More Hurricanes

Having escaped the ravages of Irene, unlike a number of our neighbors, Harold and I thought ourselves lucky to be able to catch a plane out of Philadelphia and make our way to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a visit with relatives. We touched down in Gulfport, picked up the rental car and drove east along front beach. Out over the water we could see a boiling soup of many-shaped gray clouds. It was kinda pretty.

The soup was busy forming itself into Hurricane Lee, or tropical storm Lee, later tropical depression Lee. Jim Cantore, whom I had last seen on the Battery in New York City before the lights went off in Lambertville, popped up in Biloxi and began to be storm-tossed. We began to be storm-tossed. Several days of wind and rain ensued, which were not unpleasant, at least for us, since the brunt of the storm's fury went off to Louisiana and points north. Foaming surf is quite unusual for Ocean Springs. People like it. It's exciting. For the last few days the weather has been sunny and mild here, ideal vacation weather.

Now that we're getting ready to go home I see from the internet that the wretched Lee has washed out Route 29 both north and south of Lambertville, dumped enough water upstream to flood the Delaware again, and closed most of the bridges. Philadelphia Airport was said to have been under three inches of water. We hope it's okay by the time our plane lands. From time to time we pull up the web page of the USGS streamflow data for Lambertville, hoping the Delaware River hasn't gotten into our house.

Meanwhile I won an award. I'm very pleased about that. I can't tell you what it is until Monday.

Kate Gallison

The Healing Power of Apples

The party was thought of months before and planned for weeks. We already had the old wooden cider press but hadn't used it for years. My Sister-in-law Kathi had discovered the pick-your-own apple orchard not far from our place in the country. So we decided to have an apple-picking, cider-making outing for kids and grown-ups.

The plan was to gather family and friends early on Sunday, drive a beautiful country road to the orchard, help the children pick apples, and go home for a barbecue and home-made pizza from the wood burning oven on the patio to be followed by apple chopping and cider pressing. Invitations were sent, rsvp’s received. We all pictured a beautiful September day and lots of wholesome family fun.

Then, five days before our party, on exactly the kind of gorgeous day we had hoped for the following Sunday, on September 11, 2001, horror struck our city.

For the first couple of days after the tragedy, none of us — mostly all downtown New Yorkers — was thinking about the weekend or anything much at all but the dreadful losses. But then on Friday evening, people started to call and ask, “Are you going to go ahead with the apple picking?” We decided we would. Many of the children were so little they did not really understand what was going on. “Let’s get the children out of the city and into the sunshine,” was the general response. So we did.

On a glorious late summer day, we drove the picturesque dirt road, went to a mountain top in Putnam County, and carried the young ones on our shoulders while they picked bags and bags of beautiful red, green and yellow apples. We carted the fruit of our labors home, while snacking on some mcintoshes and eating homemade cinnamon donuts from the farm stand.

Kids rolled out dough and chose their pizza toppings. People of all ages ate barbecued sausages with their fingers, and feasted on harvest salads and corn on the cob.

Moms, dads, and grandparents chopped apples and turned the screw to squeeze the cider into plastic cups held in little hands at the spout. Children who had drunk only apple juice from the supermarket tasted their first fresh-pressed cider.

Bathed in the sunshine and the smiles and giggles of our children, we affirmed life in the face of the worst blow our country had ever taken.

Every year, on the Sunday after 9/11, we’ve done the same thing again — with some of the same people and some new ones. Being alive and loving each other. Apples are our best revenge!

Annamaria Alfieri

Snuff's Enuff

Recently I was cleaning out some bureau drawers and came across a small wooden box that belonged to my grandmother. In the bottom was a piece of paper folded over. I had never noticed it before and I doubt if it had been noticed for over a hundred years. I unfolded it, and this is what I read:

"How to Partake of a Pinch of Snuff

The true artistic method of ‘taking a pinch’ consists of twelve operations:

1. Take the Snuff-box with your right hand.
2. Pass the Snuff-box to your left hand.
3. Rap the Snuff-box
4. Open the Snuff-box
5. Present th box to the company
6. Receive it after going the round.
7. Gather up the Snuff in the box by striking the side with the middle and forefinger.
8. Take up a pinch with the right hand.
9. Keep the Snuff a moment or two between the fingers before carrying it to the nose.
10. Put Snuff to your nose.
11. Sniff it with precision by both nostrils, and without any grimace.
12. Close the Snuff-box with a flourish.

A. Steinmetz, Tobacco, London, 1857"

So you think you have problems?

Robin Hathaway

Were You There?. . .

Pearl Harbor Day

When I attended the Buie's Creek Academy in the 8th grade, a strict Southern Baptist school in Buie's Creek, North Carolina, one of my friends was Anne Green, niece of the noted Paul Green, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the famous symphonic drama The Lost Colony. Paul had also been a student there many years before.

Religion was a major theme on the curriculum. We seemed to spend a lot of time in church. Though not a Baptist, I loved the hymns. One of my favorites was the Negro spiritual "Were You There?"

As we head toward the 10th anniversary of 9-11 next Sunday, "Were You There" naturally morphs into "You Were There."

No rational adult will ever forget the where of those gigantic moments. THAT MORNING... THAT DAY...

I'd set out into the brilliant sunlit blue sky morning for a meeting, when I saw the TV in the window of the cigar store across the street. I dashed back to my apartment and stayed glued in horror to watch Katie and Matt and the other shocked but professional news anchors, as they described what was happening in real time.

The Twin Towers! OUR towers!

The Pentagon! No, it wasn't real. It was a TV horror movie!

Then the quiet, isolated, lonely field. . .

This could not be happening! Not to Manhattan, the capital of the urban world!

Or the mighty fortress near our capital. The impregnable invincible forever pentagonal pinnacle of defense in Arlington, Virginia, not far from the remains of many of our finest and bravest. . .

The minutes exploded, each frame more horrible than the last.

We huddled in our safe cocoons, but safe no more. Watched the nightmares unfold.

Helpless. Terrified. Numb. Weeping.

The acrid scent of smoke and ash came right through the TV screen. Inch by inch. Cloud by cloud. Then the sight of body by body. . .

Until it stopped.

But it never did stop, did it?

Now, ten years later, we relive one of the most difficult mornings of our national history.
The memory segues into other milestones of our lives.

And the question lingers.

Where Were You... when...?

My first memory of our nation's list of injuries was that Sunday afternoon, December 7. A day of infamy. Then the mellow, steadying voice of the old guy with his cape and cigarette holder, calming the fears of a little girl through a dark wood radio from an invisible wheelchair.

Then the old man's death, down in a tiny hamlet called Warm Springs. And the somber train procession up to his New York grave.

How quickly the years pass...

A phone call that dark November from a fellow college dean in Newport, Rhode Island. I heard her crying. "I can't meet with you today. The President's been shot. Turn on your TV!"

Another round of watching. Waiting. Glued to the TV.

Jackie's bloodied clothes. Everybody there crying.

The vain hope that would soon be dashed.

Then Walter's final solemn pronouncement.

Camelot was dead.

We may never know what drastic changes those earlier events made in our national and personal lives.

But we do know first-hand the cataclysmic upheavals 9-11 enacted in every layer and foundation of our lives now.

They touch us everywhere – on land, in the air, on the sea.

On September 11, 2001, a tsunami reached from the island of Manhattan over every square foot of Mother Earth.

May God be with us and give each of us courage and light and vision and hope, as we step gingerly into the vast unknown. The dark mist of time.

Where Were You???

You Are Here......................................................................

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

Hurricane Irene in Lambertville: How it Went

Here's how the hurricane went in our little town.

As regards our private lives, in the interest of full disclosure I must reveal that Harold, my spouse, grew up on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and knows from hurricanes. It's a rare year when they don't get a tropical storm coming on shore there. So he was an anchor of calm in the wish-wash of uncertainty and fright. I bid goodnight on Saturday to Jim Cantore as he stood on the Battery predicting disaster and laid an untroubled head on my pillow, there to fall asleep lulled by the pleasant sound of wind and rain.

But the public life of Lambertville was going nuts even as we slept.

In the morning the electricity was off. This meant, first of all, no coffee. Secondly, no news. No TV, no internet, nobody in the family had an Iphone or even a battery-operated radio. Church had already been called off, a first in the history of St. Andrews, as far as I'm aware, and there were other inconveniences, other wants, but no coffee and no news were the worst. What of Jim Cantore? Was he standing there still, the water now up to his chin? What of the threatening Delaware River? What of our little town of Lambertville?

Eventually we suited up and went out in the rain and gusty wind, careful not to stand under trees. We looked at the Delaware, high, fast, and full of tree limbs, where the ducks were struggling not to be swept clear down to Trenton. Fly, you ducks! Fly! After we saw the river we walked around town. People were standing together in knots, hanging onto their hats and swapping gossip. We stopped and talked to them. They said, "Did you see the boat?"

The Bridge. Note the urn-shaped posts.

At the bridge where Union Street passes over Swan Creek a startling sight met our eyes: a motorboat on a trailer, upended in the middle of the bridge, on the upstream side of which a ten-foot length of the concrete bridge railing was pushed over and broken in pieces. Police had blocked off the street. The old urn-shaped posts and the newer, oatmeal-box-shaped posts were scattered here and there. Apparently a flash flood had come down the creek, sending debris-filled water into the city parking lot and up the sides of people's houses. High water marks could be seen.

No journalists were anywhere in evidence. As a result, exactly what happened there may never be known. As we continued to wander around in the rain talking to people we heard many accounts of the event, most involving greater or lesser degrees of incompetence on the part of the water company and various city officials. It was generally agreed that a four-foot wall of water had come down Swan Creek from the city reservoir, looming above us, confined by an earthen dam. Either water was released from the reservoir to ease pressure on the dam, thereby saving the city from the much worse fate of a burst dam, or water somehow spontaneously erupted from the reservoir as a result of the heavy rain, or incompetent water company minions lost control of a controlled release. People in the streets screamed and ran. "What were they doing in the streets at one-thirty in the morning in the middle of a hurricane?" "Screaming and running," was the reply. Many people had to be evacuated from their homes.

The water swept the boat and its trailer out of a yard that backed on the creek and hurled it into the bridge railing, which broke.

And at that point, Jersey Central Power and Light cut off the power and the city of Lambertville went dark, to remain so for three or four days, depending on what part of town you were in. The water went down an hour later, but there were still problems with the power lines.

When daylight came a tourist with New York plates was seen collecting one of the urn-shaped pieces of the bridge railing and putting it in his car. If ever you wonder why the locals here are sometimes hostile to tourists, this is the sort of behavior that brings it on.

I would love to see this story covered in a newspaper, just like they used to do in the old days. I would love to hear the thump of a newspaper on our porch, open it up, smelling the fresh printer's ink, and read a cogent account of the Swan Creek flood. But it isn't going to happen. In a few months we may read that some of the irate residents are suing the city, or the water company; houses got water in them that never had water before. It must be somebody's fault.

As for us, we remain dry, and hope you are the same.

Kate Gallison