While I was keeping my eye on the god-awful heat in the southwest - mostly so I could commiserate with my friend in Dallas - closer to home, Vermont was suffering from god-awful flooding.
I have always had a sweet spot for the Green Mountain State.
I was 11 or 12 when I first visited our neighbor to the north.
My family was having a "stay-cation," taking a few day trips from Worcester during the first two weeks in July, when the company where my father worked shut down and that was it for your vacation. Every other year, we decamped to Chicago to visit family. On the off year, we took day trips or, later, went to the Cape.
During our day trip phase, those day trips always involved a trip to the beach (Nantasket or Horseneck), a trip or two to a nearby lake for a swim and an ice cream, and a day jaunt to some place of historic interest within a few hours drive from Worcester. One year, the place of historic interest was Bennington, VT.
Bennington was the site of a Revolutionary War battle, and home to a museum that had a lot of Grandma Moses' art.
Mostly what I remember about the day is just the lovely Vermont countryside. Hills and mountains. Dairy farms with all those black and white cows munching all that green Vermont grass. Winding roads. Shallow rock strewn rivers with water rushing along right next to the winding road. Pokey little towns with the requisite white clapboard church. (I also remember my father trying to keep up with the baseball All Star game, then a day game, by fiddling around with our car's AM radio.)
Anyway, I loved Vermont. And I was primed for it.
All those Currier and Ives scenes. All that Norman Rockwell. All those cornball movies - as black and white as the Vermont Holsteins - that I watched on Boston Movietime, movies that showed Vermont in all its bucolic glory: Dark Victory. Now Voyager. White Christmas.
Our brand of maple syrup? Vermont Maid, of course!
During college, I was an occasional skier. So, Vermont.
Then I met my husband, a Vermont boy.
Jim hated his native state and couldn't beat a fast enough path out. He went to college at Rutgers, grad school at NYU and Harvard, and never looked back. Forget Vermont boy. Jim became a city boy. His favorite place on earth was New York City, as far a cry as you can get from his hometown of Bellows Falls, the ugly, nothing-quaint-about-it town where Jim grew up.
Jim's father died when he was a little boy, and he had little to do with his mother. In all the time I knew Jim - and his mother was still alive for 25 of those years - I think we visited Grace maybe four or five times. (Jim was very close to an aunt and uncle who lived in Western Mass, and we visited them regularly. I considered them my in laws.)
We did a bit of Vermont tourism around our rare visits to Bellows Falls. We spent a few days in Burlington. A weekend on Stratton Mountain. A few days in the scenic AF town of Grafton.
But Jim couldn't understand why anyone would want anything to do with Vermont. He'd grown up poor, in a troubled family, in a hard little town. He wanted out, and got it.
I, on the other hand, never lost my affection for Vermont, and I've made a few trips there in the last few years.
In my most recent trip, my sister Trish and I spent a couple of days in Burlington, in a hotel overlooking Lake Champlain, which is gorgeous. Burlington also has excellent restaurants and nice sops. But it's a bit crunchy-granola (think Bernie Sanders). Still, I enjoyed it, and could imagine myself living there.
We then wended our way to the capital of Montpelier. There's not much to do there, that's for sure. But we stayed in a very nice ye olde inn, with a very nice restaurant, and used the town to explore the environs. (We even took a day trip to the Vermont Country Store, where we were disappointed at how few muumuus they had on offer.)
Of course, driving the back roads of Vermont, alongside all those shallow rock strewn rivers with water rushing along right next to the winding road, I certainly realized that, while Vermont has a ton of lovely scenery, and plenty of those charming towns with the white clapboard Congo or UU churches, there's a lot of Vermont that's pretty nasty. More Deliverance than Cascade, the lush Vermont mental health resort where Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) got all better in Now Voyager. Dilapidated porches. Beat up trucks with gun racks. Trump flags.
This was the Vermont that Jim couldn't wait to abandon. And I can't say that I can much blame him.
Still, I do continue to harbor a mostly sentimental appreciation for Vermont and its beauty. (And, despite its rural Trump spots, its overall lefty politics.) So I was devastated to see the damage the recent floods caused.
Forgot those burbling brooks of fond memory. Here were gushing rivers overflowing their banks and taking down everything in their path.
Downtown Montpelier, with all its little one-off shops and restaurants - it's the only state capital that doesn't have a McDonald's - was totally flooded. Fortunately, the dam outside of town held, so the town wasn't totally destroyed. But it was heartbreaking to watch the bookshop owners, the restauranters who'd just reno'd their places, digging out from the muck. Many didn't have flood insurance. Sure, they'd been bothered by a hurricane every once in a while, but this was Vermont
Vermont, the state that Pew Research had just declared the state least at risk of damage from climate change. (Number two was New Hampshire; number three was Massachusetts. Maine was the only New England state that didn't place in the least-risky Top Ten. Texas placed 44; Arizona was 37. No surprise that Florida is the state that's viewed as most at risk.)
This Pew study just came out in late May, and one of the factors they considered was "inland flooding." (The others were heat, drought, wildfires, and coastal flooding.)
Wonder how those rankings will change if and when the study is revisited.
Meanwhile, Vermont is still bailing out from waterworld.
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