Rethinking Rural Resilience in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom

On July 16, 2023, I answered a phone call from my sister. In a panicked voice, she told me that the creek behind our childhood home was quickly rising. “Should I call our parents and tell them to come home?” she asked frantically. They were visiting family in Montpelier, the state capital located an hour west of our house in Burke, Vermont. Over the phone, my sister described the sounds of roaring water and rocks banging together, swept up by the raging river’s heavy currents. “It sounds like thunder, Erin. I’ve never heard anything like it.” 

This type of flash flooding had never happened in the fifty years my family has lived in the rural Northeastern corner of the state, often referred to as the Northeast Kingdom. Adding to the shock of the event was the fact that it came with little warning. While other parts of the state have gone underwater from tropical storm rain in recent history—2011’s Hurricane Irene being the most pertinent example—the 2023 flooding did not result from a spectacular storm. There was just a lot of rain. 

Over the course of forty eight hours, up to nine inches of water fell across the central region of the state. The rain caused dramatic flooding that garnered national media attention, particularly in the state’s capital. Five days after the initial flood event, continued precipitation brought three more inches of rain to the already damp Northeast Kingdom, including Burke Hollow, where nearly four inches of additional rain led to the flash flood my sister witnessed.

I watched from afar as the floods emerged in news headlines and social media posts. I gasped at aerial footage of my state’s capital underwater and Instagram posts linking to fundraising efforts for flood recovery. Most of the news coverage focused on damage in Montpelier, featuring shots of kayak rescues in the city’s downtown and interviews with local shop owners whose inventories were wrecked.

Neighborly collaboration was a common theme that emerged from this media coverage. Reporters honed in on the community response to the floodwater’s damage, sharing stories and photos of neighbors coming together to lend one another a hand. Central to this narrative is a story of radical altruism during disaster, which Rebecca Solnit might classify as a “paradise built in hell.” 

These stories conveyed how Vermonters are self-sufficient in helping each other out and lifting one another up from despair. Speeches from the state’s governor, Phil Scott, echoed this narrative. “We’ve faced challenges before, and Vermonters have risen to meet the moment,” he said in a press release on July 11. “Vermonters continue to inspire me with their resilience and can-do attitude,” he remarked in another press conference a week later.

Later that summer, Scott unveiled limited-edition “Vermont Strong” license plates—a revival of a design created after the state’s devastation from Irene—as a fundraising mechanism for flood recovery efforts. “Time and time again, Vermonters have shown how willing they are to step up, join together, help their neighbors, and unite for their communities,” Governor Scott said at the license plate press conference. “This summer’s flooding has been no exception.”

Scholarship within disaster research argues that urban and rural places experience catastrophes differently, requiring varied approaches in the ways that proactive measures toward resilience and disaster response are applied. In the case of the July 2023 floods, the story of community-led resilience, while presented as homogenous across the state, was not as simple as the headlines made it seem.

As conversations with family and friends in the often-overlooked Northeast Kingdom would prove, the “Vermont Strong” rhetoric of flood relief efforts touted by state leaders and media coverage as a hallmark characteristic of the Vermonter identity was often at odds with the lived realities of many of the state’s rural residents. While Montpelier’s resilience may have been marked by mutual community aid, aspects of individualism present in the internalized Vermonter identity hindered recovery efforts in places like the Kingdom.

“Vermont Strong” in the Northeast Kingdom

“I felt a little crazy,” Reverend Alyssa May tells me over the phone. We were talking about her experience coordinating flood relief efforts in her childhood home of Barton, a town in the Kingdom not far from where I grew up. “We were just flabbergasted… they got so many people to show up and clean in Montpelier and people don’t even recognize that we’re here.” 

Parts of Orleans, one of the three northeastern-most counties in the state, received the same amount of rainfall as Montpelier over July 10-11, 2023. Yet, a lack of media coverage across this ultra-rural area rendered the flood damage invisible to many people outside of its immediate effects. This was true across towns within the region. Washed out roads, neighborhood centers spread out miles away from each other, and a disparate amount of rain from town to town meant that folks living mere miles away from the worst of the damage didn’t realize the extent their neighbors faced.

The floodwater damage in the Kingdom was also overlooked by federal relief groups like FEMA. The agency performed aerial assessments of the region in the days after the flood to gauge its impacts. Unlike Montpelier’s spectacularly waterlogged downtown, FEMA’s footage of Orleans County showed a far less dramatic account of the flooding. The fact that the region is forested and that much of the floodwater damage was hidden in basements and houses made it hard for outsiders to see the level of destruction that had occurred. This lack of visible evidence meant that, at first, FEMA did not qualify the Kingdom for national flood relief services. Orleans was only added to the list of counties eligible for funding after regional community leaders petitioned for further on-the-ground assessments. 

While the floodwater damage remained invisible to mainstream media and federal aid services, many Kingdom residents experienced significant devastation to their properties, homes, and local community centers. Scenes of totaled trailers sinking into riverbanks, church cupboards filled with standing water, and black mold setting into the basements of homes across the region were among those that May shared with me from the first few weeks of flood recovery work. These impacts were not revealed by national news sources, but by community organizers who were knocking on doors and assessing their neighbors’ homes. 

As a local pastor in the community, May collaborates with Northeast Kingdom Organizing (NEKO), a mutual aid coalition that organizes and advocates for justice-centered issues across the region. Despite a lack of formal disaster training, NEKO’s small team of staff and volunteers led flood recovery efforts throughout the Kingdom. They surveyed community members, distributed essential resources like food and clean-up supplies, and coordinated aid efforts with other local and national groups.

In this way, NEKO heeded the advice of Governor Scott when he advised Vermonters to “focus [their] volunteer energy at the hyper-local level” and “check on [their] neighbors and the most vulnerable in [their] neighborhoods.” Vermonters in the Kingdom reflected the resiliency and toughness alluded in the “Vermont Strong” rhetoric, though in a different way than the governor may have imagined. While organizations like NEKO were quick to mobilize with communal support, other internalized aspects of what it means to be “resilient” in a Vermonter identity made it difficult for folks to accept this help.

The Kingdom Identity 

The “Vermont Strong” rhetoric Scott has used in the context of the July 2023 flood relief efforts is indicative of how many folks in the state have come to envision their identities as Vermonters. From the late nineteenth century, Vermonters have been depicted in national media outlets as a rugged and self-reliant group of people. Today, Vermonters largely conceive of their identity in this same way: tied to ideas of strength, resolve, and fortitude against challenges one may face. 

As is the case with every place-based identity, the Vermonter identity is a product of the surrounding physical environment and the sociopolitical processes that have shaped it. Throughout the state’s settler-colonial history, Vermont’s leaders have sought to mold the identity of the state into one that is “homogenous and untroubled by change.” The terraforming of landscapes to fit a pastoral ideal, originally for utilitarian farming purposes and now for tourism, has played a big part in crafting the portrayal of Vermonters as “timeless people” who resist cultural and economic changes. 

This homogenized identity, though, was only made possible through settler projects to eradicate differences that state leaders saw as threatening to the white Vermont identity. One need look no further than the state’s horrific history within the eugenics movement for evidence of this. From 1924-36, the University of Vermont carried out a Eugenics Survey across the state, resulting in hundreds of forced sterilizations among Indigenous populations, people of color, and other marginalized groups who fell outside the criteria of “desired” Vermont whiteness. The legacy of violent identity-making politics like the eugenics movement persists today, as does the dominant conception of Vermonters as tough, independent, and largely white. 

The dominant regional identity within the Northeast Kingdom embodies an amplified version of the rugged resilience projected onto Vermonters. Nestled against the Canadian border to the north and the New Hampshire border to the east, the Kingdom comprises three of the most isolated, rural, and poor counties in the state. The Kingdom has a harsher climate compared to the rest of Vermont, with record-low temperatures, persistent frost, and little sunshine. 

As scholar Cheryl Morse and colleagues argue, “regional identity may be housed in material landscape itself and perpetuated through both landscape activities and the act of viewing [it].” In the case of the Northeast Kingdom, residents often draw connections between the rocky soils and harsh climate of their landscape to personal identities of ruggedness and toughness that come from rurality, isolation, and dire economic circumstances.

Conflating Resilience with Survival

A theme that arose from local media coverage of flood recovery efforts in Orleans County was the idea that “the people who may need the most help are often the least willing or able to reach out and request it.” May told me that she saw this attitude of unyielding individualism and self-sufficiency in many of the folks she interacted with. Examples included instances of people who had lost their homes to flood damage but chose to rebuild in the same place. “There’s the loss of pride if you ask for help, but there’s also this sense of pride that you have stayed,” May explained. “That you have maintained, that you are still here, that you are a survivor.” 

But there is a big difference between surviving as opposed to thriving in one’s environment. The “storytelling of the Kingdom being so resilient,” May expressed, can lead to an external narrative “that these hardscrabble people are going to figure it out.” The Kingdom has long been a place of myth-making that enforces a binary framework of its people as either exceptionally resourceful or living in a “rural slum.” 

This identity of resilient rural people who make do with what they have reinforces cycles of poverty and hardship in places like the Kingdom. As scholars like Maxwell Woods argue, the label of resiliency can lead to negative impacts on a population. Defining a group as resilient has historically allowed policymakers to justify focusing on persevering through hard times instead of preventing those hardships in the first place.

The label of resiliency in the Kingdom also leads to an internalization of this mentality and a sense of pride in being a Vermonter who will persevere despite the circumstances. This disrupts the narrative of Vermonters harmoniously coming together in the face of disaster; the geographic and economic realities of the rurality that are often celebrated and held as an ideal within the homogenous, white Vermont identity are at odds with media depictions of communal collaboration.

In the context of physics, resilience refers to the “capacity of a system or material to recover its shape following a displacement or disturbance.” In the 1970s, C.S. Holling expanded the term to the field of ecology, using resilience to describe the ability of systems and the relationships within them to persist through the absorption of changes. Only in the past twenty years has the concept of resilience been established in the realm of social science. 

Today, resilience has become a buzzword at the forefront of discussions about climate change, risk reduction, and the ability of vulnerable populations to persevere. Resiliency’s normative social science definition, scholar Bridie McGreavy says, describes the “ability to cope, no matter how dire the circumstances.” The adoption of this definition, which centers on the ability of people to bounce back from adversity to a state of perceived normalcy, has appeared in various frameworks that serve as the blueprint for risk management and disaster response practices. 

As Subas Dhakal points out, however, this conception can be hard to achieve when communities are poor and ill-prepared to deal with disaster. This is especially pertinent in the Northeast Kingdom, where hidden damage and a “resilient” attitude from the Kingdom’s residents following the July 2023 floods masked the severity of the damage that occurred.

The type of grit that means coming together to help each other out is the “Vermont Strong” that Governor Scott spoke about in the weeks following this summer’s floods. This is the “Vermont Strong” for which we should strive. But toughness is often conflated with independence, which is the last thing Vermonters need right now—especially in the Northeast Kingdom.

A New Northeast Kingdom Resilience

Reconceptualizing what it means to be “Vermont Strong,” and thus preventing further entrenchment of identities that praise surviving over thriving, requires a reimagination of resilience. Current conceptions of resilience tend to be conservative in their approaches to system adaptation rather than transformation. To be resilient often means “bouncing back” after harm is done, which ensures the maintenance of the very systems that create harm in the first place. The normalization of resilience—a version assuming “unforeseeable systems disruptions are natural and survivable, if not by everyone then by some ones”—leads to the justification of inequitable resource distribution following disaster.

Looking ahead, we must see resilience not as ‘bouncing back’ to the way things were, but as ‘bouncing forward’ to new futures. This means acknowledging the increasing frequency of devastating climate events and also taking into account the power of humans’ collective agency. An important, and often forgotten, part of Holling’s definition of resilience is his focus on the persistence of relationships amongst changes. Our understanding of resilience must recognize the necessity of the strength of our relationships in the quest to find new ways to persist amidst system transformations.

Mutual aid groups like NEKO exemplify a focus on relationships in their disaster relief work. At the center of this work is neighbor-to-neighbor solidarity that focuses not on the charity of individuals (a sometimes unwelcome idea to the independent Vermont identity) but the cooperative sustainability of their community relations. Places like the Northeast Kingdom, which have historically had less access to financial capital, must invest more time and labor into helping their community capital flourish.

Along with a reconceptualization of resilience, folks who claim Vermonter status should think critically about what this identity means and the processes implicit in its shaping. The creation and upholding of any state or national identity will always exclude various populations. We must reckon with the state’s history of racist and violent practices of erasure, which have been essential to naturalizing one specific “Vermonter.” While we reshape resilience, we have an opportunity to reshape what this identity is, broadening who counts as a Vermonter and the varied knowledge and experiences they carry. Giving value to and supporting the sovereignty of wisdom from Vermonters whose identities have been marginalized is essential to the creation of a stronger collective resilience.

Governor Scott has insisted on the need to “rebuild Vermont and make it stronger” following the 2023 July floods. This rebuilding must acknowledge not only that urban and rural areas experience disaster differently and require varied forms of support for their recovery, but also that strength comes not from standing firm in the way things are or have been. Instead, it may mean redefining the Vermont identity that many folks take pride in. True resilience derives from the interdependent relationships we form with one another and the ability to accept help when we need it to make better lives in our changing world. 

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Featured Image: Flooding in rural Vermont during the July 2023 floods. Photo by Nicholas Erwin, 2023.

Erin O’Farrell (she/they) is a Master’s student at the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities program, where they study eco-justice issues through a communication lens. Born and raised in the rural Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, Erin is passionate about cultivating community to build just and resilient futures. Some of her recent work has been published in VTDigger and Resilience.org. Contact.