Nine years ago, one of the most damaging storms in Vermont’s history came roaring in, bringing the state to its knees, as some said, with more than 500 miles of state roads destroyed, 60,000 homes and businesses without power, and 200 bridges damaged or ripped off foundations.

One of those was the Norwich’s Kids Bridge over Blood Brook connecting Beaver Meadow Road and neighboring families to Huntley Meadow. Kids used the bridge to cross the brook on foot and bike to use the fields, playground, and continue on their way to school and town.

The wooden bridge, built by Eagle Scouts, was never replaced, despite an approved bridge design, necessary state and town permits, and approved site. The last remaining obstacle was expense – until now.

Thanks to private donations recently received from residents and friends of Norwich, the town has set up a special fund called the Kids Bridge at Huntley Meadow. To date, over $10,000 has been raised to replace the bridge. The estimated cost for the project with riverbank abutments and slope suitable for bike and foot approaches, in addition to the assembly and placement of the bridge, is $12,000. The total cost, however, is projected to be $20,000.

The steel prefabricated walking/biking bridge will be delivered to Huntley Meadow. The grading and footings and the installation of the bridge across Blood Brook will be done entirely by volunteers from the Trails committee, local contractors, and residents.

“We are currently past the halfway point in donations from friends of Norwich,” said Norwich resident and project overseer Don McCabe. “If friends continue to make tax deductible donations at our current pace, we hope to have the bridge in place this summer.”

McCabe’s family has lived in Norwich for 36 years. He and his wife, Lisa, built their house there, raised their children and brought them to Huntley Meadow over many years, crossing the old suspension bridge, catching crayfish under the bridge and going for an occasional swim.

“Our kids came to Huntley for sports practice, family picnics, kite flying with friends, and biking over the years,” said McCabe. “When it became clear recently that there was not enough support for taxpayer dollars to replace the bridge, the old-fashioned ‘let’s do it ourselves’ spirit took hold. I reached out to personal friends first, then to Norwich residents through the Norwich List.”

The response has been overwhelming, McCabe related, but there are still more generous friends needed to make the Kids Bridge a reality this summer. He met with Norwich town manager Herb Durfee, Recreation Council director Brie Swenson, and members of the Norwich Trails Committee in March to find out if there was collective interest and support to proceed.

“All supported the concept of private funding and volunteer person power for this community project,” said McCabe. “The town manager agreed to set up a designated fund to be used solely for the Kids Bridge. The Recreation director agreed to manage the project and secure permits from the state. Local contractors agreed to donate their time and equipment to prepare the bridge site. The Trails Committee volunteered its members to assemble and place the prefabricated bridge.”

That need for funding and the warm memories that many families have had over the years using the bridge with their children prompted McCabe to begin the fundraising project using only private donations to bring the bridge back to Huntley Meadow.

McCabe believes that when Norwich families donate to the Kids Bridge project, it underscores the commitment to ‘think globally, act locally.’ “We’re aware of what is happening in our country and the world,” said McCabe. By putting resources into rebuilding the Kids Bridge, past and future generations of Norwich residents, alike, can talk about the simple pleasures of life like “…hiking and biking across the little bridge that spans the brook.”

Publisher’ Note: I don’t typically publish profiles of people after they’ve passed for a number of reasons: that we’re only quarterly; that I like to ‘introduce’ people to the community in hopes of facilitating real-time connections; that we try to capture a person’s heart and soul in the moment.

I am making an exception for Ruth.

Ruth Sylvester, herself, was exceptional in every way. I can safely say that the Norwich Times would not be the time-honored publication it continues to be were it not for the articles she wrote for just about every issue since the very first one in September 1997. Although Ruth and I rarely saw each other over those 20+ years, and didn’t have much in common superficially, I felt a deep love for and connection to her that I couldn’t explain. She truly und erstood my mission for the Norwich Times and was able to capture and translate the essence of Norwich and its people, places and events like no other.

And, why, you might ask, did I not feature her when she was living among us? Because, true to who she was, she did not want the focus to be about her. She wanted to shine her light on others.

While Ruth has passed on, her spirit is alive and well in everyone else’s stories she so magically shared through her written word.

Ruth Ellen Sylvester lived an extraordinary life – one filled with adventure, song, dance, books, writing/editing, athleticism, travel, gardening and a myriad of friends. But there was more. This was a woman who was joyful, generous and compassionate, one who took risks and was not fearful of being alone. Her strength of character was reflected in her philosophical optimism and her encouragement of others to share in kind.

Ruth was born in the spring of 1952 and passed away in the winter of this year after a courageous battle with cancer. The host of family and friends who surrounded her mirrored the admiration they had for her.

“Her gift for being fully involved in the present moment made her wonderful company,” said Ruth’s spouse, Edith Forbes. “She was quick to notice other people’s needs and liked helping in ways large and small. Thanks to her generosity, joyfulness and multiplicity of interests, she had a wide and warm circle of friends.”

With a degree in classical Greek and Latin from Bryn Mawr College in her academic pocket, Ruth headed north in the early 1970s to Franconia, New Hampshire where she had lived and worked on a vegetable farm during summers while in school.

“This was a reflection of her style,” said Forbes. “It wasn’t political or philosophical as was the sign of the times back then when people were getting college degrees and then moving back to the land. Ruth was just enthusiastic about life and lived in the moment. She got fully absorbed in whatever she was doing. She loved being at the farm but I think eventually she outgrew it.”

As such, Ruth relocated to Norwich where her parents and grandparents had previously retired. The move gave her the continuation of a lifelong connection with the Vermont town. At first, Ruth tried a variety of work including the Kiewit Computation Center, Peter Christian’s Tavern, Countryman Press, and substitute teaching. Eventually, she became a freelance writer and editor. She edited books by local authors and wrote regularly for the Norwich Times, Quechee Times and Lebanon Times.

She had a vast storehouse of memorized poetry, Forbes noted, that she could recall to suit the moment. Close friend Marcia Cassidy agreed. “I think because Ruth majored in classic Greek and Latin, it gave her an understanding of words and vocabulary that were deep in their roots. She was an incredible writer and a keen listener. It was never about her, but always about others.”

As longtime and dear friend Steve Maker noted, Ruth spent decades helping others in a variety of ways. “She was serious and consistent about helping others have fun,” said Maker. “She held annual parties, one of which was called GBC for garlic, butter, and chocolate – the major food groups – and people had to bring a dish that had one of those ingredients in it. Can you see what fun that would be?”

Good friend Tracey Sherry recalled Ruth’s annual strawberry and lobster parties, among others, the purpose of which were to assemble friends and neighbors. “They were really excuses to bring people together and to share good, fresh food,” said Sherry. “She was so generous of heart and spirit.”

“Ruth wrote profiles of people in the area with
her eye on a particular topic. She loved words.
She had an acute ear for the exactness of
language. In fact, one could have called her ‘a
birdwatcher for language.’” -Edith Forbes, spouse

In 2001, Ruth began attending a local reading group where she met her future spouse, Edith (Elfie) Forbes. The couple celebrated their civil union in 2004 and a legal marriage five years later. They moved to Forbes’ farm in Thetford where Ruth dove into gardening and tending to the farm animals.

As a local resident and passionate cello musician, Ruth also joined the Upper Valley Music Center in which she played with several ensembles, including a string quartet, a folk dance jam group, the Bach study group and the Upper Valley Chamber orchestra. She also served on the organization’s board.

“We were delighted to have her as a colleague at the Music Center,” said Louis Cornell, president and board member, and one of the founders of the organization. “She had played the cello as a girl but gave it up until she joined us.”

Ruth also came on board as a student of chamber music which is how she initially became involved in the center, Cornell related. “She was enthusiastic and funny,” Cornell said. “She had a wonderful sense of humor which made working with her a joy.”

Cornell met Ruth through her parents with whom he was friends, and the two musicians played string quartets together for years. She was a chamber music player and was also in the chamber orchestra. “Ruth was intelligent and enterprising,” said Cornell. “She was an independent soul who was willing to take risks. She leaves a big hole where she touched many lives in all kinds of circumstances and considerations. She was a delightful person to know, and she will be very sorely missed.”

Ruth was deeply involved with a variety of dance styles including English country, contra, Morris, folk, and ballroom. She also became a lifelong dance caller. The adventurous and independent sides of Ruth were reflected in her world travels – solo. While at Bryn Mawr, she traveled around the western United States and, after graduation, through Europe and Africa by herself.

“She loved life,” said Forbes. “She loved being alive. She trusted fate and, in general, that served her well.”

Willing Hands’ new headquarters is on Church Street in Norwich. However, its impact reaches far and wide as it picks up nutritious food otherwise thrown away, and donates it to organizations and people in need across the Upper Valley.

Willing Hand’s history starts in 2004 with founder Peter Phippen. Phippen worked in the produce department of the Hanover Co-op and noticed that there was an inordinate amount of nutritious food going to waste. He resigned from his job and founded Willing Hands in order to be able to redistribute quality food into the community which would have otherwise gone into the landfill.

Phippen started out with a donated mini-van to collect food and deliver it to local organizations. The aging mini-van was without a garage, and so major temperature changes when storing produce before delivery was challenging. Despite many hurdles, in its first year, Willing Hands delivered over one hundred tons of food to over thirty organizations and gained its non-profit status.

Today, Willing Hands serves over sixty organizations every week in the Upper Valley, delivering food in box trucks. “We made a decision early on in our history to focus our time and attention – and our donors – on perishable and healthy food,” said Gabe Zoerheide, Executive Director of Willing Hands. “In 2019, Willing Hands delivered approximately 266 tons of food to our neighbors in need and 93% of this was fruit and vegetables.” The other food collected by Willing Hands includes eggs, milk, frozen meat, and locally-made, home-made bread.

As another part of its mission, Willing Hands has several programs to create more accessibility to healthy food. There is a nutrition education program to teach people how to cook healthy meals on a limited budget with limited kitchen items. This program is volunteer-run by board member, Birgit Humpert, a registered dietician. People can also donate food from their own gardens, and even wild game they’ve hunted to help supplement the foods which Willing Hands receives in donations.

Another important part of Willing Hands is the garden sites run by Gleaning and Gardening Coordinator Jim McCracken. The gardens, which are at Cedar Circle Farm and Willing Hands home base, are entirely tended by volunteers who come to plant, weed, and harvest crops for donation. With the recent threat of Covid, McCracken spoke of the importance of the gardens for community building. “I think they really enjoy being out and having a purpose to what their work is, and being able to help and be safe at the same time.”

Gleaning, which is the act of harvesting leftover crops from a farmers field, is a high-yield, volunteer-run activity to collect more produce for donation. The volunteers will go to local farms and orchards to collect spare fruits and vegetables which were not collected by the farmers themselves. Places such as Crossroads Farm, Honeyfields Farm, Edgewater Farm, and Cedar Circle Farm have generously donated their excess produce to Willing Hands. In 2019, gleaning alone contributed about 60,000 pounds of produce. Right now, there are five weekly-scheduled gleanings.

Carolyn Frye, who is the Gleaning Program Volunteer Lead, said she joined Willing Hands because of the simplistic nature of the organization. “I just thought it sounded like such a perfect mission. At the time it was very straightforward, there was surplus food and there were people in need and Willing Hands was collecting surplus food and giving it to people in need,” said Frye. “I feel like everyone who comes to Willing Hands to volunteer has that same interest and so there’s such a wonderful camaraderie…That’s the wonderful part of that, to see the spirit of others who want to help others in that way.”

Willing Hands has recently moved into a new location at 198 Church Street in Norwich with 10 acres and a 4,160 square foot building. Before the move, the biggest issue for the organization was with space. “We had these crops available and no place to store them so we had to leave them in the field or find another organization to take them right away,” said Frye. Their new location has a warehouse space for more food storage, allowing them to house their food for a longer time.

In response to Covid-19, Willing Hands is facing a huge challenge. With an increased demand for donated food as people face the economic crisis, Willing Hands has responded in kind. “Our organization has really been on the forefront of the community’s response to the pandemic, particularly around food response…The past six weeks have been the busiest I’ve ever had during my career.” said Zoerheide. The organization has had to increase their capacity by up to forty percent. “There has been an outpouring of support from community members monetarily and with volunteer time, which is a heartwarming and positive thing. Logistically, it’s challenging and it’s been very rewarding to play a role in the community’s response.”

Willing Hands has been uniquely able to handle this crisis in a way they weren’t before. “We finally found a perfect location and our programs have been able to grow. At this time of such tremendous need we’ve been able to take so much in. It’s really remarkable that we are really set to respond to this crisis, having moved into the facility just last spring.”

The work that Willing Hands does is an example of how a small idea can create such large-scale impact. Food waste is an enormous problem in the United States, creating vast quantities of methane which is a highly impactful greenhouse gas. Being able to redistribute food that will otherwise be discarded can actually start with a mini-van and turn into a large-scale operation. There are networks of organizations doing their small part to end food insecurity across the country, but creating a network of organizations such as Willing Hands has been able to do, has made a larger dent overall. Outstretching Willing Hands far and wide will do wonders for solving food insecurity across the country and beyond.

In the 1943 movie, Lassie came home to Roddy McDowell. In the 1996 song that won Shawn Colvin the Grammy, Sonny came home with a mission… and a vengeance. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, Phin Choukas and Noah Kahan came home to the Upper Valley with time on their hands and with music on their minds.

So why – with Choukas’ sophomore year at Middlebury College and with Kahan’s rising career as a touring musician and on hold for the foreseeable future – did the childhood friends limit themselves to a single week of mud season to record Cape Elizabeth, an EP of five acoustic-folk songs?

Why, that is, aside from limiting the odds of one infecting the other in the Choukas family’s Dreaded Zig Zag studio on Kerwin Hill?

“We wanted to have a really raw sound, to build up the songs a little bit, but not take away from the rawness,” Choukas said recently from his Norwich home. “Just focus on Noah’s voice and the songwriting.”

That focus, along with the tight deadline, gave Kahan just the right context in which to play out songs and ideas he’d been struggling to bring to life between tours and recording on behalf of Republic Records, the label with which he’d signed out of Hanover High School in 2015.

“The time frame we were working with took away any chance of falling into overwhelming doubt about any given song, doing a lot of takes,” Kahan said from his home in Strafford. “I didn’t want to overthink or over-produce this record.”

Republic released the finished product on May 1 – barely two months after Kahan fled his professional home base, New York City, just ahead of the tsunami of Covid-19 infections. Picking up his younger brother Simon following what he calls “a week of almost total panic,” he drove north to shelter-in-place with their family.

Mostly for the sake of channeling their anxieties, the Kahans jammed with a song that Noah had written and set aside a few years earlier.

And now, This Troubled Mind took on new meaning, anchored by the following verse:

I worry for the sun, yes, I worry for the snow

I worry I’ll die young while I worry I’ll grow old

Oh, I worry for the time I spent worrying alone

It makes me sad

It takes me back

I break in half

Ah-ooh, I break in half.

Next thing the Kahan brothers knew, their mother had posted a video of them performing the song on the community Facebook page “The Quarantine Circus.” (facebook.com/groups/243263783376076/search/?query=Berkencamp&epa)

And shortly after the video hit Instagram, Republic commissioned the EP. For that, Kahan knew exactly whom he wanted to co-produce it – and where. “I’d recorded some of my very early stuff there with (Phin’s older brother) Nate, so it felt incredibly comfortable,” Kahan said. “Interesting to be back in that place. Felt really special.”

And Kahan knew that Phin had learned a few things from Nate, particularly how to make the most of the production software Ableton Live. In recent years, with Nate away pursuing a career in golf as well as post-doctoral studies in psychology, Phin has collaborated at the Dreaded Zig Zag with Norwich singer-songwriter Hans Williams, with Middlebury classmate Max Drazen, and with Ian Smith and Hunter Simpson of the band Loon.

“It takes a really long time to learn the tools,” Choukas said. “I see my computer as an instrument. There are so many aspects to the technology.”

On top of his technical skill, Kahan said, Choukas “has a knack for understanding what a piece needs to sound like. He’s great at hearing a song, knowing where the emotion needs to hit really hard.”

All this, two years out of Hanover High School. “Production is really all about your ear,” Choukas said. “The more reps you get, you learn to pick details out in songs. The more experience you get, you start to hear different things.”

And working with “incredibly talented people like Noah,” he added, “I’ve learned that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That collaboration is what makes me most excited.”

In Kahan, he’s collaborating with an old friend who also is making a name for himself. Kahan’s EP Hurt Somebody, particularly a duet with Julia Michaels on the title track, drew wide acclaim in 2018. And before the coronavirus hit, he was preparing for a busy year of touring until the coronavirus postponed or cancelled them.

“Making music with Noah, to be so involved was such a privilege,” Choukas said. “He’s a great songwriter, and he knows how he wants to do things. We had a great work flow, super efficient.”

Much of the efficiency flowed out of necessity. “We were super careful,” Kahan said. “We both wore masks through every session. Phin was disinfecting his stuff, and I was disinfecting mine. I didn’t even use his bathroom.

“As well as we worked together – he knew what I wanted to do with the song before we went to the mic – there was always a little bit of tension in the room. “It was the strangest recording experience I ever had.”

As happy as they are with the finished product, they look back with mixed emotions, resisting the temptation to call the sheltering-at-home a blessing in disguise. “We’re so privileged, able to carry on our own lives” Choukas said. “I’m reluctant to say. At the same time, if not for this situation, this EP wouldn’t have happened. The music kind of fits the situation. “It’s something that can definitely be done in this world right now.” Kahan seconds those emotions.

“This project definitely provided a paradigm switch for me,” he said. “After five years of touring and writing and recording, I was feeling directionless. I didn’t feel like I was doing it for me anymore. One of the things that was reinforced for me by this experience is that things have changed. You can’t change them back.”

While Choukas is continuing to work with Kahan and other projects at the Dreaded Zig Zag during the pandemic break, he still foresees returning to his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Middlebury, as well as taking courses in sociology, education – and music appreciation.

“Music is what I’m most into, and the last two years, I’ve been more seriously into it,” he said. “At the same time, I find that having a good balance of interests helps with the music. Zoning in on one thing or the other, I can get kind of burnt out. When my class work gets kind of heavy, I need music as a bit of a break from the work.”

As much satisfaction as he’s finding in producing, Choukas will keep it as a side gig before deciding whether to go to law school after graduating from Middlebury.

And until further notice, he’ll continue to golf, mostly at Baker Hill Golf Club in Sunapee, between recording sessions until further notice.

“I’ve probably gotten out six or seven times since the weather started getting better,” Choukas said. “I’m definitely looking to keep my game sharp.”

To hear Noah Kahan’s EP Cape Elizabeth, visit https://open.spotify.com/album/7rAXvbNQSxnAnVl3taoMLj or www.republicrecords.com/artists/noah-kahan. David Corriveau is a freelance writer living in Lebanon.