Talking About Irene

Now I know how much I love my husband.  We spent ten hours in the car yesterday on what should have been a four hour ride.   And after dropping me off in New York at our apartment, he drove another nearly six hours to Washington DC for work this week. 

Yikes! 

And we can only be grateful, since our story is not nearly as bad as the guy who left when we did from the Ausable Club in upstate New York, also headed for New York City, and spent two additional hours dealing with a flat tire.

And the stories of people we left in upstate New York who are dealing today and the rest of the week and perhaps much longer with the cleanup left in Irene's wake are saddening, some heartbreaking.

Actually, I was staying at our beloved Ausable Club on my own.  It's a kind of magical camp for grown-ups that was built over a century ago in the time of the railroad barons.  It was one of many Adirondack "camps" established during the railroad heydays.  The ritual then was that the wives and children of prosperous New Yorkers, Bostonians and Philadelphians would come to the Ausable Club for the summer and be joined on weekends by their husbands who would commute on the trains serving that part of the state back then.

Ausable Club is a remarkable place with golf and unparalleled hiking of the 46 Adirondack peaks, and trout fishing and lawn bowling and much more.  Here's what the club house looks like, an example of summertime architecture from another era. 

My husband was about an hour away at another camp near Lake George, with a group of his Choate prep school classmates planning their 2012 class reunion.  So when the Irene-based rain and floods came to the Ausable Club, I was on my own.  And since I had the car I had to get out of there to pick up John and return to New York and DC.  So I panicked when Sunday night the one road out of the Ausable Club looked like this.  No longer a road, it was a rushing stream.

So I resigned myself to staying Sunday night and figuring things would be OK in the morning for an early departure.  But here is what that road looked like in the morning.  Much of the road had imploded, falling into the hole dug by the pounding rain that created a trench that eroded the road from beneath.  The officials gathering in the morning decreed that "no one is leaving this Club until we give further instruction.  We'll talk with you about it at noon."  I realized that if I waited until noon, the conversation would have gotten even more authoritative, backed up by signs and highway workers and trucks gathered at the road and no one, at least no "civilians," would be allowed to get out on that road.

So I did the only thing I could do...tiptoed out of the impromptu early morning meeting, got in my intrepid Mini Cooper S, got to the bottom of the hill, and maneuvered my way around those gaping holes, praying hard...really hard...as I did it.

And, suddenly, there I was on open highway, on my way to Lake George to pick up my husband and make our way down to New York (no easy feat...we encountered no fewer than 11 road closings).  When I found myself on the open highway, I felt I was channeling Martin Luther King..."Free at last.  Thank God Almighty, I am free at last." 

There will be much cleanup to be done at the Club, and in the town of Keene Valley and throughout the region.  Irene, you've given us much to talk about for a while.  And we thought--foolish us--that we were escaping New York and its bout with Irene for the bucolic mountains of upstate New York.  It was not to be.

But Irene gave my husband and me plenty of time to have a conversation.  A looooong conversation.  And it was terrific.  A beautiful day, sunny skies, how could we be anything but grateful to have survived the hurricane of the century and know that our families are safe as well?  A gift.  We'd been given a gift.. 

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