A Flower, a Butterfly, a Flood

One Year After My City's Climate Disaster

State Street in Montpelier, Vermont, from my canoe on 11 July 2023 / © Bryan Pfeiffer

ON THAT TERRIBLE day one year ago, the rains came and the rivers rose to destroy my city — Montpelier, Vermont. The flood came for nearly every downtown business and first-floor office, and for too many homes and apartments. It came for our fire department, our post office, our city hall, and our places of worship. And it nearly broke our spirit.

Through it all, understandably, none of us found time to think much about the fate of a lovely plant with a funny name, Ivy-leaved Toadflax, or an approachable butterfly, Baltimore Checkerspot, living beside the river. Had the flood taken them as well?

Instead, in the days after the disaster hit, even as we mourned for our community, and for so many others across Vermont, we got to work. We pumped and mucked out basements; we hauled to the curb tons of waterlogged books, documents, carpeting, furniture, retail goods, food, and artwork. The giant trash heaps that lined our streets held our memories and so much of our innocence. Then they were hauled away.

But in the year since, Montpelier has mostly recovered. We donated money to help our business owners and neighbors. We held community meetings about flood resilience and building back better. To be sure, families remain displaced; businesses are gone for good and others struggle to carry on; homes and lifetimes of belongings now rot in landfills. We now live more viscerally and literally with the climate disaster at our doorstep. (Doesn’t everyone? Shouldn’t everyone?)

The Butterfly

A Baltimore Checkerspot caterpillar and its partly eaten Black Ash leaf during calmer times beside the North Branch of the Winooski River. / © Bryan Pfeiffer

In the days before the flood, I had been visiting a population of spiky, orange-and-black Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton) caterpillars living beside the North Branch of the Winooski River below my home (on higher ground). Munching on the leaves of White Turtlehead, Black Ash, and Morrow’s Honeysuckle, the caterpillars were about to undergo one of the most spectacular transformations in nature to become free-flying adult butterflies displaying bold orange, black, and white wing markings. Then came the rains. Everything changed.

Days after the flood, once the river had resettled into its banks, I wandered down to the North Branch to check on the caterpillars. Seeing none, I assumed that the surging waters had swept them all away. Turning for home, I noticed a flash of orange beneath the leaf of a Sensitive Fern. Not a caterpillar. Better: a pair of Baltimore Checkerspot butterflies. They had cheated death — and were mating on the fern. If all went well, the female would go on to lay eggs on White Turtlehead and perhaps other plants along the shoreline.

But it would take until this July, a year later, for me to know whether enough of the checkerspots had survived to sustain the population — for their cycle of life to go on, like the rest of us, beside the North Branch.

The Flower

Meanwhile, there’s a spot where the North Branch runs through the heart of downtown Montpelier before meeting up with the main stem of the Winooski. From State Street you can look upriver and see the brick walls and foundation stone of businesses, apartments, and office buildings. That’s the view above featuring one of the most notable walls in our city, which a year ago was underwater up to those windows.

I had never taken much notice of the plants clinging to the gray granite foundation stone, at least not until I saw them flowering this past May: Ivy-leaved Toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis). It’s a rare species here in Vermont.

Okay, not your typical rare species. As it turns out, Ivy-leaved Toadflax is an immigrant here in North America. Native to mainland Europe, the toadflax does fine on walls, and now makes for a lovely ornamental plant of cities and gardens around the world. Still, Montpelier is among the few places in Vermont to find Ivy-leaved Toadflax. For four decades I had been walking past this spot unaware of those cascading blooms. Until this year.

Perhaps it was my newfound sober view of the river in the wake of this flood. Or maybe, as I age, I see more beauty in the cracks of sidewalks and in the gaps of stone walls. Whatever the case, Ivy-leaved Toadflax exemplifies tenacity and resilience. It’s a survivor. A storm that took so much from my community could not take a gentle plant clinging one of its rock walls.

I guess that’s an irony of our fraught relationship with nature. No matter how harsh our assault on wildlife and wild places, no matter how much we destroy, sometimes the gentle and the gossamer can be tougher than we are.

As for the checkerspot butterflies, well, I’m not so sure about their fate. I did find caterpillars along the river this spring, fewer than usual. But so far, I’ve noticed only one had gone on to form a chrysalis and then successfully emerge as an adult Baltimore Checkerspot — a male. Whether he will die a lonely death beside the river, I do not know. I suspect not. I’m keeping vigil.

And even as we commemorate this storm and celebrate our recovery here in Vermont, we do so with unsettling recognition that our burning planet was partly to blame for the carnage a year ago. We live with the knowledge that the torrential rains are now more likely to return, and that our rivers will rise yet again to bring more suffering before we can do enough to ease the climate crisis.

Still, we’ve got it relatively good here in Montpelier. Vermonters are not dropping dead in triple-digit heat in the way they are in the American South and Southwest, in Europe and India and Africa and other over-heated places. Butterflies as well suffer in heat and droughts.

All the while, plants grow on the edifice of the Anthropocene. And Ivy-leaved Toadflax, kind of a world citizen, will bear witness to the human suffering — in Montpelier, Madrid, Melbourne and in far too many other places beyond.

Baltimore Checkerspots from another site here in Vermont / © Bryan Pfeiffer

Postscripts

• Vermonters still suffering from this flood will benefit from your paid subscriptions to Chasing Nature over the past year, a portion of which, totaling $464, I will now donate to ongoing flood recovery as part of the one-year commemoration. Thanks!

  • ADDENDUM (11 July 2024) — Heavy rains last night again flooded Vermont, not as horrible as one year ago but nonetheless with tremendous loss of property, roads, and perhaps human life. The donation will go to THIS YEAR’s disaster, even as we still work to recover from the Flood of 2023.

• As it turns out, Montpelier’s flood recovery celebration, called “Flood the Streets with Art,” has been postponed for a week owing to the threat today (July 10) of heavy rains and flash-flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Beryl.

• I’m learning more about weather, including flash droughts and floods, from

  Aaron Price
  and the American Meteorological Society’s education team at
  Weather with a Twist
  .

• Ivy-leaved Toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis), also known as Kenilworth Ivy, has a long, storied history as a world traveller. It reportedly made its way to London on marble slabs imported from Italy in 1640. From there, of course, the world. We’re not quite sure of it provenance on that wall in Montpelier. (Many thanks to Arthur Gilman and his New Flora of Vermont for information on the plant.) By the way, its scientific epithet, muralis, means “of walls,” as in mural.

• Finally, some of you may have noticed my discovery in Montpelier (on 9 Jul) of a zombie snail infested with a parasitic flatworm. I’ll write more about it here on Chasing Nature. Until then, here’s a crazy preview: