IRENE -- FLOOD -- AFTERMATH

“Losing your house means everything to people. I know that, but if you’ve lost your child…” She shrugs. “What does it mean? When it looked like we would have to evacuate, all I took were my son’s ashes and his pictures. I couldn’t have lived without them. The rest doesn’t matter.”

Sandy Kiley and I stood talking in the spacious wooden shed that serves as their family’s farm stand. They grow the best fingerling potatoes in Greene County, and service the finest restaurants on the mountaintop which is what we call our small nook of the world. Sandy and Bob, her husband, owners of RSK Farms, consider it fortunate that they’ll have potatoes for the next two months. Their other crops were destroyed in the flood caused by Hurricane Irene. Their lower fields, the ones bordering the river, a flood plain, yes, but the best soil, those lower fields are nothing now but twenty-eight acres of fist sized gravel. What will the Kileys do? Sandy shrugs. “One day at a time,” she says.

The Kileys live and farm in Prattsville, New York, the hardest hit village on the mountaintop, a small, old town of 650 where I often shop at Jim’s American Supermarket and the Agway, Prattsville, now gone. The Kileys along with the rest of the town are in survival mode. Main St. with its FEMA tent, portable showers, food pantry, clothing drop-off, and port-a-potties looks like a refugee camp. Houses gape open. Porches in shreds. X’s spray painted on houses set for demolition. Small mountains of muddy debris outside of ruined homes display contents that were once belongings: waterlogged rugs, splintered furniture, possessions now junk, less than junk, worthless. Mud all over. What will these people do?

They are doing it. They are not the type to back down. Rebuild or what? They see no choice. One family, completely isolated from the road, constructed a make-shift bridge across the water. The DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) came in and ordered them to take it down. The family refused. This is how they had been surviving. A confrontation brewed. The National Guard called in the state troopers who were thought to back the DEC, of course. Not at all. The troopers arrived and backed the locals, their neighbors, and told them to continue doing whatever they needed to survive. Morale is surprisingly high. Neighbors help neighbors, and there are volunteers from as far away as Michigan. In my valley, twenty-eight neighbors trapped for a week without phone or electricity, cooked dinner as best they could and ate with each other every night.

Certainly, the horror stories are many: the Chassidic old man who watched his wife drown in their kitchen when he waded out to snag a boat and couldn’t get back to her; she had been a Holocaust survivor; the farmer who watched two hundred dairy cows drown; houses literally floated away; trailers torn in two. But the aftermath – how these people are surviving and rebuilding – is an equally compelling story. The core values of these people, when not inflamed by irresponsible politicians, are strong and resilient, the kind of work ethic that made the United States the dominant industrial power in the world. Rosie the Riveter, tillers of Victory Gardens, teen-aged members of the Civil Air Patrol, Junior Achievement (Remember that?) – these are symbols of American strength. These are the people of Prattsville working to rebuild their lives in the face of a national economic crisis as well as a natural disaster, now caught in a political shoot-out between wealthy politicos who tie emergency aid to cuts in job programs. True, FEMA has a large tent in town as its headquarters. They are here to help, but word is getting around that a woman who lost her home valued at $102,000 was handed a check for $560. People are angry. No one seems resigned. The goal is to survive, to survive and go one better, and that’s what they will continue to do. Most do not want to go anywhere else. This is home. There are so many entities at play here. Other nearby towns suffered dreadful devastation as well: Lexington, Windham, Fleischman’s, Margaretville, Arkville. Looks on faces are the looks of the shell-shocked. Still, they are determined to go on, to make it better than it was before. I am privileged to be in the midst of them. People want me to tell their stories, and I intend to do just that.