You know, I honestly hate coming down here a pretty much every day.

It's a complete disaster area.

But to see the friends of the sh you know, family and staff on a daily basis and just be able to, you know, be in this space t and laugh and and have them helping us, you know, that that does make it all worthwhile.

I'm not sure whether or not we will be rebuilding this basem in this day and age.

It seems ridiculous to build und to build anything that's under the flood line.

So you can kind of see where the line was.

We, you know, we knew that the rain was coming So we lifted books off the bottom shelves and put them But we didn't go up high enough.

Obviously.

Yeah, this I mean, they've alrea two giant piles of trash this size last week and this wee And this is, I guess, the third.

This is the contents of our base and the Bailey Road basement and all our flooring.

It's really crushing to see the piles of trash outside all t You know, realizing as bad as it it's every single store in this And it's a lot.

You know, one of the things that's a little bit unique about RIver Outdoors was just the hist that's been in this space.

So, you know, 50 years of a bike here, you accumulate a lot of pretty c kind of esoteric bike parts.

So we were able to fix a lot of with, you know, stuff that we just had legacy parts from the old busine And unfortunately, most, if not all of that has been thro starting over a little bit.

You can see there is the flood w for the 1927 flood.

So we didn't we didn't do that bad, I guess.

Right.

Basically, here was a floating d pile of alpine touring boots telling my how it was pretty amazing sight, you know, 7500 square feet times you know, eight, nine feet of ce And it's about 400 to 500000 gallons of water that we pumped out over the next couple of days.

Which is pretty nuts.

Oh, it was total chaos.

My refrigerator freezer was turned over on its s My counter, which weighs about 2 was tipped over and was pushed f Everything was just a mess.

I mean, everything was topsy turvy and turned over.

So obviously, this is the lobby, as you can see, this was the las to to be breached for for water.

Then we come into the main ballr You can start to smell.

We get the dehumidifiers through You can see the walls cut up.

You have to be careful through h These have all buckled up, the h floors.

And again, I just don't know when this will occupied again.

It's hard to throw away a lot of So the army of volunteers we've had over the past week plus here now have helped us clean, separate, sort all of this yesterday was our big move out of our inventory in preparation for demolition and renovation eventually in thi I think that probably has solidi any doubts that might have been there about whether or not we could co I think we know that the communi will support us coming back and they are supporting that.

They are showing up to make sure that we can do we c that we can get out of here and we can save and restart again.

I am personally overwhelmed.

I mean, I've lived in Montpelier for 22 years and I have just never seen a res like this.

I mean, I thank people profusely they blow me off like, Hey, neve Of course this is what we're doi We have people in there who don't even live in Montpelie We've had people come from South We've had people come from Middl It's just been overwhelming.

So what these wonderful volunteers are doing now is they're ripping off the floor And then we're going to this wee just these shelves will come off and we'll assess the sheet rock.

Amazing, amazing amount of volunteers downtown, people coming from all We had a whole family helping us clean out our basement who just to Montpelier three days before.

But everybody, our customers, complete stranger Everybody has been downtown helping everybody.

FEMA does not do anything for bu Most of us don't have flood insu downtown because it's prohibitiv expensive and high interest.

Small business loans aren't really going to do us any good.

We don't need to go into debt fo To put all the time, energy, mon into reopening...

In the back of your mind, is the of my goodness, this could happe Yeah.

I'm not saying it's a sane decis but it was definitely the decisi that we are firm in you know.

We do have moments of wondering is this a good idea?

But there's really no choice for Bear Pond Books has to reopen an just the bottom line.

I just went to this place of pea and I said, we're going to do it We're going to redo it.

If it you know, if it means building the my onli website even stronger to help support this for a while But I love what I do.

I love my store, I love my custo So no, I'm not ready to quit.

I mean, I think Monday night when the flooding was happening, I was kind of up all night worry that would we be able to pull it Would we be able to restart?

But I think that was middle of t anxiety.

I think since then there really been any question in my mind that will reopen.

We just have to figure out where and when and how.

It's hard to imagine downtown co You know, it's hard to imagine all of these stores rebuilding and re opening.

I'm sure that probably won't hap I, I don't know.

It's hard to hard to know what will happen.

Look we can't go into into the f requiring communities to put everything back exactly the way If a 100 year flood is about to become an annual eve if your road gets washed out, we have you put it right back the way it was and then it gets washed out agai Are we really going to repeat th We don't have time to get caught in political and ideological deb about this.

It is upon us now and we need to respond now and we're going to rebuild in different ways now.

We want to build back we want to build back better and smarter and make sure that w you know, investing in our downtowns and s but doing it in a much different A friend told me a long time ago, Montpelier, it seems like it's a town at war with its rivers.

And it's it's kind of true.

We have boxed this river and it has nowhere to go except our businesses and homes.