The small Vermont town I lived in as a child is reeling from Hurricane Irene’s wrath, cut off from the world around it on all points of the compass as its two main state highways that intersect at the village center have completely washed out in some sections or are blocked by debris in others.

And when I say debris, it’s more than just some upended trees or a yard gnome or two that weren’t tightly secured.

Entire buildings were swept from their foundations by the rampaging waters of the Deerfield River and unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the road hundreds of yards away. According to my old hometown’s newspaper, everything from propane tanks to furniture to livestock barreled south through Wilmington, propelled by the force of the Deerfield, already several feet above flood stage just a few hours into the storm.

The front windows of many establishments built along the river were blown out as the backs of the buildings were blown in by the water’s buffeting, yanking furniture from a local pub out into the flooding streets, along with the entire technicolor contents of the local yarn store — the remnants of people’s lives and livelihoods.

Granted it was nothing more than a “rain event” by the time Irene drew a bead on southern Vermont, but the verdant Deerfield Valley that cradles Wilmington and its smaller neighbor, West Dover (a few miles to the north where my parents eventually built a home), have felt the storm’s fury.

And although it’s been years since my family called those two towns our own, I’m feeling it, too. And it just breaks my heart.

The beauty and history of the Deerfield Valley are captivating, and even as a child, I was taken in by it all. The region is a virtual sensory overload, from the taste of pure maple syrup to the feel of crunching snow under your boots to the sight of entire mountainsides aflame with fall color.

And the people of the valley are intriguing as well. The blossoming ghoul in me was fascinated by the valley’s cemeteries, where the names on the centuries-old tombstones are the same as the ones currently on the Wilmington and West Dover tax rolls. Bartlett, Boyd, Brown, Wheeler ... they’re all there.

I took up the hobby of gravestone rubbing, wandering among the tilting slate markers that looked like crooked teeth in an ancient skull, hunting for the oldest ones in the lot and marveling at the names, dates and downright threatening messages that were etched into some of them. I’m not sure which southern Vermont graveyard I was loitering in at the time with my rice paper and charcoal sticks — it might have been the Riverview Cemetery on Stowe Hill Road in Wilmington — but on one headstone dating back to the late 1700s, I found this:

Look ye here as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you shall be,
Prepare for death and follow me.

Or something like that, as I remember it. Menacing, like Irene’s rains.

I also remember the trips into the “big city” of Brattleboro about 45 minutes away, the nearest town that had a movie theater and a McDonald’s. And on the occasion when my parents had the intestinal fortitude to gussy up three young children in their Sunday best and pile them into the faux-wood paneled station wagon to go to church, it was the only place to attend a Mormon
church service — in the basement of the town’s Grange Hall.

But best of all, Brattleboro was home to the closest Dunkin’ Donuts, where my mom could get her pistachio doughnut fix. I remember they were delicious, but man were they a ghastly shade of green.

Brattleboro was hit hard as well, when a branch of the Connecticut River, the Whetstone Brook, inundated parts of the town, eroding the ground beneath major roads, compromising bridges and leaving the heart of downtown caked in mud. Route 9, the main road west to Wilmington about 25 miles away, is a wreck and was still closed last I heard.

The flooding spawned by Irene swallowed up not just present-day possessions and historic covered bridges, but a life in Wilmington was taken as well, when a young woman was swept away by the Deerfield and found later in an open field as the waters receded. It’s awful to witness, even through the ether — right now one of the only ways to get news in and out of the
area.

There’s an old adage about two Vermont farmers, leaning on a porch railing as they watch the incessant rain of a wet, cold spring turn their roads and fields to knee-deep mud.

“Think it’ll stop raining?” asks one, his brow furrowed by decades of watching the same scenario play out year after year.

“Usually does,” says the other in pointed observation.

Those farmers, as always, were right, and the rain has stopped. But the heartache of this beautiful valley’s destruction is painfully present and the roar of the raging Deerfield River on its destructive path through town will echo for years to come.