|
|
|
cement mine east of Kingston
Thursday, May 6 2021
My boss Alex asked today if Gretchen and I wanted to go walk dogs in a quarry near his new place on the Rondout, with the stipulation that only Neville be in attendance. That seemed reasonable, since, as Alex put it, "Ramona would eat Winnie." (Winnie being Alex's dog.) Winnie is a sweet dog, but she's exactly the kind of dog that Ramona is inclined to attack: she's a female with terrible canine social skills. I said that that might be difficult, since Gretchen doesn't like taking just Neville to things (except the bookstore back when he used to work there). But then it turned out that Gretchen had to do a poetry reading via Zoom for something in Arkansas, so only I could go. And that meant I could maybe sneak out with Neville and Ramona would still have Gretchen.
Unfortunately, though, Ramona was well aware that I was leaving as I did, and she came out to the car and actually saw Neville get climb in while I prevented her from doing the same. But then Gretchen made it all better by giving Ramona old Chinese food from the refrigerator.
I went a little out of my way and did some shopping at Home Depot on my way to the Rondout, where I bought some drawer hardware and a gallon of what I thought was semi-gloss white (but was actually just unpigmented base).
I let Neville out of the car near Alex's stoop. As had been happening before, the neighbors were out on their stoop, this time with no children but a tiny little dog that Neville somehow missed. Winnie met Neville at the door and initially made a threatening lunge, but Neville ignored it while remaining interested in meeting a new canine friend.
Alex and I convoyed to the end of a no-named street in a skeltal industial park (41.933191N, 73.977908W) between Kingston and the Hudson in that part of the map I've rarely visited. When I say the end of the street, I mean it was paved and had a yellow stripe down the middle until it suddenly stopped at the edge of the forest. The forest here looked to be mesic and nearly old growth, though many of the bigger trees looked to have grown up in the open (they had squat trunks with lots of thick branches). We climbed through the forest into the remains of an old surface cement mine (the rock here was all limestone), eventually reaching the precipice of a cliff. The undergrowth here was rich in bush honeysuckle and columbine, the latter a certain indicator of alkaline soil (or so my father always used to say). The dogs were so distracted by the many things to observe and investigate that they barely paid any attention to each other, though by now Winnie wasn't the least bit hostile.
After walking through a swath of old mine that Alex thought would be a good setting for a western (41.940577N, 73.971276W), we came to the precipice of another cliff (41.943609N, 73.970985W), this one above a large water-filled depression resulting from the removal of many thousands of tons of limestone (the algal bloom visible in the Google Maps' satellite view is still active and in the very same location). Alex had asked me if I would worry about Neville being near the edge of cliff, and I'd told him that dogs aren't inherently suicidal, and that I'd seen Neville successfully negotiate cliff precipices in the past. But the cliffs in these abandoned mines are very high and sometimes even more than vertical (that is, to stand at the edge means there is air under the rocks beneath your feet), and Neville did indeed make me nervous when he'd go snorting right up to the edge of oblivion.
There had been no-trespassing signs, so I asked Alex who actually owned all this prime real estate we were walking on. He seemed to think it belonged to Scenic Hudson and that they were planning a park for this location. I suspect the no trespassing signs were more about avoiding liability than anything else. For a place this beautiful, there were surprisingly few indications of humans having been there. There was some graffiti at one of the cliff precipices, but there was almost no broken glass. I suspect it's all a little too hard to reach for the modern teenager looking for a place to make out and drink beer.
Given all the work we've been doing together, Alex and I only discussed work matters in passing. He seemed happier about the project than he had been in the immediate aftermath of firing the Ukranian outsourcing team.
We made a loop, returning to where we'd parked mostly via a linear powerline clearing that ran along the back of a suburban neighborhood. The only way to keep a teenager living in one of those houses from making out in those woods would be to cultivate pathological neuroses about poison ivy, rattlesnakes, and lyme disease.
On the drive home, I snacked on Fritos-brand 70s-style corn chips, offering one out of every several to Neville, who was beside me in the passenger seat.
This evening I took a bath while Gretchen continued her Zoom-based Arkansas poetry reading.
The hot water softened the dry scaly skin that had come to cover my kneecaps in recent weeks, which I was finally able to scratch away. I've found that the bathtub is a great place to focus the mind, and today it helped me grasp a few important concepts about RxJs, a technology heavily used by the frontend of the app the Ukranians built.
Later I joined a Zoom call for about a half hour with Gretchen's family, sitting on the floor behind Gretchen instead of doing it from the laboratory.
Neville and Winnie at the base of a large plug of rock remaining after extensive mining.
Click to enlarge.
Winnie above the artificial pool.
Alex, Winnie, and Neville at the edge of a very ominous cliff, with the Hudson River in the background.
Click to enlarge.
Neville in the linear powerline clearing with the suburban neighborhood and the Catskills visible behind him.
Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210506 feedback
previous | next |
