There is no one center of the universe
NICOLAUS COPERNICUS
By Labor Day evening we had three inches of rain, five inches by midnight. This is approximately a week after Hurricane Irene, earth soaked, so the five inches is pretty much running freely through cornfields and jumping all streams and rivers quickly. Our river is fed in a watershed of only more and more other rivers and woods streams which fly off down the rocky hillslopes like nobody's business. I can hear them working, flashing, while standing out in the rain right now in the pitch dark. This could get bad all over again. But I'm typing this on a typewriter and who knows when I'll be near a town to re-type and post it onto the Birdhouse. We may be in for another flood. I know we're in for a road already ruined going more ruined. What's after ruined?
Lights flickering. Phone out all week, so far.
This morning in a college town where we went to access a computer before everyone woke up and we were successful, we later walked a posh neighborhood of each and every elegant home. The lawns unmowed because of all the wet weather and the long grass moved in the breeze like a small green sea. The hardwoods were top-of-the-line vintage maples and oaks, and the spruce trees were scalloped as if personally manicured, which I wouldn't put past the neighborhood. The last time I walked in a neighborhood so well-looked after, and not a gated community (yet), was Beverly Hills. Maybe you wouldn't believe, right along with me, how this very street ended up at a Shangri-la of its own private golf course. It was lightly drizzling rain now and out on the rolling manicure and deep forest backdrop we found some stoic players not about to give up. This whole place wasn't built by slouches. It's maybe come to that in these times, but at one time the refinement and class and crafted detail of the immaculate homes' woodwork was measured and etched into place by craftsmen. Mainly men, who way back when, arrived on the job in station wagons with toolboxes in the back. I worked as a boy with these guys -- Germans and Irish and Scandinavians. They worked in clean overalls and their hair was cut short. Every single job started, was a job finished.
I miss these workers now when it's come time to rebuild towns, roads, and think about old bridges. And covered bridges -- and we have one in our village (see photos below). Floods are part of mother nature and these craftsmen came from the same nature. They flowed with the same fluency. It's why their carpentry practice moves so well to this day to the moving eye.
When I moved into this river valley as a boy there were only two families on the road, and one was tucked up on a side road from this road where the river hugs. I became used to two families and to this day it's about all I recognize on this same road. Any two given families. From the old days, only one of the families is gone, and parts of the other one is still around, and some parts of that family has been responsible at helping rebuild our ragged road. They aren't part of any paid town work crew; they're just doing it. Good Samaritans.
Yesterday when I cut cord-length logs on the river from flood damaged trees and got them across and out of the bowl before this next potential flood, I waved to one ATV going by carrying two (man & woman). Then a pair of joggers, bare to the waist, went by and I could hear them moan when they saw what tree work was ahead of me and one gave a sympathy wave. A couple I've never seen walked by and probably returned when I was ducked away at work in the trees. Then a white pickup truck rode by slowly and slowly returned, followed sometime later by a car with Massachusetts plates that I knew would be returning because there was no longer road access to any Massachusetts. Where I was piling my logs on the other side of a shallow section of the river is now five feet in rushing water and all my logs could be long gone. Finish what you start.
I just picked up the phone, 10PM, dead as doornails. I hear the same sound in the receiver that I used to hear holding a large seashell to my ear. It was my mother's brought from her homeland in Ireland; she said the sound I heard in there was the sea. I was seven years old and fully impressed. A mile up river driving home today through mudholes we saw FairPoint workers and a pole-setter crew in dayglo t-shirts head down, getting another new pole in from where another old pole vanished in the flood. It's muck and mud and a backhoe groaning away at it.
One day I'll lift the receiver and it won't be the sea. You think?
Lights flickering. Phone out all week, so far.
This morning in a college town where we went to access a computer before everyone woke up and we were successful, we later walked a posh neighborhood of each and every elegant home. The lawns unmowed because of all the wet weather and the long grass moved in the breeze like a small green sea. The hardwoods were top-of-the-line vintage maples and oaks, and the spruce trees were scalloped as if personally manicured, which I wouldn't put past the neighborhood. The last time I walked in a neighborhood so well-looked after, and not a gated community (yet), was Beverly Hills. Maybe you wouldn't believe, right along with me, how this very street ended up at a Shangri-la of its own private golf course. It was lightly drizzling rain now and out on the rolling manicure and deep forest backdrop we found some stoic players not about to give up. This whole place wasn't built by slouches. It's maybe come to that in these times, but at one time the refinement and class and crafted detail of the immaculate homes' woodwork was measured and etched into place by craftsmen. Mainly men, who way back when, arrived on the job in station wagons with toolboxes in the back. I worked as a boy with these guys -- Germans and Irish and Scandinavians. They worked in clean overalls and their hair was cut short. Every single job started, was a job finished.
I miss these workers now when it's come time to rebuild towns, roads, and think about old bridges. And covered bridges -- and we have one in our village (see photos below). Floods are part of mother nature and these craftsmen came from the same nature. They flowed with the same fluency. It's why their carpentry practice moves so well to this day to the moving eye.
When I moved into this river valley as a boy there were only two families on the road, and one was tucked up on a side road from this road where the river hugs. I became used to two families and to this day it's about all I recognize on this same road. Any two given families. From the old days, only one of the families is gone, and parts of the other one is still around, and some parts of that family has been responsible at helping rebuild our ragged road. They aren't part of any paid town work crew; they're just doing it. Good Samaritans.
Yesterday when I cut cord-length logs on the river from flood damaged trees and got them across and out of the bowl before this next potential flood, I waved to one ATV going by carrying two (man & woman). Then a pair of joggers, bare to the waist, went by and I could hear them moan when they saw what tree work was ahead of me and one gave a sympathy wave. A couple I've never seen walked by and probably returned when I was ducked away at work in the trees. Then a white pickup truck rode by slowly and slowly returned, followed sometime later by a car with Massachusetts plates that I knew would be returning because there was no longer road access to any Massachusetts. Where I was piling my logs on the other side of a shallow section of the river is now five feet in rushing water and all my logs could be long gone. Finish what you start.
I just picked up the phone, 10PM, dead as doornails. I hear the same sound in the receiver that I used to hear holding a large seashell to my ear. It was my mother's brought from her homeland in Ireland; she said the sound I heard in there was the sea. I was seven years old and fully impressed. A mile up river driving home today through mudholes we saw FairPoint workers and a pole-setter crew in dayglo t-shirts head down, getting another new pole in from where another old pole vanished in the flood. It's muck and mud and a backhoe groaning away at it.
One day I'll lift the receiver and it won't be the sea. You think?
{ Many of the photographs below are of the road I write about along the Green River. That's not dry river bed you're looking at -- that's the road. I have films and still photographs I took the hour when the flood was at its zenith and made this damage, but I still have no way to post these without a phone line to the house. Soon enough. }
writ in VT.
posted in MA.
photos: CNN
photos: CNN
