the smell of rain the smell of rain the smell of rain
Waiting on Spring (photo:Nicki Steel, 2013, all rights reserved)
Hugs between friends last a bit longer this time of year; while caffeine and chocolate consumption climbs. It’s not winter. It’s the in between time. The waiting. The last foot of snow. The slow melt.
Those of us who can’t leave, head east to Brattleboro, where a 10 mile difference makes for grass. Like winter refugees, we soak up their signs of spring; our lives held hostage by a hill. By mud. By a home. By a family to whom we’re expected to return, and to make dinner and small talk; when what we really want to do is drive south. And never stop.
(I can’t go. I can’t go. I can’t. Right? Even if friends post beach weather just 300 miles away. )
My husband suggests that I work down in Brattleboro this week. “It’s supposed to be sixties in town,” he says. “It will only make it to about 50 up here.”
I add another piece of wood to the stove and try to settle in with a cup of tea; but my mind is as itchy and inflamed as my skin; desperate to shed winter’s wool.
I look outside and note the increasing signs–the green cap of the septic tank, the garden beds, the dry patches of dead grass–indicating land in what has been a sea of snow. Despite this welcome melting, winter continues to trump spring; white beats brown; and my glass is half-empty, and leaking.
“Why don’t we go down to Brattleboro now,” my husband says.
Though it sounds like a booby prize to the beach, I reluctantly get dressed so that he and I can walk the streets downtown, without boots, and drift into shops, and join an event at the River Garden center which sits on the Connecticut and has a glass roof that lets in lots of light.
There we find live music and hot chai and loads of desserts and fellow refugees from up the hill. I hug one too long, as if holding on; and then I dash back toward the front entrance. Toward a sudden and unexpected rain. Not rain on snow which is a sad, sad thing. But rain on earth. And rain on roads. And rain on sidewalks and rooftops–and us.
Just as the sky really lets loose, the sun bursts onto the scene–with a rainbow–stretching across the Connecticut and touching down at the foot of Mt. Wantastiquet. People flock out the back exit onto the deck to see the promise of color; because even though Brattleboro has lost its snow, it is stalled in monochrome.
One man turns toward me, beaming, noting the sweet smell.
“Don’t you love it,” I say, restraining myself from embracing him.
“I smelled it this morning too,” he continues. “Up at our place where there’s still a foot of snow.”
“Two feet,” his wife counters.
“But it smelled like rain, even without earth,” he says.
I smile. And sniff. And consider the different scents that come with rain; and wonder if it has its own.
I walk back to the front entrance and smell the sidewalks and the road. I return to the deck and smell the wood and the earth and the river. I finish back at the road and stay there awhile because it takes me to my childhood. To rain on hot tar in Virginia. Lying face down in the road so that I could soak up every ounce of that delicious, fresh scent before the sun smoked it away.
We linger past the rain, and into the evening at the River Garden, and when we finally head home, into the hills of snow, I feel freer. I decide to stay put. To be here to bear witness to my own spring’s emergence–to the return of our very first Robin; and even more beholding–to the appearance of a baseball–tribute to the life once lived–right here–where it shall return again.
Yesterday, with the coming rain, I was on edge. I was exhausted and distracted and anxious. When the lightning and thunder began, I lit candles and filled water jugs and waited. During the night, I slept fitfully, hearing the water teeming from the sky; but I am fine.
By comparison, my house and driveway are relatively untouched.
And still, I am afraid.
I’ve had enough of flooding and vanishing roads and friends in crisis.
And still, the rains come.
Out of courtesy, I put in a call to my busy, doctor father who tried to reach me during it all. My entire extended family has long been frustrated that I don’t have a cell phone, and when the devastation hit Vermont, they were exceptionally concerned following our days without power or phone.
Today is a holiday, so my father is probably in Annapolis where he spends his weekends sailing. I try him on his cell, and end up leaving a message; after which I feel hot tears spring to my eyes–like those of a child.
Though I’ve never been a “daddy’s girl,” I have to restrain myself from weeping when he returns my call.
“Sidewalk Closed”, Route 9, Marlboro, VT, August 2011 (Irene); Kelly Salasin, all rights reserved
If only I could write a tribute to roads like Langston Hughes bestowed upon rivers, but there’s no poetry in me this week, and none like his.
That anything could wash away thoughts of murder inside the Co-op is unfathomable, until Irene. On the morning after she hit our unsuspecting mountaintop town, I ran down my driveway toward Neringa. There I found clusters of neighbors in sober conversation, and passed them without a word, continuing toward the mangled dock that crossed the pond where the dam was surprisingly holding steady.
I continued down the road alone until I came to the bridge that crossed over to the camp and saw that in its place was a gaping span of… nothing.
“We’re stranded,” called a young woman from the other side, “There are a hundred of us.”
“I know,” I called back over the rushing water. “I’m so sorry this happened while you were here.”
Bridge washed out at Neringa, MacArthur Rd, Marlboro, VT; photo: Camp Neringa, August 2011
These wedding guests had flown in from Toronto, and others from California, while one had come from as far as Lithuania. We shouted some more across the roar of the Whetstone–about water and food and generators–before turning our backs on one another on opposite sides of what had once been whole.
I held back tears as I continued down MacArthur Road where I came across more neighbors helping one another over the gaping pits where sections of our road once stood. At the bottom of the hill, the underbelly of MacArthur was completely exposed–revealing gravel and dirt and a culvert many times my size. With hesitation, I leaped over it to make my way toward the Route 9.
MacArthur Road, photo from Catherine Hamilton, August 2011.
Instead I continued up it, past the hill where young Kayla died, and without any specific destination in mind. I’d never walked along Route 9 before, at least not with such an unsettling sense of safety, and I couldn’t stop. For awhile, it was only me and the butterflies until I passed a man coming down the road with a wax bag in his hand.
“Sweeties isn’t actually open, is it!” I asked, and he nodded his head, and kept walking.
A half-mile later, I stood inside the darkened store, relieved to see Michaela, a graduate of Marlboro College, attempting to make coffee and sandwiches for the community; and Ashleigh–a Brattleboro Highschool student, arriving to work by some heroic effort of her mother; and Rose, a town official, bending over a large map, helping travelers find routes home should any open.
Though I hadn’t thought to bring any cash with me on my walk, I was able to create a tab so that I could take home some groceries and a wax-bagged treat of my own while stranded guests from the other wedding across town left with six-packs, and brownie mix–which perplexes me still.
I passed other explorers on my way back down Route 9, and when I arrived bact at the intersection of MacArthur, it was crowded. A mini-van was abandoned there, atop a pile of rocks and trees, and someone said that it had been a traveler caught up in debris when the Whetstone Brook took the road and turned Route 9 into a grander expression of itself, rushing east toward Brattleboro.
By now, the sun had risen on the day, and although I was overdressed for the coming heat and unprepared for such a trek as I had already taken, I found myself passing MacArthur by, and continuing east on Route 9, to see what others had described as indescribable.
There at the edge of town, about a mile further down the highway, I approached Steve’s Auto Body Shop where half of Route 9 had neatly collapsed, right at the yellow line, into the rushing stream that didn’t used to be there below. Beside this section of missing highway stood a small sign which politely read, “Sidewalk Closed.”
No sign was needed for what lie just passed Steve’s. It was a destination so awe-inspiring that it had attracted elders and mothers with baby carriages for what was sure the most apocalyptic view of this flood’s devastation.
Route 9 had simply vanished, and a river took its place below. Some said a hundred, others two, and I can’t recall how many feet stood between me and the other side of what was once the highway, but it made me laugh when I recollected the span each time drivers rolled down their windows near MacArthur to ask, “Is it passable up ahead?”
Often these travelers would persist, as if I hadn’t noticed that they had good clearance and four-wheel drive; and then I would have to be firm:
“There is no road up ahead. It no longer exists.”
And if they still looked dubious, I would explain that even if they could, by some miraculous Evil Knieval feat, daredevil their way across what many called the Grand Canyon, they would find similar canyons all along Route 9 heading east into Brattleboro–each with ten to twenty-foot pits below.
Then these desperate souls, hoping to get home to work or to pets or to children even, would turn their heads toward MacArthur, asking if there was any chance…
“Not even the National Guard, on a rescue mission, with tires bigger than your car, could get through last night.” I’d say.
Similarly, the roads heading West into Wilmington were closed, and those in the north, and in every direction; so that these drivers turned around, one by one, resigned to being stuck like the rest of us. Some slept at the church or at the Inn or inside their cars, I suspect.
By the time I hiked back up to my house, the boys were awake and ready to do some of their own exploring. Their father took them out while I went upstairs to lie down, drifting into the sweetest, exhausted reverie I have ever known until the sound of a helicopter circling my home, not once, but three times, brought me to standing as I heard it land across the pond to sounds of cheers.
I jumped up then and dashed out my door to make my way over the mangled dock, and up the path to Neringa’s field where I came across 100 wedding guests huddled together as the chopper lifted back into the sky.
I caught the last words of an announcement made by a bearded man from Toronto: “If we have any medical emergencies, they’ll airlift them out,” he said, “but for now MacArthur Road and the bridge to Neringa are not high on the priority list.”
I stayed on to talk to some of the guests, and drew maps of possible routes out of Marlboro should the backroads be cleared and someone come to fetch them. (They would have to leave their cars behind, most of which were rentals.)
And then I returned home once again, and slipped out of my clothes, and into bed, and slept–for the rest of the day–stirring now and again to the sound of more aircraft—the Red Cross, the governor, the National Guard—only to let my head drop heavily back on the pillow in what felt like a drugged stupor.
The air was crisp, the sky beautiful, and my home–and even my steep driveway–uncannily untouched by the devastation that was all around me. From under my covers, the world was more tranquil than ever. There were no cars passing on MacArthur and no whine of 18 wheelers from Route 9. The house was silent too–absent of the hum of appliances or the ringing of phones.
I couldn’t bear to think about how long we’d be without power or how much it would take to repair these roads or how hard others may have been hit, and so I slept as long as I could. The sublime quiet brought me back to the days after 9/11–when our skies were as empty as our roads were now.
In my 47 years, I’ve known roads—mud strewn ones and flooded ones—empty ones and crowded ones–worn ones and brand new ones–but I’d never known anything like today. My soul has grown deep with our roads, deeper than I ever knew.
A few years back my family and I rented a house atop of Cow Path Forty–What a winter! It seemed to snow more in March that year than it did all season. We watched as the plow piles in our driveway reached alarming heights. And then it all began to melt…
Each day was another adventure as we maneuvered our way up and down our road, dodging the deepest of ruts. We thought a lot about cows and demolition derbies, but nothing encouraged us more than the discovery made one day at the crest of our hill:
a large sunshine-colored pinwheel planted smack in the middle of the tiny pond that had formed in our road.
So deep was this rut that her plastic-petaled face survived for days without being crushed. The sight of her buoyed us through all that brown… with the promise of SPRING!
