Episode Transcript
Dan Nott: There’s this one Emily Dickinson poem that kind of makes me think about electricity.
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Dan: This is such an interesting time capsule of being in the 1880s and writing about electricity as the public awareness of it was growing.
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Dan (reading Emily Dickenson):
The farthest thunder that I heard
Was nearer than the sky,
And rumbles still, though torrid noons
Have lain their missiles by.
The lightning that preceded it
Struck no one but myself,
But I would not exchange the bolt
For all the rest of life.
Indebtedness to oxygen
The chemist may repay,
But not the obligation
To electricity.
It founds the homes and decks the days,
And every clamor bright
Is but the gleam concomitant
Of that waylaying light.
The thought is quiet as a flake, —
A crash without a sound;
How life’s reverberation
Its explanation found!
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Dan: We probably have lost a little bit of that in 2025, of thinking about electricity as this wonder or this magic that exists. I think it is something that we mostly take for granted. And I’m not sure exactly when that started happening…
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Ryan: Welcome to the Vermont Reads podcast, brought to you by Vermont Humanities. I’m Ryan Newswanger.
Miciah: And I’m Miciah Bay Gault. We both work at Vermont Humanities.
Ryan: That was our friend Dan Nott, reading a poem by Emily Dickenson. It’s often referred to as “The Farthest Thunder that I Heard.”
Miciah: We’ll hear more from Dan soon.
Ryan: So, Vermont Reads is our one-book, statewide reading program. It’s been going on for 23 years now. But this is the first time we’re doing a special podcast series to support Vermont Reads hosts.
Miciah: The book we chose for Vermont Reads 2025 is The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton. In a moment we’ll tell you more about this book…but we’ll do our best to not give away any spoilers!
Ryan: I do want to say that you don’t need to have read The Light Pirate to get something from this podcast. But it might help.
Miciah: It might. And who knows, maybe you’ll want to read the book after listening to the podcast.
Ryan: I hope so! OK, The Light Pirate is divided into four sections.
Miciah: Power, Water, Light, Time. In that order.
Ryan: We hope to release multiple podcast episodes following those themes. This first episode is centered around Power.
Miciah: But maybe we need to set the scene a little, so that this episode makes more sense for the folks who haven’t read the book?
Ryan: Sure, let’s get into it. I have to say, Miciah, this book starts with a bang. A big storm is coming, and a family in Florida is getting ready in a frenzy, putting plywood over their windows, the whole bit.
Miciah: And to top it all off, mom is very pregnant.
Ryan: The family already has two boys.
Miciah: Their daughter is born in the midst of the storm. They name her Wanda, which is the name of the storm that essentially wrecks the town.
Ryan: Wanda’s father, Kirby, is an electrical line worker. He’s trying to keep the power and the lights on, even as storms become more frequent and the town where they live – Rudder – kind of ebbs away.
Miciah: There are just too many storms that follow Hurricane Wanda, and people start to leave Rudder in droves. It’s like that song: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Ryan: Yeah, like: If I go there will be trouble. If I stay it will be double. Anyway, Kirby’s son, Lucas, later joins Kirby in the power line work once he grows up. But it’s a futile effort, and everyone knows it.
Miciah: The power grid ceases to function as the book progresses. People learn to live without it. And Wanda brings her own special power.
Ryan: The author of The Light Pirate, Lily Brooks-Dalton, grew up in Halifax, Vermont, in Windham County, not too far from the Massachusetts border. She says it was a good place to grow up.
Lily Brooks-Dalton: I got to run around in the woods a lot. We had a big pile of boulders in the meadow near our house. And so I would just be down sitting on those rocks, making up stories and having entire full-blown conversations with myself and doing all the different parts. (Laughs.) It was my own private universe.
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Lily Brooks-Dalton: It was a surprise to me to find that I was writing a book set in Florida. That was never a plan for me. But the deeper that I got into the book and the more that I thought about it, the more that I did actually draw on my childhood in Vermont of growing up in a small town in a rural place. And thinking about the infrastructure of that town and what holds a place like that together, both in terms of the people who keep the lights on, the people who keep the school running, the kids that fill the school.
Miciah: Wanda’s father, Kirby, is one of those people. Keeping the lights on.
Lily Brooks-Dalton: So in the beginning when I was writing, light was a very literal keeping the lights on, the work of linemen. And it was a kind of meditation on how delicate the electrical grid of our country is and how we just assume it will always be there when we need it.
Ryan: Dan Nott, who we heard from earlier, has written a book called Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day.
Miciah: Dan actually won the Vermont Book Award in Children’s Literature for that book in 2023. In the book, Dan examines the power grid that Kirby is trying to save in The Light Pirate.
Dan Nott: One of the things that I think is really important to remember is that with all of these systems, whether we’re talking about electricity, or the internet, or water, they don’t just emerge out of nowhere, right? The systems that have been built to provide them to us have real costs, and there’s almost no way to get around the cost that those things have. Things often feel a little bit more like magic when we don’t have to understand and appreciate those costs associated with it.
Miciah: In The Light Pirate, Kirby and his wife, Frida, meet in Puerto Rico after a disaster.
Ryan: So let’s talk a little about Puerto Rico. Federico Cintrón Moscoso is the Director of El Puente Puerto Rico. El Puente – “bridge” in Spanish – started in New York. But part of the organization is now based in Puerto Rico, and that arm focuses on climate change and climate justice.
Miciah: Let’s have Federico give us a little background on the Puerto Rico Power Authority, which provides electricity to the island.
Federico Cintrón Moscoso: So the historic development of the Puerto Rico Power Authority is a very complex one because on the one hand, Puerto Rico was able —contrary to other places – to provide electricity for close 90% of the residents. So the development of that power grid was able to reach places that are very isolated from the urban centers.
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Federico: And that was a very important and successful development strategy at the time…I’m talking the past century. And so in that sense, there’s a story there about good planning, about thinking of power as a human right, so everyone needs to have access to it.
Ryan: We’ve gotten used to hearing about disasters in Puerto Rico. It’s located in a part of the world that regularly gets hurricanes. And the power system is now brittle, for a bunch of reasons, including lack of maintenance.
Federico: It’s a power grid that was centralized. So we have main generation in the south of Puerto Rico, but most of the consumption happens in the north of Puerto Rico. So therefore you need huge power lines that cross completely the island and all those power lines are exposed to the elements. So it makes us very vulnerable to things like hurricanes.
Miciah: This can sound familiar to those of us who live in rural Vermont. Here’s Cyril (Sir-ill) Brunner from Vermont Electric Co-operative, which serves most of the northern half of Vermont.
Cyril Brunner: VEC is in a really rural part of the state. When these lines were first built, Vermont, by and large, was not treed. And so what you’ll see today sometimes is you’ll see these sections of line that just go straight into the woods. And so you’ll often be wondering, well, why did they put that line there? Well, back in the day, it might not have looked quite as crazy as it does today.
Miciah: Cyril estimates that about 60% of the co-op’s lines are not accessible by road, using traditional utility bucket trucks. The lines go through the woods.
Cyril: And those lines are, as a result, much more susceptible to major events, whether that’s large windstorms, ice, wet snow. And they also take much longer to restore because we can’t get to them from the road.
Miciah: Outages can be a surprise to people who have newly moved to Vermont, including those who came here as a result of the pandemic.
Cyril Brunner: And what we realized very quickly was that those folks were likely used to either never having a power outage if they lived in a large city or very infrequently having a power outage. And so when all of a sudden we had several major events over the last five years – you know we’ve had significant wind events, we’ve had multi-day flooding events –they were very surprised that their power went out, whereby you know your typical Vermonter likely has a backup generator. Likely is aware that these longer duration outages have occurred in the past. They’ve certainly increased in severity and likelihood.
Ryan: As Cyril says, Vermont has seen significant flooding the past two years. But nothing like the hurricanes Maria and Irma, both of which hit Puerto Rico in 2017.
Federico Cintrón Moscoso: Irma happened at the beginning of September. And Maria was close to the 20th of September. Both of them were Category 4 Hurricanes. Irma went a little bit north of Puerto Rico and Maria hit us directly. And the devastation of the winds and the water were so significant that they basically destroyed the power grid.
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Federico: And the lack of power in Puerto Rico for many communities also means lack of potable water, because in remote areas, they need a water pump to move the water up to those areas. So if you don’t have electricity, you don’t have water.
Ryan: People in rural Vermont have experienced this as well when the power goes out: no water to flush toilets or to bathe. But in Puerto Rico this lasted for weeks. And there were other problems.
Federico: The communication towers broke down, they also needed electricity to function. So basically for at least two, three weeks, we were completely disconnected and isolated among ourselves and to the world.
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Ryan: A lot of people died in Puerto Rico after the hurricanes because of the lack of energy and the lack of water.
Miciah: Early in The Light Pirate, Puerto Rico is named as a place that people have decided to essentially abandon. This later happens with Rudder in Florida, Wanda’s hometown. We asked Lily why she chose Puerto Rico as a place that would be abandoned.
Lily Brooks-Dalton You really just have to look to the response to Hurricane Maria, and the utter failure of the U.S. to rally behind that island after that catastrophe. This country does not support communities of Black and brown people, and it does not support communities of people with no money.
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Lily Brooks-Dalton It was a matter of thinking, okay, the dominoes are starting to fall, right? What’s the first domino? What’s the second domino? What does that process look like?
Miciah: Puerto Rico hasn’t been abandoned yet, not by a long shot. But events like Maria will become more common…there and in other places.
Federico Cintrón Moscoso: We’ve seen, for example, last year in Florida, three Category Three and Four hurricanes in the same season. So we know that what happened with Irmá and María is not going to be the last time that we’re going to see it. And you know, that’s part of the message here. That’s why we need to prepare, why we need to adapt, why we need to be thinking proactively.
Ryan: It’s easy to feel like we’re safe here in Vermont. That our reality is so different from people in Florida and Puerto Rico. But Lily reminds us that isn’t so.
Lily: Hurricanes are affecting Vermonters too. This is not just a Florida problem.
Miciah: Some publications once named Vermont as a place that will be unusually safe from climate change. We’re pretty far from the ocean, unlike Puerto Rico and Rudder.
Megan Mayhew Bergman: The truth is that extreme weather is not going to spare any of us.
Miciah: Megan Mayhew Bergman directs the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference at Middlebury College. She is also a fiction writer, essayist, critic, and environmental journalist.
Megan: I was recently working with a representative of a statewide farming organization in Georgia, and she had this line where she said extreme weather doesn’t pick and choose farms. It’s not going to choose a red state or a blue state or spare those of us who believe in climate change.
Miciah: Maybe after two summers with major damaging floods in our state, we no longer think that Vermont is a safe haven from climate change. The question now is: how are we going to adapt?
Megan: I think this era is going to demand some agility from us, both in resiliency and resourcefulness of how we use the land, how we feed one another. It’s going to take new technology, new approaches, it’s going to look different.
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Megan: And I think we’ve got to find a way to love that. We’ve got to find a way to look at clean energy as beautiful, look at justice as beautiful, environmental justice as beautiful, and the way that’s reflected in the landscape. So I think it’s going to require just being willing to change, which is not one of Vermont’s strong suits.
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Miciah: Here’s Lily again.
Lily Brooks-Dalton: This kind of ties back to Halifax and to my experience of growing up as a Vermonter, which is this really firm attachment to the way things have always been done, and that’s the way, “That’s the way we do it.” And that is so much of who Kirby, Wanda’s father, is as a character. He is committed to the way things were.
Miciah: Like Lily said earlier: there’s some of Vermont in Rudder.
Lily: That was how I was thinking of that town, as a town that’s really not able to look beyond the way things were. And having to learn the hard way that things have changed and they have to change with it.
Ryan: Let’s return to Puerto Rico, and to the way things were after the storms of 2017. The events and the suffering on the island led El Puente to a key question.
Federico Cintrón Moscoso: What are the systems that we need to sustain life? That’s really the question that became very clear for everyone: Are we producing the food that we need? Because the ports were closed. Are we generating our own energy using the resources that we have, which is the sun? And suddenly, all that history of dependency became very, very real.
Ryan: Puerto Rico was first a colony of Spain, until 1898, when it became a territory of the United States. The island’s power grid was set up to be dependent on oil-generated electricity. This benefitted oil companies on the mainland.
Miciah: Here’s Dan Nott.
Dan: The legacies of how these systems are set up often stretch very, very far into the future. There’s a lot of places where the electric grids would be built to benefit the government that was occupying a territory at the time.
Ryan: But El Puente, where Federico works, has started to reclaim some power. In both senses of the word.
Federico Cintrón Moscoso: After Maria, we were trying to decide what was the best action for us. And we received funding for working with communities, especially those communities who were already organized and had a community center.
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Federico: We developed this program that was called Oases Energéticos, or Energy Oasis, to accompany those community groups in developing a plan around the community center to make those community centers emergency hubs.
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Federico: So we would provide a small rooftop solar system with batteries for the community center, but also a series of workshops to add capacity to the community.
Ryan: These workshops not only train community members in how to manage the solar panel system, and how to respond to emergencies, but also how to practice better energy efficiency.
Miciah: Vermont Electric Cooperative is also working to help Vermont become more energy resilient. They are looking at what they call, “distributed energy resources,” which can include solar panels.
Cyril: The power system of old was very centralized. Centralized generation, centralized transmission, centralized distribution, right? One-way power flow, quite simple in many ways, worked very well for many years, but fundamentally less resilient than a distributed system and fundamentally harder to change.
Ryan: Let’s get back to Federico and the emergency hubs.
Federico: So we partnered with seven different communities. And for three years, we worked with them in developing those strategies around those emergency hubs.
Ryan: El Puente is taking what they learned in those seven communities to create a learning center in Rio Piedras, near the capital, San Juan. The learning center will host workshops where communities can share their knowledge about resiliency and adaptation strategies.
Miciah: The power company in Vermont is adapting as well.
Cyril Brunner The electric grid, I think, will continue to look probably the same from a physical standpoint. The distribution system, the lines that you see outside of your house will still remain there, as will the transmission system. But the way that those lines are being used is going to be much more complex, is going to be potentially much more enabling.
Miciah: If you have an electric car, and plug it in at night, that power can go both ways. Your car can get charged, and also feed the grid to provide power to others.
Cyril: So your vehicle, which you use to drive, your electric vehicle that you use to drive, may also be really valuable to the utility to manage the fact that there is no solar during the nighttime…And we’re already doing this today. We are compensating folks who have batteries, folks who have electric vehicles, to allow us to manage those resources to reduce the costs for our whole membership.
Ryan: This has the promise to make Vermont’s grid more resilient. And so it’s tempting to believe that technical solutions like solar panels and EV batteries will help us meet the coming challenges. But in the book, after the power grid is gone, real power – and security – comes from community. Here’s Federico, about Maria.
Federico: One of the narratives of everyone who went through that period, the most surprising thing was to come out the next day and look at the devastation in the vegetation.
Ryan: Most places in the interior of Puerto Rico are heavily forested. Jungle.
Federico: The trees were not only down, but the ones that were still up lost all their leaves. There was a hue in the air that was an ochre color. It wasn’t green anymore. I’m getting goosebumps remembering that because the color, people talk about the color, that was so significant. It was a different place.
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Federico: And I remember people started saying, “Wow, I can see what is beyond the trees.” That became suddenly a mantra and a symbol of “we can now see each other.” We can now see my neighbors, my community. And really what it meant is that we need to pull together all our resources and see how everyone was doing and work together.
Miciah: The Light Pirate is a beautiful book, but it has a lot of hard scenes in it. Of storms and their aftermath. Of loss.
Miciah: But it does end on a hopeful note, because Wanda, the hero, finds her community at the conclusion of the book. Here’s Megan Mayhew Bergman.
Megan Mayhew Bergman: I think we forget how much the possibility of action is still available to us. I think so many people get locked in hopelessness and doom scrolling and the internet and the sort of self-oriented thinking that we forget that every single day, it is available to us to alleviate someone else’s suffering, making a phone call, checking on someone, delivering a meal.
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Megan Mayhew Bergman: I think we do ultimately need to be in community. I think the human spirit craves it. It’s how we were…you know, we evolved to operate within that context.
Miciah: Thanks for listening to this Vermont Reads podcast! In our next episode we’ll look at water.
Ryan: We’re grateful to our supporters: the Trout Lily Foundation and the Jack & Dorothy Byrne Foundation.
Miciah: Vermont Public is our Media Sponsor. And thanks to Junction Arts and Media for the use of their recording studio.
Ryan: If you’d like to learn more about Vermont Reads, and perhaps host Vermont Reads in your community, visit vtreads.org.
