Karen Meisner and Pär Winzell live in a home situated along the Winooski River in Plainfield. They experienced catastrophic flooding in July of 2023.
This summer, they were nearly finished with cleanup, and then they were hit hard again. The Winooski became a lake around their home, and their kitchen filled with mud.
More than a month later, they are still wondering how to proceed.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Karen Meisner: It's been really hard not to just completely despair. Everybody is being so helpful and so communal about like, trying to volunteer and work together. But everybody's home is their own problem, and nobody knows how buyouts are going to work. You know, we don't want to do that. It crushes us to think of having to turn this house over to get destroyed, but we don't know if that's even an option for us. It would be nice to know if it was an option, because we don't know what our other options are.
Pär Winzell: This is basically a jigsaw puzzle, right, where you can lay down possible paths into a better future, you know, like, maybe, if we do this and this and this, and we apply for this grant from FEMA and maybe this thing from the state, we can cobble together something that really works. The problem is that, you know, when you get up in the morning and you're just like, "I'm gonna get to work on fixing this," you want to have some confidence that you can see how to get there. And right now, it's like 20 different things. We talk to all kinds of people who are very helpful and informative on their specific piece, but it's still up to us to put together a whole plan that actually works and that we can have confidence in.
There's things we shouldn't do now if we're going to flood again. There's things we shouldn't do now if by some chance we go through with the buyout program. There's some things we shouldn't do if we're going to rip up the ground and elevate the building. Do we spend money now to make a livable house? Do we just sort of wait and pursue these different leads?
"We're also trying to figure out, like, how is it possible to be in a situation where there's just no solution? Is that where we are?"Karen Meisner
Karen Meisner: It's all we talk about: What to do to make things better in the short term, trying to figure out if there are things we can do to make things better in the long term, but we're also trying to figure out, like, how is it possible to be in a situation where there's just no solution? Is that where we are?
Erica Heilman: What would it mean if you were in a situation where there was no solution?
Karen Meisner: You know, either we fix it and we don't know how, or we live with the way it is, which is so unbelievably depressing and unsustainable. Or we leave and we, I mean, we couldn't even sell the place. Who would buy a flooded house if we couldn't fix it? So we just go broke and crawl off somewhere where it's not flooding constantly and try to find a way to live there. It just feels like there isn't, there isn't a way out, and we can't stay the way it is.
Pär Winzell: My greatest dream is that somebody will be able to come in and just give us a ton of actionable advice — things that we hadn't thought of, ways to piece all this together. I don't think that exists, but we have that urge. And I think every single one of us have that urge, but we're all sort of walking into this new world side by side, and we haven't really started, perhaps, talking to one another about what we're going through and what can be done.
Erica Heilman: You're on the edge of the thing that we all know, but we're boiling slowly, like frogs. But the thing is, I'm over here boiling, but I'm not flooded. How do you wake everybody up? Talk to those people who are like, "Yeah, you're right." There's a lot of "Yeah, you're right." But I have laundry, and then I gotta pick my kid up at school, right?
Karen Meisner: I mean, we're all like that, right? There's a million disasters happening everywhere all the time, and you only have bandwidth for your own and those of your neighbors, and you know, a few people you know, maybe. I don't expect people who aren't going through it to necessarily understand what it's like to be like, an American climate change early adopter, you know. But here we are.
How do you sort of communally acknowledge that the way things used to be are not available anymore? That is really hard, but it's absolutely crucial.Pär Winzell
Pär Winzell: I wanted to sit a bunch of people down, you know, perhaps people who have been through this, but maybe everyone, to sit down and sort of look everybody in the eye and say, like, "What does this really mean? What can we do? What do we have to change?" Let's not distract ourselves with the laundry or picking up the kids. Let's actually grapple with the imminent future. How do you sort of communally acknowledge that the way things used to be are not available anymore? Because that is really hard, but it's absolutely crucial. But like, that is a really strange and difficult conversation to start. It's like inviting people to a really crappy —
Karen Meisner: Worst barbecue ever.
Pär Winzell: Yeah.
Erica Heilman: The toll that it takes on a marriage — what is the different quality in the challenge, interpersonally, after this second flood?
Pär Winzell: We had a rough year. We have had more intense confrontations in the last few months than ever in our marriage, but you get to sort of meet each other anew.
Karen Meisner: I've pretty much wanted to kill him for like, a year straight.
Pär Winzell: Have you?
[Meisner laughs]
Karen Meisner: No, I mean, what he says is true. We've been together like, I don't know, 30 years, 30 odd years now, and this last year has been some of the worst. It's been so, so hard on us. Because not only is there just endless amounts of work that has to be done, but everywhere we look in our house and out of our house is just this doom and misery and that's really hard to navigate without feeling like you end up taking it out on your relationship. So yeah, we've had a rough, rough year. And at the same time, like Pär said, there is a lot to be said for when you can get through the really rough times by turning to each other instead of turning away from each other. Like it's nice to discover, after a million years of marriage, that there's still stuff we can discover about who we are in a crisis and how we can help each other.
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