The GNC After Irene

It has taken me a few days to assimilate what happened here in the GNC since Irene passed through a few days ago.  I'm not sure I have completely assimilated it, because each time I travel around the Mountaintop, I am overcome once again by awe at nature, sadness at destruction and optimism at people.

Since Irene, the weather has been magnificent, the kind of weather summer vacationers come here to enjoy.  But I can't enjoy it.  I can't swim in the lake, because it's not reachable, or bike my favorite routes, because many are not passable.  One of my favorite bike routes is "Nine Bridges", so named because the route crosses the Schoharie Creek nine times in about twenty miles.  Six of the nine bridges are gone.  One of my favorite swimming holes is unreachable - in fact, the National Guard was needed to rescue residents from the road that leads to the lake. A friend's home, that last week sat on the banks of a babbling brook, no longer sits there. When I meet friends and neighbors, we are dumbstuck in speechless awe.  Irene had power, but no grace.  Irene had fury, but no elegance.  Irene had kick, but no tact.

I can't enjoy the weather because there is too much sadness.  There are many homes like my friend's in Haines Falls that are gone, or if not gone, have become inhabitable.  They are teetering on a newly expanded riverbank, or they are longer retained by a retaining walls or roofs and walls have collapsed under the weight of tree trunks torn from their roots.  Cliches like "tossed like matchsticks" don't capture the awe or the sadness.  An 82-year-old holocaust survivor could not survive Irene - imagine the sadness of her husband who saw her drown when their tiny house was rammed by a torrent while we was in the garage a few yards away.  Can you empathize with the parents of a 19-year-old son whose car hydroplaned into a tree a few miles from home and killed him?  About ten miles from my home, a  45-year-old man, blinded by the sheets of rain, drove off a road that had been there all his life until moments before he arrived this time - can you feel the feelings of the motorist on the other side of that crevasse who watched him drive into it?  If you can get your mind around it, try to imagine the sadness of a farmer who watched his two hundred dairy cows as they were grabbed off their pasture by the raging Schoharie, to be drowned en masse as they struggled against the turbulent current.  His pasture land, crops, equipment and buildings are destroyed, too.

I do see optimism coming slowly down the road.  Friends and neighbors are becoming closer friends and better neighbors.  Generosity is everywhere.  At the supermarket, I watched second in line pay the balance of the man in from who was short of cash for bottled water.  He paid the balance for his new friend with food stamps.  A call for generators produced more generators than could be used; a call for empty propane containers to be donated produced a mountain of containers to be filled and donated by the local company.  A call for volunteers at a food pantry produced food and volunteers in excess of those rescued.  Donations of hand sanitizers, toilet paper and baby wipes are everywhere.  But I can see it: the optimists are sad and awestruck.

I want to hang on to my awe and grow my optimism.  The sadness, which I would be quite happy to jettison into the now quiet Schoharie, is stuck within, though, like the deep, ragged craters in the beautiful, gently rolling GNC roads that, after Irene, go nowhere.

Summary of Irene

"It was a dark and stormy night"

Irene is a big one!

Things That Are Doing It: Brace Yourselves, It’s Gonna Be a Big One - http://pulse.me/s/1nwIQ

Hurricane Irene Preparation Checklist

1. Remove everything from front deck – place on back deck.
2. Purchase a case of wine or two. 
3. Find the candles and matches somewhere in the garage. 
4. Fill up the streaming Netflix queue.
5. Purchase a case of beer or two.
6. Find all the flashlights that need batteries somewhere in the garage.
7. Place everything that needs a good hosing down in the center of the driveway, away from the house.
8. Find the good old fashioned transistor radio somewhere in the garage.  Probably needs batteries.
9. Purchase a case of vodka or two.
10. Eat frozen food for lunch and dinner so it doesn't spoil during power failure.
11. Take clothes off the clothesline.
12. Find those knee high wading boots somewhere in the garage.
13. Try again to un-jam the damn window that won’t close in the den.
14. Purchase several bags of ice.
15. Don’t bother to water the lawn.
16. Don’t bother to wash the car.
17. Don’t bother to stain the deck.
18. Be sure both dogs are inside the house.
19. Put car in garage.  Remember to close garage door.
20. Fill bathtub with ice, wine, beer and vodka. Place candles and matches nearby.
    

Did I forget anything?

Waiting For Irene

To prepare for Irene, in addition to all the standard procedures, I decided to dig a ditch to bury the downspout  from the rain gutters on the roof. Currently, the rain runs out onto the surface of the lawn - no big deal when the rain is less than hurricane volume, but a bit of a concern if the predicted rainfall materializes, since it will then flow into the basement.  So, I borrowed a pick-axe from a friend, went to the hardware store for supplies, and began digging.

As most of you in the GNC know, the ground here is very rocky.  I was reminded of this when I saw sparks flying from the pick.  Some of the stones are movable, others were stubborn. I'm guessing the iceberg effect was in play - that the round portion I could see at the surface, poking eight inches out of my trench, was about 1% of the mass of the boulder.  Well, I said to myself, no reason the ditch has to be a straight line.  If the stones won't roll, the ditch will have to go around them.

Two hours of pick-axing later, to my surprise, I discovered there had once been a stone wall at the spot where the ditch would empty into the roadside trench.  Even a former city boy like me knows the ditch has to go under the stone wall, not over it or through it.  I suppose it had been a sturdy stone wall in the distant past, but now it is rather flimsy, so I think I will be able to snake the drain pipe under it before Irene arrives.

Ah, ha! When I bought the house a few years ago, the seller didn't tell me there was a stone path leading to the steps of  the deck hidden under the topsoil. The slate stepping stones are now covered by grass, weeds and moss.  I found a bit of this abandoned walkway when I tried to re-route the trench around the boulders.  Maybe, after Irene passes, I will dig up the old walkway and make it nice once again.  In the meantime, with Irene arriving shortly, I focused on the trench for the downspout, weaving it around the prehistoric rocks and the slick slate toward the roadside trench.

After four hours of work, the pick axe had become rather heavy and repeatedly hitting the obstinate boulders had dulled the sharp end.  I hadn't gotten that far with the trench, about ten feet long, I'd say, and not deep or wide enough to put down the Item 4 and the plastic drain pipe I bought at the hardware store.  Today's rainstorm, which turned my sad little trench to a gloppy, meandering  Amazon of mud, isn't part of Irene, it's just your average GNC mountaintop sheets of rain.

When I get up tomorrow, I'm going to finish the trench.  But tonight, I'm running a hot bath filled with two pounds of epsom salt.  Irene had better show up with a few friends and stay for the weekend.      

Quiet, Please

I want to listen to the rain bouncing off the leaves onto the grass, not your kids shouting "Mama, Mama, Mama" across the yard while you ignore them.

I love to hear to the Schoharie, swollen with run-off, rushing past, slamming into and over the rocks in its bed, not the whizzing, beeping and whirring of the musical Frisbee you toss back and forth in the yard.

I appreciate thunder as it winds through the valley, reverberating off cliffs and echoing across the steep walls of the clove, not the racket of kids screaming "Shut Up!" at their too-numerous-to-count siblings.

I need to absorb the sounds of the GNC night, uninterrupted by the cacophony of your family, friends and hangers-on as you go about your business on cell phones, outside on the porch.

And please, MIDAS-ize the run-down, wrinkled, out of tune Caravan with the imitation Thule box on top.  Every time you pull in or out of the driveway, it sounds like a blitzkrieg.

Enjoy your two-week rental property in the GNC. Thank you.

This Blog is on vacation August 6-14. Leaving the mountaintop for the beach.

Three Helpful Hints for Living in the GNC, (learned by personal experience in the last three days)

1. If you leave your shoes outside on the porch overnight, be sure to shake them out before you put them on in the morning.
   
2. Try as you might with any combination of solvents, deodorizers, detergents or other old-wives-tales remedies, nothing removes skunk spray.
   
3. To avoid roadkill, either witnessing the aftermath or causing it, don't go anywhere in a car.

Dogs and Death in the GNC

Yesterday at the bank, while I was at the teller's counter, a big black Lab appeared at the drive-up window in the driver's seat and proceeded to drop an envelope into the sliding tray.  The teller didn't mind the slobber, recorded the transaction and then said, "Nice to see you again, Smith" as the pick up drove away.  I asked if Smith was the dog's name or the owner's name.  The teller said, "The dog - like Smith & Wesson".  Yup, people here love their dogs (and their guns).  Wesson was in the back seat.

At a neighbor's house party last week, there were four guests, and each brought a dog.  I left  my two dogs at home because the host's dog once attacked my dog, necessitating a trip to the vet.  All the dogs got along fine this time until food started to drop from the table.  It was interesting to watch how the owners reacted to their own pet's begging compared to the others.  Table manners matched up pretty well.

A friend down the road in West Kill has a pretty pooch with sad eyes and arthritic hind quarters. A friend up the road in Lanesville has an outdoor-only dog named Shubert who sings along to classical music, preferably Shubert.  A friend up the hill in Jewett has a Lab named after a huge NFL linebacker of roughly equal size.  This dog could swallow a pig without a hiccup.  Across the valley in Windham,  there's a terrier - chihuahua mix that is a nervous wreck, not sure if it wants to be European or Mexican.  At the mountain in Hunter, there lives a pure white Siberian who can't wait for it to snow so he can romp down the trails next to his owner on skis.  He seems to hibernate in the summer (the dog, not the owner.)

At the vet last week, as I waited to purchase the monthly supply of  hormones for one of my dogs, out came a corpse, wrapped in mover's padding.   Three people were needed to carry it out to the waiting pick-up.  The owners followed, sobbing, heaving and barely able to walk.  I don't know if the COD was an accident (there is a lot of road kill here in the GNC) or a put down - I suspect the latter, since they were prepared with the padding.  I wonder how soon before the owners get another dog.  

One of my dogs is diabetic, blind and incontinent.  The other is deaf.  Both are quite old for their breed. Today, I woke up wondering where on the property to bury them when that becomes necessary, and how to make a proper headstone that will endure the harsh GNC winters.  As I was pondering, a friend called in tears to say she had put down her Shepherd last week due to cancer.  She could hardly draw a breath.

I called a city friend to discuss my dogs' fates. He said, "Just put them down, together.  No big deal.  You'll get another one. Dogs are a nuisance anyway."

Cityfolk -- what do they know about dogs and the GNC?