Jake McBride spends a portion of each day walking along the Winooski River, looking for something — anything, really — that might be his. On July 10, McBride’s home, an apartment building in Plainfield known as the Heartbreak Hotel, was destroyed by floodwaters, displacing McBride and at least 11 other residents. Other nearby homes were also inundated.
In the days after, McBride and his neighbors started piecing together their lives. They needed new passports and new social security cards and, most importantly, new places to live. Searching for lost items was not on the top of their lists.
“At first, we didn’t understand the urgency we needed in our search,” McBride said. “We were still in shock.”
And yet, with each passing day, irreplaceable photos, family heirlooms and other personal effects are making their way from the Great Brook to the Winooski River.
For survivors searching for their belongings, time is of the essence. So McBride, 10 or so friends, and other volunteers started searching the riverbank downstream from the Heartbreak. What emerges, and what matters, is often a surprise to all involved.
Last week, McBride found a chip clip on the riverbank, the type you use to keep food fresh. Trash, one might assume.
“It was my great aunt’s,” McBride explained. “I lost everything else that I have of hers. I keep telling people that anything is something right now, and something is everything.”
It’s difficult for volunteers to decide what to salvage from the river — on the off-chance it is valuable to someone — and what to throw in the trash. Much of what emerges is plastic, simply because it floats.
Those who find items have been bringing them to the stone wall at the Methodist church in Plainfield, where volunteers placed plastic bins. A hodgepodge collection of things — photos, DVDs, bags of handmade jewelry — have ended up there.
The items have brought solace to some who lived at the Heartbreak Hotel. Margie Yoder, an elderly resident of the building, found some of her photos and trinkets.
“I remember her saying, ‘It’s proof that I lived here,’” McBride said.
Some survivors, McBride said, don’t want to be reunited with their lost items. It may be too traumatic, or too burdensome, to deal with.
But for many, reunion with a beloved object has brought waves of emotions. Neil Towne, a volunteer from Waterbury, spent the days after the flood looking for lost pets. While Towne didn’t find any animals that were still alive, he did find a number of photographs scattered on the riverbank.
Some were of Allison Lurene’s late cat. Lurene, who lost her Brook Road apartment in the flood, asked Towne to keep an eye out for a flag she’d received at her father’s military funeral.
The next day, Towne found the flag. When he picked it up, it nearly fell apart. But he followed tradition when he presented the keepsake to Lurene, holding the flag waist-high and giving her a salute. Both were moved to tears.
“It felt pretty important to be able to return that to her,” Towne said. “It was extremely rewarding.”
Stephen Abell no longer lives in Plainfield, but the home he rents out on Brook Road was swept away in the flood. He had stored many prized possessions — mostly instruments — in the house.
Someone found one of his guitars and posted a photo of it on the town’s Facebook page. Abell was elated to be reunited with the instrument.
“I’ll probably never play it, but I’ll hang it on the wall and say, ‘Well, that survived the flood of 2024,’” Abell said.
The recovery mission has been a whole-town effort. One Plainfield resident, Adam Krakowski, has volunteered his skills as a professional decorative arts conservator to restore photos and paper damaged by the flood. So far, he’s revived photos and a journal for a handful of neighbors. He also restored a hand-carved box for a Heartbreak resident, who got “a little teary-eyed” when reunited with it, Krakowski said.
He’s been proactively cleaning photos he finds and posting them on the town’s Facebook page in the hopes that they are claimed. The “wetter” the photos are when he finds them, the better. The moisture helps Krakowsi remove debris without damaging the image.
Toward the beginning of McBride’s search, he found a photo of his great-great-grandmother. It was the only one remaining from a box of old photographs he had insisted on taking from his aunt, who lives in Louisiana. It would be safer in Vermont, McBride said he told her.
It’s one of his several belongings that McBride has found, all of which fit in a crate he keeps in the back of his car.
“It sometimes feels like a fever dream doing this work,” McBride said. “Like: Did I even live here?”
Each day, something new emerges. The items are the physical manifestation of memories and the relics of neighbors’ lives. Out of the river comes camera equipment, half of a beloved vintage cooler, jars of carefully labeled spices and a neighbor’s old wooden stool, faded from years of wear.
Corrections, July 30, 2024: A previous version of this story misidentified Neil Towne, information about photos he found, and what he did when he returned a flag to Allison Lurene. Also, Stephen Abell’s name was misspelled.
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