The long rain—corrected
The caption had dropped off. Sorry for the repeat.
Jason Anthony’s excellent Substack, Field Guide to the Anthropocene—noting it was something Vermonters could relate to—quoted “The Long Rain,” Ray Bradbury’s short story about humans on Mars:
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.
If you are not in Vermont, you have probably forgotten our flood—your attention stolen by the firestorm in Maui, a hurricane in Florida, drought and 110 degree temperatures searing great swaths of land and water, the accumulating crises of the planet itself.
But here, many of us are still mucking out or staring at ghostly towns, like Montpelier, where few people walk, and many business have called it quits after the fourth 100-year flood in 96 years caused the rivers that run through towns to run over them.
In Barre, the worst hit were houses, especially those in poorer neighborhoods by waterways. Many have been declared uninhabitable, forcing their former inhabitants to seek other habitation, which, given an already serious housing shortage, they will be hard pressed to find.
This summer, as Anthony described,
we’ve been soggy, thunderstruck, damp, humid, mosquito-haunted, and thoroughly clammy since early June. There’s scarcely been a day when a piece of paper lying out on a table or kitchen counter hasn’t lost the will to live.”
Next week is supposed to be sunny, but the leaves are already starting to turn.
Another great pairing. Thanks, Terry. My great fear is that Montpelier will end up like one of those New England mill towns, half boarded up because the mill has long since closed and a Walmart sucks the life from what's left of downtown. But Bear Pond Book reopens today -- a spark of hope.
It is a valuable reminder of people's lives and places that are so different from mine in some ways. The whole summer here in western colorado with less than 1/2 inch of rain. We need not pity but compassion for everyone has a difficult situation no matter the differences.