The View From Chaos Turnpike

In the farther reaches of my town of Cavendish, in southeastern Vermont, is a byway—you can hardly call it a road—charismatically named Chaos Turnpike. Right now, it is washed out by the storm that just hit New England. Because other, more traveled dirt roads in the district are also washed out, a section of the town’s inhabitants is currently cut off.

Not a few rural New Englanders face the same situation. In fact, some of the more “metropolitan” folk have fared far worse: Within a 20-mile circumference of where I live, houses and cars have been entirely inundated in the medium-size towns of Ludlow, Weston, and Londonderry.

Cavendish—best-known for Phineas Gage, a railway worker who survived an extraordinary brain injury here in 1848, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who moved here as an exiled dissident Soviet writer in 1977—has endured several such incidents. Heavy rains over the Green Mountains run eastward toward the Connecticut Valley, and Cavendish is in the way. Chaos Turnpike, in my imperfect following of local lore as a relative newcomer, was bulldozed by the National Guard during the floods of 1973 to create a new passage to the same homesteads that are again stranded now. I like to think that its naming involved a certain dry Vermonter wit, but I have no idea.

[Read: Boston is losing snow wicked fast]

That year, 1973, was when my New York–emigrant in-laws bought the house up a dirt road where my wife and I now live. She recalls visiting her parents then, after the deluge, and driving her VW Beetle across the Guardsmen’s precarious, improvised wooden bridge to get over the usually mild trickle of a brook that had been transformed into a torrent. Yesterday afternoon, it was a torrent once again, cresting the crossroad and threatening to wash out the culvert—as it had done in 2011 during Storm Irene.

A few years ago, I attended a local amateur-dramatics production staged in the gorgeous barn of Glimmerstone, the village’s mansion of faced local stone and wooden gingerbread trim that once belonged to the mill owner. The play was, it must be said, of mainly documentary interest—recalling the human drama of the 1927 Great Flood. These disasters are promised as once-in-a-century events. Yet here we are: 1927, 1973, 2011, 2023 … which suggests a progression, not a random 100-year distribution.

Everyone here knows this. On Monday, that same mill building on the river—a rare prosperous postindustrial survivor—was evacuated because of rising water and imminent flooding. Whatever one’s personal politics, there’s no climate denial here. The winters are warmer; the summers are wetter and more humid. The median age of Vermonters is among the highest in the U.S. Yes, humans are unreliable witnesses to incremental change, but this change is not all that gradual—and living memory tells people everything they need to know.

Today, UTVs—utility task vehicles: ugly bugs, smaller than cars, with all-wheel drive, raised suspension, and smelly emissions—were racing around our roads. I don’t love them as recreational vehicles, but right now I can see their usefulness. The one belonging to my local fire department took off yesterday morning with a couple of chain saws and some forestry implements, followed by our assistant chief in his own tractor with a backhoe, to try to reopen Chaos Turnpike. You cannot but admire the Yankee can-do spirit: Who needs the state or federal government when you have the problem in front of you and the tools in your hands? But Chaos Turnpike may need the National Guard after all.

Or the Army Corps of Engineers. Yesterday, our governor, Phil Scott, declared the state’s predicament “historic and catastrophic.” And he warned us that the crisis is “nowhere near over.” I’ll say. He meant, of course, that the ground is saturated and more rain is on the way. But on Monday I watched as the Black River in full spate washed at the expensively repaired blacktop of Route 131. Before the whole roadway eastward along the river to the aptly named Downers junction was resurfaced this past year, you could still identify the fresh sections—hundreds of feet long—that had been entirely relaid after the dire damage of Irene.

[John Hendrickson: Boiling the ocean]

Vermont is a beautiful state; that’s why people come to visit. A few weeks ago, the rest stops on Route 131 were occupied by the pickup trucks of fly-fishers here to catch trout—generously stocked by the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department for that purpose. But down by the river is also commonly where the cheap land is, and where the trailer parks are. The second-homers’ houses generally are the ones with a view; the year-rounders’ ones are those that get washed off their foundations. If you were close enough to the river on Monday, above the roar of millions of gallons of raging brown murk, you could hear the uncanny kerthunk of huge rocks being smashed into one another, like a terrifying subaquatic game of pinball played by angry rain gods.

After pumping out my basement on Monday, I lent my trash pump to a gentleman whose land backs onto the Black River in town. He’s a military veteran who wore a T-shirt saying he worked for his grandchildren, and nothing on his feet. I wondered about that, but then I realized he was probably sick of wet footwear. Up until this weekend, he’d had a beautiful vegetable garden. Now he had a sandy beach. Evidently, this was not the riviera retirement he’d had in mind when he bought the property.

As far as I know, my little gas-powered pump is currently doing the rounds, going next to the postmaster’s house just along the road, and then to an elderly neighbor of my friend the Baptist pastor’s, right in the village. Last night, I told my wife that of all my tools—and I like my tools: chain saws, axes, scythes, you name it—this humble trash pump is now my favorite, the one I am most grateful for, the one I most appreciate. Because today, we all live on Chaos Turnpike.