Harvey

Our valley in 2006. It was the same story then.....
people showing just how good they could be, helping each other

Thanks to Facebook I have been watching ordinary people perform acts of heroism that are the stuff epic movies are made from. Watching them graciously turn away thanks and praise and go back for another neighbor. And another. And another. Watching strangers save strangers and glad to do it.

Watching America. Because this is America, not some gang of rent-a-thugs making headlines by their sheer horribleness. You are America. I am America. We are better then those making news lately and if this doesn't show that what will?

Prayers for Texas......and good on all you people that I have come to "know" on Facebook, who are working hard there taking care of those in need. Thanks for what you do.

Again with the Flooding

The calm before the storm

Ridiculous. I have no idea how Jade got home last night, as he was hauling up in the western part of the state when the really heavy rains hit.

It began raining night before last. It is raining now. It rained most of the time in between. There were horrible thunderstorms, wind, and lashings of rain, some of the hardest we have seen all summer.

All the roads were closed in front of the farm when we went to bed last night. Mud slide across the river. State of emergency for the whole county. Don't know if the report is true, but I saw on FB that someone was struck by the lightning.

I know I took the cows up the lane a lot faster than I normally do. Metal gates. Metal umbrella. Metal fence wires. Tall trees all around. Normally I meander a bit listening for good birds and staring up at the branches. Not last night.

It was nasty. It has been nasty all year. Our hay supplier from when we had the cows called to chat last night and said he was down 500 bales this year....500 big round bales that is. If we still had the cows, he would not have been able to supply us!

California, and anyone else who has come up short, come get your rain. It has outstayed its welcome.

Sound of the Storm

Amish farm just between the storms

Below is a little video I took last night of the tiny stream between the house and barn. Normally this is barely deep enough for the cows to get their noses down for a drink. This was taken a couple of hours after the first really bad round of rain had passed, so it was probably much higher a little earlier. Turn your sound up if you would like to hear it.

However, I have a deep and abiding love for the camera and don't take it out in that kind of weather. Plus it probably wasn't all that safe up on the bridge then. It has calmed down considerable since then....butter wouldn't melt in its mouth so to speak. 

I hope this is over, but the strong warmth of the sun on this really chilly, wet morning, are making me think otherwise. 

The kids are at the event below with Diamond, if you want to stop by and visit....and with Peggy Ann too!


Click image for details.

Cheated

Looks as if we won't be seeing summer this year. I feel cheated. That "failed to install" meme that has been going around Facebook since winter isn't even funny any more.

Lawn not hay field,

Last night we hated to even go to bed. And did in fact stay up very late. The airwaves and  Interwebs seethed with accounts of road closings, dam failures, and more rain and more rain and more rain. Sirens screamed up and down all the roads....

The front porch is still home to trays of garden seedlings that we can't get into the ground. I did at least shove ten zuchetta rampicante plants into a thickly fertilized (covered in horse manure) bed the boss made me. And a neck pumpkin I grew from save seed from a gigantic one some friends gave us. The former are sorta taking hold. The latter is finally looking good after weeks in the ground.

Once again we are wondering whether Liz can make it down to take care of her animals or get to the farms she needs to visit. When we went to bed last night 5 and 5S were both closed leaving the Thruway as the only route down here.

'And damn'd be him that cries "hold, enough" '


Guess I'm damned because, HOLD ENOUGH! already.

Shocking Reminder

2006 Fonda NY

Another FB friend pointed out that today is the anniversary of the start of the tragic 2006 floods.

Here is a link to a page of photos of that disaster, which did horrible damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure all up and down the valley. It is looking bad again, with towns and cities under water all over the place. Liz did make it down, but now, can she get home? Roads are closing fast. And can the boss get up and buy corn meal for the cows?

Not again....

Ready for Sandy?

Hard to know whether you are ready or not. The obvious things, such as bottled water and bathroom tissue can be taken care of today. We live high on a hill, out of reach of most of the effects of flooding, although too much water interferes with our ability to green chop for the cows. During previous floods our road has closed early and often so we must plan on that happening again this time.

Loss of power is a major issue. We need to be able to extract the milk from the cows, promptly twice a day, and need to cool that milk. If the cows are not milked, best case scenario, they will dry off and stop giving milk. Worst case they will sicken and die.

Hand milking is a last ditch, bare possibility. We don't have as many cows as we used to...too many sold for taxes and such over the past few years. However even milking just one high producer by hand would be a painful experience I don't care to enjoy, especially with the acute arthritis in my thumbs. I'd do it if I had to mind you, but I don't want to have to. 


The cows wouldn't like it either. They don't like change, including change from their accustomed machines to clutching human claws.



Thus we ordered a load of diesel for today so we can keep the tractor running and use the generator if we must. We have enough hay in the mow, although we don't want to be feeding our winter supply now, and we just got a load of grain. Of course it is delivered from bin to barn by an electric auger, but the generator will take care of that, or there is a plate on the bottom of the bin for clean out from which we can extract feed if need be.

Other than that all we can do is wait. Wish the boss could get the second forage wagon fixed so he could have two loads of chopped feed ready, but I guess that is not to be.

We will hold good thoughts for our friends and neighbors in low-lying lands, who lost so much last year in the flooding. At least the canal corporation is taking action early and lowering the river, first to barely navigable levels, and then even lower. They are warning folks to get their boats out. Now if Gilboa holds and is managed for the good of the downstream folks instead of for NYC maybe the area will be okay.

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.

Our Neighbors

Just down the road a piece. This is where we used to go for ice cream when we needed a summer break and bought sweet corn and peas and honey and met friends and socialized. I loved to sit in the car there and look across the green, green fields to the sandy cliffs along the Schoharie where the swallows nest each summer. It is a wonderful spot but the flood hit there hard.

This story offers a real tribute to the persistence, toughness and heart of this NY farm family. These are good people and I hope the road before them is smoother and easier than the one they have traveled this year.

Pulling for Flood Victims

Here is the latest on on the big benefit tractor pull coming up on the 29th and 30th at the Fonda Fair Grounds. I am praying for good weather for this unprecedented event. It is going to be amazing with pullers coming from as far as Texas.

Gilboa Dam Hearing

Called for by Assemblyman Lopez. Seems like a good idea to address concerns about this century old dam when rains of biblical proportions are not actively falling.

According to the article water was coming over the dam at one point at nearly the rate of Niagara Falls. That's a lot of water to dump into rural upstate towns and farms.

Washing Down a Mountain

Quick run to Fort Plain yesterday for parts for the milkers (inflations for you who milk cows). We took Route 5 because they just announced that it had reopened after the flood and we wanted to see what had happened that the clean up took so long. Liz drove home that way one night and called me on the phone later. She was incoherent about what she saw.

Once we got to Big Nose, so were we.

Gratuitous mild profanity erupted in its own little flood, mile after mile. (Holy S**t was the most common epithet.) Ordinary words just couldn't capture our astonishment at what had happened. The vicious flood waters carved huge channels down the flanks of that whole mountain...just scored the earth like the claws of some great beast, many feet back into the mountainside, right down to the bone and even into it..

These photos do not do justice to the vigorous new streams and water falls that splash merrily down the sides of Big Nose Mountain now. They look as if they have always been there.

I wish my Grandpa Lachmayer, who took us on many road trips down the valley on the road that curves around its steep green sides, could be alive to see. He would have enjoyed the astonishment.

Nature is powerful beyond imagination and erosion apparently does not take centuries, just a lot of water.

The boss thought he counted seven or so of these gigantic gashes in the mountainside. They went many, many feet into its sides and stretched out of sight toward the top. Can you imagine all that rock and dirt and trees and debris dumped on the roadway below? I am impressed that they got it all cleared up before freeze up.


****Just a few weeks ago this whole area was smoothly rounded and covered with forest.....

Escaping from the Flood

Old Faithful

For the past several days we have been finding a few cows in places where they don't belong each morning. We figured it was probably due to the boss doing some electrical work and forgetting to plug the electric fencer back in on Saturday. He does stuff like that pretty often nowadays.

Yesterday morning we had all the cows and all the colored heifers, but every single black and white Holstein heifer was missing. Of course it was still raining but Liz and Alan went hunting for them, fond them in a hay field and brought them home.

Alan spent the entire day fixing fence. The problem was undoubtedly precipitated by the lack of electricity on the fence. A plethora of overgrown rose bushes lying on the wires didn't help.

However the biggest issue was that the flood took the corner off the fence, ripped the post right down. Our creek is usually just a trickle, but it has been swollen to little Niagara status a lot lately. Anyhow, the kid worked the whole day and got it about half finished...good enough to get by but he will have to finish it today.

Especially since he left my good hammer and my not quite as good, but good enough, brush cutters up along the fence in a bucket. It is unwise to fail to return mommy's tools around here.

It has been very weird this summer how the heifers have segregated themselves. Now and then they gather in one bunch, but most of the time the two brown Jerseys pair up with the two red milking shorthorns and the black and whites form another group entirely. It is not because they were particularly raised together or anything, but they sort by color pretty much every day....odd....

Heartbreaking

This video features one of the farm families who lost the most in the recent floods.

The nice lady doing the narration has sat at our kitchen table a couple of times....they are hard working, highly-respected folks, who made a good name for farming wherever they went. The video will just break your heart if you love the land, the animals, and the people who care for them. It is long, but do watch.....

Hurricane Irene Aftermath: One Farmer's Story from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Enough Already

This is the river the other day,

untimely empty because the locks are all open or just plain gone.
See the channel marker aground on the side?

Today it is full again and over flowing.

I am sure you are sick of me talking about the weather. (I am sick of talking about it too, as far as that goes. In fact, frankly I am downright sick of the weather in general, in particular, and in any other way you can be sick of it.)

It just keeps raining and raining and raining. By mid-afternoon Wednesday Alan's friends were texting him from SUNY Cobleskill and putting up videos on Facebook because of the incredible flooding there. Water was racing down the stairways among the dorms, feet deep and chocolate brown. These were the dorms on higher ground too...I hate to think what was going on lower down. At least some dorm rooms were flooded and kids were moved to higher ground. It was pretty scary.

Meanwhile towns that were evacuated during the peak of the Irene flooding were once again emptied because of still more flooding. I don't know how much more people can take...

Here at the farm we still live on the hill and are still glad of it, although the driveways are taking an awful beating and the milk truck didn't get in on Monday. Water filled one shed so we had to turn Rio out with the big cows. She is a pregnant milking shorthorn heifer that we have actually wanted to add to the big herd, but we have been waiting because we have the cows spending their days in a temporary pasture. Temporary electric fence and un-fence-broke heifers are not a good mix.

Sure enough she got out twice (all I can say is ouch because that fence is HOT!) but the first time she put herself back in and the second time Liz was right there to chase her. Hopefully over the next few days she will figure out where she belongs and settle down.

Also had to liberate Wally, the blue heeler guardian of the cow barn gate. The rain washed the ground out from under his dog house so he is now enthroned in Nick's chain link kennel. Hopefully he will stay there because he is essentially a very bad dog. The cats and chickens don't need his help on their way to an untimely grave.

So there you have it. Most of the news that's fit to print. We can't chop. Can't work on the tractor. Can't do much of anything except divert water and hope for the best. Take care.

****Update, reliable source says all roads in county are closed. Good grief! Been reading FB, mud slides all over the place, the water is up in Liz and Jade's back yard. I called her and told her to forget coming to work.

Eleven Cows Found

I know some of you live where these are as common as sparrows,

but this is the first one we have seen in at least five years.

This hen pheasant is nibbling something on our soggy driveway...

I read somewhere that eleven missing cattle were found. 22 thoroughbred horses still missing.

Here are some info links:

New York Farm Bureau flood help link

NYFB Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, coming to Schoharie County dairy farm today.

How to help in flood-ravaged Middleburgh (our favorite place to collect brachiopods when the kids were small.)

Unsung

But heroes just the same.

The boss just spent a few minutes chatting with our milk truck driver while he was picking up the milk. He, his boss who is the owner of the trucking company, (a really sweet guy), and all the other drivers...and no doubt dozens of guys from other companies...have been going through H-E-Double Hockey Sticks getting to farms to pick up milk.

If the trucks can't get in, even if the farmers have generators and power to milk the cows (not to mention still having barns and cows, which many don't) then the bulk tanks fill up and have to be emptied somehow....usually by dumping milk. Having dumped milk when our market got mixed up a couple years ago, I know how painful that can be. It takes a lot of work to grow and harvest feed and grow cows and then feed the cows to produce the milk. Not much fun to watch the fruit of all that labor swirling down the drain.

Add to that the fact that some of the plants that take milk have closed temporarily due to the flood and you have a nightmare.

The owner of the company that hauls our milk just spent three hours just getting to two close together farms marooned by flood waters. One of his drivers drove all night to get to an alternate plant to offload milk. They have been having trouble even getting home at night when they are done.

Thankfully, these men know every back road, short cut, long way and detour in this part of upstate NY. If there is a way to get where they need to go, they will find it.

My hat is off to them. Thanks, Dale, and John, and all you other guys, you know who you are, who are working so hard to get our product to market. It means a lot.

Flood Video

Here

Marooned, Incommunicado

Collage of just some of the things that were flying over the farm yesterday.

I missed the governor's helicopter, having run outdoors quickly to quiet the dogs

Collage of skies, from Saturday through yesterday

What you can see from our windows

"The wind makes me restless. I can't settle to normal Sunday pursuits. Dishes, laundry, chores galore, all done before the crew is finished in the barn. Judging by posts from my Facebook friends, it's the same all over. No one can be calm with all this going on."

That was written on Sunday before the main storm hit. at that point the storm looked unimpressive, but there was a gripping, ominous tension in the air...you just couldn't walk away from it.

Our senses were not wrong. The poor valley is devastated, the whole region damaged horribly. We were lucky, we are fine. We couldn't get out and no one could get in, but we never completely lost power, although phone, Internet and television were gone.

Entities far from this region complaining that the storm preparation was over done and over-hyped are full of it. Whole farms were swept away, whole towns inundated, people died. People are still in shelters, people still don't have power. Buildings that have stood everything that has happened since the Revolutionary War were badly damaged. Guy Park Manor

It is too soon for me to process it all, but here are some links and pictures.

Video of part of the extent of the flooding taken from the governor's helicopter, which flew very low over us several times. Drove the dogs totally crazy.

Leader Herald story

There is so much more...too much more. As I said, I can't process it yet. Prayers for people who had and have it a lot worse than we do and belated thanks to Grandpa Delbert for going against convention and buying land high on the hillsides instead of river flats. I sent him good thoughts all weekend.....

If you are on Facebook, look up WRGB, WENT, the Recorder, and Montgomery County Emergency Management, etc. There are some pictures that will chill you....