Looking back at Irene

There's a hand-lettered sign on a house in Randolph that says "Goodnight Irene 2011."

Vermonters have seen news footage of hurricanes - waves crashing against beaches and beachfront homes - storm surges covering boardwalks - palm trees bent like reeds before the wind - yards and malls  like Willowbrook Mall in NJ surrounded by lakes of water.

What we got with Irene was not like those news pictures.

What has made Vermonters so resilient? Pundits right and left have quoted Coolidge's "brave little Vermont" speech (given a year after the 1927 flood), without thinking about how many more people live here now, without recognizing that far fewer of us are the self-sufficient families that were the Vermonters of 1928.  But that resilience is what has drawn people to Vermont, and we still, as a state, see self-reliance as a virtue.  In rural and even semi-rural areas, we have to be able to take care of ourselves. It's why we haven't yet emptied the buckets of extra water in the kitchen and bathrooms, why we keep an assortment of canned goods in the cupboard, why we put up the food from our gardens, why we always have dry stovewood in the house, why many homes have generators (that's got to go on my list).  And we trust that we can call on our neighbors when we need their help, and that we will in turn help them.

Vermont still has a lot of people who farm, log, and build, and a lot of people in other lines of work who possess many of those farming, logging and building skills. We have businesses who sell and maintain machinery and provide building supplies. Lots of these people have heavy equipment and know how to use it.  We have road crews who are experts at keeping roads open and patching up damaged bridges.  And they have all turned out in droves.  Everyone knows that being cut off, being stranded, can be very dangerous in our state.  Everyone knows that by the end of October  - less than 60 days away - the ground will be hard to work, and that no rebuilding can be confidently started once November starts and the cold weather sets in.

But I think Vermont's biggest asset is its history of Town Meeting.  Many "town meetings" were called: among the homeowners on Riford Brook Road, and in the towns of Pittsfield, Rochester, Waterbury, Wardsboro and others. Today's official Town Meetings  (the ones on the first Tuesday in March) are pretty different from the original ones, but every town in Vermont has that history to draw on - that formal, agenda-driven, Moderator-led, Roberts' Rules-governed, thoughtful process of considering the community's needs and how those needs will be met. Every Vermonter has experienced through Town Meeting how a community can come together, identify needs, marshall resources, and make the decisions necessary to keep people well and to get things done.  And they will do those things they decided on, because the welfare of community depends on keeping its collective word.

Town Meeting and the ethic of neighbor helping neighbor have seen Vermonters through the past week.