Wreckage, Human & Otherwise.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

There’s no one around the edges of town on Friday evening, save for a stranger in a brand-new leather jacket. He walks ahead of me.

Two weeks past the July flood, there’s stand-out heroes, and a lot of folks who stepped up in ways that are amazing, admirable, kind of jaw-dropping, honestly. But the flood unearthed all that pandemic misery, and so much more that we’d stuffed down, too. Similar — and yet, different, too. Piece by piece, my state is cleaning, hammering lives back together.

A young fox hurries along the jagged riverbank where lawn now meets abyss. The creature pauses, listens. I’m no threat, me with my hands sunk in my pockets, leaning back on my heels. The fox trots along.

The evening threatens more thunderstorms. I keep thinking of childbirth labor, how those waves of contractions bore me along mightily. Childbirth was the first time I’d understood so inherently that I’m as much a part of the universe as famed Helen of Troy, as that stranger walking ahead of me and disappearing around a broken-down scrapheap of a motel, as you reader, and my dear cats pawing a dropped ball of red yarn. Rain and more rain. Rising rivers. Even as the rain began pelting, I stood there, awestruck.

After the Floods, the Human Conundrum.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments
View from the back steps…

This week, I’m driving around a back road, far over the left-hand side, eyeing how a third of the road no longer exists. I’m far off the beaten path, so I don’t hesitate to stop, turn off the Subaru engine, and get out. The road, indeed, has washed elsewhere. The air is thick, sultry in a July way, but suffused with the wildfire smoke we’ve been breathing all summer.

I drive a little further and then drift into a driveway. I know the road drops steeply, and I’ve no intention of heading there. The homeowner is outside, and we talk for a bit, kicking around his view and his calm acceptance of the road’s condition. He asks where all the gravel to repair these roads comes from.

I’m stuck on his thought after this: it’s the human endeavor, the human conundrum. We’re always moving stuff from here to there: in my realm, moving plants from garden to pot, laundry from clothesline to drawers, and then the far larger realm — trees to boards to houses, gravel from pits in the earth to roads. And then the roads wash out.

At home, later that night, I’m still moving things, wool from sheep, to my knitting needles.

Joyous Interlude.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

I don’t often post pictures of myself (or family anymore) but here’s a shot of myself and my brother at his brewery in Conway, New Hampshire. For this record, yes, I am this short (and my brother isn’t especially tall, either). In the midst of so much — floods, rains, wildfire smoke, the endless varieties of chaos that track all of us — I’m always happy to head out on a restorative hike.

That evening, we raced ahead of yet more thunderstorms to get to brother’s house, my daughter driving, me in the passenger seat prattling on about whatever, whatever. But isn’t that the way of family? Thank goodness for joyful moments….

“Be joyful because it is humanly possible.” 

— Wendell Berry

Post-Flood, More Rain.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Nearly a week into Vermont’s floods, I’m surely not the only one in this town awake at night, listening to rain through my open windows. Lush, lush, our world is. Sunday, I trim the rose bushes that thornily cover a window, then discover moss creeping towards the house. I snip and scrape, then dash inside beneath a sudden downpour.

Sunday, I walk along the Lamoille riverbanks, silty and sandy where the river rose far above its usual path. Red metal lies in twisted sheets, remnants I’m guessing from the motel that tumbled into the river. Twisted towels and clothing, tires, a stepladder are jammed into tree trunks and roots. Cassette tapes of bible stories lie in a puddle, oddly more or less intact. Down the river, smoke churns into the sky where a flooded sawmill has burned debris for days.

There’s an odd kind of quiet hovering around here. What I’ve witnessed is shock and disbelief, a heady kind of euphoria to fix and repair, and now a sodden dullness, the earth as drenched as I’ve ever seen it. My pink poppies have blackened before they’ve bloomed.

We keep on, of course. Our beloved capital city, Montpelier, hoes and bleaches. Word goes around and around about passable and impassable roads, who needs helps, who’s yet marooned by great rifts in the earth.

In the late afternoon, I buy poppyseeds at the co-op and pay off my tab. The staff is out-of-sorts there, too, grousing about a broken cooler and the mud we’re all tracking in. Rain falls, quits, but the day doesn’t cool. I bake a cake and listen to someone on VPR talk about the Buddha. In the evening, that fat woodchuck darts among my gardens. A flock of starlings scatter on the lawn. Robins and rain. The daylilies are brilliant, the flowers poet David Budbill called coarse and beautiful.

As I said, it’s coarse and ordinary and it’s beautiful because
it’s ordinary. A plant gone wild and therefore become
rugged, indestructible, indomitable, in short: tough, resilient,
like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive.

— David Budbill

Putting the World Back Together, Again.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

By Thursday, I’ve lost track of days. A kind man stops by the town office with plates of cookies, still warm from the oven. I’ve been up for hours and hours by then, some working, some staring out the window at the dawn pushing up over the mountain, a spill of pink that widens into gold.

I haven’t been flooded. I know no one who’s injured. Yet, all around, the torn-up world, the folks who are seeking dry shelter, clean clothing, the next meal. The roads are our arteries, and slowly, gravel load by excavator sweep, the world is being put back together.

Thunderstorms and flash floods are in the forecast. Through all this, there’s the subtle underlying sense of how quickly the world turns.

Stores warn of early closings. We’re in this place I recognize immediately, almost giddy, slightly horrified, where people let down their guard, laugh at things that maybe aren’t that funny. Slowly, wrapping order around chaos.

“Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality – the source of all possible existence.”

— Mircea Eliade

Water, Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

These days, I’m working in a town clerk’s office, Greensboro, Vermont, population approximately 827. With summer folks, the population swells to three times.

Yesterday, the phone rang all day. We propped the door open, and people wandered in with questions.

Can I get to Craftsbury? Which roads are out? I have a dump truck; want me to haul fill? I’ve lost everything; do you have extra clothes, shoes, blankets?

Selectboard members set up a triage system to patch roads where anyone was stuck. Farm roads were prioritized for milk trucks. All day long, Vermont Public Radio updated us. Montpelier, beloved capital city, is underwater, threatened by a dam where waters rose precipitously.

Late afternoon, the selectboard chair rummaged for leftover potato chips from the July 4th celebration. By then, the sun had emerged. The July day was hot, redolent with blooming roses. I had my own petty worries: my car was low on gas, and I’ve kicked a front brake repair too far down the road, and I’ll need to find a mechanic stat, and who I’ll find isn’t yet clear to me. Later, I’ll call my brother and talk about my parents while weeding my neglected garden. For some time, though, we stood in the parking lot, breathing in sunlight, waiting for a contractor to look at one of the town’s paved roads that’s severed in multiple places, the asphalt broken into multiple chunks. When could he get here with an excavator and put that back together?

A friend drove up and told us about mutual friends in a nearby town. They had been out in the stormy night. Travelers on I-89 had been diverted off the interstate and wound up driving through the backroads of a rural town they didn’t know. By flashlight and headlamp, in a driving rain, water roaring down hillsides, the residents directed the strangers to a safe haven, where they weathered the night.