Three Millimeters is Enough

Took me four hours and forty minutes to get home last night. Three millimeters of ice had coated the roads, and the bottom of every hill held a drift of cars that reminded me of the boats from the marina after Hurricane Sandy, all piled up together. I should have been using my phone to blog while parked on Route 9 in the hills up behind Cold Spring, wind whipping the trees and light sleet falling, but instead I listened to the radio, wondered about the identity of the people in the cars ahead of me and behind me, texted the friends who had picked up the kids, reflected on how every moment of the past had led up to that dark night and the high-pitched zzzzzip of someone's tires looking for purchase, the ticking of the sleet on the windshield.


•

Punchline: I get a speeding ticket

I used to tell the following joke when I was a kid, to virtually anyone who would come by. The first script I’d ever memorized: “Once there was this guy, and his plane was on fire. So he pulled the cord and nothing came out but strings. Then he pulled the emergency spoke and nothing came out but strings. Then this BIIIIG FAT moth flew by, and it said ‘I can’t believe I ate the whooooole thing.’ ”

So I’m driving to work Monday morning – because on what other day would this happen? – along the gently winding double-yellow-line road through the wealthy woodland suburbs of Westchester. This is my secret back way to work that avoids highways with the first name “I-”. It’s a perfectly driveable little road. Very nice, actually, with gentle slopes, plenty of visibility, and large houses on vast spreads set well back from the road behind sturdy stone walls.

Sort of in the middle portion of this back road there’s a speed zone where the limit is 25 miles per hour; a speed limit I’d thought was reserved for nursing-home parking lots or golf courses. Shoot, there are toll booths you’re allowed to roll through at faster than 25 miles per hour. But I gather the plutocrats of [REDACTED] don’t want non-Lexii to bypass the highways at the expense of their early-morning serenity. So 25 it is.

Now right in the center of this slow-mo zone, or slowmozone, as it will henceforth be called, is one of those gizmos that tells you how fast you’re going. I never read it, because who cares? But Monday morning, a mile past this gizmo, just at the clubhouse for the country club, there’s a cop standing at the side of the road, and he motions me to pull over.

And nothing. Came out. But strings.


•

What Passes for Adventure

To Build a Fire. The Old Man and the Sea. The Bear. My Drive Home from Work Tuesday Night.

My humble addition to the canon of Man v. Nature stories was a harrowing three-hour drive in ice and snow. Ordinarily, this would be nothing to 21st-century Man in his Honda Fit, for the roads are plowed and the salt potent, even on the hills of this country.

But this storm, like the Perfect Storm, timed itself, well, perfectly. So that when I realized I needed to leave work in Westchester at 4:43 in order to ever get home, the snainy snow was falling earnestly, meaningfully, literarily, on the living and the dead alike, as it were, so anyway I got in the car.

Long story short (and short story a favorite of English teachers), the roads sucked. The Taconic was bad, Route 6 and the Bear Mountain Parkway worse. I stopped twice to clear clotted ice from my windshield wipers (and for M&Ms, because they now have a kind with peanut butter in them, yum). The traffic circle at the foot of the Goat Trail resembled Cocytus -- except that, working my way up from there, it only got worse.

But it wasn't until I had navigated those treacherous cliffs at a crawl, then descended again like an old man on a greased staircase, then crossed the bridge and another traffic circle and headed up into the taller hills, past the last motel, that it got truly ugly. On this stretch my wheels spun on the uphill slopes and, had I not come to a complete stop at the top of each rise in order to creep down the next slope in first and second gear, I could easily have careened downward out of control. Fishtailing and kept in line only by judicious use of the gas to keep the wheels grabbing, I was also contending with -- get this -- traffic, since a bunch of other idiots live up here too. And they of course drive SUVs and have a higher tolerance for the careening. There were a couple of points where clusters of cars had marooned on the side of the road, or in the road, and only those of us following ever-fainter wheel ruts could still find purchase. We passed them in a guilty line, unable to stop and lend a hand because what hand? Thus we kept going until overtaken by a plow. Even then, following the plow down the steepest hill amidst the ghosts of old crashes, locked into a sudden herd of minivans and four-wheel-drive vehicles, lanes completely invisible, everyone drifting a little off-kilter now and then, it was touch and go till we descended from the Highlands.

Later, I laid the flimsy nylon tarpaulin of Man upon the automobile against the ice that would form that night. Ice coated every twig. Water ran from my hat brim. Grainy fluzzard fell hissing, and as I stopped to listen there was music in it.


•

You've Been Warned, Maybe

Up around where I live, and dotting the countryside for a long way around these parts, there are tall poles bearing giant sirens. These are to let us know when if the nuke plant about 20 miles from here goes plooey (although science tells me that it would be somewhat louder, more like kwa-THOOM). We’ll, uh, we’ll hear these sirens, the theory goes, and then we’ll know…when…to start panicking.

Not much of a plan, if you ask me.



We’re more or less upwind of the thing, so there are no guarantees that when the plant goes we’ll be in any real danger (apart from the zombies lurching northward from the site of the blast, thirsting for the untainted blood and radiation-free brains of the living). On the other hand, the Highlands have a tendency to suck air into the valley and hang on to it (specializing in bad air with tiny particles that trigger asthma).

Either way, those sirens are there on their poles, just to let you know that you’re within 20 miles of a clean, safe time bomb energy source. Every few days (it seems) they announce a test. “We’re going to test the sirens,” they say, “so everyone listen for something unfamiliar that sounds like a warning.” There are two sirens within a mile of my house. I’ve found that I tend to cock my head to the side, maybe cup an ear. So for a few days after each announcement my neighbors and I walk around cupped and cocked—sorry, is there something you want to share with the rest of the readers? good, let’s continue—shushing people, listening for a sound we’ve never heard before.

Do this long enough and it provides your nerves with a much-needed stretch. On the downwind side of the plant, the government hands out potassium iodine pills to residents. Apparently once you hear the siren, you can pop a few of these pills and your lymph nodes will take up the potassium iodine instead of the radioactive material drifting your way, thus sparing you from that particular form of cancer. On that side of the river after a warning, they walk around cupped and cocked and nervously rattling pill bottles. At the plant, inspectors find radioactive water in little puddles. Sometimes in the control rooms there are fires.

But a few days pass, and invariably there is not a peep. Not long after we don’t hear something there’ll be a small item on page nine of the paper that says “Sirens Fail Again.” That still doesn’t mean they for-sure didn’t go off. There’s some possibility that they sounded, but that the unfamiliar warning resembled a car door slamming, or someone’s dog barking, or crows bickering over a carcass.

Shh.



•

The Eagles Are Coming! The Eagles Are Coming!

Actually, they’re already here, at least two of them, over down there by Camp Smith. The other morning, one, a juvenile I think, was wheeling low over the water where you cross the Jan Peek Bridge. Stopped at the light, I looked around for others and saw a burly, white-headed grownup perched on a tree on the slope just above the road, so that it was about fifty feet over the crowd of cars stopped three ways at the light. As far as I could see, I was the only driver craning my neck forward and up, and the otherwise secret juxtaposition of the mighty symbol of American dominance with the scrum of commuters wishing they didn’t have to go contribute to the wellbeing of the homeland this one day, was funny.


•

The Great Reveal

It seems very long ago—a long, long time ago—that I wrote of the Big Concealment, and now we've come again to the Great Reveal. When the bones of the land are laid bare, and the first snowfalls limn (come ON, you've got to love "limn") earth's contours. You can see your neighbor's house and the smoke from his chimney, but it doesn't make you want to move, à la Daniel Boone...no, it makes you want to split wood and twist newspaper and make a fire your own self, settle in with a book.

The fog lifts from the highlands in the morning and as it does you can see through the trees at the edge of the road, across the river, to the rocks on the hills on the far bank etched in snow.

In the afternoon, of course, it's all hid, because the time's all screwy. And also the windows at the coffee shop down the street steam up. On Fridays there's live music there and open mic nights and poetry and steamed milk, and all that humanity clumping up turns the thing into a single soft white lightbulb, electric and steamy as you drive past, home.


•

If You Worked Here, You'd Be Home By Now

I've been leaving work late a lot recently, for some reason, and this allows me to take the shorter way home. Ordinarily the shorter route is slower, though, because it's so popular. When I leave late, however, it becomes the shorter and much quicker route home, because the traffic has dried up and it's got nice, wide, slick pavement and no traffic lights.

Once, during the college years, my roommate and I had driven down to Long Island from our upstate campus, and were preparing to head back up. We didn't know the best route, and asked my father and brother. Before doing so, my roommate had said "I can't stand it when people tell you how to get someplace based on the time of day." I knew what he meant: "Well, you'll want to take the Cross Island to the--hold on, what is it, three o'clock? Oh, screw that. What you do is you go up the Meadowbrook, THEN cut west on the Northern. It'll be, what, three thirty-five, three-forty when you get up there, I guess. So...that should be okay. Tell you what, you get to exit 21 and it's still before four, just take the damn thing." So we asked, and it was like that.

My point is this. If I leave at PRECISELY the right time, I will arrive home before I leave work. New goal!


•

The Multiplex Parkway

It's that time of year -- commuting home in the dark, when the Movies start playing. Most SUVs and minivans seem to have televisions these days, and driving along beside one, it's hard to tell whether the driver or a backseat passenger is the audience. In fact, it's hard to see that there's anything in those cars at all, living. Just the blue ghost near the ceiling, vague forms drifting across it, silent, a square of illness in the quiet dark of the highway.

Unfortunately humans are programmed to look at points of light in the dark, and I find that invariably my foot strays from the gas as I pull up to pass one of these large dark shapes with its sweet sweet teevee center. What are they watching? I wonder. And I ease my little car a tad closer, craning my neck. Is that I Love Lucy? And then I slowly sidle over to the passenger seat and pop the door, then step out. I'm sure I can see what's playing if I can just get a little closer.

Then, I die.


•

The NaBloPoMoDo Ldrums

You can tell fatigue is setting in. But that's okay, because it's NaBloPoMoHumpDay. Buck up, bloggers! Buck up, faithful readers! You only have to endure two more weeks of mindless chatter! Dripping water! Snakes gone wild! Dead moles! Posts about blogging! Links! And one of those days is Thanksgiving!

In the meantime, can we talk about my commute? I was idling along in stop and go traffic the other day, not very much liking the newest BTIOTCD (A Thousand Dazzling Suns or something, by that dude), the radio not doing it for me, my cell-phone people all asleep, and just driving completely out of the question.

So I had to go allll the way back to the middle ages. I immediately fell into a trance, imagining that I was a humble peddler on line to ply my wares in Londontowne, waiting amidst the gray drizzle with a bunch of toothless middle-aged Britons, the entire line and all its attendant chickens (funny how there're always those chickens walking around in depictions of the middle ages...like you had to have one around or it was all "Ho there, sirrah, thine fowl be not in evidence! Produceth thine chicken forthwith or to the donjon with you!") lurching forward every few minutes as the pike-totin' gate guards grudgingly let a few more of the flea-ridden throng pass through the gap in the ancient Roman wall surrounding the City. Minstrels play, scabby urchins dash up and down the line begging for scraps of food or the odd farthing, spontaneous lusty brawls break out over one's place in line, tonsured monks sullenly sneak beer from their longnecks while massive hay wagons trundle forward, drawn by fly-swarmed oxen.

Ahh, damn, I blew it with longnecks, didn't I? Anyway, we haven't come that far, is my point.


•

The Book that is on the CD

Someone invited me to join Goodreads.com, so I did. Judging by the name, you're not supposed to talk about books you didn't like. In any case, I gave up reading for blogging, but during my commute I've begun listening to books on CD(s). So far, The Abstinence Teacher and Pattern Recognition. Both good. I've got the new one from that Kite Whisperer guy cued up, and something else I forget. The trick is, get a librarian to marry you -- FREE BOOKS (for, you know, a week).

So that the books that are on the CD(s) don't get stale, and to reclaim some of that creative time I lost when I switched from training to driving, I think I'm going to bring a voice recorder for blog entries. I'll spare you my dramatic readings, though, and transcribe myself.

Is there a NaBloPoMo award for most boringest post?


•

Crossing that bridge (when I come to it)

If there's one thing that can make you think about your place in the universe, and also death, and also your very own, inevitable (but far off! we hope!) death, it's...take a guess what I'm going to say. Okay, don't guess. Commuting.

Specifically, this week a deck-truss bridge I cross every day, as mentioned earlier, was found to have cracks in its underbits, serious enough that they needed to be fixed immediately. Another bridge of this type recently fell into the Mississippi River. Mine, a lovely red (not rusty, but more like a burgundy color) arch, crosses the Popolopen Creek Gorge. Narrower than the Mississippi. But a longer drop.

The state decided not to close the bridge, and I decided that bridge collapses are pretty rare and that the fear of death was a dumb reason to add thirty minutes to my commute, and I've been crossing it since. In fact, I stopped yesterday, crossed back over, got out, and took that picture from it (scroll down). Because it won't fall.

But every time I drive over it, guess what I think about. Okay, don't guess. Collapsing.

•

Hey Honey! We're in the Paper!

"The only deck-truss bridge in New York that came through the recent spate of special inspections wearing a red flag is right here in Orange County — the Route 9W bridge over Popolopen Creek."

How about that? Right here in Orange County! Our own little bridge is famous! Isn't that something!? And don't forget the other one, with its yellow flag! Why that one's not far off, either! But Creamery Bridge Road can't compare to the Popolopen Creek bridge, no way. I mean, that's the one I cross twice a day, five days a week. The one over the deep, narrow gorge. The one wearing a brand-new, bright and snappy red flag.

Famous! You go, bridge!


•

Written 9/11/06

The day was diamond-clear, warm where there was sun and cool where there wasn't. No clouds. That was then, and that was today too. This morning my route took me onto a boat across the river, facing into the sun where it rose over the mountain. On the far shore, I entered my train and we followed the waterway south.

The hijackers had done this too; from the north this river is a signpost to the metropolis at its mouth. It gave the city life with its downward flow and betrayed it by revealing its location to its enemies that day. They navigated by its winding path and sped over its waters to strike.

My watch revealed that I would arrive at the station at the same moment the first plane reached its target, and as I looked at landmarks passing, I could only imagine the jetliners coursing over the wavelets on that clear day. Past the nuke plant. Over the bridges. Through the highlands. Despoilers.

Stepping off the train at the terminal I heard an announcement that it was 8:46. Traffic slowed and stopped. A hush fell. A minute. Mostly silent, mostly still, we stood. Reflected. Waited, perhaps, for the next beat of that fell drum. Missed people. Missed the innocent tides and clear waters of that diamondlike morning which seems so long ago now.

And the minute passed, and we went on into our city.


•

Look out, goats, I'm on the move

Each day my commute takes me over something we apparently call the "Goat Trail," a snaky portion of NYS Route 6 that bounds its way around Anthony's Nose and south above the east bank of the Hudson, rising and falling and lurpling and slappelling (those are specific types of curving manoeuvres) as it heads down toward Peekskill. I was surprised to note that everyone calls it the Goat Trail—when I tell people from around here that I work in Westchester, they all ask whether I take the Tappan Zee or the Goat Trail.

I take, of course, the Goat Trail.

Had I known that my eventual route was to be called the Goat Trail, I would have quit my job in New York much earlier and just started commuting over it anyway, with the job as a secondary consideration.

Someone else's photo. That's the Goat Trail to the right of the bridge, blarkling up the mountain:



•

Hyper...smiling LOL

There's a geeky new craze hitting the highways, and it's called hypermiling. While others race to consume their rightful share of the world's remaining oil—because any gas not used in an SUV on its way to someplace important is just a waste—there are a bunch of guys (mostly) on the roads wearing pocket protectors and accelerating slowly, allowing a cushion of space to grow between themselves and the car in front of them, and chuckling ruefully at the unenlightened rubes in the other lanes who continue to convert their precious gasoline kilocalories into heat via the brakes, while the nempimaniacs themselves coast along smoothly on their own inertia, arriving at jams just as they magically dissolve.

I've long been a believer in the "don't stop" school of driving, trying to defuse highway volume congestion by maintaining a painfully slow crawl instead of closing every forward gap, then jerking to a stop. And when I recently took up my new driving commute, I did a little searching online and found some resources about conserving gas while behind the wheel.

Naturally, I donned my lab coat and goggles, got into the beater, and put some of these techniques into practice. And I've realized that hypermiling has been around for decades under another name: "Driving slowly."


•

The Meeting I Made

Truly friends, have things changed. Among the many ills brought about by commuting is the fragmentation of communities that disproportionately depend on long commutes for their economy. Where I live, where the average commute runs someplace in the 90-minute range (which usually means New York City), there's really no way that anyone wants to come home after such a slog and figure out how to attend the library board meeting, the school night, the church concert, etc. As County Planning Commissioner David Church put it:
"People just can't make the commitment," says Church, who notes that many towns — and his department — schedule meetings later and later, hoping for better attendance. All that time commuting is a big reason why volunteer fire departments and ambulance corps from Blooming Grove to Bloomingburg are hurting for members. "Communities lack the connectedness. It's less of a democracy."


That was my lot for the last four years. Last month, I changed jobs, and changed commutes....

And this evening, at a very civilized 7:30, my wife and I sat down in the Hamptonburgh Town Hall to hear the Orange County Water Authority's presentation on the regional impacts of climate change. The keynote speaker was Dr. Patrick Kinney of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who summarized a recent report on climate change projections for the northeast. The host was Simon Gruber, head of the Water Authority and on every local green's rolodex. And I had the pleasure of saying hello to Mr. Church, who continually advocates for smart development in the county.

It was precisely the meeting I wanted to attend, to feel like part of the space up here, to listen to people who knew something about the air I breathe and the water I drink and who understand how to keep those things working properly. But it was time that allowed it.


•