The View From Chaos Turnpike

In the farther reaches of my town of Cavendish, in southeastern Vermont, is a byway—you can hardly call it a road—charismatically named Chaos Turnpike. Right now, it is washed out by the storm that just hit New England. Because other, more traveled dirt roads in the district are also washed out, a section of the town’s inhabitants is currently cut off.

Not a few rural New Englanders face the same situation. In fact, some of the more “metropolitan” folk have fared far worse: Within a 20-mile circumference of where I live, houses and cars have been entirely inundated in of Ludlow, Weston,