Mud season is never a treat and each year it seems to be the worst one ever -- until this year.
For whatever reason, a changing climate, many freeze-thaw cycles this winter, a capricious Mother Nature – it’s been really bad for many people on The Valley’s dirt roads.
How bad? So bad that school bus service had to be abridged, appended, re-routed and canceled altogether. That left parents and educators and other school staff (who also live on dirt roads) scrambling to find ways to get kids to pick-up points.
That required driving to the edge of the worst of the mud and walking on the edges of the mud to get to pick-up points. It required hiking cross lots through neighbors’ yards and woods. It required people with the most mud-worthy vehicles transporting others. It required school district administrators to react on the fly to changing conditions from morning to afternoon and from afternoon to midnight.
After two years of pandemic schooling, it’s not surprising that people rose to this challenge.
Local fire and EMS folks were wary, yet confident that they could/can get to where they need to go, albeit also with the help of neighbors and volunteers and local road crews.
And speaking of road crews –- who else heard the grader deep into the night when it got cold enough for local road crew members to get up and grade the road? Who else heard the clang of the dump truck as material was dumped into the soupy morass of our roads?
Road crew members are our neighbors too and they also live on dirt roads. Consider the pride they take in keeping our roads open, maintained and passable and then imagine their frustration when they could not help us over the last week.
This last week has required neighbors to be creative in helping each other. It has required patience and ingenuity and the fortitude to do what needed to be done while also requiring folks to accept that we cannot always impose our wills (and our cars) on Vermont.
Mother Nature rules with an iron fist – but neighbors help.
