Vermont visitors worry about beloved towns — here’s how you can help
Even when you’re just an occasional skier, you choose a “home spot” in each state you ski. You may wander here and there, but your own “personal” ski town is the one you’ keep coming back to, where faces are familiar and everything just clicks.
For me, that spot is Ludlow, Vt.
Ludlow stole my heart, and has had it for decades.
I woke up recently to news coverage of water churning right down the Main Street of Ludlow’s downtown; huge rocks and rivers of mud changing the landscape, roadways and buildings up by the ski area access road, and insane rapids picking up cars and tossing them along the riverside throughout town.
Ludlow, and so many cities and towns in wonderful Vermont, is in crisis.
I think of all my favorite places with worry: Mojos Café, where vinyl records are the backdrop as you nosh on Mexican food in the most casual setting you can imagine; the owners always, always there and remembering guests who’d visited just once.
They’d pushed their way through the pandemic via window service take out and had finally circled back to fully operational.
How about The Book Nook, an adorable independent book store that I’ve visited every single time I’m in town for the past 20-plus years. Every day, they have a literary quote on the chalkboard. Guess it and you get 20% off — and bragging rights. How I love poking through their amazing local authors shelves as I worked my brain for the answer. Can an independent book store hold on through this?
Café At D Light, where we’d drive down early morning from our Okemo Mountain Resort perch for the best hash and eggs for me, the full-on pancakes, eggs and meat for my spouse. We were always surrounded by locals; you kind of have to know the Café is there.
It’s clear from video and photos they’re well under water.
Up the road at the very end of the resort access road — perhaps the spot most shared in media around the world today because of the giant rock, mud and water slide that completely transformed the town’s busiest intersection (clean and easy shifting roads are now rubble, rocks and mud) is where we’d stop on our way back to grab Ugly Doughnuts from Sweet Surrender Bakery (IMHO the best chairlift pocket snack up there) and say a quick hello to Shon at The Boot Fitter, the guy I’ve trusted my ski gal feet with for decades (thanks, of course, to a kind local’s recommendation on a chairlift one sunny spring day years ago. That’s Ludlow folk; always sharing the good stuff). Will they be OK?
There are so many more spots that mean so much and look so worrisome. Main and Mountain, where I learned — during the pandemic at their firepit outdoor seating — to love an Old Fashioned. Their old-school Shaw’s Supermarket, which, when wiped out by Irene in 2011, pitched tons of tents and set up a kind of field supermarket, not as much to keep making money as to keep feeding the locals (markets are few and far between up there).
And how about Tony, the super nice local mechanic who, when my car died upon arrival a few years back, called all his local customers and asked them if he could prioritize me, and had my car ready by the end of my weekend trip. What kind of town does that for a visitor? Ludlow does.
I’m worried for “my” town.
I know the people. They’re tough yet kind. They work hard and most of all, they love their little corner of the world even more than folks like me do.
In the book “Deluge,” author Peggy Shinn does a remarkable job telling the story of how Vermont towns saved themselves during Tropical Storm Irene by digging in, teaming up, focusing on forward and *maybe* forgetting to ask permission a time or two.
Could Ludlow come back better than ever? I vote yes.
Here are some ways to help:
The Vermont Community Foundation has organized the VT Flood Response & Recovery Fund 2023. Go to https://vermontcf.org/our-impact/ programs-and-funds/vtflood-response/ for ways to donate.
State officials have encouraged people to give to the American Red Cross of Northern New England (https://www.redcross.org/local/me-nh-vt.html), or a local United Way to assist in relief efforts. Granite United Way covers Windsor County, in which Ludlow resides http://www.graniteuw. org/.