Image by Monica Arellano-Ongpin, via Flickr.
A time comes when these Dispatches from Shandaken must move on from largely hurricane-related content, and that time I suppose is now. Which is only appropriate, since my last dispatch focused on Shandaken itself moving on from Irene as well. I do, however, have one anecdote to relay here that pulls together, in one short story, several of the themes found in recent dispatches, both pre- and post- Tropical Storm Irene.
But first: a tangential note. It occurred to me that you can pretty much know immediately whether it will be a hard news type of day for the current dispatch by seeing how often I slip into the first person while writing it. Tangents are, in fact, one of the themes of this one. They are literary winding roads, and that is a loose end I hope to tie up here.
So, as you may recall, we had a lost dog and a wedding on my block in Phoenicia a few weeks back. Marilyn Manning hosted that wedding and also coordinated the hunt for Clementine, who was fortunately found the day before Peter and Andy got married. A week later Marilyn’s backyard, where that wedding had taken place, was flooded by water overflowing the Stony Clove Creek. It was the beginning of the events that transformed our neighborhood firehouse, the M.F. Whitney Hose Company, into Shandaken’s temporary Emergency Command Center. I think that pulls from four prior dispatches right there.
The day when Marilyn’s yard flooded was the day that the lights went out in Phoenicia and many other parts of the Catskills. Our power here didn’t return for almost six days, and no power equals no refrigeration, equals a lot of food gone bad. Well, as chance would have it, on the day Marilyn decided that her spoiled food finally had to go, Maggie the Gordon Setter was staying at her home. To prevent any new unpleasant lost-dog incidents, before venturing out Marilyn dutifully checked to make sure all the doors and windows in her home were closed. On the ground floor, that is. Not wanting to be separated from Marilyn, Maggie promptly ran to the second floor where a window was partially open and flung herself out of it.
Maggie made a perfect injury-free landing, but not before her flight was witnessed by a volunteer at the M.F. Whitney Hose Company located next to Marilyn’s home. “We got our first jumper," he was heard to exclaim, “and it’s a canine.”
That is a long, tangential way to tell you that I need to receive news, stories, ideas and announcements from readers like you in order to file three Dispatches from Shandaken every week. I just can’t count on regular natural disasters to provide enough material. I need a little help, especially from Shandaken hamlets outside of Phoenicia, in gathering material to post, so please don’t be shy; email me.
If you don’t, I will be forced to write more semi-lucid first person stuff like this. I was in Seattle last weekend for the marriage of a very close friend’s daughter who, like her mom, is also quite special to me. I noticed Bonita (my friend) had a tattoo on her calf in Spanish, and I asked her what it said. She told me it was a quote from Tolkein: “All who wander are not lost.”
As I flew home from that city where so many tourists flock to, I realized that, while I loved being in Seattle, I wasn’t sorry to be leaving it -- though I do already miss my friends. That’s because I already live someplace that others choose for their own vacations. A place with winding roads traversing seemingly unending mountains, valleys, and ridges that pass through places I never heard of before, and that I always wanted to visit. I may not always know where I am heading around here, but I never feel lost in the Catskills. And for that I am quite grateful.
Which brings me to my final tangential loose end for this dispatch: gratitude and appreciation. I want to try something here that hopefully will spur on your own participation in Dispatches from Shandaken. I want you to write most of a soon-to-be-published column here on gratitude. It’s been a very hard month for so many people in the wake of the floods, and so many people richly deserve our thanks for all that they did to help us, individually or collectively, pull through it. Who do you want to personally thank? If you want to send me your one or two sentence message of gratitude and appreciation to someone or something, I will publish it in a forthcoming dispatch.
I’ll start out with one of my own. I want to express my deep respect and appreciation to Lissa and Julia for all of their if not exactly tireless, certainly persevering efforts providing coverage for the Catskills of Irene and all that followed inside this Watershed Post. Yes they had a great deal of support and help, but ultimately the burden fell on their shoulders, and they never let it, or us, down.
I was talking with Lissa the other day about the differences between for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises. The Watershed Post is “for profit," largely because that allows it to depend on its readership for financial support, rather than forcing a dependency on a patchwork of grants. But just because something is organized as a for-profit business doesn’t always mean that the people running it primarily do so for the money. (Though yes, we do all need to eat.) I know a labor of love when I see it. Thank you Lissa and Julia.
By the way, I threatened to publicly cry censorship if they tried to edit out that part written to them.
The next loose end is yours to tie. Pleases email me your personal expressions of gratitude, to those deserving of thanks, for the help that they provided you, our town, and/or region in a time of need.
This column was first published on WatershedPost.com on Tuesday, September 20. Tom Rinaldo writes the Dispatches from Shandaken column for the Watershed Post's Shandaken page three times a week. Email Tom at tomrinaldo@watershedpost.com.
