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.


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Move

I haven't seen the destruction in New York firsthand. My town was more or less spared by Hurricane Sandy. Trees and power lines down, power out for a couple of days, no major flooding. But I lived in New York City for eight years, my sisters and cousins and friends still do, and I've been talking with my people.

They say that the New York City Marathon is scheduled to go on this Sunday, less than a week after lives and neighborhoods were destroyed by the storm. The power is still out. Transportation is a debacle. There's wreckage in places that hasn't even been touched yet. The race is set to go, and apparently people are angry.

The race ought to go on.

In 2001 I recall being angry. Vindictive. Scared. I thought maybe the marathon would devalue my grief. That a celebration of life so soon after death would be disloyal to the dead. That I might forget, and we were very clearly told to NEVER FORGET.

But I went out to cheer for the runners, cheer for the city, cheer for my living, cheering friends around me eating bagels. In 2003, completely renewed -- a father, a runner, no longer a New Yorker -- I ran that race. I ran it again a couple of years later. Forget? Hardly.

The New York City Marathon is an annual heartbeat in a city that's all heart. If you're angry that the marathon is going on, remember what got you angry. That storm was unfair.

And one day taken from a cleanup and rebuilding that is going to take years is a small price, on top of the price already paid. More important, the marathon is an investment of spirit in a place that needs it. This marathon will be like the news of V-day. It will be like the end of the '68 blackout. It will be like -- well, it will be like the New York City Marathon in 2001.

This isn't an abstract thing, here. The marathon is a real thing. It saves lives. It redirects energy. The city is at a standstill? Not if you let tens of thousands of people run through it. You can't get anywhere? Yes you can. Use your feet. The power is out? The power is right there in front of you, taking in air and turning it into kinetic energy. You're going to tell the world that storm, blackout, and tragedy can shut New York down? You're going to tell people that the place they travel in droves to see is not as mighty as they think it is? New Yorkers: you live in the center of the universe. Light it up.

If you're angry, and you're sad, and you're frightened, make your way to the course on Sunday and let your emotions go. Cheer. Cry. Hand someone an orange. Let the brave men and women running that race -- many of whom also lost much during this storm -- let them help you remember to be alive.


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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.


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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.



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Haliaeetus can wait

Today the children and I drove this big loop, about forty miles, on the trail of eagles; down one side of the river, across, up the other side, across again. We were the only people outside, and that for just a few foolish minutes at a park in Peekskill near the train station. We stood facing the water, looking upriver in the direction of the Worragut and World's End, into the teeth of a hellacious north wind that drove whitecaps into breakers into the shore a hundred feet before us.

Flickr had told me to look there for eagles. Why do I listen to the Internet?

It was an arctic wind, too, twenty degrees, like Skadi’s own air conditioner. In the first minute the kids mounted an enthusiastic assault on the vast Structure-for-Play that's there beside the water, but the lad was hunching into his coat and the lass was crying before very long. My instincts told me that they were learning valuable life lessons through suffering. Except I was also freezing my ass off, so I let them get back in the car. Eagles be damned.

I'm a desperate tour guide on such excursions, rushing to tell my son everything I can about the world, as though there won't be enough time, as though I want to fill him up and leave none of his knowledge to chance. So I babble. Every stray memory, landmark, historical or scientific fact sparked by the landscape comes out. "You remember there we attended the Shad Fest, and the precision skydivers from West Point came down? You met Robert Kennedy there. You were one." He's thinking about air hockey, and how thirsty he is. "That's Breakneck Ridge. I climbed most of it with Uncle Larry once. I couldn't finish because I was too heavy and out of shape. That's Bannerman's Castle, but the island is also called Pollopel." He knows this, knows it was an ammo dump. He's seen it on Google Earth.

We pull over in Cold Spring, looking north through the Wind-Gate between Storm King and Breakneck. Route 218 cuts across Storm King's face. It's the northernmost of the Highland peaks on the west side of the Hudson, to our far right as we face the river from a parking lot near some condos. Strung out to the south are similarly rocky, majestic peaks, directly across the narrow fjord. There are no eagles, but they'd look right against those icy cliffs. We sit there a minute. The little one is sucking her thumb, eyelids heavy.

"What's that, like, path across Storm King?" the boy asks from the back seat. I tell him it's a road. There's a pause. "It looks like a lizard," he says.

"What does?" I turn to see what he's talking about.

He's talking about the entire ten-mile swath of the visible Highlands on the west bank of the river. He explains, starting with the head, Storm King, and its slash of a mouth, then the Crow's Nest forming the back, Target Point a forelimb. The ridge declining southward is a tail where it descends toward West Point. Of course it's obvious, once he points it out. Lizard, check.

We have different frames of reference, different senses of scale. He has no problem with a ten-mile-wide canvas. There's nothing so giant that it can't be made into something familiar and small. He's unspoiled by any notion of his own insignificance. On that we agree; he and his sister are the central objects in our landscape. Their small forms bear Jupiter's gravity and the encoded wisdom of generations. How can I possibly teach them anything?

Later, at home, he asks me if a crocodile is as big as a school bus. "No," I lie, knowing that some salt-water crocodiles are longer than the bus he takes to kindergarten. He clarifies. "No," he says. "Not end to end. I mean, could a crocodile eat a schoolbus."

Ah. "No," I tell him. "Absolutely not."


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New Words for Snow

Snain
not sleet, precisely, but simultaneous snow and rain

Chofle
snain after it has collected four inches deep upon the ground (up to four inches, it is known as chofe)

Clasmerak
ice pellets the precise size and shape of kosher salt

Fluzzard
snain or clasmerak that starts falling in earnest each time you leave your house

Scrujge
the solid sheet of ice-that-was-snow that now covers your lawn/driveway/front walk

Scoil
solid lumps of ice that was snow yesterday when you shoveled it onto the lawn and which you now use to climb your lawn, which has turned into scrujge overnight

Snoce
individual chunks of scoil that have frozen onto pavement that break your toe when you kick them

Chundl
the sheets of frozen clasmerak that fly off trucks on the Tappan Zee

Schit


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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.


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What Do You Do, After You Blogged All Month?

Next Actions
Apparently a lot of other people were writing novels last month. That sounds nice. I have a couple of other writing projects to sew up, and then I'm starting me one of those. Rather, working on one I started for NaNoWriMo two years ago.

Wafer Thin
This morning was the traditional First Scraping, as our cars were coated in the most delicate thin layers of the hardest ice. Like something made by Italian craftsmen on a little island someplace, this ice. So thin, in fact, that I discovered a new part of the car. The part where, when you scrape some ice and a beautiful, dinner-plate-sized micro-thin sheet of it slides oh-so-delicately down the outside of the window and disappears into the door; the part where you hear it shatter with a glasslike tinkle into a thousand little wet slivers. That part. My car has one.

Cold, Cold Ground
I ran a little down Baltimore way this past weekend, on a wide-open one-mile loop in a park with no trees and lots of frost on the ground. It was extremely bright, and around the loop here and there I could see other people out walking and running. Our breath made little lambs of steam that romped together in the sunlight.


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I Guess I Planted

Saturday morning we leapt from bed, jammed everyone into their fleecy clothes, gobbled down a quick cup of coffee and some oatmeal on our way out the door wandered around the house for a while like a herd of sleep-deprived goats, looking for shoes and rejecting all breakfast ideas, before finally getting into the car and driving to a tree-planting organized by the Hudson River Estuary Program's Trees for Tribs initiative. The idea is to create erosion and runoff buffers around Hudson tributaries by planting trees, and to then eat pizza.

We got out of the car and shoved the stroller (the town stroller, not the woodland stroller, whoops) through waist-high grass down toward the bank of the Moodna Creek, ignoring the plaintive bleats of our son, who hated his coat, and his shoes, and his too-large work gloves, and us, and who was cold. It was simple enough to follow the rows of plastic tubing that had been erected to protect the newly-planted saplings from browsing deer, until we found the other hippies concerned citizens who had decided this was important enough to do on a Saturday morning.

Although we had been alerted to the event by an email from a friend in another town who couldn't actually make it to plant trees, we found ourselves in the midst of a who's-who: the woman we bought our house from, a friend we made through other friends, one of our babysitters, the water authority consultant I'd already talked to about our cellar...it seemed as though we'd found the right crowd.

The work was very light (somehow the holes had dug themselves) and our companions had done much of it already. Almost before the lad had asked if we were ready to leave, we were ready to leave. Just then, atop the mighty iron Moodna Viaduct, something like 200 feet overhead, a Secaucus-bound New Jersey Transit train hove into view. That did it for the boy, and the look on his face did it for us.

While we had worked, shoving dirt in around the root balls of the thin sticks and staking up tubes of corrugated plastic to protect them from nibbling teeth, I had tried to impress the boy with the seriousness of what we were doing, tried to get him to picture a time twenty years hence when a proud stand of oaks and maples that he had helped plant would keep the creek within its banks and help the adjacent fields retain their topsoil, while providing habitat for animals and shade for hikers— and what he'll remember is the train.

Which is also fine by me.


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The Vermin Who Came in from the Cold

The high today is supposed to be forty-eight. And you know what that means. Out in the woods about a mile away, a raccoon will wake up this evening in its hollow log, shivering, and thinking about how the hell it's going to chew through another withered, jerky-like corncob, with the skeletons of the stalks all around mocking it for living such a crappy life.

Or! this raccoon might think, Or, I can go to town! And as it weighs the pros and cons, reluctant to leave the relative warmth of its loamy bedroom, the idea will become more and more appealing. The fears--angry dogs, cars, bright flashlights and the shouts of bathrobe-clad homeowners--will fade away as the raccoon convinces itself. Instead, visions of driveways covered with flimsy, thin plastic kitchen garbage bags, so tender, so vulnerable, will begin to form in its head. And just visible through the pale plastic, Good Things to Eat. Parts of bagels. Crinkly little packages with plenty of leftover food. Whole rinds of tasty melons. Fish parts!

Stomach growling, the raccoon will gather its keys and cellphone and head down the hill toward the lights, muttering to itself despite its excitement I've got to get this place set up for winter or I'm gonna freeze. Passing bushes whose berries have long been gathered, walking over the rocks where salamanders hid in warmer days, the raccoon will wonder if Earl's likely to be out tonight, or whether those skunks from the park will show. They're always good for a laugh, as long as they don't get too excited, the raccoon will think.

And about a hundred yards outside of town, the merest whiff of garbage and compost on the air, the raccoon will come around a curve in the game trail to find a couple of woodchucks, the possum twins from the Big Oak Tree, his cousin Earl and his girlfriend Arlene, and a whole tribe of skunks jamming the path, milling around and muttering. A coyote will slink back through the crowd toward the woods, snarling "This is freaking ridiculous, I come here all the time."

And standing up on its hind legs, craning its neck, the raccoon will see a bear and a velvet rope blocking the trail. The bear will explain reasonably and implacably to a couple of demanding, agitated weasels--"But if you'd just check the list!" "There is no list. I am the list."--that it doesn't make the rules and that if they would just join everyone else on the line, that would be best.

And of course the bear will step aside for two does who bat their long lashes and will unclip the rope with a little smile as their scent wafts over him, then turn back to the assembled masses and shake its head and shrug at their sarcastic jeers.

The raccoon will sidle up next to Earl and Arlene and roll its eyes. "Man," it'll say, "this place has really gone to hell." They'll all nod their heads. But they'll be patient. Because it's chilly, and there's garbage in there.

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Next Week, Sleet

We're doubtless about to be enthwapped with the wet, cold, gray sock of November, but today someone stumbling around in the glare of summer finally found the out-of-date calendar and flipped the page.











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The Heat? On.

Today Florida feels like Satan's rectal thermometer. How do I know? I know because I'm there. Here, that is. And even though it's only 7 degrees hotter here than at home (95 vs. 88), the...sun...is...burrowing through what's left of my skin like a...like a...sorry, I'm out of similies because of the above. Freaking hot.

Yesterday, I ran in the morning. Have I already said this? Perhaps I'm delerious. That might explain the palace of ice cream cones I can see hovering upside-down in the distance, drawing me forward, forward. Anyway, I ran in the morning, snakes and lizards darting across my path, heat-prostrated pit bulls ranging alongside behind fences, a petit, angry, blisteringly hot land crab threatening my feet, another version -- scuttling gray monster -- pulling itself into a burrow as I passed. Bloated alligator carcasses lined my route, dead of heatstroke all of them, dehydrated vultures plucking listlessly at their livers, the vultures thinking of January and cold-water lobster. All that was missing was Virgil to guide me the 4 miles.

Ice cream!

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You Set Me Up

Because I don't talk enough about my commute, I've decided to take one photo per day of one of its best features. I suspect I'll get a maximum of 12 shots of ol' Storm King, as that commute ends on Wednesday. But here you go, click for the Flickr set:



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FEMAlicious

We had some small amount of damage from the floods back in April: cracks in the cellar floor, possible rust to the undercarriage on the furnace and water heater, some loss to the pointing in the foundation, significant erosion in the backyard that’ll make future water even more problematic if not addressed.

Yesterday, the gummint came over to (possibly) help. A neighbor told us that the Fedrul Emergency “Heckuvajob” Management Agency (FEHMA) has been doling out funds to flood victims in our area, even those with comparatively modest needs, like us. I hadn’t considered us eligible: sure, if we wanted to fix this stuff we’d have to pay, but maybe we could just LALALALA ignore it and it would fix itself?

Apparently Warshington takes a different view. I verbally filled out an application for assistance via the toll-free number, including such odd details as the baby’s social security number – as if the feds don’t already know that – and next day a G-woman came to the house for a look-see. She said we’d be hearing from them soon.

The telemarketing calls started the day I gave all that info over the phone. Last night they continued: caller ID tells us that something called Equity Freedom is trying to call us from Long Island, but hangs up when we answer. Another number, pegged to someone called Oliver, has tossed a couple of hang-ups our way, as well. And last night my opinion on adolescent health was sought desperately by a shifty-sounding outfit who claimed to be taking surveys. We’re on that Do Not Call list, but something seems to have jammed the gears slightly. Either someone got hacked, or Uncle Spam is selling our info to offset costs. Or it’s a coincidence.

Will I take FEHMA’s dirty, dirty money? You bet. I’m happy to have my taxes help my neighbors out of a flood-related jam, so I’m willing to accept the same in proportion to my need. But can I have mine on the telephony-free plan?

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