Well, Well, Wells!

Where I grew up, nearly every summer our well ran dry. My father had an arrangement with our neighbor Charlie to lay a hose down through the woods from his spring to our back yard. My brother, sisters, and I would fill buckets of water from the hose and carry them into the house. On Saturday night, my older sister and I shared the tub, dribbling each other in about two-inches of this hard-won water.  It wasn't a traumatic childhood experience, but it was lousy.

Occasionally, my father, who was always reluctant to part with money when it wasn't a "pretty good deal", would consider digging a new well.  During one of these periods, my mother, who was known to have witchy qualities, decided to try her hand at dousing. She broke off a branch from one of our old fruit trees, and, fists face up, clenching each forked end and with the end of the branch extended straight out, she began pacing the property. We followed impressed and optimistic every time the point of the branch nose-dove into the earth.  A sign of water! (I tried dousing a few years later and experienced this same earthward movement against definite resistance.  I have no idea if the end of the branch was pointing toward water or not, but the magnetic pull was mysterious and unsettling.)  At the time my mother doused, however, in spite of her obvious (to us) gift, my Dad wouldn't risk what could have been a lot of money based on a magic stick and we never had a new well. After my parents sold our house and moved down to Westchester, the new owners hired a driller who went down 6 feet and punched into an aquifer that produced enough water to supply daily baths through all later drought-stricken summers. Ah well.

On my first day of college, I took eight baths, after which tub world became a necessity – a place of meditation, therapy, and warmth. Now, my bath life has come full circle. The bath that was a luxury when I was kid is a luxury once again. Our barn apartment has no tub, so since we moved upstate full time, my only water experience for the last two years comes from our half-assed shower, which spits out mineral-laden water that mysteriously and unadjustably swings sadistically between scalding and freezing.  Years ago on the Upper West Side, deep in pain from my brother's death and the end of my marriage, I sank within the hot healing water of our old cracked tub and experienced the bottom of grief. I miss my baths. I hate my shower.

In our future fantasy house on the site next door, we will have two tubs.  And, in anticipation, we now have a well on the site.  In fact, not just a well for water, but three more for the geothermal delivery of heat. To do this work, we hired Keyser Drilling Company, which, like many small businesses around here, is a multigenerational one. (Dan Keyser Junior, who dug our wells with one other young man, is the great grandson of the man who started the business in 1946.) This winter has been so mud-ridden that Dan and his colleague couldn't start working until mid January, when the ground surface finally froze.  On the day they were able to start, Michael and I walked down to watch. Two red trucks were lodged a few feet from our house site: one carried the casings -- long tubes stacked along the side like fittings for a pipe organ.  The other sported a shaft extending from the back of its bed about thirty feet into air like the main mast on the prow of a ship. Hydraulic tubes and fittings dangled from it, the riggings that would pound the drills and casings into the earth.

They dug the water well first, going down 360 feet and piercing an aquifer with an artesian spring that produced enough water to propel it up the shaft without a pump. Multi-bath time! Over the next three days they dug three geothermal wells, with one producing a gusher twenty feet into the air. Water is everywhere here (raising the specter of a floating basement!).  

Right now each of the geothermal wells, which go down about 300 feet each, has two ends of a tube sticking up like rabbit ears out of their bores.  Each pair of tubes is joined at the bottom of its well to form a loop.  In a week or so Dan Junior and his colleague will come back and push grout up from the bottom of the wells around the tubing to anchor them and seal off the water.

The ecological match-up between our solar trackers and a geothermal system is gratifying. The earth sources the heat for the system, and the sun feeds the solar panels to produce electricity required by the heat pump, the heart of this process.  But how does a geothermal system work, one might ask (although one rarely does).  And can one answer this question without the asker dying of boredom?  And since I am both the asker and, with this blog, the answerer, and since I took only one physics course, which was designed for poets, I risked boredom death to whack through the Google jungle of faux knowledge for geothermal clarification.  Here goes.

The primum mobile of the system is the heat pump.  On its behalf, an ordinary water pump sends a mix of water and glycol (basically anti-freeze) through the loops down into the wells and back to the heat pump.  After about 10 feet in depth, the earth in our region maintains a constant temperature of 47 degrees, so as this fluid mix passes through the tubes it absorbs heat.  Now, when I was idly wondering how this process could actually heat a house to 70 degrees in winter, I was a victim of a popular misconception: that the fluid was heated to the temperature of the earth as it voyaged through the loops and when it reached the house, the heat pump boosted that 47ish temperature up 23 degrees.  Wrong.  As Michael reminded me, "Temperature isn’t heat.  Heat is energy." 

The geothermal system, I discovered, is a slave to the second law of thermodynamics, which I had to look up.  It dictates that when hot and cold bodies meet up heat energy will flow from the warmer to the colder body until it reaches equilibrium. So, in winter when the cold fluid is passing through the warmer earth, an exchange of energy occurs and the fluid warms up. (Heat doesn't move backwards!) As the fluid moves up into the heat pump, the earth-warmed tube passes through another one that contains the refrigerant R-410a – a tube combo called a coaxial coil. Once more, the thermal law #2 police go into action. Liquid R-410a has a very low boiling point and vaporizes into a gas as it absorbs heat even at the tepid earth temperature during this legal exchange of warm to cold.  The gas then passes through a compressor, which squeezes the gas back to a liquid. Heat is released during this process and produces the hot water that will someday pass through coils under our floor, where TL#2 will keep my feet warm.  Ta Da!!! 

And, although still long months away, let us not forget the hot water in the soaking tub poised to enact the second law, exchanging grief and irritation for peace of mind.

(A note: Unlike the refrigerant Freon, R-410a does not deplete the ozone layer. It does, however, have 1725 times the effect on global warming than carbon dioxide.  One trusts that reducing dependence on polluting sources of energy offsets this impact) 

One Perfect Day

7:00 AM –Michael has to go into the city for a meeting and we head to the train. There's some time so we stop at Relish, a small breakfast and lunch spot across from the station, where Dana, its excellent short-order chef owner, grills up an Amtrak – a fried egg sandwich on toasted wheat berry bread, gooey yellow with cheddar and yolk and anchored by

chewy sausage. I listen to Dana divide up the tasks with her assistant, Heather, an appealing young woman, cheerfully tatted, writing out ingredients on the cooler door. We finish. Michael walks across the street to catch the train, and I head for the Army.

7:30. I'm unaccustomedly early, Sue, the Salvation Army's cook, isn't in yet. Jill, the director, is in her office, and Ria, the Assistant Director, is right outside it sitting at one of the lunch tables. They are counting kettle money, the spoils from the Christmas volunteer bell ringers. Coins are strewn across the surface, so I sit down and start stuffing pennies into paper cylinders while they make fun of me after noticing I'm doing it upside down. Charlie is moving large boxes back and forth into the cooler and the pantry. He is 75 years old, about five-five, and comes in every morning between two and five to organize the storage areas and set things up for the day. After about 15 minutes, Sue arrives and Jill presents us with bags of our presents, pendants of silver chains hung with polished stones. Charlie appears from the kitchen with cards and small wrapped packages. I open mine to find commemorative Canadian coins from 1976, Queen Elizabeth's youthful profile gleaming on their surfaces. It is hard to describe how wonderful Charlie is without using saccharine words, like angelic, so I continue.

8:00 – 9:30, In the kitchen, before we start preparing lunch, Sue and I share guilt over the lazy inadequacy of our own gifts, which we'll be bringing in tomorrow --- wine for Ria and Jill and sugared treats for Charlie. A hodge podge of ribs have defrosted and are spread out on the counter. A bag of potatoes and carrots lean against it. The cooler and pantry are stuffed to the door with donations. We can't get in to see if there is anything more interesting to cook, so we'll make do with what's already out. Robin comes in and unwinds her scarf. She's a young charming Fulbright scholar, home for the holiday month from Syria, where's she working off a research grant on ways to develop educational approaches for improving human rights. She asks what she can do. I put her to work cutting up potatoes for future mashing, while I scrape and cut up carrots.

9:30 to 10:00. Doreen comes in, as she does every Tuesday, with a sack of dish towels and aprons that she launders and returns each week. Being 84 with a mild kyphosis also does not stop her from hauling empty cauldrons into the sink, scraping off caked lunch remnants, and scrubbing the pots back into purity. Doreen also brings gifts, bright wooly things made by local pals. I remove the wrapping from mine and discover a Christmas dish towel printed with holly and berries dangling through a buttoned up red crocheted band. It's actually something I need.

11:00 – 11:30. The carrots, swimming in butter and cider, are simmering. My plan is to reduce the liquid and finish them off with a wash of balsamic vinegar. The ribs are in the oven and the potatoes are cubed and starting to boil up. I check my phone and read an email sent by an editor from my former company. She wants to talk to me about some captions I've been writing as part of a big contract with them. "Shit," I announce to the kitchen, "I have to go home and check out something from work." I grumpily pull on my coat, wish everyone a merry Christmas, and head resentfully to my car. I open the door, shove my O. Henry gifts onto the passenger seat, then stop. "Fuck it." I close the door and go back into the kitchen. "It can wait," I tell Sue and Robin.

11:30 – 1:00. The lunch service starts. About 10 diners have already lined up outside the door, and more are ambling up toward the Center. In the kitchen, Sue, Robin, and I serve the ribs and potatoes onto stiff plastic plates, while singing and dancing to "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" crackling from a beat-up radio someone had donated. Toward the end of service, Janie, one of the regulars, leans through the door that leads from the lunch room into the kitchen. When she isn't high and mean on something cheap and synthetic, Janie is usually severely cranky about the food we cook. She growls at us: "Good carrots. Can I have seconds?" That's a good morning.

1:20 – 3.:00 I pick up Michael at the train station and we head home. It's raining, part of the freaky globally warmed up December. He says he wants to check out the solar trackers, which should be installed today on the house site. I return to the barn and work on my captions. After about an hour, I hear him calling me from the kitchen. "They're about to move!" I throw on my boots and we slop through mud down to the site, where two giant solar trackers now stand 17 feet tall and about 50 feet apart, each set of panels pitched table flat on a stolid leg. Two young men in yellow hoodies are making final adjustments to the wiring. One flicks a switch and moves a ladder away from the northern tracker. We stand in the drizzle waiting. Everyone is silent, and suddenly it produces a birthing squeak and slowly begins to swivel, a bird just out of the egg, checking its environment, straining for food. The sky is gray and whatever sun exists to feed those ebony wings is thin with winter and blocked by shades of cloud. Still, the giant baby finds it and tips down to greet whatever milky light can sustain it. Its southern partner is late. We wait nervously, fearful that we have a runt of the litter. Then, it too squawks into life, turns and tips, rain water sliding off its surface. Minus some adjustments, they are now both in place, our new twins, monstrous and weirdly fragile. I love them.

3:00-6:00. We drive back into town. Michael has to retrieve his credit card from Staples, where he left it yesterday copying off our house factory contract. After that we need to stop at Lotus Energy, the providers of our solar stalkers, to pay them for our new babies. We also stop off for wine and unworthy presents for Jill, Ria, and Sue. Once home, we get a message from Michael's daughter, who injured her middle finger and is just back from urgent care. She proudly texts us a picture of it, splinted up and bleeping the world.

6:00 -8:00. Dave, our landlord/neighbor/friend comes over for a glass of wine, talks about the computer he bought for his sister Sue, but has no interest in watching my three-minute video showing Michael, me, and the tracker workers stare up at the unmoving solar panels for two and half of those minutes.

8:00 -10:00. We have dinner at the bar at DABA, mine a juicy chicken breast resting on parsnip puree. Amy the bartender is four months pregnant and she and I trade food craving and repulsion stories. Daniel, the chef owner, is sitting across the bar with two of his cross-fit pals. I overhear him mention the weekly pod cast he is hoping to record some day, for which his modest goal is to influence a billion minds. We talk back and forth across the bar about his latest idea, to become a food super hero showing the world how to produce great healthy food for everyone. We finish eating, wish everyone at DABA a merry Christmas, and head home.

10:15. Michael wants to check out the trackers in the dark, so he slowly propels our car up the new driveway and we stare out in the darkness, where the twins are now profiled flat and asleep. As we drive back, I can see our barn apartment windows, amber lit and warm through the skeletal trees. "Next year, someone else will be living there." And after this best of all days, I am suddenly sad. We pull into the garage. "I get so attached to a place." Michael turns off the engine. "Me too."

We Got Out Just in Time

Shrouded, trapped by Local Law 11, patches forced upon its iron cheeks, pale crackling bricks, the tarry roof, our building mourns in black (for us?).

Armani strutted through the bottom floor, no cash cow anymore, now gone, a warm step for the ragged man, beer swollen, sleeping on a cardboard slab.

We got out nicking time, cash stuffed, still mewling, lumbering our stuff up north to trees, the din of birds. 

Still,

Outside the city racket, sadness rises like the fog.

Each soul in anti-alias, known to neighbors, carved in gossip,

claustrophobic with its ghosts.

Why I ran before panicked and enthralled,

Down and pocketed in New York City's wide and generous skirt
And lived a life.

A Merry Solstice Poem

It was the day after solstice and down at the site

Were our two giant trackers just waiting for light.

The day had been rainy, which was sort of alarming,

Another clear message of bad global warming.

Although they were wired to look for the sun,

We were nervous that now, now that all work was done

That gloom would prevent any movement of solars.

And we would be stuck with two giant black molars.

Then right there in front of me what should appear

But the shimmering sight of  slow moving gear. 

The panel swung round and then tipped toward the ground,

Shedding all the day's rain with a watery sound.   

The ebony plates swiveled south in their space

Until breaks in the clouds had them anchored in place.

And we heard them exclaim as we walked out of sight.

"Happy solstice to all and hurray for the Light."

Follow the Gray Gravel Road

A couple of weeks ago, Paul, our excellent destroyer of earth, laid down the gravel for the driveway, a thick gravy of limestone shards leading to the empty patch that imagines our house.  He drove the big red truck up the drive, its hydraulic pistons urging the bed upward at the same time until its back end opened up and – with apologies for the scatological image -- out flowed the stone river as the truck moved slowly on toward the house site.  His son came along later on a tractor with a huge roller that tamped it all down.  When the drive was finished, it was so pristine that Michael didn't want to walk on it with his muddy boots, but off we trudged corrupting its surface, up the hill, around the bend, and down again where our staked out Oz beckons.  

The gravel for our driveway was dug and chopped up right here in Greenport by A. Colarusso & Sons, a local company founded by great-great grandfather Antonio in 1935. It is now into its fourth generation of digging rocks and making streets and highways. The quarries, from which its gravel is mined, are part of the Becraft geologic formation, presumably one of the world's richest sources of limestone, and, in this case, limestone with friction qualities that make it an excellent source for our gravel driveway.

The Colarussos had been leasing much of the land feeding their mines from Holcim, a giant Swiss-owned supplier of mineral and cement. A few months ago, they were able to buy 1,800 acres, which included the quarries, from this Monster Lessor for $8.75 million, a cheap price considering local land values these days. Holcim recently merged with Lafarge, a French cement monster, to form the world's largest cement and construction materials company. Holcim avoided an anti-trust action by agreeing to shed some its assets, possibly why it rid itself of its Greenport property.

But there's also a deeper story.  Holcim, formerly Holnam, has an offspring, the unfortunate St. Lawrence Cement Company, that was beaten back a few years ago by local environmentalists from building a Godzilla cement plant on the land Colarusso has now bought.  Among other egregious intrusions, the plant would have constructed a 400-foot smokestack, spreading a plume of emissions six miles into the air over Hudson and Greenport, right down the road from our up and coming house.

 

 

So Colarusso's ownership now includes the quarries and property on Greenport's rural southern end near where we live. Under the contract, Colarusso can't compete by making cement, and one hopes that Holcim has pulled back most of its forces from the neighborhood to clobber local citizens in other towns. So long, adieu, auf wiedersehen, bye bye.  (Of continuing concern is LeFarge, Holcim's new twin brother, whose cement plant right across the river is still using fly-ash in its process, a concoction that in 2009 made it New York's second-largest emitter of airborne mercury.)

Not only are most of the people up here connected to every other person here through churches, kindergarten classes, marriage, or blood, but the living things that grow in the earth and the non-living things taken from it are also connected.  We have local farms that feed us and we also have local mines that make our roads. So, Colarusso is here digging up my town's back yard, but they are old neighbors. I am leaning on the side of hope that, compared to Holcim, the family is likely to be better stewards of the earth that they have lived and died on for more than a century than alien invaders from Switzerland and France.  Nevertheless, no one is perfect. 

Colarusso's blasting has shaken Greenport houses near its quarries for years. And it also has a right-of-way on the "Haul Road", which passes through a series of wetlands still owned by Holcim, down to the City of Hudson's southern riverfront.  Colarusso is seeking to build a concrete bulkhead stretching 170 feet along the Hudson shore. The DEC doesn't think the project threatens anything historical or environmental, but local groups have risen up to fight its incursion. According to the South Bay Task Force, an ever-vigilant opponent of any threats to the Hudson riverfront, the structure Colarusso wants to build will be used for moorings, "where barges can be stacked and at the ready for an intensification of aggregate shipping". One hopes that there won't be too many barges or that Colarusso won't build a giant gravel-carrying conveyor belt from their new property down to the river, which St. Lawrence had wanted to do. 

 Although, in my dark heart I love watching a barge sloth-like making its way south, and I believe a giant conveyor belt elevated across southern Greenport and bringing stone down to the river would be sort of cool. Full disclosure, I'm a fan of the industrial landscape -- in moderation.  I would oppose a giant smokestack planted in front of Olana, Frederick Church's spectacular front yard, but the blunt leanness of a well-constructed small factory along the Hudson River parsing wide views of mountains and swatches of green foliage is America at its painterly best.  Every time we take our garbage and recycling to the town dump, we use a back road and pass Colarusso's old quarries, now mythic lakes deep as antiquity, gleaming and wreathed by pines along their craggy edges and tempting reckless young men to jump to their deaths.  The Colarusso gravel production site sits about a half mile down the road toward the dump from the last visible quarry.  It's a surprisingly compact operation for generating that much gravel.  There, occasionally, I see dump trucks or bulldozers ride up faces of dense mountains of stone, precariously balanced at the top.  Like a game of chutes and ladders, various conveyors, tracks, and tunnels carry the stone from these small mountains to a massive hopper, which loads it on the dump trucks underneath, one of which belongs to Paul.  

I can't ignore the processes that brutalize the land and poison the air above it, but we have to work with, while trying to reduce, the tensions created by their destruction and the civilization they have built. And I just can't help but view the functional movement of that gray stone and its creation, my driveway, as beautiful.

I'm in New York and Dissociating Again

What happened to my city

Now that it's white from end to end 

So I don't mind leaving 

And anyway I'm old and it's expected that it grates with young voices shrill as giant angry mice spoiled on cheese?

Of course I love the hills trees leaves rabbits all that stuff that keeps me calm

But leaving this nuthouse knowing that any year now 

Guns are back 

And kids with black thoughts 

And the plastic bag people 

And cheap food and music

In spite of that eternal loop

That when it comes I won't be

Melding my own fears, thrills, eager love, young young young anticipation 

I'll be gone

Makes me weep.

Tangled Dark Web of Local Politics

So I'm fooling around with local politics, which could not be crazier. Everyone has an uncle, a cousin, an ex-wife, or a friend from kindergarten in the other party. In fact, people around here – including the politicians themselves – casually change parties as if they were square dance partners. So even when a politician gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, not only does nothing get done about it, but no one really wants to do anything. "I couldn't turn him/her in. That's my uncle/third-grade teacher/wife." 

For instance, there's a guy running for Greenport Highway Superintendent on the Republican line, John Onufrychuk. He's up against Mark Gaylord, our man, who is the incumbent and has been managing the roads around here for 10 years. (I will throw myself in front of a snowplow if Mark loses. His workers were amazing last winter. I don't think a couple hours went by during storms, even during the worst blizzards, when we couldn't drive easily the four miles into town, starting down the back road where we live.) 

Anyway, back to Onufrychuk, who seems to be a very likeable guy. Plus he's a fireman! (Everyone loves firemen, but up here most are volunteers and approach sainthood.) Two years ago, Onufrychuk retired from his full-time job as a maintenance supervisor for a local prison. (Upstate, by the way, is riddled with correctional institutes. We have three of these major job producers in the neighborhood.)

According to a 2014 Inspector General report that I found on the web, during Onufrychuk's tenure at his particular institute, he periodically loaded up scrap metal from the prison and sold it to a local salvage company across the river, plopping the proceeds into his or his wife's bank account. The report does a good job of detailing the investigation and these transactions.  It read, "The Inspector General determined that Onufrychuk sold or directed subordinate employees to sell scrap metal belonging to Brookwood to a private company on 36 occasions from 2009 to 2011." Check the whole thing here. It makes for lively reading.

The Inspector General report was then handed over to the Republican district attorney Paul Czajka for his attention and, one would hope, action, but the DA just, oh, I don't know, scrapped it.  Turns out these gentlemen were fellow Republicans and have a number of friends in common.  In fact,  Czajka is running for DA again this year – against the Democrat Ken Golden, an entirely decent good guy. Turns out Czajka’s campaign filings reveal that he accepted a campaign contribution on June 2, 2015 from Catherine Onufrychuk, the scrap merchant's wife. 

I went to a debate between the two DA candidates last week, where Czajka stormed against domestic abusers, calling them "evil". A worthy stand, I guess, if you don't believe in rehabilitation. However, his record on these evildoers may not be all that consistent. I found an old New York Post article with the headline "Judge Dread" written at the time Czajka was a judge around here. The story covered a number of cases of abuse in which Czajka, according to the reporter, "sided with bad parents to favor lawyers he once worked with…" Also worth reading. 

And, to make local politics even more interesting,  Czajka has a new enemy – Serpico, the former New York cop and whistleblower (played by Al Pacino in the eponymous movie).  He moved upstate years ago and has now emerged from a secluded cabin to go after Czajka, because the DA failed to aggressively pursue Serpico's case against a neighbor who bulldozed part of his property and destroyed a bunch of his trees. The neighbor was fined only $350. Serpico was quoted the other day in our local newspaper that he "found an old boy's network" that blocked him from getting the correct compensation.  "I find I’m back 50 years, fighting ingrained corruption, pettiness and nepotism.”  

The other day we went to a local fundraiser to watch the movie and hear Serpico speak. The movie holds up after all these years.  So does Serpico.  (We were there for three and a half hours -- two for the movie, the rest listening to the old cop.)  The lesson, as always, bad stuff is always there and things do not always go well for the brave, good people who fight them. Otherwise, we'd all be brave and good. 

By the way, my husband Michael and I met Serpico a few months ago in town. Two old guys (our age) were hanging around one of the local restaurants when we were just getting out of our car.  Michael has long white hair and a beard and is often mistaken as either an aging rock star or Gandalf.  One of the guys came over and asked if Michael was Willie Nelson.  After we assured him that he wasn't, the man introduced himself as Frank Serpico. 

It just keeps getting better up here.