COLCHESTER, Vt. — Minnows swim in the driveway, and fat carp are now breeding in the 2-foot floodwaters that cover the street. Some days, the only way Buzz Hoerr can get out of his home is by rowboat, paddling 200 feet to a grassy spot across the street where he and others park their cars to keep them dry.

The vessels are pulled up on driveways and lawns of the handful of houses that are still occupied — the ones with sandbags surrounding them, pumps draining water, unholy piles of driftwood and tree limbs pushed up onto lake-facing patios.

For Hoerr and hundreds of others forced to cope with unprecedented flooding, this is the new normal on Lake Champlain.

“It is Lake Champlain water torture,’’ said Hoerr, a 57-year-old father of two. “Someone said to me today, ‘It’s like cutting off a dog’s tail an inch at a time so it won’t hurt too much.’ ’’

Heavy snowmelt and the rainiest spring ever noted here have combined to send the lake to its highest levels on record. Hundreds of businesses, summer camps, cottages, and year-round homes along the lake’s New York and Vermont shores have been affected — to varying degrees — for more than a month.

Some 500 homes have been destroyed or damaged in Vermont, Governor Peter Shumlin said earlier this month. No updated figures have been released.

No one has died. Everyone here is quick to acknowledge that the damages pale when compared with the carnage of Joplin, Mo., the tornado-stricken towns of Alabama, and imperiled cities along the Mississippi River.

But this is a slow-moving catastrophe. And it has no end in sight.

In fits and starts, the freshwater lake — 120 miles long and up to 400 feet deep — is draining northward, ever so slowly, into the Richelieu River in Quebec and the St. Lawrence River beyond. But it could take until July to drop below flood stage.

It passed flood stage — 100 feet above sea level — in mid-April, peaked at more than 103 feet on May 6 and has hovered just below that for weeks.

The water on Hoerr’s street, Broadlake Road, has fluctuated, but has not been low enough to drive through. About five of the 17 houses in the neighborhood are still occupied.

The holdouts are enduring inconvenience, stress, and moods that rise and fall with the US Geological Survey’s online lake level chart, which gives hourly updates.

“It’s a month without taking a shower indoors, without washing dishes or doing laundry indoors,’’ said Bryan Ducharme, 46, who lives next door to Hoerr.