From my home about 10 miles southwest of Rutland, Vermont, the past two days have been surreal --and not for the obvious reasons. Our town made it through Hurricane Irene relatively unscathed. The view from my front porch is entirely typical. If anything, it's just a bit sunnier than usual. If not for a pretty steady stream of gravel trucks rolling through our small downtown on their way to emergency road repairs, you wouldn't have any sense of the widespread damage that's afflicting so much of the state.

But then I log onto the Internet and my stomach drops. Every few minutes, something in the steady stream of tweets and Facebook updates and links and photo galleries punches me in the gut. As small as this state is, you come to know people from all over. And even those people you don't know, you might as well.

Most Vermonters, I dare say, are here for pretty similar reasons. We value self-reliance, but also appreciate all that a small community can provide. We like to know who's growing our food, who's splitting our firewood, who's plowing the town's streets, and who's setting the curriculum at the elementary school. (There are plenty of Vermonters who do all of these things, and are happy to share those skills and knowledge with their neighbors and friends.)

While I don't live in Rochester or Killington or Brattleboro or Waitsfield or Quechee or Wilmington or any of the dozens of towns that really took it to the chin this week, I easily could. Really, any Vermonter could. And with a subtle shift in the odd physics of weather, Irene could just as easily have delivered a crushing blow here in Middletown Springs. For all we know, Hurricane Katia could turn our lives upside down.

I think that's why Vermonters everywhere have responsed to Irene with such incredible zeal. We're fiercely individual and independent here, but damn if we don't have each other's backs. "Vermonters are tough. Be tough together," someone tweeted the other day, and that just about sums up the mood here. The message went on, "Get out there and help your neighbors." It's why volunteers are pouring in to a makeshift response center in Rutland to help collect supplies (food, water, diapers, medicine, shovels) to send up the mountains by whatever means possible to the isolated communities in Killington and Pittsfield. And by "by whatever means possible," I mean whatever means possible: Taking ATVs up ravaged snowmobile trails. Hiking up debris-cluttered hiking trails. Mountain biking up.

All over the state, Vermonters are pulling on their boots, grabbing their chainsaws and shovels, and heading to wherever help is needed, however it is needed. The motto that flies on our state flag, "Freedom, and Unity," feels truer today than ever.

On Monday, in a stunned state of disbelief, I rounded up a bunch of images and videos of the Vermont destruction to help provide some perspective on the breadth and severity of the damage suffered here. While I'm not going to post another big roundup (I'll have a few links to others below), there are a couple of images I want to share.

One gives a bird's-eye view of the devastation, and the other is representative of the small, acute acts of heroism that are now happening constantly on the ground here in the Green Mountain State.

First, local television station WCAX captured these stunning, stomach-dropping images from their news chopper. (I couldn't embed the video, so the link will have to do.)

Now let's zoom down to the town of Rockingham, which was isolated after the Williams River flooded out Route 103. A true Vermonter, using any means necessary to get something done, this local, unnamed hero rode a horse through the floodwaters to deliver medicine to those in need.

As for photos and videos and other coverage, I'm going to give a special nod to a few:

• First, and most importantly, Vermont's independent weekly Seven Days has gathered up a comprehensive list of resources for how you can help Vermont -- from donating goods to volunteering time -- whether you're here or looking on with sympathy from afar.
• Tyler Machado at Seven Days has been doing hero's work. He pulled together that "how to help Vermont" resource mentioned above, and also created on-the-fly this crowdsourced map of Irene's impacts throughout Vermont.
• The Rutland Herald, unable to deliver hard copies to so many throughout the region, nimbly moved all their reporting to their breaking news blog and made their e-Edition free online, both of which have been a must-follow resource for anyone in the area over the past couple of days.
• The Burlington Free Press's intrepid staff has been out in the field, slogging through the mud, and documenting the aftermath. Here's a gallery of their most incredible images.
• VTDigger, a relatively new non-profit journalism site covering the state's news, has had great, breakneck coverage throughout the storm and immediate aftermath. The "recent news" section atop their site is definitely worth clicking through.
• The local public radio station's website, VPR.net, has a great gallery of photos too.

Some of the most important and urgent reporting has been done by some of the local town and community newspapers and blogs. Speaking as someone in the media world, it's beyond encouraging -- thrilling, even -- to see these beacons of local information shine at the time their most needed. So let's celebrate the work of Woodstock's The Vermont Standard , the state's oldest weekly newspaper, which has never missed a week, and will print this weekend even after their offices flooded. Also, The Mountain Times up in Killington, that has someway, somehow kept publishing online from the totally isolated community that is cut off from all power and supplies. The Valley Reporter out of Waitsfield has managed to cover the extensive flooding in the Mad River Valley using some good old Yankee ingenuity to post updates on Facebook with a generator and a satellite internet hookup when their site was down. I'm sure there are dozens and dozens of similar stories, but these are the places most relevant to me, and so these were the outlets I was most tuned in to. (If you know of other local papers and blogs who did a bang up job throughout, add them in the comments!)

On the personal front, all is fine in our house, though that old Northern New Englander quip "You can't get there from here" has more validity than ever. While my town is no longer on the official state list of communities "cut off from state transporation systems," if we want to venture farther than 30 minutes in any direction, we're likely to get rerouted, held up, or stopped in our tracks entirely. There are ways around, but they're pretty roundabout, and some hour long drives that we take for granted (like my fiancee's commute) have turned into logistical nightmares.

Yesterday, we did manage to make our way up to our wonderful CSA farm share at Groundworks Farm. Our normal route up there was, well, impassable.

I suppose we could've taken a kayak. We did drive across the Cooley Bridge in Pittsford (built in 1849), though with the waters of Furnace Brook still lapping at its base, I wasn't exactly comfortable doing so.

Remember, this was in the late afternoon on Tuesday. I can't even imagine what it looked like 48 hours earlier. Nor how the bridge is still standing, for that matter. Good thing for Pittsford, which like so many Vermont towns both prides itself and totally depends on its covered bridges.

We consider ourselves very lucky, and are turning our attention and energy into helping our fellow Vermonters who are most in need. And figuring how to get around to friends, family and jobs in other parts of the state.