The Best of Youth-Reflections on Flooding

Madonna toppled by Hurricane Irene in VT-photo by Jenn Megyesi

The title of this post is taken from Marco Tulio Giordano's 2003 Italian film, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth).  If you haven't seen this amazing film yet, you can get the three, two hour episodes on Netflix. I am thinking about the best of my own youth quite a bit these days as I grieve for Vermont, my home State. In Giordano's film,  there is a powerful scene where the two protagonists, brothers Matteo and Nicola, meet in Florence during the 1966 Arno Flood. In it, we see the entire divided community of Florence uniting in spontaneous volunteer brigades to try to save the paintings, books and numerous treasures under water in Florence's famous museums. I am reminded of this scene as I watch images of my home State of Vermont and hear stories from family of similar community efforts there to salvage sodden houses, fields and roads left devastated by Hurricane Irene. 

There are no medieval frescoes or renaissance masterpieces in Vermont. The treasures there are less tangible but just as connected to the lives and history of the place. Rivers and bridges in Vermont are central to its soul.  Seeing footage of covered bridges crumbling under the roiling crush of flooded rivers is terrifying. In aerial photos I can trace routes that I have driven hundreds of time-they are gone. Whole roads have fallen into the rivers.


 I received an email this morning that the route of the Covered Bridge Half Marathon that I ran this summer in Quechee is still in-tact. But the photos of the ragged dirt roads and shredded banks of the river make me fear otherwise.  

Sta. Croce, 1966-David Lee's photo

As a cheesemaker and dairy goat farmer, I cannot imagine what it must be like to lose an entire herd of dairy cows to these raging rivers. Any dairy farmer knows that you interact with these animals twice daily in a mutual relationship every bit as deep as that an artist experiences with the fresh wet plaster of his emerging masterpiece.


 Will this be the best of youth for those young people like my nephew, Brad and my nieces, Sydney and Berkeley, witnessing the destruction of their little home towns? I think so. Yesterday there was a message from Brad posted on Facebook, "I was on Channel 5 news!". He was helping to gut a home destroyed by the flood in Bethel, VT. He remembers the news coverage today, but later he will remember how it felt to work along with his father and neighbors. People bringing everything they had to help-tractors to plow fields at Hurricane Flats where farmer Geo Honigford lost every acre of his organic vegetable crops; food to feed volunteers, housing for whole families of strangers. 


My nieces will remember how their mother, my sister, held her traditional Labor Day food extravaganza, but this time fed people with much bigger appetites-many had spent all day helping Waterbury residents clean-up their flood ravaged homes. They will remember how they could help-how something so terrible could be overcome by the sheer will power of a community coming together to do just that.And this is a treasure as great as any of those lifted from the flooded Arno in 1966, cleaned and restored so that all of us could share it together far into the future.


How to help VT flood victims