Karen Meisner and Pär Winzell live along the Winooski River in Plainfield in a big brick home from the 1830s. In the flood of 2023, the river ripped through their downstairs, carrying off belongings and scattering uprooted trees across their property.
A year to the day later, it happened again. Like many Vermonters situated in flood zones, Karen and Pär are still waiting to see if they’ll get a buyout, and this year there are new considerations weighing on their decision about whether to stay, or go for good.
Reporter Erica Heilman sat down with them on the anniversary of their last interview with Vermont Public. 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.
Pär Winzell: I think this year has been different than the first year. The first year there was this huge event. It was the first one in our lives. And you know, it was, I'm not going to say exciting, but there was a huge amount of adrenaline. And there’s all this energy to fix things.
When the second one hits, you kind of have to wonder, like, OK, so this is not a one-time event. Is this like an ongoing maintenance thing? And is that even remotely sustainable.
Karen Meisner: The last year has been one of coming to terms with the fact that floods are going to keep hitting this house, and we can't live here.
Pär Winzell: We got a letter of substantial damage, which changes the legal situation quite a bit. It means we're only here by temporary permit, but essentially, humans can't live here, not without tremendous amounts of flood remediation, which for here means essentially elevating the house.
We had such dreams for this place.Karen Meisner
Karen Meisner: So, either the FEMA buyout will come through, and they'll tell us you have X months to pack up and leave, or we'll just stay here until we get flooded out, or the FEMA buyout won't come through, and we'll have to leave bankrupt.
You know, having sunk everything into this place — because we sank everything we had into this place — hoping that we were going to live here forever. We had such dreams for this place.
But if the buyout doesn't come through, then we just have to walk away, turn it over to the bank, and all of that is just gone.
Pär Winzell: One of the things I've found is how difficult it is to make plans when the number of uncertainties grow too large, and so you just sort of, you're like a deer in the headlight. You can try to think it through, and we're doing that, and we're preparing, but we don't have a plan, because we cannot make one plan. We would have to make 32 plans. And that is part of the, sort of, limbo.
And I know that there are people in Plainfield who are in the buyout program who are just waiting and waiting. But this waiting is actually quite destructive. It's not just that time has passed in like, you know, it costs money to live. People don't know whether they can start something new, whether they should try to repair what they have, whether they could possibly afford to buy another place with the FEMA money that they might get. There's just an enormous amount of uncertainty all around.
We sank everything we had into this place because we thought we're going to live here forever.Karen Meisner
Erica Heilman: What are the other factors in the last year, what are the other things that you've been thinking about this year as you've been trying to figure out what to do?
Pär Winzell: Well, one of the things that happened is that over the course of the winter and spring, immigration policy in the U.S. changed pretty dramatically and in sort of chaotic ways, where, for me, personally, leaving the country right now feels fraught, because I would have to come back.
I have a green card. I've lived here for 30 years. You know, I'm a resident in good standing. But I, you know, when I was 19, I had a small altercation in Sweden.
Karen Meisner: "Altercation" makes it sound like a fight. When he was a teenager, he used his local university's internet, because that was the only internet available in the '80s, and he used it to get to a bulletin board where he could talk to people and just have conversations. And he loved doing that, but it rang up a big phone bill for the university, which does not matter in Sweden. He paid them back, and then the next year, he went to that university. So nobody in Sweden cares, but it counts as fraud and counts as a felony in the United States.
It doesn't matter that his crime was adorable. It counts as a felony. So now, if he leaves the country and tries to come back in, and somebody says, "Well, you're a felon with a green card." His ability to enter the country and not be detained and thrown into, you know, a Gulag somewhere, is seriously in doubt.
Pär Winzell: So I'm staying put for now, because I don't want to risk that. I have an 80-year-old mother who's probably going to break a hip one day, and I want to be able to go back for that. For now, I mean, this is, this is my home.
Karen Meisner: We also have a child. And our child is an autistic, transgender, wonderful, wonderful person who can't really live on their own. And we're worried about them. We're worried about the world that is waiting for them, because it's becoming very hostile to queer people. And we want our kid to feel like they can walk freely in the world without the people in charge of things telling them that they don't exist.
Pär Winzell: All of us qualify for a Swedish citizenship down the line, and we'll get those processes started. But we don't want to go.
Why? Why not go? I love this country. You meet thrilling people of every possible variation, everywhere you go.
I don't want to lose diversity. I want more diversity, I want to run into people from a million countries with brilliant ideas who come here specifically because the U.S. is a place where amazing things happen, and has for hundreds of years.
There's a reason why people immigrate here beyond there's no other recourse or beyond the paycheck. People come here because there's something that is difficult to define, but they know it and they want it and they didn't have it back home. It is, ah, man ... hopeful.
Erica Heilman: Will you be here in a year?
Karen Meisner: We don't know. Will FEMA and Vermont buy our house or are we going to go bankrupt? Will the government tell immigrants that people with Pär's history can't enter the country? Will the situation become untenable for kids like ours who are autistic, kids like ours who are transgender?
We sank everything we had into this place because we thought we're going to live here forever. We had big dreams for it, but the river had other plans.
