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McMansions of Bush Road
Sunday, September 25 2005
At noon Gretchen and I had a brunch date with our newest friends, Penny and David, who live near the intersection of Tongore and 213 on a road unfortunately having the same name as our current president. Until recently Bush Road had been largely forested and sparsely settled, but recently there's been something of a building boom and now there are a number of massive boxy McMansions (complete with decorative octagonal windows), each set in the center of a several-acre clearcut. For some reason these clearcuts extend right up to the road, indicating there is little demand for the privacy afforded by even a thin screen of trees.
We'd never been to Penny and David's house before and were surprised to discover that it's a boxy modern structure with a tonguelike ramp leading to its front door, like a smaller wooden version of Mudd Library at Oberlin College. I'm not a big fan of brunch and here's why: the featured food would be breakfast burritos, and you know what that means. Lucky for me, it was easy to opt out of the nasty ingredient that had passed from birds' cloacas. As for Gretchen, she had her own problems; a glop of guacamole found its way onto every plate as a matter of course, yet she hates avocado about 60% as much as I hate eggs.
Taking the edge off our own inevitable food phobias, though, was the constant supply of breakfast booze in the form of watermelon margaritas and mojitos.
We'd brought our dogs and Sally quickly took a keen interest in the cat, Mr. Fluffy, who was upstairs. The two could be seen lying together on the bed for much of the time we were there. Nothing fascinates Sally more than a strange new cat.
We went for a walk through the forested property around the house, eventually finding our way down to the aqueduct that carries water from the Ashokan Reservoir to New York City. You'd think it would be a well-policed strip of real estate, and it is, in a manner of speaking. On the ground it looks like an artificial ridge running across the native topography without much regard to contour. It's covered with closely-cropped grass and edged on either side by exquisitely-built bluestone walls. Despite the fussy groundskeeping, Penny said she'd never seen or heard anyone down here actually doing any work, and that includes the cutting up of trees that had fallen across the aqueduct. I wondered what happened in the places where the ridge of the aqueduct barricaded the flow of creeklets and gullies, so I climbed down the slope in one place to see. I found a concrete culvert four feet in diameter, prominently labeled with the year "1911." As an indication of the speed with which such things grow, stalactites three inches in length (made of calcium carbonate presumably leached from the concrete) hung from its ceiling.
This evening Gretchen and I watched Dirty Pretty Things, a film from the seedy restless world of London's diverse illegal immigrant community. Our protagonist is Okwe, a doctor from Nigeria who finds himself working as a taxi driver by day and as a hotel desk clerk by night, chewing herbs to stay awake and sleeping on the couch of a beautiful Turkish woman. The hotel's manager is an unscrupulous cartoon-evil character with a horrifying side business and a penchant for the bottle. All the characters' talents and frailties come together and play a role in a perfect scene of cosmic justice. It was great fun.
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