This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2024.
It had rained all night in Marshfield, where I live, and I knew what that meant. At 5:30 a.m., a friend texted me a photo of Plainfield’s Heartbreak Hotel apartment building. Floodwaters had torn it in half. Route 2 was closed, so it took me 25 minutes to get there instead of 10.
Plainfield was foggy and quiet. A small crowd stood at the crumbling edge of the chasm where the Mill Street bridge used to be. Nearby, across the still-raging Great Brook, the Heartbreak’s quaintly formal Italianate façade looked untouched, but a side wall had been torn off by debris, exposing a stranger’s kitchen décor to the world. The rambling rear section had been swept away altogether.
My friend Lauren Geiger was standing outside her Hudson Avenue home, looking stunned. Her car was socked in by two feet of sandy mud, and her basement was flooded to the ceiling.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said repeatedly. The two of us saw Nancy Everhart of Marshfield approaching to help, pushing a wheelbarrow full of shovels. In a classic case of small-town Vermont, she’s married to Everhart’s ex-husband.
I was stunned myself. It had been exactly a year since a flood had devastated my town of Marshfield, and I’d been dreading the anniversary. Now it was happening again, only worse, one town away. I suppressed the feeling of guilt that I had a home to return to.
I felt relief that no one was harmed in the fall of the Heartbreak — but also disbelief and, well, heartbreak that a local institution was no more.
The ramshackle grandeur of the old apartment house embodied the freewheeling spirit of odd, irrepressible Plainfield. My kids’ dad, Eric Allen, lived in the Heartbreak as a newly arrived idealist in the 1990s. Later, the Heartbreak — so named because it was often a refuge from broken relationships — was home to a dear friend displaced by divorce.
Eli Barlow, who had lived in the Heartbreak, pulled a pair of lawn chairs out of his car and politely invited me to take a seat while I interviewed him about the events of the night before.
“It sounded less dramatic than a tree coming down — a couple of crashes,” said Barlow, who was on a neighbor’s lawn when his home fell into the brook.
As the morning went on, the village filled up with gawkers, journalists and scores of other helpers. I found myself playing all three roles. I talked to people who had been up all night, listening to the rocks crash in the Great Brook, wondering what they’d find when the sun came up. I met a trio of women caring for a trembling, injured dog.
Though the village smelled like sewage and gas, the residents who were counting terrible losses were friendly, and they wanted to tell their stories. I chatted with a woman who was salvaging items from her family’s wrecked house. When she learned that I live next door to a family friend who had offered her daughter a place to stay, she asked if I could give the kid a ride.
Ten hours after my dawn departure, I returned to Marshfield with a cheerful and resilient 12-year-old — and I marveled at the spirit of can-do optimism that pervaded Plainfield that day.
Correction, December 29, 2024: This story has been corrected to reflect that Geiger is married to Everhart’s ex-husband. An earlier version contained an error.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Biggest Heartbreak”
This article appears in Dec 25, 2024 – Jan 7, 2025.
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