resilience

The awful rowing towards God.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments
Hardwick, Vermont

My buddy Ben Hewitt writes about waking from a deep sleep where he’s lying in the back of a pickup driven by a woman with bejeweled fingers — but I wake from a dream where I reach under the bed for a bowl of brown rice and curried onions, strings of sautéed chard, diced tomatoes. Who dreams of that? But perhaps I’m dreaming of keeping cake beneath the bed from an old article my friend Dave showed me…. The cat sits in the screened window. Rain falls hard.

In the buttery dawn, my youngest and I walk around town, coffee cup in my hand. The river and brooks have taken over Hardwick again. A man sits on his porch, water a swirl around his house, and I sense he’s been sitting there all night. A year ago, to this day, the town broke apart in a flood.

Again, the river roars, mud-dark, boulders banging. Fall into that, and you’ll drown. The town reeks of clay and rot, the earth’s innards that are better off left unturned.

I’m working these days for a small nearby town Selectboard. This early morning there’s the stream of road crew and public, of the orchardist hired for last year’s FEMA reimbursement — which we’ve not yet received — who arrives in his orange vest. The phone rings and rings. The Selectboard members arrive with donuts and freshly made banana bread and a cheerful Irish Setter. The woman who’s just joined this limping Board (who, really, in their right mind would join a Selectboard these churned-up days?), explains in her calm way precisely her motivation. She’s neither young nor naive and says just simply that the world is falling apart; but this Vermont town doesn’t need to follow that course. In this strangely remarkable day of the world we know and broken badly again, I am caught in an upswell of her plain-spoken and can-do words, her confidence as she sets down that waxed-paper-wrapped sweet loaf. I am aligned. The alternative is narcissism or nihilism or simply foolishness, and I have been waiting for her words.

In this same unexpected morning, I sit with the Selectboard as the rain falls again. They agree on a mending plan which relies on that wing and a prayer of federal money. The town, well-off a year ago, is now running on debt.

In my own one-woman world, standing in the dark against my house that rainy night and listening to the river’s roar increase and gain, I especially miss the shelter I once had in a marriage when the world’s chaos smacks into my face, as happens more and more these days. But fiercely pounding waters are never one single thing; even the next morning, bleary-eyed and soaked, I can’t help but marvel at the creamy orbs of blooming hydrangeas, the gold rudbeckia. Drinking my bitter coffee, I think of Anne Sexton’s poem “The Awful Rowing Towards God.” I once chose to dig my oars into turbulent waters and pull myself and my daughters to dry land. Now my youngest, shimmering with the pollen of young womanhood, drives, her eyes wary over the dirty water.

Oh us, all of us, in our little boats, our dinky cars and pickups, our great complicated lives. These mud-choked whirlpools, the fallen trunks smashing into rubble, the rushing waters that have not yet stilled. Which way will we row? Remarkable, all of it, remarkable.

… I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it…

— Anne Sexton

FEMA Folks and Us.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last week, when the FEMA folks make their initial appearance in our town office, I step out and chat with a woman from Georgia. I intend to skip the meeting that’s about to transpire, but I’m interested to hear what these people are seeing around my state and how this whole FEMA thing works anyway. My new acquaintance tells me immediately that she’s exhausted. They’ve visited multiple towns, driving through rural Vermont.

She’s quite concerned about the impending cold, and I assure her that snow is (probably) not going to appear in October, almost certainly not accumulate. The FEMA folks are apparently working on the state’s natural deadline, putting as much of the state back together before the snow sets in.

By the time she heads up to the meeting about the FEMA portal and so much talk about culverts and more culverts, we’ve swapped stories about working and parenting and she’s shared her love of Atlanta.

On her way out, she leans in my door and says goodbye. It’s a moment: the handful of Vermonters and a few FEMA people — politeness all around — brought together by enormously complex events. A selectboard member says, We’re hoping for a nice fall so you can see Vermont at its best…

Last evening, I’m talking to my parents on the phone, standing on my porch and leaning against my house’s corner board, looking across the little valley that holds the town where I live, when I realize the world around me is pink. The light isn’t the streaming crimson of sunset. A soft pinkness suffuses our world: sky, valley, village, right down to my bare toes. September that feels like August, but is still definitely September. That’s where we are.

Ray McNeill.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

A few years back, I was walking into Montpelier’s co-op when a man walking out said, ‘Hey, you used to come in my bar all the time.’ He was Ray McNeill, a brewer and musician. In the 1980s and ’90s when I lived in Brattleboro, I spent many evenings at Three Dollar Dewey’s, the bar Ray and his wife owned, and then at McNeill’s when the brewery opened. This weekend, McNeill’s Brewery in Brattleboro burned. Ray McNeill perished in the total loss fire.

I’m not at all a fan of Facebook, but I’m included the passage below from Ray’s daughter Eve Nyrhinen. A passionate man, with a good heart, Ray is deeply mourned. And while, sadly, each tragedy is unique, this eloquent piece is reminder that decency and kindness endure.

I’m Ray’s daughter. I’d like to share some details and dispel some rumors about Ray Mcneill‘s death. He was told in June that due to the structural instability of the building, the fire department would not be able to send a crew in there safely if a fire were to break out. There hadn’t been a fire in his 30-some years there, and he had an extensive sprinkler system, so he chose to stay. Anyone who loved him knew that you couldn’t tell that man what to do.

He knew he couldn’t open the bar this winter, and he didn’t need to be there for construction (in fact, he was told the renovations would be easier if he moved out) so he booked a tiny beach house in Baja, and planned to drive out here to Reno to spend some time with his grandkids and then drive on to there. He drained the sprinkler system so the pipes wouldn’t freeze while he was gone. He had “a few more errands” to do, and there were storms rolling into the Rockies and around Reno this weekend, so he stayed a few extra days. It never occurred to anyone that it was unsafe for him to stay in his apartment after the sprinkler system had been drained.

The fire likely started from an old multi-port electrical outlet behind his TV, next to stacks of magazines. He was probably asleep when it happened, as he’d told several people he was going to bed shortly before. From the scene, it looks like he awoke to an apartment full of smoke and fire, and between the smoke and carbon monoxide he only made it to the top of the stairs before he collapsed. My understanding is that smoke and carbon monoxide poisoning makes a person giddy, happy, and unafraid in their last few moments, and I’d like to think that his death was like this, as peaceful as a death by fire could be. His body was not burned, and he was not trapped. It took at least 90 minutes for the fire department to break through the right part of the roof to sight him, and at that point they were certain he was dead. Due to concerns that the recently-burned and completely-soaked wood floor might collapse, they couldn’t risk a firefighter’s life to check. They even brought in an engineer to try to emergently assess the situation, and were told they needed to wait for a team to come in the morning before broaching the scene.

I was an EMT in college, and the one cardinal, inviolable rule was that you do not proceed onto a scene until it is cleared for safety. You cannot risk losing a second life. My heart goes out to the firefighter who had to climb back down that ladder and tell the crowd they’d done everything they could. As a doctor, I remember the names and families of every patient I have failed to save. Each one was followed by months where I tortured myself with alternate scenarios where they might have lived. The truth is, we do our very best with the information we have at the time. They didn’t know he was up there – none of us knew for sure, and there was some confusion at the scene about whether he was in Mexico already. Had they known, they still would have had to proceed in the same manner. I promise you no one in that fire station wanted my father to die. There is something called Second Victim Syndrome, which describes the way a doctor tortures themselves after the death of a patient they failed to save. I’m sure firefighters experience it too. I hope they are not haunting themselves with the what-ifs. Please extend your love and support to the Brattleboro Fire Department. They followed protocol. They made decisions that might have prevented losing a second young hero’s life.

The building was torn down immediately because it was a risk to the community. What if another fire had broken out? What if people had ventured in? Yes, they drove an excavator onto the main floor to demolish it, demonstrating that the foundation was sound enough for that, but their real concerns were the top floor and roof, damaged by fire.

And no, the fire department did not put things from the bar out on the sidewalk for anyone to take. They entrusted what could be saved to a few individuals, with my blessing, and those things are being stored until my sibling and I can go through them.

Our community is in mourning. I’ve heard rumors that my dad committed suicide, setting the fire because he knew the fire department wouldn’t go up there. I’ve heard outrage that the fire department didn’t “save him.” I’ve heard conspiracy theories about how they tore down the building to cover up their mistakes. These sensational fantasies and lies are not helpful to a small town dealing with a large tragedy. Please have some grace for everyone involved and the difficult decisions they had to make, with limited time, limited information, and high stakes. Please believe that everyone did their best, and extend your support to *everyone* involved. I know my dad would have.

Cardinals — crimson and soft brown

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Two cardinals perch in our mock orange bush, a brilliant flash of feather and beak, meeting and mating, much to the joy of our cats, who want to eat these these little creatures.

Around our Vermont house is yet an oasis of snow and ice, not a single sign of grass yet apparent. In the front yard, the rhododendron emerges stubbornly. I’m here! I’m here!

On this early morning that promises warmth, lines from poet Marie Howe.


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days…

We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you. 

— Marie Howe, from “What The Living Do”