WHERE I LIVE IS DARK ~

The US at night, showing city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires and reflected moonlight, captured by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012.

 Image: NASA Earth Observatory/Robert Simmon

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/picture/2013/jan/03/north-dakota-glows-night-big-picture

we're blessed with the dark and quiet, thank you — but others have been forced there by a system that is only becoming more corrupt by the day — think of those suffering 67 days after Hurricane Sandy with no power, never mind homes.

A POEM FROM DOC ~

just arrived

TRICK OR TREAT ~

Dear Michael ~

Mayor Bloomberg and Gov Cuomo, dour ones, have been fine enough about the NY region during Hurricane Sandy, but right now I'm excited about the big balls on the big fellow Gov Chris Christie. Self-involved and every inch a dynamo and just maybe the guy, a Republican! in Lowell Weicker clothing and guts, who could pull Obama up and through the election. Bipartisan at work without any strings of the usual media / politico mumbo-jumbo. Maybe two leaders who really have some idea about leading.

 
Hurricane Irene was the test last year for all of us, and Gov Shumlin of Vermont learned quicker than either Cuomo or Bloomberg who watch the largest city in America float there at the shore line inches from disaster, year after year, and have done very little with dire warnings for over a decade. Hell, you and I can remember as we read our Barry Commoner, Peter Berg, and Sierra Club journals in 1970 the warnings that were already forecast for the environment. Many listened and put their life shoulder into a lifestyle honoring ecology, most didn't, and few leaders lasted who tried to act on it, from Jimmy Carter on down. So mother nature sent Hurricane "Sandy". And I think next time she'll send Hurricane "Shitstorm", or Hurricane "Slander". It'll get rougher and rougher. It's already a very tragic scene in parts of NY city and on the southern Jersey shores.

 
Did you know Sweetheart's family founded a part of New Jersey, actually around Jersey City? It was called Paulus Hook and it's still there, around 1640. It stares across the Hudson right at the old Twin Towers location. Not that I've been there. It turns out our best pal Janine (Pommy Vega) was born in Jersey City and Sweetheart never realized it was on the very same ground her forefathers founded. They'd have fun talking about that if Janine was still with us all.

 
I hope your family is doing okay in NY watery. We kept the media on the past two days and just followed the storm waiting for our power to knock down any minute, but it never did. Some small miracle for a change. Lost one tree, a maple, which I cut up yesterday as easy street next to the hundreds I've cut in the past year post-Irene.

 
We got enough rain to make the river wilder which we forever like best. Though not a flood threat.

 
And here it is Halloween. When Carson was little it was such a soft and trickster day for all of us taking him up to the village for a few door knocks and sweets. It'd be easier to get Carson at age 27 to come with us tonight to rap on village doors than to find that old village of welcomers and delight. Small lamps lit by a strong door. Mainly gone. The best has slipped away. It was all once part of that infrastructure called "old ways". You couldn't buy it, own it, build it, or scream to get it. You had to believe. In ghosts.  

photo "carson at ready" © bob arnold

HURRICANE BRETHREN ~

More Than 8 Million U.S. Homes Without Power

About 8.5 million households from Maine to Michigan to North Carolina, representing about 7 percent of the country’s population, lacked power Tuesday afternoon, officials said. 


Here are the state-by-state figures from The Associated Press:
*New Jersey: 2.5 million.
*New York: 2.3 million.
*Pennsylvania: 1.2 million.
*Connecticut: 615,000.
*Maryland: 290,000.
*Massachusetts: 290,000.
*West Virginia: 271,000.
*Ohio: 250,000.
*New Hampshire: 210,000.
*Virginia: 180,000.
*Rhode Island: 110,000.
*Maine: 86,000.
*Michigan: 79,000.
*Delaware: 45,000.
*Washington, D.C.: 25,000.
*Vermont: 10,000.
*North Carolina: 6,600.



We were lucky this time on the river — just a flicker of power wanting to go out, but miraculously it hasn't. Unlike last year with Hurricane Irene where we lost the river for awhile, most of the road, and days on end of no power or phone. 


A rock maple tree came down with the storm and we have that bucked up for next year's firewood.


Right now we're thinking most of our brothers, sisters, and critters who are lost or hurting in so many of these states. United States.  

EARTH ~

HURRICANE

______________________________

 


It isn’t right
 
to have the sea
 
come to us from
 
the sky but on
 
Monday that’s what
 
it did and every
 
one and every thing
 
that was once born
 
paid for it whether
 
there or not which
 
is the real message and
 
shape of this earth




[ BA ]
29 october 12
photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

I was in another New England town the other day, not my town, not that I live in any town per se and more along a river, and in this town which is an unusual and attractive town since it is built on a plateau where the main section of the road-in runs along a level plane. Beautiful homes. Easy walking. And right in the center of this town, on this plane, is a playing field, wide and sunny and all theirs, devoted to a school and children. The parking lot to get the kids here rings this large field and this is where the mothers and fathers come every day to leave-off and pick-up. It's quite an impressive civic and family duty to behold. Yes, the town is wealthy, but the center of town has an extremely active country store sort of facility run by what could be termed rednecks, and it's packed with all sorts of soup-to-nuts accessories, even a take out salad I saw one worker carry out along with cigarettes and two lag bolts for a job across the street. I bought a watch cap for $5.29. Black. Something I've always worn for the last 50 years. It cost twice that where I live.



So back to the kids, this sunny wide field, where it takes up all the center of the town. I've never seen a school or playground devoted with such expanse to children in any town before. Nearby I stood in a store with a woman clerk I just met and said to her with a nod of my head, "Look at those kids playing — dressed like it's still summer in shorts and t-shirts, and all the color!" She nodded and said "Yes, but there are also many of these same kids who have been badly affected by the hurricane (Irene) that blew through a year ago." I looked over again and watched these troubled children playing with such freedom. 



They are like thousands of children haunted by the big storm of a year ago. Unlike their parents who are stewed in their troubles, children can still run. Wear scruffy clothes. Play with one another. No real bias as to color, race, gender; let's just play. There's the sun, run in it. They do. It's 55 degrees and they are dressed for July. It's late October. Another hurricane (Sandy) is on its way.

 
One of the only ways possible to balance the scales of children so troubled by a haunting memory, or nightmare, is to equal it in status. Give a good to the bad, if that is at all possible.  Some say a trip to Disney World. I say how about making a better country? Why visit a fake world when you can build and shape a real world? Have we lost all context to why we exist? Or are we still moping around asking that very question: "Why do we exist?"


Same with adults, who most haven't had nearly the volume to absorb what they went through with 9-11, and before that the cheating ceremony of a Presidential election in 2000. Which may have happened again in 2004 (within Ohio), and in both cases we were given a village idiot as a President. One more figure head for the Neo-cons to channel in and run the show, ruin many countries, causing death, hardships and forcing broken economies to keep the masses broken, twisted and controlled.


Get a smart cookie like Barack Obama in there and he just starts to expose the corruption and where people can maybe take control of their actions and lives and make a better world for themselves. Get out from under the daily threat and foreboding, find a field to run in.



A hurricane is coming for the eastern seaboard. We're about to be together. And when we're forced together I only see people always working for people no matter race, color, gender, style, appearance or religion. Sometimes it takes a hurricane.



We have the outdoors as ready as we'll ever be, and indoors. The big trees have some idea something is coming, it's in the branches. Get your hair washed now, it may be some time without power. Both chain saws are fueled and sharp.

photo © bob  arnold

SANDY ~

Batten down the hatches. Yes batten.


It seems almost impossible to believe, but a week ago we were traveling deep into the interior of Vermont — small town slipped into small town, lakes, old bridges, new roads, country stores, not at all cheap gas in these parts — mostso around the White River region of the state, towns like Bethel and others, that were royally slammed by Hurricane Irene, and one can spot just the roadways that have been completely rebuilt, and others that are still being worked on, for well over a year. And now a hurricane called "Sandy" is heading our way. It was the title of a Hollies song I used to love. 

 
We've been "battening" for a few weeks now, in the usual winter preparation, and maybe sensing something was coming. The wooly caterpillars have been, each one, very brown at the center.

 
Two weeks ago I had a chance to work with an excavator and backhoe that was operating nearby and down into our land along the river to winch out logs I cut out from many hardwood trees that came down river last year with Irene full length. Rootball and all. This was on the second of two very small wooded islands on our property right on the river. You might remember last year at exactly this time I was cutting up trees on the first island and lugging all the wood home on my shoulder, up a steep stone staircase I had built to the roadside, loading the wood into our truck, and moving it home up on the knoll. Three months labor, like they did it once in Egypt and China. I wouldn't recommend it after the age of 50, or 60.

 
This time I got a very helping hand from friends with just the machine age at their disposal and expertise, so as I bucked up twenty foot logs, they got it all moved in a matter of hours. First onto the road edge for an overnight yarding, then up to our house the next day where I may get onto the logs in another year. We currently have twenty-four cord of wood in the dooryard and stuffed into the big woodshed, so there is no hurry for wood. Right now for Sandy's approach, I've been moving indoors easy wood to keep dry for about a week, and wouldn't think to touch the better firewood right off the kitchen and into the woodshed. That's for a state of emergency. One battened sealed.

 
We just did groceries for two weeks, which means I finally took off the big screen on the kitchen window for the season and will tuck that away tomorrow into the cellar. This opens the window to pass all the grocery satchels from me to Sweetheart as I empty out a vehicle and get the food stuff stored. Through the winter we'll pull the groceries to the same window with sled and unload in the same method. It's all greased.

 
We've also scouted and hunted up for weeks on end of new book acquisitions for the bookshop and will get those available over the snow months. The books came in tonight through the same window.

 
Leaves raked and composted, but now the oak leaves have to fall, and I believe Sandy will have the capacity to strip those off the trees like natives used to rake blueberries off their bushes in the old days. Let's hope it's just the leaves the hurricane strips and leaves the trees be. We don't need to lose more trees. Still along the Green River, never mind the White River further north, one can survey hundreds and hundreds of potential cords of firewood piled away into the banks of these rivers, twisted into some misbegotten shape, curved with the force of flood waters into some other form and identity called best "haunted", that few know exactly what to do with it all.



I heard two elderly women in the cellar of a library yesterday morning talk this way: "I can see you are stocking up (on books) for the next five or so days." The other woman smiles and nods "Oh yes. But I just hate to lose our power, then there will be no television at night and nothing to do." There is a quiet nodding of the heads. "I have my oil lamps ready on the kitchen table", one finally says, closing down the short but sweet conversation.

 
We have our many oil lamps, too. And one heavy-duty Makita work flashlight I go nowhere without when the power is down.

 
Laundry is all washed.

 
I rebuilt the summer driveway by hand and may watch it all wash away in one day of driving rain. The winter driveway is what it is: shorter, practical and away from the house.

 
Mail will all be addressed before the storm. 

 
50 gallons of rain water waits outdoors in their buckets. It could be 500 gallons of rain water before the storm has passed if we had enough buckets. 

 
The moon is lighting the night earth nicely.


Last night I watched the Giants back to back shutout the Tigers and the increasing and sinking sadness on the Tiger fans faces.

 
There are holes in my jeans to mend when all else shuts down and we get that awful long quiet. 

 
I want to think Barack Obama may look pretty handy and of help for the nation during this weather pounding. I could even go further and believe the gods have sent this storm right to us, a week before the Presidential election, to showcase the merits and ample good sense of Mr. Obama. Let's watch what happens.



I have news about our neighborhood and recent troubles but will hold off on that until this weather maker does its stuff. It's the difference between what could be serious trouble, and what has been irritating and despair.



More. And soon. Keep your head down, or up, at least around. 

photo : "Sandy" developing