Stay with me through Rochester here, because I want to tell you what happened to this village on a Sunday in August that everybody in it remembers by the hour.
Twenty-eighth of August, two thousand eleven. Tropical Storm Irene. It had already come up the whole east coast, and by the time it reached Vermont most people had decided it was going to be a windy day and a nuisance.
It wasn't wind. It was water — the storm dragged itself up over these mountains and wrung itself out, and the rivers did exactly what the rivers here always do. They came up fast, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, with people watching.
And this is the thing about Vermont geography that outsiders never quite grasp until it happens: there is only ever ONE road. The valley is narrow, the river's at the bottom, the road runs beside the river. Take the road out in two places and the village between them isn't inconvenienced — it is severed. Completely. No road in from the north, none from the south, none over the mountains, because there aren't any.
So by that evening, Rochester was an island. Pittsfield was an island. Thirteen towns in Vermont were cut off entirely from the outside world. Not for hours. For days.
And what happened next is the part worth telling. Nobody waited. In Pittsfield they organized out of the general store — inventoried the food in town, worked out who had medicine that would run out, who was elderly and alone. Men with excavators went out and started rebuilding their own road because the state couldn't get to them. Neighbors ran supplies over the mountains on four-wheelers and dirt bikes on old logging tracks. Helicopters brought in water and insulin. In one town they held a community dinner in the middle of it, because what else are you going to do.
The state put more than five hundred miles of highway back together before winter came, which by any normal measure of how fast government works is not possible.
So drive gently through here. This road under your tires is younger than your car in places, and the reason it exists at all is that a few thousand people in these valleys refused to sit and wait for somebody to come and save them.