Irene

"It's good to have a friend with you when you're picking through the trees for your possessions."

That's what my friend Corey said as we worked our way through the debris and the mud along the river, searching for familiar items, the physical evidence of his life. We found a snow tire in a tree. A storage trunk under a tangle of branches. Inside the trunk, the Hendrickson Family Genealogy. We found prints of his photographs, barely visible under mud. A jacket. Some books. A table upside down 50 feet from the storage unit where it once lived.

Corey had just come home from a photo shoot in France. Those of us here in Vermont had been processing the statewide floods for four days already, but it was all new to him. On that first day he came home to see his life strewn about in open air, disassembled and exposed. Because it was new, it was raw and a bit hopeless. Each thing we found, he told me to leave. "It's done," he said, "it's ruined." But I'd been shoveling mud for a few days already. Hauling soggy cases of wine bottles out of the basement of Flatbread, and pulling tools out of the silt in the fields of Small Step Farm. I'd seen some of the unlikely transformations—objects cleaned off and looking relatively normal again. I made him keep some things. And I stashed some additional things in my truck that he had already said goodbye to. I've been brushing dried mud off of his photographs in my basement for days.

The foot-thick slab of cement that was the floor of his storage unit dropped out. The earth beneath it was scoured away and carried downstream. 

We stood in the mud and looked up at the few pieces of furniture that remained. At our feet, his books mingled with the books of the neighboring storage unit. While Corey climbed up into the building, ten feet or more above my head, I looked down. One book was open at my feet; it was open to Van Gogh's Starry Night painting, the name of the café where Sam and I had our first date. I thought about that: physical things ruined, swept away, but people—what's important—still in tact. I mourned the loss of Corey's possessions, but he had the right point of view: "nobody died." Some people did actually die, but fortunately none of our neighbors, no one from our small community. I'm sick for those who did lose someone.

Bushwhacking along the river, unimaginably far from where things were stored, we found things in unimaginable places. Abe Lincoln's face looked up at me from a book jacket. Rachel Carson from another one, leaning against a log with the Winooski River sliding along lazily behind her. "Such a placid thing," Corey said, "And yet, so angry." Abe Lincoln. Rachel Carson. What would they say? Abe would be proud of communities pulling together. Rachel might wag a finger at us; "We've been telling you this would happen," she might say, on behalf of scientists everywhere. So much of this weather the fault of our over-consumption, our waste, our bad habits.

Under some plywood, wedged in the silt, I found a handwritten letter, in beautiful script, addressed to "Dear Mom," that's as far as I could bear to read. Further downstream, near where Corey looked down and said, "Hey, there's a picture of me," I found Eric Carle's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear half buried in mud. Quinn's first birthday is this week. I bought her a Brown Bear sleeping bag, with her name embroidered on it. I'm waiting for it to arrive in the mail. I turned the pages and started to cry.

I had already been crying. Standing in the wreckage beneath Corey's storage space, an older man stopped on his way back to his car. "Have you been able to find much?" he asked. Corey told him most things were ruined, or gone. He told us about his own experience cleaning things out, trying to find things. "The other day my wife and I were getting ready to give up," he said. "I found this trash bag in the mud and held it up. My wife said she didn't know what it was. Told me I should just put it down. Then she said, 'Well, maybe we should just see what's in there.' So, I opened it up. We didn't recognize anything at first, but then I reached in and pulled something out. It was her wedding dress. Forty-three years of marriage and there was her wedding dress. Then, underneath it, we found her mother's wedding dress too."

I had to walk away as I burst into tears.

Corey made jokes because that's what he does, but I know it was hard for him. He thanked me a dozen times for helping him. Every time he did, I thought of what he said after I wrote my post about my ten-year anniversary with Sam. "I've known you longer," he said. And he has. Corey and I met when I was in grad school and he was still in college. We both rented condos at Bolton Valley Ski Resort, on top of a mountain, up against the Green Mountain ridge. Neither of us was a fully formed human at that time, but somehow we've remained friends. Really he's like a brother…he picks on me and I boss him around; it's a wonderful relationship.

After we salvaged all we could salvage, we drove into downtown Waterbury to see if the grocery store was open so we could buy a bottle of wine to bring home. Sam had picked up pizzas and was waiting for us, along with his mom, Alden, who had come up to help babysit Quinn while we taught classes and shoveled mud in any free time we could find. Corey and I were depressed when we left the storage unit, but we were stunned when we saw Main Street in Waterbury. At the end of every single driveway was a mountain of debris--piles and piles of wasted homes and lost memories. It looked like a war zone.

It did not look like the place where we live. Anyone who lives in Vermont will tell you that living here is a singularly wonderful experience. It is quiet. It is beautiful. Everyone in a small community is a neighbor. People pull you out of ditches. They return your wallet. They give you a hug when you eat in their restaurant…There are so many faces in this tragedy, faces we see every day.

American Flatbread at Lareau Farm

The Little League Fields

Small Step Farm

Behind Bridge Street

On Sunday, when Irene hit, I had just come home from Maine. My friend Julie turned forty and had a party. I spent 24 hours with my three best friends…they are all forty, and we are now (finally) all moms. We have been friends for twenty-two years, through deaths and marriages and births and all kinds of storms. Driving home I was eager to write about them…about how important they are to me, how incredible it is to have so much shared history. Driving into the hurricane with Kim, I was certain there was no one I'd rather be driving with…she brings out my adventurous spirit, my courage, my sense of humor in the face of absurdity and chaos. But once I got home, the storm was becoming real and all of my time in the week since has been spent dealing with its aftermath.

By Sunday afternoon when our bridge washed out, again, I thought our disaster was the disaster. We lost power and had no access to the internet. It wasn't until midday Monday when I drove into Waitsfield to get more milk for Quinn that I started to realize that things were much worse down below in the valley. That morning there was no way to get from one side of the Mad River to the other…the bridges were all impassable. Bridge Street, where the covered bridge is, was closed off. Mud and gravel left patterns of flowing water in fields and yards. Whole sections of roads were simply gone. I went to my neighbor's house to use her internet (Stephanie's is wind-powered), and it all started to sink in.

All week I've been struggling to concentrate on anything but the stories and the cleanup effort. I've been continuously scanning the online bulletin boards for updates, watching countless videos of the rivers rising, houses crumpling, roads disappearing. I watched one video of a man on horseback carefully traversing a river (on top of a road), to bring medical supplies to one of the many towns that was cut off on all sides. I've watched National Guard helicopters passing overhead at all hours of the day, and brought baby clothes and my own clothes to a Flood Drive for families that have lost everything…There are families that have lost everything. It is hard to feel that anything else is important…anything other than putting my boots back on and going back to shovel more mud.

And it will be hard in the years ahead not to associate the milestone of Quinn's first birthday with the Flood of 2011. It has been a perspective-changing experience, but some of it has been uplifting...people helping other people, new friendships formed working side-by-side in dire circumstances...the joy of dancing in the street last night with Quinn on my shoulders as everyone came together to share food and drink and music, and the experience of this challenging moment together.