Ryan Hogge rides down the Connecticut River on the way to a campsite where he and some other Armory Square Apartments residents were camping.
Chapter Three
In truth, Chase Island has already taken on the aura of legend. It will be spoken of as a paradise after these men return, but it is also a paradise now, before they have arrived. People everywhere need their islands. People at the Block need them more than most. And as the boat enters the Connecticut River and picks up speed, a cool wind whipping away the sullen 90-degree air; as John, his silver hair blowing behind him, opens up the outboard motor, pointing once toward a picture-perfect upriver view of the Windsor-Cornish Covered Bridge; as hawks appear above the New Hampshire treeline, cutting across the pale blue sky as though to welcome these waterborne fugitives, it is difficult to remember that a place like the Block exists.
"Life sucks. I've got no money, no food, and no job."
At least Julie Rowden is alive. It is a muggy June afternoon. She trudges down the stairs, removing the car keys from her purse. It's time to pick up Timmer, the grandson who calls her Mom, from school.
She pulls up in the school parking lot and rolls down the windows. Heat invades the car. She props an elbow on the driver-side door and puts her head in her hand. No tears, no wrath, just a grim and even blankness to her face.
Things went bad all at once. That's one thing about poverty: desperation is always close. A thin veil separates getting by from total collapse. One nudge in the wrong direction — a heart attack, a broken down car — can send you plummeting over the edge, where Julie fears she's now headed.
Julie didn't have a heart attack, though her doctors told her she still might. She has a heart problem, she said, as yet undetermined; one of the symptoms is an irregular heartbeat. The doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where she was rushed for treatment the week before, wanted to keep her overnight, she said. She refused — she said she was too busy to stay — and left without a diagnosis.
Soon after that, her car broke down. Bruce Waugh, who lives below her on the first floor, was able to fix it up so it would run. A former trucker and truck mechanic, Bruce says he can fix just about anything, and he says he likes to help Julie out.
But Julie's luck ended there. She missed work after her heart emergency, and as a result, had to drop out of her training program — Julie says she had already missed some of the training, and will have to wait until next fall if she wants to re-enter the program.
And so she has said goodbye, at least for now, to her hopes of becoming a licensed nursing assistant, along with the $8 an hour she made while training. She remembers all the nights when she put Timmer to bed and stayed up studying until she fell asleep.
"The part that makes me the maddest is I never got less than 100 on any test I took so far," she says.
Timmer appears at the entrance to the school, wearing a Superman tee shirt and a camouflage jacket. On his head is a wrap-around paper hat, each side of it inked with a profile of the human brain. He hands the hat to Julie and then, with a blissful grin, tumbles to his knees and rolls on his side down a short stretch of lawn.
Back at the apartment, Timmer occupies himself on the floor with a yellow car-toy that pops up to reveal a fanged snake. Julie flips the TV to Judge Joe Brown. She calls an old friend to talk, but he's not around.
Julie never did find out who broke into her apartment and put obscene pictures on her cell phone, nor why. She said that after she called the Windsor police, an officer came to her apartment while she was showering, was told to come back by a friend who answered the door, and never returned. Cushing, the police chief, says the officer left a message for Julie to call him, and she never did, an account Julie disputes, saying she called the officer back as soon as she got out of the shower.
"And they wonder why people don't like police," she says.
Out of work, Julie has no money — her welfare payment isn't scheduled to arrive for a while — and a weekend to get through without food. She hopes that one of her friends, or Cheryl, who recently moved out of the Block to a new apartment, will be able to lend her some cash so she and Timmer can continue to eat.
"I'll work it out," Julie sighs. "I'm just freakin' out today."
Timmer is rummaging in the kitchen. He emerges with a can of SpaghettiOs, which he cracks with a can opener.
"That's the only dinner you got, so I hope you enjoy it," Julie says.
When Timmer is done eating, Julie makes him a cup of hot chocolate. The boy sips it and smiles.
"If we had marshmallows, we could put them in here," he says.
As Julie struggles with her empty pockets and empty pantry, the nonprofit developers hoping to transform her home are also facing their share of problems. Principal among them are money and politics.
The project's total cost — $17 million, with $11 million of it devoted to the building's physical renovation — is of a magnitude unusual in Vermont public-housing projects, and Housing Vermont and Rockingham Area Community Land Trust are struggling to cobble together the necessary funds. At the Vermont Housing Finance Agency board meeting early in June, some board members were unhappy to hear that Broderick was depending, at least for now, on up to $1.2 million in federal "earmarks" — money allocated in Congress to local projects through a system that has been criticized as overly politicized — that he hopes will be procured by Sen. Patrick Leahy.
It is unclear whether the earmark will come through, or whether the project will be left $1.2 million short. Broderick says he doesn't yet know how the money would otherwise be found. Beyond that, the Armory Square renovation depends on a patchwork of state and federal grants, any one of which could delay or even sink the project if it doesn't come through.
Additionally, the conditions imposed on the Block's purchase and redevelopment by state funding agencies could prove onerous. Even the VHFA board, which voted to grant the project more than $7 million, stipulated that the building must undergo a new appraisal (the agency had concerns that the $3 million sale price was too high) and refused to fund a $165,000 "management cancellation fee" that Armory Square management demanded as part of the deal. Broderick said that the owners so far seem relatively amenable to these requirements.
(Herbert Berezin, who has owned the building as a partner in the Armory Square Limited Partnership since 1985 and who heads the two management companies that have overseen Armory Square in recent years, did not respond to repeated requests, by telephone and in writing, for an interview.)
Broderick is an affable and ruddy-faced man who, in his fast-talking and incisive discourses on the Armory Square redevelopment plans, gives the impression of knowing housing policy backwards and forwards. When it comes to making the Block a better place to live, he and Jeff Staudinger, the equally energetic executive director of Rockingham Area Community Land Trust, have drawn praise from local leaders and state housing officials as the men for the job.
But as the summer wears on, Broderick and Staudinger, generally bullish on the project, are starting to worry. Their sales agreement with Berezin only lasts through August, and is subject to renegotiation if renewed, according to Nancy Owens, vice president for development at Housing Vermont. Two of the three most important potential backers — the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and Vermont Community Development program — have yet to commit.
"We need to figure out how to convince the state officials who are in charge of that money that they need to support it," Broderick said in a recent interview. Continued debate of the project's virtues by funding agencies, he said, "may put some pressure on my contract. We could lose control of the property. That's my biggest fear, is that this opportunity might get lost."
Broderick said he is particularly worried about the Community Development funds, which are ultimately controlled by Gov. Jim Douglas' secretary of Commerce and Community Development, Kevin Dorn. "That's money that's within the governor's discretion," Broderick said. "And we really need the governor to demonstrate support for solving the problem."