OF TREES, MUSIC, AND DEBRIS

The Vergennes Opera House in our town was built as a theater and community center in 1897.  Whether there was ever an opera staged there is doubtful, given that the official history of the building cites all kinds of functions except opera.  Notably, it was the first place moving pictures were shown in Addison county.  It must have grown shabby over the years, because by the early 1970's the theater was shuttered.  It wasn't until 25 years later that community efforts brought about restoration and a new beginning, the opening celebrated with a performance by the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.  I'm mentioning this because a performance of the VSO brought us there again two weeks ago, and another performance by the Champlain Philharmonic had us there again the following weekend.  In such a relatively small space a full orchestra can fill every part of your body with music.  You are inside the music.  The Champlain orchestra had a smaller audience than the VSO and played not on the stage, but on the floor which meant, for example, the soloist in the Saint-Saens cello concerto was five or so feet from me.  I could watch her fingering, see every gesture.  And Beethoven’s Fifth was overwhelming.  It was glorious.

We have also been hearing a sort of music (or is cacophony a better word?) of geese.  Everyone hears geese in the fall, but this is really a lot of geese.  Besides being located on a major sightseeing bicycle route, we’re on a major snow goose and Canada goose migration route.  Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area near us and near Champlain has a viewing area for observing the migration.  Every day we hear the distant honking of hundreds of geese in the western sky, in their rough formations like sloppily lined-up bomber squadrons.  This afternoon, confusingly, several groups looked like they were heading south while several other groups were flying north. But I think they must only have been making a wide sweeping loop before setting their GPS to S.

The flames of fall color have come to the Adirondack mountains across the lake.  Here too, the colors are evident on the higher slopes and some low-lying hollows where the cold sits at night.  Right around the house there is more color than there was yesterday, and, it seems, more this afternoon than this morning.  According to an article in the Burlington Free Press foliage colors are about a week late this year.  There is no hard evidence that this is due to climate change, although, like many changes, it certainly could be.  We have had some heavy frosts (frosts that killed only the basil; not the eggplants or raspberries) but the days have become warm again.  I know this is temporary.

Those eggplants (& tomatoes) just keep coming.

Rain is expected again soon.  Eric the bread maker and rice farmer I wrote about during the summer had been planning on a wet start to the season, then a dry time for picking.  (I gathered that in some areas where this rice is grown the fields are drained at harvest time.)  Heavy rain at the end of the season in September wet his rice field and so he wasn’t able to harvest dry as expected; he had to pick the rice from a wet field and is now waiting for it to dry.

Repair of Route 125 near Hancock where much of the road washed away.

Which brings me to the rivers.  Not all rivers, of course as Otter Creek is unchanged, and the New Haven River doesn’t look noticeably different in most places.  It takes a bit of driving around to see the impact of Hurricane Irene.  Trips to Boston, Manchester, and Brattleboro brought us through hard-hit towns like Hancock, Rochester, Bethel, and Newfane.  Roads have been reopened and most bridges–though not all–have been repaired.  What remains are riverbanks piled up to ten feet high with debris, piles of gravel where there shouldn’t be gravel, the occasional house undermined by water sitting abandoned, and fields covered by silt.  Because of heavy economic pressure to repair roads, construction equipment has been placed in streams to mine the streambed for rocks, turning many 

Hastily replaced road and bridge in Jamaica.

roadside streams into unnatural rock-lined channels.  A walk along the Mad River gave us a closer look and a sense of the force of the water, as well as wonder at how all this crazy stuff­–hay bales, tree branches, lumber, and more is ever going to be cleaned up.  The bridge in the southern Vermont town of Jamaica now spans masses of piled up stones instead of the placid stream it once covered.  The giveaway of flood damage is man-made piles of dirt, stones, tree branches, miscellaneous lumber, and car tires.

Shoreline of the Mad River

Along some streams the damage is less obvious (no washed away road or house), but still severe.  We walked along the Mad River not long ago and it's here, close to the river, where you can see the power of the water.  Bushes look as if they have been run over by trucks, there are pieces of hay bales in trees, and the plastic some farmers use to wrap their bales hangs like toilet paper from tree limbs. The tangle of branches and stray lumber is over four feet high.