her son can be.

The miles pass as we go, enjoying fields, the few quaint houses, and the gorgeous distant view of the valley far below to our east.

Far below-- that is the key phrase: I forgot that we had to make that drop to get home to that valley floor, using a road ominously called, at this end, the Oxbow.

Up ahead, the road becomes inexplicably snowier. Wondering, I continue. Next thing I know, the front of the car is distinctly lower than it was a minute ago: a drastic steepness has begun. How could I have forgotten this end of the road!? Instantly it is too late to back up: my wheels’ grip is tenuous on slick, moist packed snow. Turning around is violently prohibited by a ditch at least two feet deep on my right, scoured to jagged new depths by Hurricane Irene. Ahead of me, a ninety-degree corner looms on a thirty-degree slope. My heart begins to pound. My wheels are not gripping well though it’s a four-wheel drive car. The slightest forward momentum of this car and it’s out of my control.

Inch by inch we creep gently forward. (No need to worry about another car, not there, not then.) Ugo is in awe—he’s never been in anything like this situation. He looks at me trustingly and in wonder. “Wow,” I say to him through gritted teeth, “Wow.” After what seems like a long time but is just one-quarter mile, we reach the corner, sliding gently and not quite in position to actually turn the corner. We get out and look down the road. My heart sinks to my shoes. The road slopes down, down, with the nasty ditch on the right and a big drop-off to the left with a slight mud bank to prevent all cars from sliding off regularly--to another corner bearing left far below. I will have to make it down that straightaway and not keep going into the ditch on the right. The distance and the slope combine with the necessity to avoid momentum to make success look impossible to achieve.

“Back up, “ suggests Ugo, puncturing the reverie of terror that grips me, and I agree, “Yeah, it’ll probably move back a little, and then we’ll be in position to turn the corner.” I put it in reverse and nudge the car back a few inches. And again. But it slithers a bit from side to side. I ask Ugo to help me, as I get out of the car and go to the mud bank. We pull clods of cold dirt out of the bank with our bare hands—Ugo does not even have his jacket—and make a trail for the tires to grip to back the car into position to turn the corner. Thank God for emergency brakes! After too many scrabbles of cold mud for Ugo’s non-Vermont hands, the car is in position. I do not mention my fears and say, “Maybe we should walk down to the valley and get some shovels for more dirt.” Because the only way I can imagine getting down that long threatening expanse is by making a dirt trail all the way down for the wheels to grip. It’s a very big job to do with just hands. Ugo says, “It’ll be dark soon,” and he is right.

Just then, I hear voices and, coming down around the corner steps a cheerful couple. “Are you stuck?” asks the young woman. “I completely forgot how this road ends!” I tell her ruefully. The four of us stand and strategize. “How about if you put it in neutral and sort of coast down?” asks the young man, a non-Vermonter. “No, no,” I declare, trying to be tactful about the fact that he is suggesting exactly what I think will get us killed. “I’ll call my father,” says the young woman, Casey, “he lives just at the bottom of the hill. Maybe he’ll have shovels and sand… Oh, but he wouldn’t be able to get them up here. Only a tractor could get up here.” We stand and stare at the straightaway.

I persuade them to join us in pulling mud. They set to work with a will, Casey declaring herself a native, though living in Cambridge and just up for Thanksgiving with Mike, her boyfriend from Cambridge. Just then Mike has a great idea. “How about if you get your left wheels onto this untouched snow next to the bank? Then you’ll have a little traction…” because packing mud by hand for a good half-mile as dark is coming on is daunting to say the least. My heart lifts a bit. It looks feasible. We make a mud path for the car toward the untrodden snow. I hop into the car and the three others stand by to guide the thing if it slithers. I begin, so tentatively. It moves, then slips too far and almost hits the mud bank. Gently, I pull on the emergency brake. We strategize. Casey hops to the left front and says, “Go! I’ll keep it away,” and she applies her shoulder to the left front as I try again. The car goes straight for a few feet, then slips right, toward the ditch. On went the emergency brake. Mike and Ugo go to the right wheel and Mike says, “Okay, we’ll apply pressure on this side so it won’t veer right.” With the small amount of traction from the fresh snow and the guidance on both sides, I creep that car down the hill, my breath coming a little deeper with each car-length forward.

The corner ahead turns out to be on a somewhat more level spot and, getting Ugo back in the car, we take that corner like a piece of cake.

“Hop in! Would you like to come back to my house for some brandy?” I cry to Casey and Mike, but they cheerfully decline both offers, wanting to continue their walk. “How can I repay you?” I ask them, and Mike says, “Do you have any friends in Cambridge, Mass.? I am running for Congress and would love people to spread the word about me.” “What’s your platform?” I ask. “No money,” he says, and explains, “I want to run just by going door to door, explaining the idea of the No Money candidate. My views are in line with Occupy Wall Street. I’ll be announcing my candidacy soon on Facebook.com/nomoneycongress.”

I promise him I will spread the word. Then, slowly, almost gracefully, due to the kindness of those strangers we ease down into the tiny village of East Bethel . We cheer, wildly. We drive the few miles home and step into the kitchen and knock back a shot of brandy each, throwing ourselves luxuriously into soft chairs. And I say, live and learn!

Make Hay While the Sun Shines--we did it

The farming endeavor. As October wore on, I began to wear out.

Every day, hours of physical work—just what I asked for! Still harvesting all month, crops still grew, carrots, kale, collards, broccoli—even tomatoes and peppers until October 20^th at least, because we arduously covered them for the first frost in September. (We’ve got to invent a spiffier way, a thoroughly pre-thought-out way, of covering plants. Old sheets and crumbling wire contraptions just won’t do.) Digging potatoes, garlic, onions—a treat to dig all the successful root crops (something hideous got the carrots and deformed them in scary ways). The potatoes taste incredibly good. Drying winter squash on a tarp on the lawn. Drying garlic and onions: I put them on screens on sawhorses upstairs in the shed where it’s dry and warm (though I had to sneak around very jealous and nasty hornets up there); the old-wood warmth of that obscure shed space is old-Vermont evocative and I felt the abundance as hops replace the dried onions and garlic which got sent to the root cella with the bushels of potatoes.

I realized that scads of mulch would have made my year a lot easier. So we prepared for a satisfying quantity of mulch for next year. And with the time that will be freed up next year, there will be just more and better farming to do...still so much to learn.

Onion sets need loads of hay as soon as they’re planted in early May. The hops need it now—they’re perennial. Winter squashes need it, strawberries, all the things we put out there in the crop field and leave to grow on their own. But also the in-garden tenderer things, carrots and garlic, broccoli and such need it. (And the sea-roses I got from an old Swiss woman who also makes a nutritious green powder from the edible weeds that grow in her yard: plantain, lamb’s quarters, dandelion, pigweed, maybe some others I’ve forgotten. She got us eating these things last June, but then our garden came in and we turned up our noses at them. It’s a spring thing, wild greens, like cowslips, also known as marsh marigolds, you know? Mark’s mother grew up eating cowslips, and she would serve them to her kids in early spring, the practice a holdover from the days when you could not get green things in early spring and you got what you found. Oh, are they bitter! Yecch! A huge patch of them grows in the wet spot I see from my library window beyond the little field by the big apple tree. We will not be eating them again. At least I hope not! We will keep loving their brilliant gold flowers in the April bog, though. Although that’s where Mark is planning on putting the pond—I’ll move them if the pond goes in.)

So in early October, we made hay to use for next year’s mulch. Beautiful days in a string fostered our work. Mark mowed a half-acre of one of our little fields and next day we set out with our rakes and optimism. The way hay was made before machines came along is to rake the long grass you’ve scythed into rows called windrows. Then you move along the windrow with a pitchfork and a wagon and pitch it in. Then you drive the wagon below the hay window up in the barn loft and someone operates the big hook pulley and lowers the two big hooks like pincers into the wagon and grabs up a big hunk of hay. Up it goes, into the window. Someone pulls the hooks in, and the pulley man keeps pulling, making them ride along a rail over the loft floor until they reach the end, where they drop the hay. Hunk by hunk that loft fills up until it becomes that legendary place of strewn, comfortable hay where children leap and teenagers lose their virginity.

About sixty or seventy years ago, they invented bailers. Our neighbors have and still use a bailer, and they did it here for us in ’09. It looks like a large blue metal box which your tractor drags over the windrows (that you had raked into place with your tractor-pulled rake). It sucks up the hay and spits out bales which fly out a chute into the air and fall into the yellow hay-wagon at the end of the little train: tractor, bailer, wagon, red, yellow, blue. It’s great to watch it. Of course now, bigger machines make wider windrows that are rolled into huge balls and encased in white plastic and placed at the edge of the field: the giant marshmallows of modern farms. This is indeed better, you need no huge storage space. You do need bigger equipment and a fork-lift to move the marshmallows. That white plastic technique has also taken over the silage, as you probably have seen. The enormous white worms you might have seen, lying in the back of barns, are filled with silage. The cornfields that border us to north and south were harvested by a big combine in mid-October to make the stuff that goes into the worm. The huge machine looks like it’s two stories tall though it’s probably not; it grinds its way into the fields and mows the corn down, chewing up stalks, corn and all and spewing out the bits into a very large wagon. That’ll be your silage. I don’t know exactly how they blow it into the worm—maybe the worm is like a long balloon. Perhaps you know that the sweetness of the corn cobs ferments it. It gets moist and molasses-y, but as it goes in, it looks as dry and unappetizing as wood chips. Cows love it. I don’t know, though, if pure hay is ultimately better for them. I haven’t learned much about cows yet, though we owe the beauty of Vermont to the cows. We owe them, so I will be learning more about them. Right now, the Armstrong brothers have put some of their herd on their November grazing land, right out our north windows. Pastoral beauty, green fields against fall skies, with cows.

Mark’s and my hay? We found our rakes could not move through the cut grass very well, so we mowed again. “We,” because this was the day I finally learned to use the tractor. Fun! Really fun; no wonder Mark’s on it every chance he gets. It’s easy, too. It made the hay much easier to rake. We let it dry another day, then we went again to the field with optimism. After about six hours, (phew) we had raked our half-acre into five windrows. (Think of them having to scythe it first in the old days,…we are soft!) Next day, we did indeed get pitchforks and toss it into the wagon which we moved around with the tractor. Amazingly thirsty work, haying. And then—we left it in the wagon. That simple. It’s just mulch hay, it doesn’t need protection. And we had a hay ride for some friends, which felt like a big triumph somehow. We’ll dump it when Mark figures out how to use that dump trailer we bought last spring—its new identity is “the wagon.” The word changed naturally. Wagons are for farms.

Love, Josie

Update from Vermont

Dear friends, Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Worse and worse news coming to me from the region. Got a phone call today from a picture framer I use whose business is in Randolph. She told me 331 homes in Vermont have been destroyed by the storm, 20 in her town of Bridgewater alone. People I talk to have friends and neighbors who have lost their homes, or all of whose possessions are piled in moldering heaps in front of what they hope to recover as a home. As you know, home insurance does not cover floods. Flood insurance costs over $2,000 a year, and most people in this state don’t have that kind of money. It’s a total wipeout for them.

I thought of FEMA, but the picture framer told me she was in Munson, Massachusetts where the tornado ripped off roofs this June, and they still have blue tarps on their houses and not a dime of FEMA aid has reached them yet. You can imagine how stretched thin FEMA is these days.

Yesterday I drove to Randolph village. I passed a church with a sign: “Free hot showers and household goods.” I took a turn down by their river, the Third Branch of the White River. There are some little businesses down there. In a case of excruciating irony, there in front of a soaked-out building with a sign for a business that promised remediation of mold and water damage towered a pile of sodden used furniture and miscellany: a canoe resting on a couch, upside-down televisions—all from the second-hand shop next door. Nothing anyone was going to be able to do soon about those buildings. I heard that in Pittsford, the townspeople were stranded as well. They had no power and thus no water. There is only one small general store. It ran out of diapers right away and people with babies were having distressing problems dealing with them since they couldn’t wash anything that could have substituted for throw-away diapers.

People are losing their jobs because they can’t get to work. Cars are trapped on the other side of broken bridges. Routes to work have doubled, tripled in length due to road and bridge closures so workers are spending huge amounts of time and money keeping their jobs. Festivals and farmers’ markets are cancelled. And farmers cannot legally sell any crops from flooded fields, as ruled this week by the USDA, because of such things as Randolph’s sewage control plant falling into the river, as well as entire cars with their petrochemical contaminants.

What does this mean for our pumpkin-seed field….? But we will not suffer. We want for nothing.

My acupuncturist is providing free stress treatments for anyone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and grief.

Questions arise I am not used to considering. How soon can bridges be replaced? What if this happens again? How do planners determine priorities and what will get rebuilt? How long will towns like Rochester and Pittsford be out of reach?

So last night I went to our beautiful flood-free garden and picked loads of beans for hungry people. I can’t give them away raw, because people don’t have cooking apparatus. I’ll go to the store and get some bacon and cook them all together in a recipe that I think will appeal to lots of people. Comfort food. I’ll get it to the Red Cross in Bethel, along with any clothing and household items I can spare. And then, I will choose from the following list compiled by Vermont Public Interest Research Group and make some donations.

Do you think you could do the same?

Thank you and love, Josie

NEWS, UPDATES, HELP REQUESTS:

DONATIONS

• Text FOODNOW to 52000 to donate $10 to Vermont Foodbank. The Foodbank will turn each donation into $60 for families in need.

• You can also donate to the American Red Cross of Vermont and the New Hampshire Valley. The Red Cross set up shelters immediately after Irene hit for flooded-out families to stay in.

• The VT Irene Flood Relief Fund is raising money to help people and communities affected by flooding. 100% of all donations will be distributed to businesses and families. The fund was set up by Todd Bailey (the former director of Vermont League of Conservation Voters) and is being administered through the Vermont State Employees Credit Union.

• Vermont Baseball Tours has set up the 8/28 Fund to raise money. Donations of $20 or more get you a cool t-shirt.

• The MRV Community Fund has been reestablished to help Mad River Valley farmers who saw devastating crop losses due to the flooding.

Floodbath Irene in Vermont

Dear friends,

Disaster. It seems a thing that happens elsewhere, in a parallel world, and, indeed, disaster did not happen to us. It was not even particularly visible to us, and yet it happened all around here, just out of sight. And we didn’t know until a week after the storm, when we got our local paper. That feels bizarre to me, and yet we tried to get information….Funny how sometimes information becomes unattainable. Below is what I wrote before I had read the Randolph Herald.

The first thing you need to know is that we weren’t there. We were on Islesboro, the island we’ve been going to in Maine’s Penobscot Bay these past two dozen years. We intended to be home, to leave on Saturday the 27^th of August. “If we leave on Saturday, to be home for harvesting on Sunday, well, we can’t harvest during the storm, so we should leave on Sunday,” we decide. Sunday morning we hear that there will be twelve inches of rain in Vermont, with gusts of sixty miles an hour. With a sense of dread and wonder, we stay over Sunday as well. About noon Sunday the wind begins to blow in Ryder’s Cove and kick up some big waves. The power goes out. No rain comes down, though wind blasts us in a steady fifty-mile-an-hour force of nature for about eight straight hours. No hurricane has ever done that in my experience, that steady inexorable roar. It rocks the cottage so strongly that the page of my journal rocks beneath my pen. The roar is so loud we have to raise our voices when we speak. Air blows through the tiny holes in the walls like an electric fan on high. I feel like one of the three little pigs in our flimsy little cottage. But still, it’s rather thrilling.

We have no power and we have no phone, cell or otherwise, and we have no Internet. What is happening at home? And what is happening to Jessamine in New York? Jamaica is with us, though she leaves to go surfing with friends on Back Beach. They have a wonderful time.

I go next door in the evening and find their phone is finally working and I call Jessamine in New York City, who is fine, and then Trapper John, our peculiar neighbor and friend who is caretaking the River House. He loves disaster. “The road is closed!” he bellows into the phone. “The interstates 89 and 91 are closed too! And the river has jumped the banks! My garden is flooded and I can’t even see my cauliflower!” The surge has thrown big trees and rocks up onto the banks. The back road by his place has washed out, leaving the people on the hill stranded. The river is a torrent. He’s okay, his trailer is on high enough ground, but he can’t get to his chicken yard and his feed barrel and apparatus have all washed away. But, bless him, before the storm he yanked a bunch of vegetables from our garden and put them in the kitchen and piled our porch furniture upside-down in a sheltered corner of the porch, as well as other heroic details.

Monday morning dawns crystal clear with a “what storm?” innocence. Finish packing, clean the cottage, say our goodbyes until next year and speed on down to the ferry. Many hours later, we’re peering down at the mighty Connecticut River from the “entering Vermont” bridge, exclaiming at its size and muddiness and whirlpools and speed. We get off the recently-opened interstate at our exit and are immediately shocked. There’s a dairy farm right under the highway pylons. It’s on the fertile banks of the White River, a rocky, rapid river normally like a mountain stream gone large. This time the White is huge and oh, that’s not a huge dirt parking lot, that’s their hayfield under mud! And is that a tractor I see in the middle? And where are their cows? And look, that tilting house—there never was a house there before! And, look, our road has had mud plowed off it as though it were snow—it was under water, too. We stop so Jamaica can take a picture in the fading light. But Mark orders her not to linger, we’ve got to get home.

Many tree trunks recently sawn show where they had come down across the road. A soon-to-be familiar gray color of vegetation shows where just hours before the flood had engulfed most of the fields. Now there are new lakes. But when we get home at last, we see lovely lawns! Flowers blooming. Bridge over the Middle Branch just fine. The river had come up as much as twelve feet, and though the lawns had flooded they are not gray and the water had not quite reached the knoll on which our house is built. The lower north field, our pumpkin field, had flooded, was now drained, pumpkins look like they will survive. Sure, our basement has some pools where water had never leaked in before, and we have to drag out sodden cardboard and throw out some books and clothing we’d stored down there, but so what? The River House and its farm have passed a major weather test and we feel great about it.

We reward Trapper John with fresh-picked lobster meat and crab meat from the coast, a hand-painted card and a decent amount of cash. What he does for us, he does out of the kindness of his heart and never for money. But this time, we risk offending him. He has not acknowledged receipt of the gifts, but he’s still speaking to us. And he tells us, by the way, that no big winds blew, and the rain itself was just long and steady, not really dramatic at all. All the drama comes after.

Okay, that was my report. We had to leave again less than two days later for a long-planned rendezvous with dear friends on Cape Cod and went into a frenzy of unpacking, laundering, mowing, harvesting, canning, pickling and freezing—thank goodness Jamaica was with us to help. We got back last night, September 4^th, and our local paper was waiting for us in the mail. We found out that disaster was right here this time. This area will not be the same for years to come. Rochester, the next town west, was one of the stranded places you may have heard about that had to receive food and medicine by helicopter. All bridges to that town were blown apart. They’ve been having town meetings in a church all week to make decisions on how to live: who to help, how to allocate resources. The road to Rochester from Randolph is now just a ravaged stream bed. People in Braintree, to the northwest, have a stream and waterfalls where there main road was and have been walking in on railroad tracks all week. It’s shocking to see that torrents of water can crumble asphalt like coffee cake, as we saw in photographs of roads we have driven. Royalton, where that farm under the highway was/is, saw its bridge over the White River turn into a twisted wreck and one of their roads completely destroyed. Our friends from Brattleboro, in the southern part of the state, called us today to see how we fared. Like us, they came out fine, but their downtown had been under four feet of water.

Last evening, Sunday about 6:30PM, I found out in detail what effects such a flood has on stores. Driving back from Cape Cod, I decided to engage in a little disaster tourism on behalf of Trapper John, who had asked me to find out how the big box stores in West Lebanon, New Hampshire fared, where people in this region shop when they need to. His favorite store is J.C. Penny. The whole “Miracle Mile,” as I’ve heard it referred to, is situated right on the bank of the Connecticut River which divides New Hampshire from Vermont.

I turned off the interstate just before the bridge and ended up first at a K-Mart behind a sign that said, “PLAZA CLOSED.” The store was lit up brightly and its doors were open. Giant yellow flexible duct snaked through the doors, delivering hot air from a tractor-trailer truck in the parking lot labeled North Star Emergency Response Team. I walked up to the door and slipped inside the store. Nobody was around. The floors were clean and dry, the shelves empty for much of the vast store. In the distance I saw shelves packed with merchandise that looked clean. I walked a bit through the emptiness, then I saw a uniformed disaster worker with a hard hat walking in another aisle. I instantly ducked behind an empty end display for pantyhose, feeling like I was in a thriller movie where people with guns might be aiming for each other down the deserted aisles. I got out after that, feeling grateful that this was not an area prone to looting. All was peaceful and as in-order as could be under the circumstances.

Back in the car, I diligently found the J.C.Penny store in back of a big Shaw’s supermarket that had handmade signs on it saying, “Open for Business.” The plaza went downhill to the Penny’s. There was a trailer from a truck parked outside, labeled Belfor National Disaster Team, but no workers were here. This door, too, was wide open, but the interior was a dark hole. I walked up to the door and peered in. The floor was wet in a murky, revolting way, leading off into the darkness. I saw goods tumbling off shelves, piled high in the dimness. An indescribable stink emanated from the mess. It was dreadful. A security man showed up from the parking lot and asked me my business. I said I was writing an article about the damage and he enthusiastically gave me a little tour of the outdoors. There is no way either of us would have stepped inside that building. He showed me the place on the trees in the parking lot where the water had stood six feet high, leaving that dead gray residue all the way down that had become familiar to me. Sand was blowing through the lot, giving it an extra lonely, deserted air. We stood silently for a moment in contemplation. Then he took me round to the back and showed me a truck trailer that had been hit with a surge of mud that splashed it about nine feet up. And he pointed out the neat stack of mud under the trailer, about eight inches of packed soil, that had been plowed up from the entire lot everywhere else. He brought up climate change as the probable cause of such a strange storm path. Then he exclaimed, “Oh, we shouldn’t be here. This is toxic—there’s silica blowing here and it’s bad stuff.” I made a hasty farewell and thanks and sped on home, worried about all the small businesses, if this is what happens to the big ones. I think this drama will set the tone of life around here for a long time to come.

Love, Josie

Fourth of July in Two Flavors, or, Joie de Vivre

Dear friends,

Harvard, Massachusetts has a “good, old-fashioned Fourth” of July—homemade floats, marching bands, lots of onlookers waving lots of flags, pie-eating contests, three-legged races—the works. Many’s the parade we marched in, made floats for, and cheered on. On 4^th of July, we felt it was truly our town.

So last year, we trotted over to Randolph village, our new town center, with expectations. We were cruelly crushed. We witnessed a display of militarism and religiosity, coupled with a grotesque array of commercialism with floats from such as the local McDonald’s and car dealerships. Nothing homemade and only one horse. I was outraged and swore never to return.

This year we drove over the hills to Strafford, two valleys to the east, where we go to the Unitarian Universalist Church. Strafford is an exquisite village, with steep rolling hills decked in green fields, church steeples and gorgeous 18^th-century houses arrayed along a common. They have a clapboarded, twenty-four-pane windowed Town House with a very tall bell tower built in 1799 on top of a high, grassy hill overlooking the common. Strafford celebrates on July 2nd.

With our guests from Washington State, we arrived in time to disport ourselves on that high lawn, on a day of extraordinary sunshine and warm blue skies. We were lucky enough to have run into a couple of people we know from church, making the event feel more home-town to us. Is that the parade? we asked them. No, that’s just the high-school band under that tree, playing the same marching tune over and over again. How about that? No, that’s the fire engine just parked over there. The common stayed quiet and nobody seemed to hurry.

At last the parade came, tiny in size but not lacking in spirit. Animals were well-represented by two gorgeous matched black horses pulling a wagon with a bunch of old people from the Senior Center, and an ox team washed and polished to a fare-thee-well. Two entries were outstanding. The Lawn Chair Drill Team approached in circular formation, nine middle-aged women in wigs and grins, holding their aluminum lawn chairs aloft and cracking them smartly against each other’s to make a good noise. At a whistle, they stopped, opened their chairs and threw themselves into them in attitudes of exaggerated relaxation and abandon. They got up and at another whistle looked alert and suddenly threw their chairs with a cry of “Ho!” to their neighbor in the circle, and kept that up til it seemed right to move on. For this they received wild applause, including ours. They were having a great time.

The other delight was the kazoo team. They had a leader in majorette boots and she had a whistle. They marched toward us, maybe a dozen of them, male and female in motley plaid skirts—white and green, yellow and red, very different plaids, and t-shirts and purple triangular hats. They didn’t look Scottish in the least. At a stern whistle from their leader they stopped marching, turned 90 degrees to face us, whipped kazoos up to lips and solemnly tooted an unknowable tune on their kazoos, straight-faced. At another whistle, they turned and marched off to serenade another part of the common. We were practically rolling on the grass laughing. How they could keep straight faces and toot was beyond me. A final eccentricity was that the whole parade went around the common one more time, I guess to make up for its brevity. We did enjoy it.

Games followed and I closely watched the frog-jumping race. Some of the kids brought in teensy frogs, with names like Very Small Paul and Tiny Tim. These kids did not have the competitive spirit, since their frogs could not hope to out-hop the big ones. No-one cared, which I found so refreshing. Highlight of the games was the tug-of-war between Strafford and South Strafford. I could see that South Strafford, where our church is, was outnumbered. At the start of the tug, I overcame my outsider feelings and plunged down the hill to lend my strength to the southern village. “One-two-three—PULL!” cried my team again and again, and we actually were pulling down our foes. So we got cocky and unknowingly quit before the time was up, and Strafford pulled us all right down. It was great fun, even if I was totally anonymous. Turns out Mark and one of our guests ran down to join us, but were too late.

A variety show in the Town House took place that night with really good talent in singing classical and traditional music and guitar work. Fireworks ended the evening, with children in pajamas and all. You would think that would have been enough.

But on the 4^th itself, another gorgeous day, we still felt celebratory. We’d heard that Warren had a famous parade though they are a town as small as Strafford, so off we drove to Warren, over the Northfield mountains to the west. Oo la la. I have to give you some highlights: Disorganization, once again, with no stress. Eventually, a pickup truck loaded with a musician playing excellent jazz piano and a teenage backup band upped the tempo on the street and set us up for roistering. We saw a pyramid proceeding down the street (picture a tiny town surrounded by mountains, big gushing stream going right through it) and a gigantic King Tut head following it. “King Tut for President 2012” read a banner. A giant Alice in Wonderland tea party table followed, peopled with enormous characters from Where the Wild Things Are. An outraged housekeeper for the local ski area stalked by herself holding a trash bin and a dust mop and a sign saying “Down with Dominque/ Arnold/ and all the rest of you—I am a victim too.” She was literally taking it to the streets. Then came a group of lean, strong men in short-shorts, leather chaps of the type loggers use and lots of earrings holding signs that read, “Gay Loggers for Jesus.” They were real loggers, and very gay. We couldn’t figure out if the Jesus part was real, too. In the distance I spotted a giant cigarette puffing real smoke. “Loco Smokehouse” read the sign, and I expected bacon and ham. But no, up came an old Cadillac convertible with a bunch of cheerful old and middle-aged people in it, decked with a sign that said, “Vermont’s First Mariuana Dispensary!” Flanking them was a small troop of really old women, all bearing signs: “Grannies for Ganja!” One young man accompanying them held a sign saying, “This is Vermont. I do what I want.” The whole joyful, blatant display made me gasp and wonder where the cops were. When it was all over, the crowd moved to the area in front of their general store, which has a balcony overlooking the street and the stream. Hot people took turns in the rushing cool water and picnickers ate among the flowers on the banks. Arrayed on the balcony a jazz-rock fusion band with about a dozen competent members started cranking out irresistible dance music and we danced in the street for hours.

What’s not to love?

Love, Josie