Like almost every downtown Montpelier storefront that was inundated in last month’s flood, Bear Pond Books is closed until further notice. Approximately 3,000 sodden books have been cleared out of the retail space near the corner of State and Main streets, along with piles of fixtures and furniture accrued over its 50-year life. On Monday a construction crew was hard at work installing a new floor and the bottom sections of the walls.
“We moved things up, but not high enough,” co-owner Claire Benedict said, noting that the water level peaked at 3.5 feet on the first floor. No books were in the basement at the time of the flood.
Three weeks after the deluge, Benedict still looked a little stunned. Tired, too, as she and her partner, Rob Kasow, consider a daunting to-do list. For example: Finding replacement bookshelves, which Benedict sourced in New Jersey, was difficult and expensive. They’re on the way to a projected Labor Day Weekend reopening.
“After the pandemic, I thought I was done with disasters,” Benedict said with a sigh.
I went to Montpelier bearing news that, under normal circumstances, would likely have cheered them up. Seven Days readers selected Bear Pond as the best bookstore outside of Chittenden County in our annual Seven Daysies competition — as they’ve done a dozen times in the past 20 years. Look for 68 pages of readers’ choices in a special keepsake publication, All the Best, at the center of this week’s issue.
Benedict cracked a weak smile. “We’re not coming to the party,” she said of the annual celebration on Friday at Burlington’s ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, at which we honor contest winners, finalists and advertisers in 234 categories. “We’re, like, the least enthusiastic Daysie winners alive.”
Sadly, they’re not the only preoccupied winners in town. Around the corner is Julio’s Cantina, voted best Mexican restaurant outside of Chittenden County. The interior of the State Street eatery is unrecognizable except for the bar.
A short walk from Julio’s is the gutted storefront of Onion River Outdoors, voted best bike shop outside of Chittenden County. At the time of the flood, the basement was full of merchandise, according to the landlord, Lucky Boardman, who recently bought the building on Langdon Street.
Across from it, a life-size grim reaper — or is it the Ghost of Christmas Future? — stands sentry in front of an emptied-out Buch Spieler Records, a finalist for best record store. The statue perfectly captures this eerie moment in Capital City history.
But Montpelier is far from dead and, in time, will be ready to embrace a more hopeful metaphor: Simple, ubiquitous and perennial, a daisy blooms in all conditions, including adverse ones. Last year’s best-of contest and party were a love fest for the businesses we cherish — and almost lost — in the pandemic.
Putting up a shingle in Vermont might look easy. But in this rural, sparsely populated state, it’s not. Good thing there are other measures of success: how many customers show up to help you move books to higher ground before a flood; the number of strangers who contribute to your GoFundMe campaign; the miracle of readers paying for a free newspaper to keep it going. Benedict said authors from all across the country have been sending money to Bear Pond and ordering books through its still-operational online store.
Last Saturday, 18 Vermont members of the New England Independent Booksellers Association donated 20 percent of their sales to the bookstore and to another one in Barre, Next Chapter, that also flooded. Benefactors include all three Phoenix Books locations, Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, Shelburne’s Flying Pig Bookstore and Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock.
In a comparable act of magnanimity, the best nonprofit in this year’s Daysies contest, the Humane Society of Chittenden County, is giving the cash portion of its award — money from Daysies party ticket sales — to the Vermont Community Foundation’s VT Flood Response and Recovery Fund. We’re helping the Humane Society by gifting them the same amount in free advertising.
“Thank You Everyone,” reads the message plastered across one of the front windows at Bear Pond. “Recovery is just getting started. Please continue to help.”
That goes for all of us.
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This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2023.
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