Mini-Apocalypse
An extreme weather event as pivot point
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Flannery O’Connor
I’ve lived across the street from the Esopus for 20 years, watching, hearing, and feeling the water flow from Slide Mountain to the Hudson River.
My town would not exist without the Esopus. In the mid-1800’s, Phoenicia was built around this waterway on which boats laden with tanned hides, beaver pelts, and lumber ambled to the Hudson and beyond. In those days, the Esopus was fouled by runoff from the tanneries, but it would recover to become a renowned trout fishing destination. Downstream, it powered the mills around which Saugerties was built.
On maps, the Esopus is labeled a “creek.” I cannot use that designation. I recently wrote a song in which I promoted the Esopus from creek to river, because once you’ve seen something – or someone – otherwise mild transform into a raging torrent, you can’t unsee that.
One such occasion changed my life. Hurricane Irene, August 28th, 2011, the most destructive natural force I’ve thus far witnessed up close. It revealed what this “creek” could do under the right circumstances, and hammered within me a reminder of life’s brevity and fragility. It motivated me to alter my course before something unforeseen altered it for me.
Increasingly, I recognize pivot points in my life. Hurricane Irene was one. I can trace a line from that event to these words.
The Esopus is cresting its banks. It flows over the abandoned railroad tracks and creeps across the street, into my lawn, towards the porch of our 1910 Victorian. I stand on the bluestone steps, taking it in. Time slows. A beaver rises to the water’s surface, stands on the tracks, locks eyes with me, and dives back under.
I shift into adrenaline gear, a weird, energized numbness. My wife, Holly, thirteen-year-old son, Jack, and I begin moving furniture to the 2nd floor. I plunge a large stick into the soggy ground about five feet from our porch.
I tell my family: “If the water moves past that stick, we head up the mountain behind the house.” The Esopus will come within a foot of that point before receding.
Electricity, cable, and phone are knocked out. Water rises to the top step of our basement – about seven feet. The roaring of the Esopus is punctuated by booms I assume are thunder but are in fact two- and three-ton boulders slamming into one another, and into the bridge pilings a ¼ mile away. These distinctive sounds – which I’ve yet to hear again – echo in me still.
Over about 12 hours, Irene and the Esopus change the Phoenicia landscape, destroying a lot of property. The unbound water flows onto roads, carves massive trenches and craters, carries away chunks of pavement, uprooted trees, and an abandoned railway car. The iron tracks on which that railcar had sat for decades are twisted like so much licorice, the ancient railway ties washed away.
It is a mini-apocalypse.
About that word, apocalypse. It conjures the end of the world. But it is actually the Greek word for revelation, disclosure, uncovering of the truth. It has morphed to mean the end of the world because the idea is that when crisis comes, you really get to know your world and the people in it, especially yourself. Revelation of the truth, of the unseen, thoughts unspoken. These things can end one’s personal world, or at the very least, profoundly change it.
Obviously, Irene is not the end of the world. But its wanton force will tap into something deep within me. I’ve spent the previous six years mostly making music for children, and although my passion for the gig has waned significantly, I’ve pretended otherwise. That pretense is about to collapse.
In late 2004, after working part-time as a preschool teacher’s assistant for a couple years, I’d debuted Uncle Rock. It was a lark. I pitched this alter ego as a cross between Pete Seeger and The Ramones. Rough-hewn music designed for both kids and parents to enjoy. It remains the most successful original music endeavor of my life.
Jack, then seven, was my sidekick. We didn’t hunt, fish, ski, or throw the ball around; our father/son activity was traveling the country playing festivals, libraries, bookstores, schools, clubs, and backyards. I made a decent living, and I loved my time with him. He sang – and shouted, talked, and giggled – on four Uncle Rock CDs, all of which people bought. Imagine that. Smaller children stared at him in wonder.
Around the same time I launched this endeavor, I lost my oldest, best friend Todd to suicide. Two years later, my other best friend, Luis, died from head trauma sustained in a motorcycle crash on our street. Other personal travails bedeviled me. It was the best and the worst of times, seared into my memory for good and for ill.
Investing ever more energy and time into Uncle Rock offered immersion in people untouched by grief. I.e. children, mostly kids aged one to seven. Their joyful intensity, and cluelessness about death and time, were therapeutic.
For a few years, Jack was an enthusiastic partner. But it was not to last. After an awkward period in which I tried to rekindle his interest with cash, he would stop performing with me in 2010, right around the time his voice started changing. He would form his own band, and fall in love with movies and moviemaking.
Fast forward back to 2011.
The day after the deluge, my family surveys the extensive damage to our town. The Esopus is still flowing through Main Street. Silt fills the floors of mom n’ pop businesses. Everyone not pitching in wanders in a daze.
The bridge into town will be impassable for almost a year. Our furnace and hot water heater are toast, and our basement is an in-ground pool for the foreseeable future. But many have it worse than us. All will be in a 19th century-type deprivation for almost two weeks. Totally unplugged.
In our mini-apocalypse, Phoenicia comes together. Politics mean nothing. The local grocery is underwater, but people get fed. The Red Cross shows up to find the Rotary Club and the M.F. Whitney Hose Co. have taken care of everyone.
As generators whirr in my neighbors’ yards, I can no longer ignore that I have outgrown Uncle Rock, just as my son had. Other thoughts crystallize.
Concurrent with my Uncle Rock success, a novel has been germinating within me. It rises into my forebrain. A story about musicians and the people who love them, relationships shaped by success and failure, children and lack of children, money and poverty, dependence on drugs, both legal pharmaceuticals and otherwise, alcohol, betrayal, death, desire, and especially grief.
The question of forgiveness. What, exactly, is that? What could it look like?
I’ve been witnessing some of the aforementioned situations play out at Uncle Rock events. “New parent” drama, from the Bearsville Theater to festivals to children’s birthday parties. From my onstage vantage point, while children sing and dance, the obviousness of couples in trouble astounds me. They think we don’t see. We totally see.
At least half the couples I encounter will not remain together.
My heart goes out to them. Bonds are being tested. I get it. I’m compelled to try to make beauty out of pain – theirs, mine. I want to reveal the sustaining power of simple pleasures. I want to enshrine my own early parenthood that has just passed, before the echoes fade. I want to write erotic scenes in the face of it all, because clearly, despite everything, people are still having sex. That need, that act, is the cause of a lot of drama. Shocker.
I’ve started this novel repeatedly, only to abandon it – sometimes to my relief – to focus on some all-consuming Uncle Rock-related activity.
There is no such activity after Irene.
We are always closer to Death than we think. As the adrenaline fades, I begin to realize just how much closer Death had been during Irene’s rage. If I’d taken a walk into town during the flood, I would not have returned. My beloved, swollen Esopus would have killed me.
Now that I’ve lived through an extreme weather event, I can put it in the story with verisimilitude. This is the linchpin that kickstarts my novel in earnest. Extreme weather in the air, and in people’s hearts. Unpredictable, uncontrollable, destructive, forcing change.
Although I will still visit local preschools and play the occasional Uncle Rock gig, I focus my creative energy on the page. I seek other forms of income, including writing for several local and regional outlets, and many online platforms. These activities prime the pump, hone my chops. I finally settle into a writing routine. To my amazement, mornings are best. I work towards a fictionalized extreme weather event – a flood – that will change everything for my characters. Their flood experience will be much, much worse than ours.
The process frightens me. It’s dark and, indeed, erotic. I keep going. I worry what parents of Uncle Rock fans might think. Then I realize they’ll need to read it to judge it. (Some will do exactly that.) I keep going. I worry what my family will think. I keep going.
In three years, my novel Perfectly Broken is done. The Story Plant publishes it in 2015, the year I turn 50. The first review on Goodreads is from Jack, a high school junior looking to the horizon. It’s a rave.
Because of similarities to my life, people who don’t know me well will assume Perfectly Broken is autobiography. I will be surprised to learn some functioning adults do not know the difference between novel and memoir. And I will be surprised to learn not many people know me well.
Indeed, Perfectly Broken is close to my life in some ways, but one point of making it fiction is to control it, to play God. And I got very Old Testament God. To my characters, I am the opposite of a good parent, i.e., I put them in dicey situations – mini-apocalypses – to reveal their true natures. Some relationships do not survive. But some do, albeit with altered landscapes. Like Phoenicia.
I will not have the presence of mind to include Irene in my Perfectly Broken acknowledgements. But if I could fix that, I would write, “… and thanks to Irene, my mini-apocalypse. You revealed a lot about my town, my time, and the river that runs through everything, including myself.”
A great piece - and appreciate that you voiced your opposition to calling the Esopus a creek!