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 27th 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 4th, 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
