After Seven Days‘ editors, proofreaders and graphic designers finish putting together the paper on Tuesday night, they pass the metaphorical baton to Matt Weiner, director of circulation and logistics. It’s his job to get 35,000 copies of the issue into the hands of readers across Vermont.
Last week, that was more difficult than usual.
Matt started prepping before the paper even went to press. Keeping an eye on flood updates — and gathering intel from our reporters — he reconfigured circulation routes, deciding to hold deliveries to the hardest-hit areas until Thursday and Friday.
“The drivers definitely rose to the occasion in a pretty amazing way.” Matt Weiner
Which of Seven Days‘ 1,000-plus pickup spots would be open for business on Wednesday morning? Figuring that out required a bit of sleuthing. Matt sourced some info from social media, though in many cases, he said, “we had to get the drivers in there to see.”
Our 17-person crew embraced the challenge of getting our reporting on the flood into the hands of those affected by it. “The drivers definitely rose to the occasion in a pretty amazing way,” Matt said.
Liam Mulqueen-Duquette of Proctor wins the persistence award. His route into the Northeast Kingdom on Thursday morning required “lots of detours, lots of guessing,” he said.
He picked up his papers in Burlington and hit the road in his 2016 all-wheel-drive Volvo station wagon. En route to towns including Calais, Adamant, Cabot and Danville, he encountered numerous intersections lacking any kind of signage. Some of the signs he did see looked homemade, with messages like “high water, road closed” written on duct tape, likely by someone with a big Sharpie.
In some places, flood damage was marked by intermittent traffic cones that looked as if they’d been placed there by people who lived nearby. “It really felt like a grassroots effort,” he said.
The roadside foliage he saw along the way all leaned in one direction, as if the plants had been stroked by “a muddy comb.” In Adamant, Liam discovered that the co-op, his destination, was open, but the road in front looked more like a riverbed.
When he made it to Marshfield, he found his stops open, including the Jaquith Public Library. “They were saying, ‘Oh, my God, how did you get here?'” he reported.
Hardwick was the toughest place to reach. Liam tried different approaches, backtracking more than once. Finally, at the intersection of Greenwood Lake Road and Route 14, he encountered a guy in a big black truck who said he was headed to Hardwick and invited Liam to follow.
“That was a godsend,” he said. They drove a circuitous route Liam had never taken before; the anonymous Good Samaritan clearly knew where he was going.
When they got to town, Liam turned off at the Village Restaurant. “The guy craned his neck looking for me,” he said. “We gave a wave to each other, and that was it.” Thanks, whoever you are!
Nearly all of Liam’s Hardwick stops were open, except Tops Friendly Market. “It was just a mudslide,” he lamented. He brought its papers to the nearby Buffalo Mountain Market instead.
Nat Michael had an easier time getting to Barre on Thursday, though the downtown was covered in a layer of silt left behind by retreating floodwaters. All the traffic kicked it up into the air. She pulled a pandemic-era surgical mask from her glove box and wore it while she delivered the papers.
In Montpelier, where photographer Jeb Wallace-Brodeur had captured the cover image for the issue, showing canoeists floating down a city street, driver Russ Hagy parked at the Shaw’s and walked to State Street to assess his route.
“It was a bit of a shock to see the devastation,” he said of the heartbreaking Thursday morning scene. Shop owners carried ruined merchandise and furniture from their stores and piled it on sidewalks. He saw crews ripping out hardwood floors and tearing down drywall.
A few Seven Days racks, covered in muck, stood out among the wreckage. Russ tried to clean one but didn’t have the right supplies, so he left it.
Of his 20 downtown stops, just a few were open. Besides Shaw’s, racks at the Skinny Pancake and the adjacent office building were accessible. An outdoor box that normally sits on the Main Street curb out front had been moved onto the steps at the entrance of the building, above the waterline.
Not an easy task, Russ noted: “It’s got 50 pounds of sand in the bottom so it won’t blow over.”
Russ hefted the box back to its usual spot and filled it up with newspapers. “I thought it was important to get something downtown, since that’s what was on the cover,” he said.
Most of his downtown papers went to Hunger Mountain Co-op, which escaped the flood entirely. It was open on Thursday — and busy.
Russ is new to Vermont: He and his wife, Julie — one of our substitute drivers — moved to Burlington last fall from Ann Arbor, Mich. Both of them had recently retired and wanted to live in a place where they could avoid the effects of climate change. They picked Vermont over Colorado.
Catastrophic flooding and smoke from Canadian wildfires were not what they’d expected from their first summer here, alas. But experts say both are becoming more commonplace because of the climate crisis, which is apparently hard to escape.
Russ also found something uplifting in the disaster area: people coming to help. He saw many volunteers among the cleanup crews, along with tents set up to feed them and signs thanking them for pitching in. “That was great to see,” he said.
Thanks to everyone who’s lending a hand with cleanup and proving that we’re #VermontStrong. Here’s hoping this week’s paper, filled with flood follow-up stories, is easier to deliver — and our friends and neighbors get the help they need to recover. I think we’re in for a long haul.
Flood Recovery: How to Help
- Read on for stories in this issue about flood recovery efforts.
- Sign up for the State of Vermont’s volunteer network at vermont.gov/volunteer.
- Visit town websites, community newspapers and Front Porch Forum for local volunteer opportunities.
- Give to the VT Flood Response and Recovery Fund 2023, set up by the Vermont Community Foundation. Find more information about the fund, and links to other local aid efforts, at vtfloodresponse.org.
- Check out our calendar listings this week and in the weeks to come for information about flood benefit events.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2023.
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