ABSTRACT
Henry Moultroup is a 70-something Vermont farmer with two new hips and a well-used backhoe, a yellow, 1980-something, Extenda-hoe. He's a soft-spoken man with keen eyes, strong wrinkled hands, and many jobs. In Vermont, a rural state, most of the land isn't serviced by public water supplies. The schist is mica-rock to the local well drillers who collect nine dollars for every foot of it they drill in search of water. Geology students from the University of Vermont look at these well records every year: sometimes for classes, sometimes for projects, sometimes just out of curiosity. Every one returns to Burlington surprised. We know most about the Winooski River; draining much of Vermont's highlands, it responded dramatically to this flood of debris. The Winooski's flood plains filled with sediment, rising in some places five or six feet in the 1800s, before the river's flow subsided as trees regrew on barren hillslopes and the sediment supply waned.
