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emergency commotion
Wednesday, August 7 2019
I had Ramona with me at work today, and, as usual I took her for three walks over the course of the workday. On the second one, I took her down to the grassy lowlands into which I'd seen that mother deer flee yesterday. Today, I saw a buck deer down there watching us warily from some distance away. Normally I execute a loop across a massive field overgrown with broadleaf plants and poison ivy, but as I headed in that direction, I saw the deer happily browsing directly in front of me. He might not've even known I was coming, as indicated by his wagging tail (something deer and goats do when contented). So I turned around and exited to a nearby street. A woodchuck was startled by our random appearance and made a break for a municipal shed, but Ramona never saw her. Some minutes later, I had to stop Ramona from eating some fecal matter.
On the drive home this afternoon, I passed through a powerful thunderstorm that stretched from the intersection of Middle Road and 9G to the middle of the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. Just west of the storm, the rain ended suddenly, though the wet roadway indicated the storm had been there as well. The storm I'd passed through had evidently been part of a long line of such storms, which I could see blasting southwestern Kingston repeatedly with lightning bolts.
As I drove south down Hurley Mountain Road, I could see the flashing lights of an ambulance coming up rapidly behind me, so I accelerated so I could get to Dug Hill Road before it passed me. What I got to first, though, was some road workers cutting up a chestnut oak that the storm had blew down into the road. At the intersection with Dug Hill Road was a big scary commotion of emergency vehicles. It included a fire engine, a state trooper, another ambulance, and possibly others. They were evidently responding to what looked like a single-car accident. I saw a car with a smashed windshield from which an addled-looking woman had just emerged. It wasn't clear what had happened, but I suspected it had involved that fallen tree nearby on Hurley Mountain Road.
A couple hundred feet further up Dug Hill Road, I saw a dead white ash had cracked off at its stump and was now suspended in electrical wires. The tree had severed the topmost wires, which lay menacingly on the ground. I would've stayed well away from those had I been on foot, but I was in a car, so I gunned the engine to dash under the hanging white ash and then over the fallen wires back homeward.
The power was out in the house, but it was restored relatively quickly, by 6:30pm
In other news, today I learned that David Berman of the Silver Jews had died at the age of 52. Berman had actually been a reader of my various web sites during the early web and reached out to me before I knew who he was. While I was still living in Charlottesville, he sent me a vinyl record that I never even asked for. I got into the Silver Jews later, when I was living in California, around the time I got into Songs:Ohia (Jason Molina, whom I also knew, is also dead). I particularly like the song "New Orleans," though he's made lots of great music, all with his characteristic dry irony. Interestingly, Berman's father (from whom is son was estranged) was a lobbyist for a devil's picnic of terrible industries (such as guns and tobacco).
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