The Commemoration of Irene: August 28, 2012 (Chandler Center for the Arts, Randolph, VT)



Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, Senator Pat Leahy, Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, Representative Peter Welch, and Senator Bernie Sanders, at Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph, Vermont (August 28, 2012)

 One year has passed, since Tropical Storm Irene traveled in from the ocean and almost exactly up the path of Route 100 in Vermont. On this anniversary, a crowd of around four-hundred filled Randolph’s Chandler Center for the Arts, beneath a few rolling clouds on a late August afternoon. Food vendors filled the small space between Chandler and its neighbor, a popular Laundromat, including Randolph’s own Valley Bowl, American Flatbread; one of the state’s largest corporations, Ben and Jerry’s, distributed ice cream pops, gratis. A banner, affixed to the stone block wall that is the front façade of the building, towered over the gathering Congressional delegation: Senators Bernie Sanders and Pat Leahy were joined by Representative Peter Welch, Governor Peter Shumlin, and Lt. Governor Phil Scott. Church bells rang, inside steeples across the Green Mountains at 7 PM, shortly before the program commenced, creating a soundscape of echoes and tones more pleasant than the tumbling of river rocks, rolling beneath the flow, one year prior.

It had been a freakishly strong storm: one that made it rain for hours, turning ditches to creeks and streams into rivers, scooping up structures and vehicles, carrying possessions into the Connecticut and the sea beyond. Governor Peter Shumlin praised the rapid relief effort and its dedicated volunteers: “we are a tale of two states,” he described, in that those who have been able to get on with our lives, and still clearly those who continue to anticipate and wait. The Governor urged his people to “remain generous,” attributing any progress so far as being due to the work of “extraordinary volunteers.” Announcing 3.6 million dollars had been raised, towards a 10 million dollar goal, Shumlin advocated citizens purchase the limited edition “I Am Vermont Strong” license plates, to help contribute: “we will use the spirit and the goodness […] to insure we leave nobody behind who got whacked by Irene.”

"America's Senator" Bernie Sanders speaks with Representative Peter Welch

Jeffrey Domoto directed the Vermont Youth Orchestra through a dissonant rendition of Samuel Barber’s unnerving and pensive Adagio for Strings, followed by Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus: the tension in the first work was modern and appropriate, as ascending lines of counterpoint grew, and gave rise to a feeling not unlike a mudslide, or heap of broken blue Styrofoam insulation, one of my memories, as this debris served as the longtime high water mark of the flood that followed the storm. The few final strands of Barber’s work famously feature a lone violin, sounding the root note of the unsettled chord. The young man at work in the important First Chair, First Violin trembled; the fingers of the entire ensemble wavered at times, seeking to accomplish the tremolo intended by the composer. One’s experience amongst this music seemed as fragile as a streambed, ever risking disintegration and collapse. Mozart’s illustrious segment was more stoic, as the stands of telephone polls installed by a crew from a faraway land. A boy—he could not have been older than fifteen—bowed away at the double bass, singing as well as playing the bassline. Later in the program, Shyla Nelson, a soprano whose remarkable natural yet unsettling vibrato reminded me of the violins, sang “Amazing Grace,” following a moment of silence, honoring the six Vermonters who lost their lives in the disaster (Nelson is currently working on a massive, synchronous, global event of singing, to take place on the Winter Solstice). Longtime Vermont performer and songwriter Jon Gailmor appeared late in the program: whether one is musically inclined or not, one could not help but appreciate Gailmor’s earnest and heartfelt efforts. He performed a new song about the tenacity of our statewide community, “A Year Later,” acapella and without a microphone; on an acoustic guitar, he accompanied himself through a song of tribute to Vermont, “Long Ago Lady.” Gailmor is one of the state’s finest musicians, not necessarily for his technical ability but because his aim is obvious—communication with those before him, be them children or adults, an action he described as a “sublime and indescribable honor” to accomplish at this event. The program ended with Diane B. Martin, co-author of the Vermont State Song, belting it out from center stage, and across “These Green Mountains.”




Senator Pat Leahy shares a photograph he took, and used on the floor of the U.S. Senate, to gain support for federal relief funding following Tropical Storm Irene. The homemade sign read, "Thank You Volunteers/ You Give Us Hope." "It kind of gets you right here," he said to those of us nearby, pointing to his heart with a closed fist.

Peter Shumlin appeared to be the event’s de facto emcee, introducing the Congressional Delegation. Pat Leahy admitted to chasing down members of Congress, to lobby for and secure federal disaster relief funding following Tropical Storm Irene. There have been generations of Leahys in Vermont, he told the crowd, “and I wasn’t going to be the one who let it fall apart.” Bernie Sanders characterized 8/28/12 as a “day to […] give thanks for the extraordinary efforts,” and to commemorate moments now entrenched in our collective memory and history as times when “people who were not hurting [were] helping those that were.” What has, and will continue to ensure the success of Vermont, is the “human resillency and human spirit” available to us all: “if we focus we can, in fact, prevail.” Congressman Peter Welch heartily congratulated “Chandler Music Hall” on its recent renovation, praised the Vermont Youth Symphony Orchestra for their accomplishments, before admitting that “none of us know why that [the flooding] happened.” “Will we have the character to remember,” Welch asked, the goodness of our efforts? Perhaps most provoking were the comments of Lt. Governor Phil Scott, who likened August 28, 2011 to the events of September 11, 2001, as both events “proved our strength and inspired our people.”

 Others, including David Coates of the Vermont Long Term Disaster Recovery Group, Greg Sharrow of the Vermont Folklife Center, and Staige Davis, Chair of the Vermont Community Foundation, spoke briefly of their organizations’ experiences in collecting, interpreting, and assessing stories of the flood—Coates was the only one who specifically thanked the Waterwheel Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the popular Vermont-based jam band Phish, whose October 2011 concert raised a full million dollars on its own, toward relief efforts. During the second half of the program, Irene Recovery Officer Sue Minter served as emcee; her glowing introduction of Hillary Laggis, a University of Vermont student, stopped short of assuring us of Laggis’ future success in democratic representation at the national level: Laggis, through a class on Service Learning, documented some Waterbury residents’ stories on video. While not expecting her to be a scholar, and to describe an ethical framework that would explain the remarkable volunteerism following Tropical Storm Irene in Vermont, Laggis’ comments and video clips were quick and shaky; one fellow student was projected on screen, describing the “altruistic high” produced by getting involved; a flood victim admitted volunteers had helped immensely, but work had progressed “slower than [she] wanted to have it fixed.” While I appreciate UVM’s involvement and participation in service learning, the dichotomy between the country mice and the city (read: Burlington) mice in this state may have been an understated nuance in Laggis’ lengthy comments.

The legacy of a tragedy has come to necessitate commemoration, and has helped define the importance of the action of gathering together: I would have been interested to know what towns were represented, within the audience; I would have applauded loudly any member of the audience who had been physically displaced by the flood. I was, however, proud to live in this small and beautiful state, ripe with the tenacious and the empathetic. Irene Recovery Officer Sue Minter: “Vermont is a state where love abounds.”