Rochester & Irene's Scar — a stop on Vermont Route 100.
Coming into Rochester, with its long village green and white church — a classic Vermont village, and one that went through something genuinely extraordinary within living memory.
On the twenty-eighth of August, two thousand eleven, Tropical Storm Irene came up the Connecticut River valley and parked over these mountains. Vermont is a state of narrow valleys with rivers at the bottom and roads beside the rivers — which means when the water rises, it takes the road, and there is no alternative route. Irene destroyed or damaged more than five hundred miles of state highway, and Route One Hundred, the state's spine, was cut in multiple places.
Rochester was completely cut off. So was Pittsfield, just south of here. Islands — no road in or out in any direction, for days. Supplies came in by helicopter and by neighbors on ATVs over logging roads. In the Rochester cemetery the floodwater was violent enough to disturb graves.
And then Vermont rebuilt the roads in a matter of weeks, before winter, largely because they had to. People here will tell you about Irene the way other places talk about a war.
Look at the river as we run alongside it. It looks charming today. In two thousand eleven it took this valley apart, and it will do it again.