schedules finally lined up that Allison, who i've known since 6th grade - and i could get together for dinner at The Williamsville Eatery. But first Allison brought prosecco and glassware to celebrate the land and driveway.
5:45am coffee and breakfast at Dot’s. 64 cubic yards of gravel and I have a driveway. HUGE shout out to Todd from Cersosimo Industries - http://www.cersosimo.com/conagg/index.html - who delivered loads of gravel weighing 80,000 pounds each. Mom and dad came up to watch it all happen. Neighbors from across the road who are up for the weekend came over to watch and Peter and Kathleen Wallace stopped by. Donnie Wilson and Jared kicked ass getting this thing done so fast. A damn awesome day in Vermont. Meanwhile in Scotland…….. The Magnetic Fields ’50 Song Memoir” international tour which I designed the lighting for resumes as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Dates include London, Bristol, Dublin etc before heading to Australia for the Melbourne Festival.
so ends up while i was in vermont this morning posting about the post for my street numbers - my piece of granite was being quarried in Rockport, MA.
wilmington, vermont. 28 august 2011. During my second semester at Goddard in the MFA-IA program, I listed the exploration of ‘community’ on my semester study plan. I never quite got around to that due to many things. I find now in my third semester what has stuck me quite profoundly over the last few days here in Wilmington, Vermont is that some academic exploration could never have taught me about community in the way living in this small town though the flooding caused by Hurricane Irene did. The past week has shown me first hand what community really is and can be.
Wilmington is a small town – only 1800 people. I have not lived here long. I am considered a flat lander. But this has become my town – and that is very important to me. The downtown is destroyed – every single business presently out of business. People who I have come to know over my short time here are unemployed now. We all knew the storm was coming – but for what ever reason no one thought we would be dealing with five to six feet of water downtown where the Deerfield River runs. No one thought the river would overflow it’s banks by hundreds of feet north of town along route 100. The Deerfield River rose 35’ in 12 hours. No one thought about flooding to surpass the 1938 levels. No one thought anyone in town would die in the flood waters. One young woman – 20 year old Ivana Taseva – lost her life in the waters just north of town on route 100 by the elementary school. The rains started the late afternoon of saturday the 27th. It rained hard all night. We didn’t get the winds – which is what it seemed everyone was talking about and the fear of losing trees and what damage that would cause. It was oddly still except for the constant downpour. Sunday morning brought more of the same and I would walk down to route 9 along the river and that was the first sign that something was wrong. Concrete Jersey barriers blocked route 9 into town and the Wilmington Police were stationed forcing people to turn around. Standing along the guardrail at the edge of route 9 I stared in disbelief at the level of the river below and the amount of debris rushing towards the lake. My lake. As I stood there for 15 minutes, recognizable pieces of buildings, propane tanks, cars, a dead cow, furniture and whole trees passed by my perch. My town was being destroyed and all I could do is stand there and watch. I can’t compare the flooding here to anything else I have seen – even though I’ve lived through 9/11 – having been working at the World Trade Center plaza on the 10th and I’ve lived through natural disasters such as the blizzard of 1978 in Massachusetts. While I have vivid images of storm damage in ’78 – I have no recollection of it’s aftermath in terms of the clean up and rebuilding. 9/11 was an event of such epic proportions and very much on the national scale I don’t recall any local reaction in Philadelphia except that everyone was glued to their televisions and it was burned into our national psyche. It wasn’t personal for me, which sounds horrible as I type it. But it wasn’t, not in the way the flooding in Wilmington has been. Monday after the storm, I wrestled with a sense of helplessness amidst a surreally beautiful day outside. By now news was filtering out of Wilmington to the local and national news outlets. Wilmington was becoming the poster child of the devastation statewide in Vermont. I sat at home, the morning was the clearest in some time, and it was very cool out. Curiosity, cabin fever, and the driving need to see my town took over and I left the house and started the exploration of washed out roads, bridges gone, and lives changed – all while trying to get downtown. I’ve been struggling the last several days at moments overcome with emotions – and the realization of how attached I’ve become to Wilmington and how important it has been for me to be here. It might not come as a surprise to many who I’ve talked with about my summer in Wilmington, or those who have come to visit. While a great deal of my summer was spent along the lake’s edge, I had started to spend more time in downtown – eating at Dot’s or Wahoo’s, buying books at Bartleby’s – and getting life’s necessities at Shaw’s, Rite-Aid. I had met leaders of the town when interviewing for a job that I ultimately did not accept. I connected with artists in town – I was starting to learn the secret spots and backroads of the town. I was also starting to meet people and know them by name – they also started to know me by name. Wilmington just felt right to me. After taking a long roundabout route, I made my way down Ray Hill Road having dodged a few partially washed out roads to come out down the hill along side Dot’s Restaurant and was confronted with a bashed in, twisted structure who’s foundation was fully exposed, the parking lot, road, and sidewalks scoured away by the flood waters. I stood there next to business owners who were in tears, still not allowed by the National Guard to see their businesses first hand. It was really hard to hold back the tears – even though many others had let them flow. I was dumbstruck to see what I could of downtown – while devastated, it was totally dry. Like my time in New York City in the days after 9/11 – it was very quite in downtown Wilmington – people around me silent – no hum of the exhaust vents at Dot’s. No traffic – just the sound of the still swollen, but radically lower Deerfield River. The Vermont National Guard sealed the downtown off Sunday night after taking the only way into town via Massachusetts late that night. Route 9 east to Brattleboro and west Bennington were impassable. (In later weeks returning to Wilmington via a reopened Route 9 – there were at least 7 sections the size of 4 or 5 car lengths that has been totally washed out.) Route 112 south towards Greenfield, Massachusetts was washed out. Route 100 north was closed – Wardsboro one of the next towns up from Wilmington was totally cut off. Route 8 south into North Adams, MA was questionable – and being reserved for emergency vehicles. So while the National Guard had made it – it seemed, and was very much of a case of we were on our own – and I would quickly learn that the adage of Vermonters being self reliant was not just lip service. I would take a few more routes around town, just trying to see, and comprehend what had happened. The roof of a house lay in route 100 north of town, trucks and propane tanks dotted the landscape. Looking at downtown from route 100 the Maple Leaf Brewery had it’s facade totally ripped off. The yarn shop was totally empty and yarn was stretched over everything like a spider web where the water raged. Wahoo’s Eatery was knocked of it’s foundation and the building looked bent. The Mobile Service Station had been underwater – which explained the strong smell of gas along the river and at the lake. Some buildings had already been condemned. The Viking Motel’s first floor was totally underwater. Debris was every where. Farmers fields were flattened. Large chunks of roadway where everywhere where they shouldn’t have been. At least two buildings were totally gone. Monday night on Facebook the calls started going out for volunteers to help downtown. There was never a question in my mind that I would go – despite my chronic bad back. Tuesday I was the first to arrive at the National Guard security checkpoint and from there head to Bartleby’s Books. I wasn’t prepared for what greeted me downtown. Ann Coleman’s gallery was completely gone. So was a large part of the Country Store. I met Phil Taylor, one of the owners of Bartleby’s and was almost overcome with emotion as I peered into the ravaged store. It was really one of those instances where I just didn’t know where to start. Wet muddy books were pilled three feet deep in some places, shelves over turned. The front door was ripped off , the large windows smashed out – which I later learned Phil had done in an attempt to save the building while losing the business by allowing the water in. Phil and I worked alone for maybe the first half hour – slowly more and more people showed up and dug in. Fifteen pairs of hands when all was said and done at Bartleby’s that day. Over the next five or six hours we emptied everything out of that store. A large mountain of books grew along side the building. I took wheel barrel load after load outside. I kept thinking of Farienheight 451 all day. It seemed criminal to me to be throwing all these books out – even though I knew there was no chance at saving any of them. We worked late into the afternoon. My back and legs were on fire, but I kept pushing forward until about 4pm when I noticed this woman, Patty, who is a massage therapist in town setting up her massage chair on Main Street outside Bartleby’s and in front of where Ann Colman’s studio was – now just a large vacant lot since Ann’s entire building, concrete slab and all was taken down river. She had a broad smile on her face and loudly yelled to all of us hauling books “Who’s first?!” Patty went on to work well into the evening giving free 15 minute massages to all those toiling away in the debris as huge National Guard and dump trucks rumbled by only feet from her chair. She even had her CD player there playing music one normally associates with getting a massage – which wasn’t very successful, but it was her attempt to get back to what she knew as normal. It was a striking juxtaposition. Perhaps this was the first sign to me that this place, this community, these people are different. The coming days would find me reporting to the high school which was serving as emergency shelter, town hall, police station, fire station, and essentially the nerve center for Wilmington, and the majority of the Deerfield Valley. The high school was this nerve center because every other facility that normally housed the above outfits had been under upwards of eight feet of water, and massively damaged. The town, while devastated, was alive with activity. For the most part we were still cut off and on our own – but there was no waiting for others to show up to start cleaning up, to start rebuilding. Days spent ripping water logged drywall, vapor barrier, & insulation out of Meg Streeter’s real estate office and Bartelby’s would amaze me finding the voids inside the wall packed solid with mud. Walking down Main Street the images of natures power would never cease to stop my in my tracks. Growing up on the coast of Massachusetts I learned as a kid not to mess with the power of water. But I never expected to see that power in a landlocked state. Working at different locations in town – there were so many people – most of who’s names I can’t remember (I’ve never been good with names) but we’d work together like we’d known each other for years. Recently passing Wilmington Home Center they had a huge sign in the window that said “In Vermont We’re All Neighbors” – which now rings true for me – even without knowing everyone’s name. I continue to feel that I would not have witnessed such acts of community in Philadelphia or any other large city where the scale of population actually limits human connection. I am not a religious man, spiritual yes, but believing in God and Jesus, and all that in the christian sense – I’ve just never bought it. But I have to admit to wondering from time to time how any god could allow such events at the destruction of Wilmington. There was much talk through out Wilmington in the days following “this is god showing us what he can do’ etc. In the middle of the week, after coming home from downtown I came across a piece of writing by a pastor from a church in Wilmington – and was deeply effected by words of a woman of the cloth. It was in reading Reverend Emily Heath’s words that the emotion of the events of the past week came pouring out and the impact Wilmington has had on me came into focus. While I’m not fully sure what the details of the emotional depths are – or where they will lead to, it’s been awakening to me and the idea that I have found place where I connect, where I belong. While at first I thought I was a leap too far – this disaster to my Goddard work. I am now seeing a connection to my work this semester on the idea of home – but also in building and the decisions of how, why, and where to build. I’ve been left with the feeling that we as humans need to place more consideration in where we place ourselves. Not to downplay the devastation of Wilmington, and much of Vermont – but this destruction could have been avoided with good design and not left to blame god for. It seems horrible to point out, or to say – but this event, this disaster – this thing – that there will always be a before, and an after, for me – has renewed my spirit. Has given me hope. Has taught me more about community then I ever thought possible. Wilmington, Vermont. September 2011 I recently got my 911 address from the state of Vermont. now to have a sign at the end of the drive way. I made the choice to have a roughly 5' tall piece of granite from Cape Ann, MA where I grew up. Rockport Cut Granite (http://www.rockportcutgranite.com/welcome.html) is quarrying it for me from either Johnson's or Gromblatt's quarry. I swam in Gromblatt's as a kid. and have walked around Johnson's for as long as i can remember - its near impossible to get access to the water at Johnson's. I really wanted this little piece of rock from where i grew up.
pix - Erin Dutton cutting a slab. my MOM (!) checking out their operation at Johnson's quarry. Pix supplied by my cousin Jean Jacobson - who made the connection to Rockport Cut Granite for me. despite the fact that any trip through Wilmington village along route 9 took 45 minutes cause of the resurfacing project - got a bunch done today. just about ready for the 20 or so cubic yards of gravel and 20 more of serpac to arrive. Staked out the position of the future HOUSE.
snafu with the excavator rental - which didn't arrive till 3pm. Hired in two guys to help today. have them most of the week. but made a ton of progress, digging down, moving boulders, bushhoging the back of the lot where the house will be. fingers crossed by the end of the week, 180' of driveway will be done.
while in grad school i worked with Pete Hocking as an advisor for two semesters. we talked at length about the idea of "home" and shipping containers as a house. when he posted this photo of one of his paintings for sale in proviencetown at four eleven gallery - i just had to have it for the future house. it's now making it's way to vermont. YAY! "the path to impermanence"
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