Today's Vermont: Close to Home
On August 4th 2020, a massive explosion tore through Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, shattering glass windows and doors throughout the city.
Mere minutes later the shockwave reached Vermont, in the form of videos from Beirut that poured onto our screens with intimate immediacy - first smoke, then a relatively small explosion, and then a huge rushing blast, terrifying in its force and speed.
For months Vermonters have been physically shut off from the world by quarantine. Our shared understanding of what it means to be present has shifted as school, jobs, appointments, and even family gatherings take place online. The distinction between physical and virtual space matters far less than it did last year. When the Beirut explosion captured our attention, the country of Lebanon, all the way across the globe, seemed suddenly as close as the town of Lebanon, New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut River.
Only half the size of the Green Mountain State, Lebanon is a small nation made large by the diversity of its landscape and the resilience and cultural vitality of its people.
Like Vermont, Lebanon is a land defined by mountains, with a range of peaks that run down the middle of the country. Vermont has The Long Trail, a hiking path that traverses 272 miles of Green Mountain ridgelines. The Lebanon Mountain Trail extends for 292 miles, from near the Syrian border in the north to the Israeli borderlands in the south.
State14 has roots in Lebanon, too. As founder Carolinne Griffin wrote in Dance, Medicine, Love and War — An Immigrant Story, her parents met in a hospital in the coastal town of Maameltein and emigrated to the United States in 1975, not long after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War.
What was it like for the people in Beirut who filmed the explosion?
One minute they were observers, curious and concerned, but seemingly at a safe distance, holding up their phones and zooming in on the Port of Beirut to capture the startling scene of brown smoke rising from a warehouse engulfed in flames. A split second later the shockwave was upon them - no time to find shelter, no chance to dodge the flying shards of broken glass.
We Vermonters watched the destruction from a safe distance, just as we watch the wildfires out West, the tornadoes on the Plains, and the hurricanes that batter the Gulf Coast.
How much warning will we have, I wonder, when disaster hits closer to home?
Two weeks after the Beirut explosion, on a lovely late summer evening in the Northeast Kingdom, I spread out a picnic blanket on a patch of meadow grass under an apple tree at Cate Hill Orchard in Greensboro. The farmers of Cate Hill, Maria Schumann and Josh Karp, had organized an Orchard Concert and Picnic to Benefit Beirut, inspired by their friendship with a Lebanese artist named Dima Mabsout, who worked at Cate Hill in the summer of 2019.
Bundles of goldenrod marked socially distant picnic spots throughout the orchard, and volunteer bakers delivered steaming loaves of bread baked fresh in a woodfired oven to accompany a hearty Lebanese picnic of lamb stew, hummus, cucumber and tomato salad, smoky baba ganoush, and creamy labneh with golden honey and tart orange seaberries.
Singers and musicians performed at the foot of the meadow, in front of a small stupa bedecked with brightly colored prayer flags. Gideon Crevoshay sang ancient songs from Kurdistan and the Caucasus, and Pavi Mehta and Polash Chowdury, practitioners of a spiritual musical practice known as Baul Fakiri, offered soulful music from their native Bengal, and spoke of finding an ashram - or shelter - here in the hills of the Green Mountains.
The evening was profoundly local in scale, but international in scope, in a way that helped me make sense of today’s Vermont. Here we are hunkered down in our homes and rooted in our local communities, but even as we appreciate the fresh air and the fruits of the land we are ever more aware and attuned to the complexity of this fragile and resilient world.
The Lebanese food we ate in the apple orchard was mostly grown on the farm. The singers and musicians performed without a stage, lights, or microphone. At one moment, between songs, all attention focused on a single songbird that perched in an apple tree. And yet we were also participating in a wide-ranging blend of cultural traditions. We were present, in a sense, in a landscape that encompassed the rolling hills of Greensboro, the mountain pastures of northern Iraq, the swollen rivers of Bangladesh, and the neighborhoods of Beirut where shellshocked Lebanese citizens were sorting through rubble, and beginning to rebuild.
After finishing our meal, we gathered in the farmyard and watched a video message from Dima, the former Cate Hill farmworker, who took up her camera in the aftermath of the blast.
Seated in the dusk of a Vermont summer evening we walked the broken streets of Beirut. As the sky darkened Jupiter and Saturn emerged and a few mosquitoes whined. The video from Lebanon grew clearer, brighter, and louder as night fell in the Northeast Kingdom. We watched and listened, bearing witness to the selfless and spontaneous cooperation among strangers that always seems to follow in the wake of disaster, as people picked up whatever tools were at hand and set to the work of repair.
Is there a place far away from Vermont that you feel connected to these days? How are you coping with the coronavirus pandemic? Is there someone whose voice you want to amplify? Join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #todaysvermont, and thanks, as always, for reading.
If you feel inspired to support rebuilding efforts in Beirut you can participate in the same grassroots fundraiser to rebuild windows and doors that the Cate Hill event supported.
Big thanks to Breezy Hill Marketing for sponsoring this column and helping us spread the word of Today’s Vermont. Read more about this friend of State14.
Big thanks to Breezy Hill Marketing for sponsoring this column and helping us spread the word of Today’s Vermont. Read more about this friend of State14.
