WATER

I was going to write of other things, but it’s not possible to write about Vermont this week without mentioning water.  A lot of water in a short time poured on us by tropical storm Irene, nine inches in some places.  Since last Sunday, the day of the storm, we have been learning about the damage throughout the state. Each day brought more news of destruction.  It was incongruous, because our early awareness was only of our pond filled to overflowing, and Otter Creek higher and more fast-moving than it had been in the spring rains.  The waterfalls in Vergennes and Middlebury were milk chocolate brown and sounded thunderous.  But we were only sightseers. 

The falls at Middlebury, the day after Irene

An email went out a few days later from the local USDA office asking farmers in this county (Addison) to report crop damage caused by flooding.  So there must be more crop flooding in low-lying areas than we have noticed.  (I wonder how Erik, the rice farmer, fared.  See "Bread.") Bill, living up-mountain in Starksboro off route 17, has had to adjust his commute because of a partial road closure.  A road to nearby Sugarbush is closed.  Harry’s vet mentioned today that the trail to Buck Mountain behind us has some tree damage.  My sunflowers were destroyed.  This is minor, my sunflowers trivial, compared with what happened elsewhere. 

Three covered bridges were lost.  Still, I read that the flood of November 3, 1927 was much worse.  Two hundred covered bridges were lost (out of a total of 1,450 bridges).  Not surprisingly in those times people were happy to replace them with steel.  Wood=old.  Steel=new.  Today there are fewer than 100 covered bridges.  The Pulp Mill bridge in Middlebury, built in 1820 and mightily restored in 1984 and 2002, an unusual double or two-lane bridge, easily survived.  We often cross it when we take Morgan Horse Farm Road home.  It’s one of five covered bridges in this county.  In the many summers I spent in Vermont as a child I never quite worked out exactly why the bridges were covered.  It’s not that I didn’t ask.  But I got answers like “to keep the snow off the bridge,” or “to make it easier to cross in bad weather,” or, more dismissively, “it was the way they built them then.”  Not quite.  They were covered to protect the those elegant massive wooden trusses from the elements.

A week ago we stumbled into a photography exhibit called “Visions of Place: The Photography of John Miller, Peter Miller, and Richard Brown” at the Middlebury Folk Center that brought home a powerful sense of the changes in Vermont culture of more recent times.  Not so long ago, when covered bridges had long been antiques, in the 1960’s, the 1970’s, even the 1990’s, more people farmed, and more people lived more simply than we do now.  I shouldn’t romanticize this because it was a harder life in many physical ways.  It reminded me of a long time ago when I and my family were spending the summer, as usual, in Townshend, Vermont. I must have been about eight years old or so, when one day I went with my mother to a market in Newfane, Vermont where a new butcher had begun work.  I remember standing there listening to him telling my mother his story:  how he and his wife had moved here earlier that year from New York City (before route 91 was built, and New York City was worlds away!), and how harsh their first winter was, and how his frightened wife wept every night for the loss of friends, familiar things, familiar food, and the vibrancy and comfort of city life.  Such contrast:  we are going to Boston for two days next week, just to see a play.  Our friends are all on the internet.

In the 1927 flood eight inches of rain fell in a 36-hour period.  Eighty-five people died in Vermont and 9,000 were homeless.

The trusses of the Pulp Mill bridge