Scho-Mo Confluence

A necklace of gulls hunts where the waters merge

 A mighty tree the flood washed up at the boat launch

 Mappy for size reference
You can see part of the aqueduct behind him

The Auriesville Shrine from the boat launch

The innocent corn fields looked much the same...

you would never know that they had been inundated with feet of swirling water. When we were little the then owners let my dad and his friends and us kids walk these river flats after the rain, searching for chips of flint, arrow heads, pot shards and other evidence of those who lived here before us.

On the way home from the hospital Sunday my brother and sis-in-law were kind enough to stop at the boat launch where the Schoharie "creek" (a word used loosely for a sometimes-raging monster river) and the Mohawk River (which did some raging of its own last year.)


All the way home, things had looked the same and yet different from the last time I had been this way....before the flood...houses still sat where they always had been, but now they were wrapped in Tyvek, surrounded by dumpsters full of sheet rock and sofas, or sported condemned stickers and waited for their fate. 


It was a little like moving away, growing old, and finding your town somehow different when you came home to visit....you knew where the streets were, but life had gone on without you. Kind of misty and confusing.


Except that it goes on for miles and miles all over the state and a lot of places are much worse than here.


Much the same at the boat launch...the hard things of concrete and stone were still where they used to be but water channels had changed, roads had washed out and been replaced with lesser roads, debris was piled everywhere in windrows and mini-mountains. 


I was really pleased to see that much of the aqueduct still stands...I thought it might have all fallen. Imagine the kind of construction that has kept that much of it upright since 1841.


The place was thronged with people, much busier than it is in the summer when the state holds its hand out for money every time you drive down the access road. People hunted lures, played with eager doggies, or just looked out where the gulls whirled in the current, hunting herring. It was wild and eerie and.....well...I can't come up with a better word than different.


For more on problems with flood debris, go here.