Aside: We've been on generator power since last night due to the remnants of hurricane Ivan blowing down trees on power lines all over the county. Our house was spared any damage, but a couple of big trees just missed the house when they fell.
My wife and I went out in the rain at first light and cut up a big oak tree that had fallen across our access road. We were trapped!
Isn't it amazing that we "mountain people" seem to be able to recover from a big storm without FEMA </sarcasm>
Oh, and regarding my tagline, Zell Miller saved me ;-)
LOL! So you haven't eaten since the Republican Convention?
Visiting a place like Sharpsburg, you can understand how some cultures and some people believe in spirits. Joshua Chamberlain was right. Something does stay in places like that.
You're right, it was a rainy and foggy day today and Snippy made the comment that you could almost hear the sounds of the men this day in 1862.
So glad to hear that the trees didn’t in any way damage that beautiful home of yours. And I’m sure the wood, once seasoned, will be appreciatively used in your beautiful fireplace (you know, the one held vertical by a furring strip in the photo? :)
~ joanie
P.S. Your FEMA sarcasm is well-founded, Mountain Man.
As I told you, my three sisters and I share a 'sisters only' getaway once a year, and our plans this year included a weekend in a cabin in the mountains upstate -- mountain biking, hiking, shooting, swimming, etc.
I took our daughter's dog, Ernie -- part lab, all outdoors-loving -- with me (our own dog is eighteen years old, and would have had difficulty keeping up with us in the woods).
The drive to the cabin generally takes me three and a half hours. After the first three hours of driving on Friday night (all of it done amid a steady, but only moderately heavy, rain), the heavens opened up, and most of the remainder of the drive was accomplished at a speed of between ten and fifteen mph, making the total travel time closer to five hours than three. The last ten miles or so consisted of dirt roads which, by the time I arrived at the cabin, were well on their way to being edged with fast-running shoulder-streams that had not existed only a few hour earlier.
The winds also increased to what I would estimate to be between thirty and forty mph, causing the two mountain bikes that I had strapped to the back of my car to begin to have a mind of their own (and when bikes and car appear to be of different minds as to which direction they want to go, the driver has to make the final decision, and then cross her fingers in the hopes that her decision-making power is respected by her inanimate 'friends' :).
The long and winding gravel driveway up to the cabin already had small rivulets weaving its entire width and length as well.
After bringing all of my belongings (including the two water-drenched and wind-blown bikes) into the cabin, we all sat down to enjoy a warm and welcome chicken dinner, and catch up on each others' lives -- all the while accompanied by the soothing sound of a steady, heavy, pounding rain on the cabin roof.
Nancy and Connie, the two youngest of us, hit their pillows early and Judy and I stayed up, intending to watch 'Open Range' (there is a television in the cabin, but no reception -- only for video watching). About halfway through the movie, the wind and rain picked up even more and the television went black. And we were without electricity, or running water, for the remainder of the weekend ... which simply served to make our stay much more memorable. The cabin had a supply of oil lamps, but no lamp oil, no working flashlights, but an ample supply of candles.
The time spent in the cabin each night consisted of reminiscing about our Dad (who passed away three years ago next month -- who, by our consensus, was the most honest, decent, courageous, character-laden person we will ever know -- and whose physical energy, and knowledge of construction, twenty-four years ago helped build the cabin in which we now sat). We also spent hours playing cut-throat (by sisterly definition) cards -- 500 rummy and blackout -- by candlelight, re-living both good and bad memories of the past four or five decades, and verifying each others' opinions about the vileness of the American left, the weakness of much of the so-called American 'right', and the threats that both pose to us all. And thanking God that there was dry wood in the cabin with which to keep the fire going in the trusty Fisher wood stove (it dipped down into the mid-thirties at night. And with wind chill ... we won't even go there, since we're all in agreement that 'wind chill factors' are an invention of modern man, designed to prove the falsehood that we are as hardy as our forebears were. :)
It rained, heavily and non-stop, through the night on Friday and well into Saturday afternoon.
During the day, we took the dogs on long hikes down the road and visited with the old farm lady who has lived on the nearby farm since Jesus was in diapers. She's eighty-four years old and completely self-sufficient. We spent a good couple of hours in her kitchen with her, listening to her stories of life in America in the early part of the century. Each time she would share a particularly 'homespun' story with us, I would good-naturedly assure her that I intend to include it in a book I may someday write about her, and she would laugh and pat me on the knee and assure me that such a book would be a good dust gatherer on the shelves of any self-respecting Barnes and Noble.
Typical of one of her many sweet stories:
My Aunt Sarah got so old that she had trouble cutting her own toenails. So she would pay me a nickel to cut them for her. It was hard work, because those toenails were thick and brittle, and I didn't want to cut them wrong and cause her pain. But it was worth it, because I loved taking my nickel into the dry goods store and standing there in front of the rows of apothecary jars filled with penny candy. It was always so hard choosing what color and flavor to bring home with me -- but it was the pleasantest of choices, too. I sometimes got to wishing that Aunt Sarah's nails would grow much faster.
We got into the jeep and drove to Hancock, NY -- the nearest form of real 'civilization' -- on Saturday afternoon. We traveled down several dirt (and paved) roads that were barricaded as 'closed to traffic' due to the flooding ... by driving around the barricades. Whenever we would come to a portion of the closed road that was flooded, we would send sister Connie out, barefooted and pants rolled above her knees, to determine the maximum depth of the water. Our consensus was that, if the water didn't reach too far above her knees, the Jeep could make it through. (Connie was elected to be our depth-scout simply because she was recently married and has no children yet, so her demise, should the water sweep her away, would conceivably have somewhat less impact than that of the rest of us -- who all have children and husbands of longstanding. :)
(Actually none of the water was rushing strongly enough to pose a real threat, but Connie will no doubt remember it otherwise, if only for the sake of drama and personal heroism :).
Arriving in Hancock, NY (having taken a very circuitous route), we went into one of the local saloons, sat at the bar (soft drinks/spring water in hand :) and talked with a handful locals who had managed to congregate there. The handful of men at the bar, and at the pool table, were like little children who were caught in the middle of an exciting real-life video game – wide-eyed, and describing with great gusto and animation, what they had heard on the radio or from their neighbors, about the potential for cresting far above flood stage of the nearby Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers, tales of neighbors whose basements were flooded and whose first floors were knee-deep in water, evacuations to school facilities of portions of nearby towns, the concern that a dam upriver from Hancock might not hold, comparisons to the flood of '72, etc. If it weren't for the fact that every fifth word out of some of their mouths consisted of four letters and began with f, I would have thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the conversations. (I would have reminded them that there were ladies present, but for the fact that I think that would have dampened their enthusiasm. And their boyish eagerness was somehow strangely endearing. :)
We then drove out to a two-room schoolhouse that Florence (the old farm lady) had told us she attended back in the early twenties -- a small, white clapboard building that now serves only as a polling place, and that is still furnished with its original little wooden/swirled iron/inkwell school desks. Peering through the large-paned windows into the classroom/cloakroom areas caused a warm longing to return to those simple, honest days (of which we were not a part, but we somehow understand and revere). We sat on the front porch of that simple, humble, monument to past educational simplicity (yet excellence, no doubt) for quite a while, envisioning what it must have been like to be a part of that strong, proud, uniquely American era.
On the way to and from the school house, we passed through many areas hard-hit by the flooding. One macadam side road was completely detached from the macadam main road by a twenty-foot wide, ten-foot deep chasm with a torrent of rushing water at the bottom. It would have been impossible to get from the main road to the crossroad without making a very wide circuitous path around the chasm -- by foot.
One campground that we passed was particularly hard it. Many very large RVs were on their sides and half-submerged in the swollen river, and several smaller ones were being literally carried downstream, finding themselves (no doubt temporarily) snared on submerged trees or a bend in the riverbank.
We drove over several decades-old iron bridges across whose spanned rivers one can generally wade. Fly fisherman can normally be seen in their hip boots beneath the bridge. On Saturday the river waters were rushing whitewater-style to within a few feet of the bottom span of the bridge. I would roughly estimate that in some especially hard hit areas where wading would normally be possible, the river depth might have been a good ten to fifteen feet. And all kinds of storm debris was being swept forcefully downstream -- large garbage cans, huge trees, hundreds of large tree branches, picnic tables, etc.
The batteries in my digital camera were dead, but my sisters took regular photos that I am eager to see.
We also stopped at a very old cemetery that Nancy occasionally visits when she is in the area. Many of the headstones are markers for young children, or Civil War casualties. A very large number of them also bore the names of casualties, both young and old, that seemed to occur in a cluster in late 1872 and early 1873. (I need to do some research on that period -- a local cholera, typhoid, or smallpox epidemic?) The half hour or so that we explored that hallowed ground was sadly fascinating.
Uncharacteristically, we saw very little wildlife this weekend -- with the exception of two enormous wild turkeys who crossed the road in front of me as I began my drive home (and whose appearance served to remind me again that I might well have voted with Ben Franklin when he proposed making the wild turkey our national bird). Lots of grazing horses and dairy cows, though -- to whom long, heavy rainstorms appear to be but a minor annoyance, if noticed at all.
Back at the cabin, we took the small cooler that I had brought up with me down to the shoulder of the dirt road at the base of the cabin's driveway (the shoulder was now a rushing river) and periodically filled it with water – carrying it back up to the cabin to pour into the toilet tank so that we could flush the toilet (we had no water at all – drinking or otherwise -- because the pump that pumps the water from the well is, of course, electric). At night, we filled the tank by candlelight – one sister holding a candle over the tank, one holding a candle over the cooler, and one scooping and pouring the water. During one of these treks we thought we had managed to capture a tadpole in our cooler water, and took great pains to avoid scooping him up with the rest of the tank-destined water (despite what seemed to be his determined and untiring efforts to swim into the scooping bowl), until we had scooped enough water out to lower the candle deep enough into the cooler and discover that the tadpole was simply a tadpole-shaped leaf. We then took turns laughingly blaming each other for the previous ten minutes of stupidity (you had to be there, I guess :). We also boiled the side-of-the-road water (on a propane stove) to do dishes, etc.
Late on Saturday night, when the storm finally broke, we took my bicycle lights and walked down to the dirt road with the two dogs. We stood in the middle of the road, turned the lights off, and looked upward. I have never seen so many stars -- and now appreciatively comprehend the real, and almost spiritual, meaning of the phrase 'canopy of stars'. If you looked straight upward, you could see hundreds of large, bright stars -- and thousands of smaller twinkling ones. You could also see large wispy grey areas around certain groups of them (separate galaxies? I'm no astronomer). Nancy and Connie saw two very quick shooting stars as well during the time we stood there. Judy and I missed them, they happened so fast. In the blackness around us, it was completely silent – not even crickets -- except for the rushing water on either side of us. And we all stood there -- even the dogs, somehow uncharacteristically quiet and still -- contemplating the incomparable majesty of nature above us, and the awesome, determined power of nature all around us.
I had brought up a few Bush/Cheney yard signs for my sisters, and forgot to give them to them. So, on the trip home, when it was dark, while driving through one of the smaller towns, I quietly stopped the car by two different darkened houses and replaced their two Kerry/Edwards yard signs with Bush/Cheney ones (deposited the Kerry/Edwards signs in a Giant food store dumpster). The Bush/Cheney yard signs that I passed were visibly predominant on this trip, and the Kerry/Edwards signs were few and far between (and are now two fewer yet ... :)
Now that I'm back in (what we choose to call the more) 'civilized' world, with its modern conveniences, and its perpetual motion (going where?), I find myself enormously grateful to have been afforded the opportunity to experience a few days away from 'civilization', with three terrific gals who enjoyed the 'unexpected experiences' we encountered every bit as much as I. And, although I wish our Dad could have been there with us, on some level that we don't yet quite comprehend, I know that he was. :)
~ joanie