Episode Two: Water

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Episode Transcript

Ryan: I remember reading something sort of snarky in the New York Times, where people were laughing at folks in Vermont for being so connected to weather cycles. Like they had interviewed someone in Vermont who said, “You have to understand: the weather really matters a lot to us up here.”

Lily Brooks-Dalton: That is so bitchy to make fun of that! It matters to people’s crops and people’s livestock, and whether someone can get up the driveway or get down the driveway. There’s no subway to come rescue you in Vermont.

Miciah: That was Lily Brooks-Dalton, the author of The Light Pirate, our Vermont Reads 2025 choice. And I’m Miciah Bay Gault at Vermont Humanities.

Ryan: And I’m Ryan Newswanger. This is the second podcast episode we’re producing for Vermont Reads 2025. The two episodes follow the first two sections of Lily’s book.

Miciah: Those four sections are: Power, Water, Light, and Time. If you haven’t listened to our first episode, about power, you might want to do that first.

Ryan: We give an overview of The Light Pirate in that episode. This episode is about water.  We’ll begin with filmmaker Jay Craven.

Jay Craven: Howard sort of got here at the very last minute where you could still connect to a culture that persisted out of the 19th century, really.

Miciah: Jay is talking about author Howard Frank Mosher, and about the Northeast Kingdom area of Vermont, in the state’s rugged upper corner. Howard moved there in the mid-1960s…I consider myself lucky to have been his friend.

Jay Craven: And so he was able to capture the cultural aspects, the mythic aspects, the work, the poverty, the ways that people survived. It was not a supermarket culture. It was a garden culture and a hunting culture and a logging culture with hand-powered saws and horses that pulled the logs. Howard worked for an old logger shortly after he moved here, who was the model for Noel.

Ryan: Jay Craven has made several of Howard Frank Mosher’s stories into films. The stories are set in the fictional Kingdom County.

Miciah: One of those stories – and one of Jay’s films – was Where the Rivers Flow North, which centers on the character of Noel (No-ell) Lord, a logger who is about to be forced off his land.

Jay Craven: Clearly Howard was very closely connected to the natural world, and the idea of the rugged, unforgiving natural world in the North Country, specifically, as a challenge, but also an inspiration. Also a source of work, a source of how you earn your income, a source of also a kind of spiritual balance and inspiration that guided these people that lived so much by the seasons, by the weather, by shifts in the weather. It was dramatic, it could be punishing, it could be unforgiving.

Ryan: Extreme weather and the power of water play a key role in Where the Rivers Flow North.

Miciah: Noel’s land is going to be flooded when a hydroelectric dam is completed. And before the waters rise, he wants to have one final payday, by logging the biggest trees on the property he leases.

Ryan: The intentional flooding of parts of the Northeast Kingdom also took place in real life, in the early 1930s.

Jay Craven: As I’m told, the building of the Comerford Dam, it was around 1926-27, was the largest construction project in the United States, east of the Mississippi River, and that workers came from Texas, as far away as Texas and Louisiana, to work on it. There were like 2,300 workers, there were 900 horses, there were shacks that you could still find the remnants of out in the woods of where some of the workers lived.

[music]

Jay Craven: There were traveling prostitutes that were sort of hanging out in the camp. It was one of those pretty dramatic, huge construction projects for that time.

Miciah: Author Dan Nott, who we heard from in our episode about power, grew up near an area of Massachusetts that had also been intentionally flooded, to provide drinking water for Boston, 65 miles away.

Dan Nott: So the reservoir in question is the Quabbin Reservoir. I grew up in the Quabbin region. I went to a school called the Quabbin regional high school. We were all sort of based around this area in central Massachusetts.

Ryan: Four towns were flooded and destroyed when the reservoir was filled in the 1930s and 40s.

Dan Nott: I learned about it growing up, but it wasn’t until more recently that I was driving from the Quabbin region to Boston, and it occurred to me, wait, how does all that water get from the reservoir to Boston? People are using so much water all the time. Do we use aqueducts like the Romans? Like, how does this actually happen? And it was one of those questions that I feel   kind of just defied my understanding of the world.

Miciah: A few hundred miles north, in Burlington Vermont, there’s another hidden water system, from another era.

Ryan: The Barge Street Canal is near where the Burlington Farmers Market is today. It was excavated in the 1860s to facilitate the loading and unloading of canal boats along Pine Street and Burlington’s waterfront. The Queen City was one of the largest lumber ports in the nation at the time.

Miciah: Paul W. Gates from the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum describes the scene.

Paul W. Gates: We had lumber coming in from Canada. There were stacks as tall as buildings throughout the entire waterfront. Mill yards were everywhere, and this one little kind of canal coming through the Pine Street area really was used to service that.

Ryan: Little boats would go out from the canal to unload the cargo from larger ships and bring it to shore.

Miciah: However, Paul’s interest isn’t with the canal exactly.

Paul W. Gates: But just further out, there’s this little tiny basin that had a breakwater made around it. Initially, it had an opening so that vessels could still come into this older basin and use it. And then at some point in time, it was filled in and closed off.

Ryan: Within that basin are the remains of five vessels. Shipwrecks.

Paul W. Gates: And so my interest was in exploring that, in thinking: “How did this come to be?”

Miciah: One definition of the humanities is that they help us make sense of the world in which we live. Paul’s interest in these five shipwrecks is one way he makes sense of Burlington.

Ryan: And Dan’s graphic novel, Hidden Systems, also tries to help us understand the world around us. One of the chapters is about water.

Dan Nott: The more that I started to look into water systems, I learned that just the systems that we’ve built for water are really only a very small portion of how we get water to us. Most of it is done by the Earth’s natural systems and by climate. Our systems of reservoirs and aqueducts are always, really just based off of and sort of hitched on to what we understand about climate systems.

Miciah: The subtitle of Dan’s book is Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day.

Dan Nott: It really shifted the perspective of the book for me, because we all know that these climate systems are changing. And what does it mean to have built a series of infrastructures around systems that are changing underneath our feet?

[music up]

Dan Nott: That means that maintaining these systems doesn’t just become about fixing bridges or fixing this thing, but it’s actually about adapting as we go.

Miciah: We talked about adaptation in our last episode: solar panels being installed in communities in Puerto Rico. But in The Light Pirate, the human-made world is almost completely gone. To get fresh water, the main character, Wanda, visits an underwater spring under the cover of darkness. There is no electrical grid, no artificial light.

Ryan: As we record this episode, Texas is recovering from catastrophic flooding. Here in Vermont, we have had floods three years in a row on July 10. We can see these climate systems changing. But how far away are we from what’s in The Light Pirate? Is that future inevitable?

Megan Mayhew Bergman: I tend to think when it comes to a sort of climate awakening or a cultural awakening, it’s often about a pain point.

Miciah: This is author Megan Mayhew Bergman, who we heard from in Episode One.

Megan Mayhew Bergman: And I wish it weren’t so. I wish we could look at data and what science is telling us and make better decisions now and change our ways now. But after being in climate journalism and being a science literate person for about a decade or two, I don’t think that’s really how humans change their minds.

[music up]

Megan Mayhew Bergman: I study conversion moments a lot. So when do we actually change our minds and our behavior? Generally, we don’t. And in this country, we tend to wake most to economic pain.

Ryan: Economic pain: businesses were closed for months after our July floods. Houses were lost in Barre, in Howard Frank Mosher’s Northeast Kingdom, and in Johnson, where Vermont Electric Cooperative has long been based. That’s where Cyril (Sir-ill) Brunner works.

Cyril Brunner: Electrical infrastructure is generally away from streams by and large. We definitely have some poles that are kind of close, but by and large, the poles and the wires are okay in these flooding events. But what we noticed was that our headquarters in Johnson, Vermont, didn’t flood, but was completely inaccessible.

Miciah: We also spoke with Cyril (Sir-ill) in Episode One.

Cyril Brunner: So for those of you who are familiar with Johnson, there’s two ways, t  wo little low points. And both of those low points were flooded so bad that you couldn’t drive a vehicle through, which meant that our line workers were unable to get to their bucket trucks to go restore outages.

Miciah: Like the bucket truck that Kirby, the father in The Light Pirate, uses to try to repair the fading electrical grid.

Cyril Brunner: And it’s probably the first time we took into question, “Is this the right physical location for us to be able to ensure the response to our members?” Which is definitely a tough question when you’re talking about a company where a lot of people will work at for 20 or 40 years, and have built a relationship with that place and built a relationship with that community.

Ryan: So much is being lost, and could be lost. Let’s go back to Paul W. Gates at Lake Champlain.

Paul W. Gates: Super storms and flooding specifically, if we’re looki  ng at a maritime archeological site, something that is very near to shore, such as the Pine Street Barge Canal graveyard…

Ryan: We already mentioned the five shipwrecks in that part of the lake.

Paul W. Gates: If we have flooding events caused by super storms continuously, having wave action bash up against near shore, not only shipwreck sites, but maybe the remains of prehistoric sites, that’s causing erosion. That’s destroying that archeological site.

Miciah: Wave action isn’t the only threat. Cold water preserves shipwrecks. But during droughts, the water temperature rises, and archeological sites can become exposed above the water line.

Paul W. Gates: Lake Champlain is a great preservative environment. It does very well in taking care of our shipwrecks for us. However, if you aerate an area that had originally been submerged with water, that environment will now desiccate any wooden remains of shipwrecks. Timbers, framing, the backbone of the vessel, the keels, those vessels start to fall apart. And when those vessels fall apart, we lose information archeologically. We lose that context. We lose the stories.

Ryan: So. Who cares if we lose archeological sites? Who cares if we lose the stories?

Ryan: Who cares about the humanities? Maybe not the federal government, maybe not anymore. Funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities was frozen by DOGE and the Trump administration in the spring of 2025.

Miciah: But other people DO care. Let’s return to Megan Mayhew Bergman. She is head of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writer’s Conference.

Megan Mayhew Bergman: I think environmental writing, in quotation marks used to be a really limited lane. I think it was mostly seen as the byproduct of independently wealthy men who could take long hikes. And it was pretty white and there were a lot of waving strands of wheat in the sun, and a sheep dotted landscape.

[music]

Megan Mayhew Bergman: And now it is so urgent. It is so all inclusive. Our applications to the Bread Loaf Enviro nmental Writers Conference have gone up significantly because it’s hard to not be an environmental writer right now. It’s hard to not touch it in some way because climate change is not just a plot point. It’s not just something upon which a story pivots. It’s a condition that is providing constant, multidimensional, polycrisis pressure on characters, on landscapes. It permeates everything.

Miciah: Howard Frank Mosher wrote the stories in Where the Rivers Flow North in the late 1970s.

Jay Craven: Things are in flux. There’s a sense of things being a little precarious, you know, and certainly that’s part of the story of Where the Rivers Flow North. Things are precarious.

Ryan: Noel Lord, the logger at the center of the story, was trying to hold onto a way of life that was changing forever. Over the course of the story, he cuts down the most valuable trees on his leased land, and plans to send them down the river to be sold. But the river has other ideas.

Jay Craven: Noel was poor, he didn’t have a lot of money. His one asset was this lease, you know, and then the lease doesn’t exist. And so now what does he do? And there’s money, but money’s not really a solution because it’s a way of life and the way of life is threatened. And then the weather comes and even after you go back and you embrace what you know, which is the logging, and then the weather comes and blows that up.

[music]

Jay Craven: And so that’s a life cycle and we’ve always been susceptible to that, those same elements of precarious being. In our current moment, it seems like things are a bit more precarious.

Ryan: Tropical Storm Irene hit Vermont in 2011.

Jay Craven: Irene in particular showed me, I mean, I was driving up to Marlboro College where I taught, as the torrent of downpour was at its most intense. And an hour after I went up the highway, Route 9—paved highway—it was torn to shreds.

Jay Craven: Traditionally flooding in America is in these flat areas of Iowa and farm places and we see the water sitting idle in the flat fields.

Jay Craven: But once you get water coming down a 3,500-foot incline, it develops quite a force. It was just beyond intense.

Miciah: The culminating scene in the book – and the film – is when the logs breach the dam and Noel rides the logs down the flume to his death. Mosher imagined that the logs could destroy the new Comerford dam that had flooded parts of his beloved Northeast Kingdom.

Jay Craven: The idea that logs would knock out that dam, they would not. They could do some damage, I guess, coming down.

[music up]

Jay Craven: There was always some element of magical realism in Howard’s work. I think he admired the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez quite a bit. Obviously he liked Faulkner and Faulkner also can be a bit magical in some of his renderings.

Ryan: The humanities, art, literature, can help us feel the loss of the worlds that we are leaving behind. And maybe point us to a new reality.

Megan Mayhew Bergman: That’s one of the most extraordinary powers of art and literature. We can talk about how things make us feel. We can lead a reader to an emotional experience. And typically humans change their behavior based on an emotional experience and not a rational one.

Miciah: The Light Pirate is Lily Brooks-Dalton’s second novel. Her first, Good Morning, Midnight also describes the end of the world as we know it.

Lily Brooks-Dalton: OK, so I’ve written enough to kind of have a quote body of work, right? Which is kind of exciting to me. I’m like, ooh, I’ve got a little spot on the shelf and it’s widening.

Lily: And there is a part of me that kind of thrills to the challenge of writing really different stuff and making each book feel like its own universe. And I think they are to a certain extent, but there’s another part of me that’s kind of coming around to this idea of well, this is my work. This is what my work is about. This is what I think about.

Ryan: Some might describe The Light Pirate as an apocalyptic book. But as we said in Episode One, it ends with hope. Hope in human connection, and in the possibility of adaptation.

Lily: I’m slowly but surely developing this sort of emotional expertise, if you will, in this idea of collective dread and the dissolution of the society that no one thinks is as reliable as we used to, but that we that we live in, that we count on.

Lily: And there’s something exciting to me about that, about sort of finding a lane, a road that I’m like, yeah, I want to see what’s at the end of this. Like, let’s keep going.

Miciah: Thanks for listening to this Vermont Reads podcast! We’re grateful to our supporters: the Trout Lily Foundation and the Jack & Dorothy Byrne Foundation.

Ryan: Vermont Public is our Media Sponsor. And thanks to Junction Arts and Media for the use of their recording studio.

Miciah: If you’d like to learn more about Vermont Reads, and perhaps host Vermont Reads in your community, visit vtreads.org.

Episode Credits

The Vermont Reads 2025 podcast was produced by Ryan Newswanger; with script, interview and production help from Noel Clark; and with script and narration help from Miciah Bay Gault.

We’re grateful to our supporters: the Trout Lily Foundation and the Jack & Dorothy Byrne Foundation. Vermont Public is our Media Sponsor. And thanks to Junction Arts and Media for the use of their recording studio.

Music in this episode was created by:

• Theo Gerard
• Adi Goldstein
• Rick Gallagher

Photo by Oona Ahonen on Unsplash