This commentary is by Erin O’Farrell. She was raised in the Northeast Kingdom and currently studies environmental humanities at the University of Utah, researching questions related to environmental communication and rhetoric.
In Aug. 2023, Gov. Phil Scott unveiled a new license plate to support relief efforts from July’s devastating floods. “Time and time again, Vermonters have shown how willing they are to step up, join together, help their neighbors, and unite for their communities,” the governor said at a press conference. He held up the new “Vermont Strong” plate, a design updated from its original conception made after Hurricane Irene in 2011.
As a Vermonter living outside my home state, I watched the flooding unfold from afar, following coverage on the news and social media channels and from close contact with family in the state. In articles covering hard-hit towns like Montpelier and Ludlow, reporters echoed Gov. Scott’s rhetoric about the strength and toughness of Vermonters, focusing on the positive community response to the floodwater’s damage with narratives of neighbors coming together to lend one another a hand.
The story unfolding from family and friends in my beloved Northeast Kingdom (NEK), however, complicated this story. The “Vermont Strong” I heard about on the news did not match the struggles I saw playing out in my rural hometown region.
Parts of the NEK got just as much rain during the July floods as widely reported Montpelier and Barre. The NEK, though, got almost no national media attention. The damaged roads and rural nature of the area made it hard to get around and assess flood damage, let alone ask your neighbors if they needed help. FEMA’s aerial footage of Orleans County, in contrast to Montpelier’s spectacularly waterlogged downtown, showed a much less visually newsworthy account of the destruction. The rural, forested towns and the fact that much of the floodwater damage was hidden in basements made it hard for outsiders to see the level of harm that had occurred.
Even if folks were able to get to their neighbors and assess damage, the fiercely independent attitudes of many residents acted as yet another barrier to receiving help. As reporters like VTDigger’s Kristen Fountain have observed, “the people who may need the most help are often the least willing or able to reach out and request it.” A family friend, Rev. Alyssa May, has told me about this attitude of tough individualism that she witnessed in many of the folks impacted by the flood. Through her ministry at Orleans Federated Church, May has been involved with the mutual aid group Northeast Kingdom Organizing (NEKO), whose response has been a center of flood relief efforts in the NEK.
“There’s the loss of pride if you ask for help, but there’s also this sense of pride that you have stayed,” she explains. “That you have maintained, that you are still here, that you are a survivor.”
Throughout the history of the Green Mountain State, Vermonters have been characterized as a rugged and independent group of people. By embracing their rurality and learning to be self-sufficient in their lifestyles, this hardiness creates a connection to the land and a sense of place that so many of my family and friends hold. Folks in Vermont, especially the NEK, feel rooted in the land in the activities they perform that give them a sense of independence and uphold their Vermont identity.
When strength is conflated with survivorship, however, it creates a narrative that Vermonters are a group of “hardscrabble people who will figure it out,” as May puts it. The storytelling of unbroken resilience reinforces cycles of hardship in places like the NEK, the state’s most economically impoverished region. When people hear their resiliency lauded by outsiders, it is often internalized by the form of pride in their ability to persevere, independently, no matter the circumstances. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
NEKO’s continued efforts following the summer’s floods exemplify an alternative response. Rather than centering help from the charity of outside groups, NEKO’s mutual aid model allows neighbors to help each other without losing their sense of independence. These efforts, which are centered on a place of collective care and sustainability for one’s community, adhere to the vision of “Vermont Strong,” which Gov. Scott talks about when he invokes the community spirit of the state.
We need to advocate for this toughness of collective community strength, but we must not conflate it with a notion of fierce independence. We need each other to solve our problems. Resilience is often thought of as a resistance to change, the ability to “bounce back” to the way things were before. But resilience can also mean a radical recognition that the way things are doesn’t have to be how they continue. Groups like NEKO display that this change is possible. We need to invest more time and labor into helping these collective efforts flourish. As we “rebuild Vermont and make it stronger,” we need to recognize that strength comes not from standing firm in the way things currently are, or have been. Instead, it may mean refusing the narrative of the stubborn Vermont identity to recognize that we need to rely on one another and accept help when we need it to make better lives that are truly resilient.
