7/11 Climate Thoughts from the Flooded Field
This blog post was written originally as an Instagram post on July 11, 2024 by Rural Vermont board member, Marya Merriam, owner and operator of Wood Frog Flowers, in response to the devastation caused by the July 2024 flooding event in Central and Northern Vermont.
Marya has given Rural Vermont permission to reproduce and share their thoughts here.
If you would like to follow Marya on Instagram, their handle is: woodfrogflowers
This morning, | drove over to my parents’ place [Brookfield] to harvest garlic and cried in anxiety and frustration. And then, | drove home this evening and cried some more, in exhaustion and despair.
To be clear: I'm fine, my parents are fine, all my crops are fine. This is my lowest lying field from today, compared to where the flood waters reached last July 11. We got 2.5" of rain yesterday, and that was 2.5" of rain we didn’t need, but we lucked out. The big storms tracked just barely north of my parents, and Williamstown was evacuated late last night, but here everything's fine.
I'm frustrated because every year the weather gets more extreme and unpredictable, every year my job gets harder, and every year farmers still have to figure out how to make it work. I'm anxious because | don't know how much harder my job can get before | can't keep doing it anymore, and | don’t know how we will survive the climate change apocalypse if small farms can't keep feeding their neighbors anymore. I'm exhausted because | had to surprise harvest garlic today, because everything's two weeks early this year from our abnormally warm and dry spring, and now that things are soaking wet, the heads are starting to split. I'm in despair because we've had three disastrous floods in one year and still won't put the lives of poor people over the comfort of the wealthy.
I'm sick of my job getting harder every year. I'm sick of my housemate waking up to the rain in the middle of the night afraid the mobile home park nearby is going to flood again. I'm sick of watching farmers and homeless people and small towns have to be resilient. I'm sick of wealthy people who've made money off of climate change come up here to vacation and “escape,” while young people who want to live here and build strong communities can't afford to.
| wish | had some neat little policy suggestion, but the truth is farmwork is one of the only things that makes me feel like I'm creating positive change in regards to climate, not just screaming into an abyss, and | don't know much else to do.