JAMAICA — When Greg Joly thinks of Tropical Storm Irene, he remembers the sounds of rocks, like “dull thunder,” moving in the river.
He knew it had rained, but his off-the-grid homestead, located on a ridge, wasn’t damaged. So when he wandered into town the day after the flood, Joly didn’t know what to expect.
Jamaica, with a population of about 1,000 people, was built along the junction of Ball Mountain Brook and the West River. Joly saw the damaged roads on his walk into town, but the full scale of the storm didn’t hit him until he saw the missing houses. Unearthed from their foundations, they had washed into the turbulent water. It was the same street where he used to live.
He remembers being directed to the Three Mountain Inn, the emergency management hub in town, to check in with officials who were trying to account for all of the town’s residents.
There, Joly found Paul Fraser, Jamaica’s acting emergency management director.
What could he do to help? Joly asked Fraser, who asked him to wait a moment, then turned away to finish the business at hand. When Fraser turned back around, he had vanished.
Joly, needing no direction, had overheard what Fraser needed. He began walking.
Over the next two weeks, Joly became Fraser’s scout. He counted the propane tanks in the river. He hiked ice and milk to a young father and child whose mother, frantic, was stuck out of state. He checked on second homes and called their owners to report damage. He scrawled details about each house he passed, noting missing decks and septic systems. He told Fraser, who had to stay put, how the projects were coming along where workers were operating heavy machinery in the river.
Joly’s wife was teaching in Manchester, and for two weeks, he’d help her hike out of town on old logging roads on Sunday evening. She’d stay in Manchester until the following weekend, and Joly stayed in Jamaica to help Fraser. ATVs, helicopters, and trucks with supplies couldn’t reach some residents who had become isolated by washed-out roads and damaged landscapes. But Joly could.
With roads unnavigable, he walked through woods and along abandoned roads. Sometimes, he just bushwhacked.
“In those two weeks, I clocked probably 60 miles, easily,” he said.
He remembers the smell of the humidity and the mud slurry that seemed to cover everything. Images of the wreckage have also endured. In one case, the river cut across an oxbow and through a house in its path. When Joly arrived, the house was gone. The river had turned the concrete foundation 180 degrees, “like a bathtub.” He saw sheets of metal roofing in the water, 16 feet wide, “crumpled into a tin ball.”
Being near the river, he said, was humbling.
“When you get near that type of raging water, you realize how uncontrollable it is, and also, that you can’t chance it,” he said. “If you go in, you’re going to be like everything else that goes in the river. Destroyed.”
Joly moved to Jamaica in 1990 from Southampton, Mass., where he grew up. In the 21 years between his arrival and Tropical Storm Irene, he became well-enough-acquainted with the town to identify its missing and altered pieces. That knowledge came through years of walking, he said, and talking with people who grew up there.
“If you’re paying attention, and you’re interested, you accrue a history and an understanding,” he said. “At least that’s the way I do it.”
Joly, Fraser said, is an example of the collective action taken by many of Jamaica’s residents in Irene’s aftermath — one of many who went to extraordinary lengths to ensure an efficient recovery. Joly said the connections still exist between residents who helped, if a similar event were to happen again.
“That network is still kind of microbial, underground,” he said.
Jamaica is different now, Joly said. Irene changed the town’s geology. It changed the people, too.
“There was an acknowledgement that we were working together, and we can work together,” he said. “It’s one of those times when whatever political harangues you’ve been through go out the window. Whether I agree with you or not, are you OK?”
From Monday: In South Royalton, reflections on what was lost, and how people came together
Coming Wednesday: In Waterbury, ‘everybody just stepped up’
