Rutland writer Peggy Shinn is best known for profiling Olympic athletes and writing about the outdoors for national ski and travel magazines and Vermont Life.
But in a new book, Shinn writes about champions of another sort - the every day Vermonters who were hardest hit by Tropical Storm Irene and those who helped put the state back together.
Shinn says the day of the storm she was hunkered down with her family playing Monopoly. She remembers thinking Rutland had gotten off easy with just rain.
But that was before she checked Facebook and saw photos posted of Route 4 collapsing. “And I remember it felt like my stomach fell out of me,” says Shinn, “and I was like - oh my God, this is much more than a rainstorm.”
Shinn’s sister, Betsy McKay, is Atlanta Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal and was overseeing Irene coverage for the paper. “And I called her up, and said you need to see what’s happening up here,” says Shinn. “It’s really bad.”
Shinn says her sister went on Facebook and called her right back, in shock. “Oh my god,” she said.
Knowing how difficult it would for outside journalists to get in, Shinn offered to help her sister out with some spot reporting.
“So I loaded my camel back with a ham sandwich, a couple energy bars, I had a water bottle, a camera, my note pad a digital recorder, my cell phone was charged and I got on my mountain bike and just started riding.”
Shinn headed for Killington and said everywhere she looked, there were people working. “Nobody was waiting for help and everybody had a story and it wasn’t a woe is me story it was a ‘well, this is happening and this is what we had to do.’”
The Wall Street Journal published a couple of her reports, but Shinn says she had so much more material; stories that she felt deserved to be told. “I mean you look around at the country,” she says, “and everything you read in the newspaper is bad. Oh we can’t get ourselves out of the health care crisis. Oh Congress can’t get the budget balanced.” But Shinn says, “look what a group of people can do when they put their minds to it.”
That’s when she realized she had the makings for a book.
Shinn knew she couldn’t tell every storm story, so she chose five different perspectives: Wilmington’s Lisa Sullivan, a business owner who’s bookstore was flooded and town clerk Susie Houghwout, who saved the town records. Local contractors like Craig Mosher and Doug Casella who put route four back together; and the town of Pittsfield. “We chose Pittsfield, because it’s kind of the poster child of how an isolated town can respond in a crisis.” And she says “I found Geo Honigford in South Royalton who was a farmer who’s crops were effected.”
Shinn also profiled homeowner Tracy Payne, who’d just finished renovating her 1840s farmhouse in Jamaica only to have it lifted off its foundation by floodwaters and smashed downstream. “Tracy lost everything - everything.”
The Rutland writer says it was very difficult to ask people who had been so seriously harmed by the storm to relive that experience again and she says it was difficult to hear.
Peggy Shinn says that was especially true in Rutland where she interviewed those who searched for weeks for the body of young Michael Garofano who drowned alongside his father during the storm. “And it really hit me at that point the loss to the whole city of these two men.” Shinn says, “It wasn’t just the water supervisor and son out checking the valve - it was a real Rutland family - and it was hitting everybody so hard.”
Shinn’s book is not the first to come out about Irene. But it may be the most thorough and detailed account. “I’m a story teller,” Shinn says, “and how Vermont responded is a helluva story,” one the Rutland author thinks the rest of the country could learn from.
Peggy Shinn’s book “Deluge, Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont’s Flash Floods and How One Small State Saved Itself” was published by University Press of New England.
