Chapter 1 You and I are with Iris and her baby on a cliff edge in the Catksills as I tell this story. Farm fields quilt the valley below. Looking down it, other bluffs like this, long and flat, frame the view. I imagine the mountains all filled in and the land a thousand feet higher in the air, as if we are all floating, levitating together. The sun has burned off the fog, and the sky is a cerulean so bright language fails it. Two hawks screech past, floating on thermals. Light catches in Iris''s hair. Her mass of curls and corkscrews is illuminated like a halo.
It is a few days after the solstice, and we wear cut-offs and masks because it is June 2020. Hers is emblazoned BLM. Mine bears the Maltese cross of my volunteer fire department. The hike to this plateau is teeming with children--so many it feels dystopian, like the world is ending, and maybe it is. It is also a pandemic, where we have been told to be scared of each other and are unsure how to be together, even out- side. Sharing space feels transgressive and transcendent. Behind us people have strung hammocks between the few trees at the summit, and country music plays. The kids climb past in their shorts and high-top sneakers, flip-flops and T-shirts emblazoned with sports teams and school names, owls, unicorns, and dinosaurs.
On the trail, I love most the one little girl in an impractical lace sundress and sandals. I love, too, this Whitmanesque sense of nature, us all together, asses and elbows, bodies sharing breath and space; that in this catastrophe we have taken en masse to the outdoors. This is not some Thoreau or Emersonlike bracing experience of the individual in the wilderness, the self against the world. I ask the girl if she likes hiking. She buries her head in her father''s legs. And, I see myself in a Snoopy sweatshirt in the photo my father takes when I am six: blond hair gold in the light and a view of Vermont several thousand feet below. He has carried me up these heights as I complain, and I stand with him on the granite ledge. Before me is some kind of a bird, a brown hen, I now know is a grouse.
He takes a picture of me, and in it I shrug. Maybe at the bird and this view, as if they are nothing, or his work in delivering me to the summit, nothing. Now Iris waves at a field a thousand feet below. Silver flares of light reflect off cars as they park. She asks if that''s a U-pick farm, and I say yes, I did pick strawberries there a few days ago with my husband David. The woman who weighed our baskets told us it''s the busiest start ever. People are worried about food and supply chains. The farm just opened for the season, and already the fields are nearly picked clean.
At our feet names are carved into a long, flat boulder, so big and broad it''s called the dance floor. It is sedimentary stone from a sea nearly 400 million years old, and in a time frame closer to ours it was covered in moss. Sometime a century ago, people rolled the moss up like a giant carpet and started inscribing their names into stone. "LEO" is rounded as if carved in Arial. "Frank and Lydia" came in 1985. An arrow points to Frank''s name and the date. In what seems to me an act of hubris, "JA & GB" only put "86" after their initials. Is it 1886 or 1986? Or, don''t they think it will one day be 2086? Maybe JA and GB just give up.
Or, perhaps that year 2086 is unreachable, impossible, and we will never make it that far. The biggest carving reads "DOW VROMAN," and this hill is called Vroman''s Nose, not for the person whose name is incised in grand serifs but his forebear who steals the land from the Mohawks who''ve lived here for millennia. I tell Iris that the farm below sits on the grounds of a Mohawk village. Onistagrawa. I sound out the word with the long "youh" of the first syllable and "nee-sta-grawa" as I''ve been taught to say it. At its margin is a river that''s called a creek, the Schoharie Creek spelled Skóhare in Mohawk. The creek runs north and gives its name to this county and region. Onistagrawa means the place where the corn grows by the hill, and the people whose land this is do not name themselves Mohawk.
Here they are the Skóhare, part of the Kanien''kehá:ka, the people of the flint place. Their lands extend almost all the way to the Hudson River and north through the Adirondacks into Canada. At the foot of this bluff, the Skóhare Mohawks take in refugees from white colonization, Mohicans and Munsee Lenape and others, all together, even I will learn soon, white refugees from British tyranny and greed. On the way up, boulders are scarred with striations, glacial chatter it''s called, as if we can hear the ice. And, I want the names at our feet to talk, everyone here speak- ing, jostling together outside--this communion of us in nature. I picture the public, a collective body even cuts across time and is impossible to pin down outside the frail two letters, U and S, of the first-person plural. I want all of it--all of us--plus the girl in her impractical dress, the people in hammocks, and the clouds. They are lazy in the sky, a blue I learn that if not for vapor, for aerosols, would be black.
Those aerosols are in the news, too, now, as our breath is an aerosol that carries a virus. Iris gestures to a wobbly 1929 in the rock. Was it be- fore or after the crash? she wonders. The jump down is precipitous. The twang of guitar catches in the air. I imagine us all waltzing together on this dance floor. I rock the baby and have come here for a dead man. He draped the landscape in smoke.
He brings floods and clouds and studies forest fires. I have been tracking him now a half dozen years, and he loved this mountain. I have come to love him too, even though a technology he develops destroys my village in a flood in 1950. It is the floods that carry me here. This summer (and every summer is now this summer) will bring the worst fire season in the West and brushfires in my town. Greenland''s ice sheet will melt beyond repair. People die in deluges around the world, and for this moment we stand here together--you and Iris and her baby and me, and the man I''ve come searching for. Vince--his name is Vincent Schaefer--and I learn of him after my second flood.
Chapter 2 The first flood comes my first year in Margaretville, New York, a tiny village in the Western Catskills where at that point, the population is around 594. It is early morning, and a friend tries to rouse me. He pounds on my bedroom door. I''ve moved from London to a Victorian house with ginger- bread, it''s called, for the fancy details outside, like a house in a fairytale. It also has a turret, and right now my hus- band David is away for work and I am asleep in the turret like Rapunzel, like some princess, like, wake up now, Jennifer, like hearing voices call, Jen, Jen, in my dreams. Only I am drugged. Sleeping pills. Zolpidem tartrate.
And, this turret is not a turret at all, just a bulge inside the house. From the street, yes, it has that Rapunzel-let-down- your-hair look, even three inset windows. Inside, however, the walls simply curve around and are just big enough to fit the headboard of a queen-sized bed in this Queen Anne Victorian home, and me, on Ambien. I''ve taken it to drown out the banging of rocks in the stream outside. The boulders in the century-old walls lining the banks pummel each other with the force of water lifting and dropping each rock as the creek rises. They strike with heavy thuds, a resounding bass that crashes through the house, through the bed, through my shoulders and neck. Jen, Jennifer! Wake up. I smell gas.
The word gas is repeated more than once. The stream is called Bull Run, and in all my years here I never learn why it has that name. My guess is that this now, today, is the reason. It is running like a bull, and I will come to know that the straighter the stream, the faster it runs. To straighten it is to try to get it to obey the laws of our world--rationality and order (or what seems like order)--and to abide by where we put our roads and houses. Walling it in only makes the water race faster, higher, with more danger in moments like this, in a wet summer when it has been raining all day and all night and into this moment now with this banging about the gas. My friend, Free, his name is, he''s staying with us while David is back in the UK. Free is 6''5", maybe taller, with the broad torso of one who lifts weights and wears muscle shirts to accentuate said weightlifting.
He is also gentle and shy, too shy to barge into my bedroom even in a disaster. His Long Island accent presses down on the "g" of gas, and that gas he repeats is an immediate danger. I am finally awake, and he is amazed that I did not smell anything be- cause I can smell cigarettes from a hundred yards off--not to mention drier sheets and perfume. I''m allergic to them all, as well as mold, mildew, and car exhaust. That sleeping pill, however, has pushed everything aside and left just fog, clouds, and blur. Downstairs. Somehow I am in the basement in a T-shirt. It is not just gas leaking but water.
It is a flood. A 2000-gallon heating oil tank is stuck under the bridge a dozen feet from my kitchen door, and water, brown, red, and muddy, laps at the basement door. I have yet to have coffee, but a precise awareness dawns. My house is about to be inundated. I grab everything I can off the floor. A cooler, dirty laundry, a bag of birdseed. I shove them all on the washer. The water seeps in through angled metal doors in the ground that make me think of the storm cellar where Dorothy hides in the Wizard of Oz.
An inch rises, then another. Water creeps closer. It pools in the middle where the floor slopes imperceptibly. I run back upstairs to the window to see what is happening outside. Water overtakes o.