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.