Giving thanks for surviving Route 10 after dark

On Thanksgiving we went from our home, in the northeast corner of our county, to dinner at an inn in the northwest corner of the county. If a person were to research New York State Route 10, he could read all about where it goes and what other routes merge with it. All you really need to know, if you're going to travel on Route 10 after sunset, is that it is DARK. 
It's a little country two-lane road, paved, but effectively shoulderless, with lots of blind curves. 
No sidewalks, no bike lanes, no jogging lanes. 
Not a lot of wiggle room in either driving lane.
No street lights and, since the houses are very few and far between, not much front yard lighting either. 

To illustrate, here's a picture of the beautiful countryside we passed that afternoon as we drove to dinner:

And yet . . . and YET . . . on Thanksgiving Day, an hour after sunset, in the thick woodsy wilds at this globe's 42nd parallel north in late November . . . we passed half a dozen joggers swinging along jauntily in the [perhaps] eighteen inches of snow-covered space between driving lane and four-foot-deep ditch or brush-covered earthen bank. 
All of them were dressed head to toe in dark colors, with only their faces uncovered to reflect the light from our car's headlights. Not a strip of reflective tape, nor a little light anywhere to be found on their bodies. 
From my seat in the car, it was like having ghostly figures appear in a haunted house:  nothing, nothing, nothing, movement, movement coming, turning into a human and then gone. 
Ghastly. 
Shocking. 

I am left believing that people who jog at night wearing black spandex and black caps and black gloves and black footwear have their priorities somehow awry.  If I were a jogger, drivers would be able to see me coming from half a mile away. I would be decked out in battery-operated multi-color flashing lights. I would look like a smallish traveling carnival. Drivers would slow way down, fearing that that they were about to come upon some spacecraft, glowing there up ahead. I would be an oddity, but I would be visible.

It's just what you do

I've been feeling a little bit embarrassed about that last post. Some of you seemed to think I had gone above and beyond, and that makes me feel as if I was tooting my own horn. It took a long time for me to write about that day, although I knew I would. Melinda seemed to me so singular, such a character. She was the reason for the post. I have so much more memory of her than I wrote . . . sometimes I want to get the story told and I leave out details. Her direct brown eyes, her square jaw, her wide straight-line lips. The faint dramatic intonation: "Yes . . . mine is a lonely life." 
What I want to say here is that that's how it is in the country. I always thought so, and now that I live here, I do know it to be true. Maybe it's true in the city too; I don't know because I haven't lived in a real city. Maybe it's true wherever one human being asks another human being for help.


A long time ago, before we bought this land, but after we had begun looking around for a country place, I spent a few hours driving around being happily lost on country roads. It was late fall, might have been Thanksgiving weekend . . . and in the 'burbs the roads were clear. In the country, of course, they were snowy, slushy, muddy. I was on a long, long, unpopulated road when I slid into the ditch. I don't recall the details now. It was not a very cold day. Cell phones hadn't yet been invented. I didn't know where I was, but I remembered having passed a house less than a mile back. I trundled myself down the road, thinking to call Husband for help. There was one person at home, a young man. Early twenties, I'd say . . . big and burly and blond and country-messy . . . which is to say, clean but surface-dirty from physical labor.
But get this: his job was driving a tow truck.
That guy got on his overalls, got his truck and his big heavy chain, and he got underneath my car in the mud by the side of the road and he pulled me out most handily. I felt so bad that he was getting so wet and dirty but he said he was used to it. 
I had no cash to give him, and he didn't care. 
I never saw anybody work so hard and smile so much.
I still don't know what road I was on, or what his name was, or how I ever found, on a long, long, empty country road, the one person who would know exactly what to do and how to do it in fifteen minutes.


So, you know... What goes around comes around.

Melinda at my door

To the east, regions already suffering the aftereffects of flooding from Hurricane Irene almost two weeks earlier had those problems aggravated by 2–4 inches (51–100 mm) of new rain on saturated ground and rivers still swollen. TheWallkill River crested at five feet (1.5 m) above flood stage in Ulster County, and the village of Washingtonville in Orange County to the south was isolated as it had been after Irene by the rising waters of Moodna Creek. The Orange County Government Center in Goshen, just reopened a day earlier, was closed indefinitely. Roads were closed, including exits on the New York State Thruway in the Mohawk Valley and, south of the Interstate 84 exit at Newburgh, the entire road. Some businesses that had spent considerable time and money to reopen after Irene were once again flooded.^[52] Damage in Tioga County in the Southern Tier was estimated at around $100 million.^{[53] ~Tropical Storm Lee}

When the second inundation, courtesy of Tropical Storm Lee, was imminent, I left work early so as to get to this side of the creek before I could not. At home, I ensconced myself on the couch with my book. It was chilly. I thought about starting a fire in the stove, but it didn't feel as if it would be worth the effort. It was very quiet. The rain pattered against the windows, stopped, resumed.
I thought I heard a car's tires roll up the driveway, but from where I sat, saw neither Husband's truck, nor any other vehicle. After a few minutes, a tiny tap-tap-tap of a key on the glass of the door. I unwound my legs from among the poodles and got up, craning my neck around the end of the kitchen counter to see the door. A tall white-haired lady peered in, hoping for a human. I opened the door and she stood on the porch in the rain, telling me she'd been a mile from home and had gotten detoured . . . and lost. "I could see the church up on the hill there, you know the one, with the blue cross? And he wouldn't let me go on!"

She wore no coat, and her black sweater was soaked. I got her inside and settled on the couch, provided, with my apologies, a cup of coffee reheated from the morning, and put the afghan on her shoulders. We visited for a little bit, and I heard the short version of her life story. She's from Lubbock, Texas, had a husband who died, then a son who died. She went to school for architecture but then decided she didn't like it because she didn't want to have to work with men all her life, so she got a degree in interior design. She was in cohoots with builders and worked a deal in which she'd decorate the new houses that they built. Anyway, then her son died, and this man Bob somebody (who owned the place near here where she lives now) married her and brought her here and then "no sooner did we get here, but he died."

She was matter-of-fact about the whole thing, except a slight wonderment at all these people dropping dead around her, and I enjoyed listening to the Texas flavor of her speech. In the short time she was here we covered a vast amount of conversational ground. She said the women here have been unfriendly to her. I said, "Well, you know, there's that little bit of antipathy between Northern and Southern women." I mentioned Jeannie to her, who had said once, in one of her Scarlet O'Hara fits of pique, and probably quoting some romance novel heroine, "That's work that only niggers and Northern women would do!" My guest was aghast. "I was raised with ladies, you know. No one I knew would ever have used language like that!"


While we talked I checked the computer to see how to get her home. 
She said, "I'd better write this down." 
"You don't have to," I said. "I'm going to lead you there." 
She did that whole upper-body recoil that it seems to me only Southern ladies do so well, and said, "You're going to lead me there?"
All little back roads and the poor thing had no idea where she was, I couldn't send her off into the rain alone to follow directions that included no landmarks. Some of the roads look like hardly more than somebody's camp driveway. But all told, it looked like only about seven minutes from here to there. 


After a while I said, "Well, you finish your coffee and get your keys, and we'll go out and get you home. And you get into a hot bath and warm up."
"I will. I'll put on one of those things, you know, that you wear over your bra." I expect she meant a camisole. Another Southern lady thing. I would have put on my flannel jammies.
I wasn't real sure where I was going but I knew where we needed to end up, and I knew the general direction. Some of those roads were ones I'd never been on, but lo and behold, after a while, we came out on the other side of the big pond that was the state route and I delivered her to her door. We blew our horns, waved out our windows, she pulled into her driveway and I went on. I wanted to see the flooded road. I saw it . . . all covered in several feet of water, guarded by sheriff vehicles with red and blue flashing lights. Having seen it, I had to back into somebody's driveway and, anticlimactically, pass by my erstwhile guest as she stood at the end of her driveway, in the rain, talking to someone I took to be a neighbor. Getting more soaked as she did so. Excessively gregarious. Maybe that's her "Texas" coming out.
We waved again and I wended my way home.


I am not an Earth Mother type. I don't go around Doing Good Without A Second Thought. I would not be one of those women about whom people would say, "Oh, she's just an angel . . . help anybody." But it never occurred to me not to go out in the rain and take that poor soul home. I think it's just the way it gets to be when everybody's all together in a big uncontrollable mess and we find out we need each other to survive. When I look at it that way, it makes natural disasters look a little bit like blessings.

Stopping by cow pasture on a sunny morning

I have told you before about the obstacle course that my daily commute has become this summer. Considering the great change the state is making in the road, it's gone very quickly, really. 
So it's almost over. 


One day, when I had chosen the squiggly road option in lieu of the long-wait-in-the-dust state route, my heart fell (Here too???) as I rounded a curve and came on a ROAD WORK AHEAD sign, the feet of its spindly-looking metal standard held in place by dead woodchucks. They're sandbags, but they look like the corpses of expired large rodents. I drove a third of a mile and saw no ROAD WORK. Maybe it was a sign left up from the previous day?
But no . . . another curve and there was the young man standing in the road with his handheld pole with the sign at the top that says STOP on one side and SLOW on the other, and he was holding the STOP side in my direction, with a couple of cars already halted and obediently waiting. 
On such a curvy road you can't see the reason for your wait and it seems pointless and neverending, but it was a pretty morning and I didn't want to ruin it by allowing myself to get frustrated. I looked around to notice things I might not have seen had I been traveling at the breathtaking speed of thirty miles per hour. Green fields that stretched up over the hill, a home that used to be a farm . . . I could still see where the cows had been pastured. There is a certain look that cow pastures have: bumpy, and growing not-quite-grass, with the odd mostly-buried rock poking up through the green, impressions of the cows' paths still meandering across and up over, however many years since no cow's hoof has touched them. I watched the man with the sign, too, and thought about what a drag it must be to stand all day, holding a sign, knowing that people are mad at you just because you are there, impeding their progress. He was a stocky young man, and tall, with a chubby face. The guy who holds the sign, I suspect, ranks near the bottom of the road crew hierarchy. Poor slob. He must have people being surly with him all day long.  
While I mused, several more drivers accumulated behind me.


The young man held his big boxy radio close to his head for a moment, and then began to walk toward the first car in line, stopped and said a few words to the driver, nodded his head, moved on the second, said a few words, came to me. As he came close, I said, "How y'doin'?" 
"Good," he said, "How're you?" and gave me some words of explanation that I don't recall. Before he passed on to the vehicle behind me, I said, "Lemme ask you somethin'."
"What's that?"
"How long did it take you to put all that duct tape on your shirt?"

Image source

I was pleased to see that he was nonplussed for a moment. He looked down and chuckled heartily, stepping away to the driver behind me. 

Made me happy to have given the guy an amusing moment in a long day of standing in the sun, holding a sign, looking at people who wished he weren't there.

June's Rules of the Road

I have never been involved in a road rage incident. Not even close.
Over the last several months, however, my drive to work has been increasingly frustrating. 
Now, you say, how can that be, since you live out there in the country* where, if you see fifty cars in a sixteen-mile one-way commute, it's a busy day?
I'll tell you how, after acknowledging that my gritted teeth probably have more to do with the fact that I don't want to go there than with the situations herein described, but be that as it may...


When I was a drunk, I sometimes drove my vehicle while under the influence (she admitted, shamefaced). I knew enough to scrupulously obey every traffic law and good-sense rule of which I was aware. I stopped at stop signs for four seconds ("1, 2, 3, 4"), looked back and forth several times before proceeding. I always signaled my turns well in advance.  I stayed far behind the car preceding me down the road, knowing my reaction time was, perhaps(!), faulty. I never drove over the speed limit. I became religious in my use of the car's cruise control. If the sign said "30MPH" I set the control at 30. On the interstate, where the speed limit is 65, I always always (well, mostly always) drove at 65MPH. By these methods I  managed never to be stopped for any traffic infraction and never got busted for driving while impaired.  
Those habits hang on. In particular the speed limit one. I know, within about twenty feet, give or take, the location on each of my regular routes where the speed limits change from 50 to 55, to 65, to 45, to 30, and finally back to 45, before I arrive at the office. I believe that it is efficient, as well as law-abiding, to travel at the posted speed limit.
The people who dawdle along on a two-lane, no-passing road at 45, where they could travel at 50 . . . bother me. (I'm not talking about farmers on tractors; I like to roll along behind them at a leisurely pace. That means Country to me . . . unless they're just coming back from spreading manure . . . I don't enjoy that quite so much.)
And the people who see me, three hundred feet away, rolling toward them at the prescribed 55MPH . . . why, O why, must they turn left into my lane so that I have the choice of rear-ending them or braking? It breaks my rhythm. Where that happens most often is at the mini-mart near the entrance to the interstate; there isn't enough space for me to "resume speed" on the cruise control before I make my left turn there.  Very inefficient.


Once I was following a woman through the village.  I was pleased that we both were toddling along at 30MPH, nicely spaced, nicely arranged. My right turn appeared; I turned on my directional signal. Her right directional signal went on too. She braked, slowed. And slowed. And slowed. And slowed! I was at a dead stop behind her. We were turning right!  My head dropped forward on my neck, my jaw slackened, my eyes widened, and I said to her from safe within my car, "When making a right turn, first: Come to a Compleeeete Stop." Snidely, I said that. But she couldn't hear me so she wasn't insulted. As I rolled my eyes, I caught the gaze of a man waiting to turn out of the street into which the woman and I were both turning. He had seen me, and since I was enunciating very clearly, he had read my lips and knew my frustration. He shook his head and grinned in sympathy. I burst into giggles. 


The drivers who really make me crazy are the ones who meander along varying their speed at random, now 40, now 45, now 35. I want them to choose a speed and stick to it, so I can set my cruise and stop trying to anticipate their next adjustment. They don't appear to be sightseeing, and they know I'm back there. What's wrong with them?


The state department of transportation is working on a bridge very near the entrance ramp I use. The workers have put up a YIELD sign and concrete barriers and traffic cones by the hundreds to direct everyone to merge into one lane where there used to be two, and where the ramp joins the road at a twenty-degree angle, as illustrated in "d - Tapered acceleration lane -Option 2" below. Is that even twenty degrees? It's tight, anyway.

What is irksome is that on random days, the YIELD sign is replaced by a STOP sign. Now look: it's tough enough to YIELD to somebody when we are all moving. To STOP and then start again requires me not only to use my mirrors, but to spin my head around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. My head doesn't turn that far; I have to close my right eye and peer left-eyed over my left shoulder. Usually there's nobody coming (see * above), which makes the resulting neck sprain even more annoying.


Most bewildering of all are the big trucks. Those five-ton dump trucks that have signs on the back telling me "DO NOT FOLLOW. CONSTRUCTION VEHICLE."
If I turn onto a road behind them, how am I to get to work?