Disasters and Lasagnas

By Sarah

I gotta make this fast because I don't know for how long I'll have power. Living in Central Vermont, near  Ground Zero Irene, our lights have been turning on and off ever since winds started picking up early Sunday morning. Let's just say it adds a kind of urgency to one's writing.

Now, I know a lot of you live in Florida or out in the Great Plains of the Midwest where tornadoes touch down with alarming regularity and "Cat #1" storms are for amateurs. So forgive me, please, for acting like my nervous Aunt Betty who used to scream at every firework on the Fourth of July. We're just not used to watching our streets turn into rivers up here or our roads crumble like children's sand castles at high tide. All we can say is jeezum crow!

Snow, yes. We do snow well. Ice is never pleasant but we can handle that, too. A blizzard? Geesh, we're pros. Because we take that kind of weather seriously. We know from experience what it means when 8-12 inches of white stuff is blowing in overnight. It means load up the wood stove and hunker down. We know better not to run out in our skivvies just to see what it's like outside. Or to get on the roads because we're bored. But rain and wind? Not so much. Our attitude up here is - how bad could a little unfrozen water be?

That is, until Irene.

Which might explain why my daughter's boss at Woodbury Mountain Toys rolled her eyes when I insisted Anna stay home during the 35 mph winds and the rain that dumped up to 11 " in 24 hours.  Or why on our blessed local radio WDEV, to which I was glued during the storm, boneheads would call in to complain that they went out for a ride and "couldn't go no place" 'cause every place they go had either a log or a cave in or, shoot, a wall of rushing water.

"My girlfriend was getting kind of pissed," one caller said. "So I had to go home."

Yup. That's Vermont.

 Oh, crap. The lights are flickering again....Gotta shut down the computer and wait for the electric cooperative road crew to finish resting up..... TO BE CONTINUED!

 Okay, I'm back. Heard about Michele Bachmann's statement and figured it had to be hyperbole, no? I mean, what are WE being punished for - gay marriage? I'm sure that's why God has isolated at least ten Vermont towns and when I mean isolated, I mean not even the National Guard can get to them by land. 

A lot of people up here are looking at this latest disaster metaphorically. Vermont towns used to be self sufficient. You had your crops, your cows, your town hall and school. If you had to go someplace else, well, I suppose you could cross the small bridge, but really why would you? The only way Vermont became a tourist destination was because of the Communists. Like the Red Menace.

President Eisenhower, while fearing the military industrial complex, also realized that this part of New England would be impossible for the army to cross in a hurry should the Russians come marching in. So, he connected us to the real world through the I-91 and I-89 interstates. Until the late 50s, early 60s, you really couldn't get here from there because the towns were bridged by winding two lane roads that took for-ev-er.

Now those roads are underwater and the covered bridges have fallen. It's the end of an era, no doubt, and probably the end of what was already a touch-and-go agricultural season. Everyone at the farmer's market on Saturday was saying things like, "get the last of the blueberries before the hurricane" and wondering how their apples would survive in the winds.

Someone on my Facebook page griped that the Midwest gets this kind of treatment all the time and no one makes a fuss. Maybe that's true. But this is the biggest disaster to hit my state in over 100 years and I think it's acceptable to bring in some attention.

Now, here's my favorite video of the whole thing. Wait for the punchline because that's a quintessential Vermonter speaking. Enough excitement. Time to check on the lasagne.

Also:

 

Thank God it wasn't worse!

 

Sarah