Schoharie River Center - clean-up

…a toy truck, a bedsheet, photos, a fireman’s boot, half-filled sandbags, lotion, a jewelry bag, cds, dvds, books, magazine, aluminum siding, vinyl siding, wood siding, roofing, sheetrock, pipes, a snowplow shovel, chairs, a stereo, a vacuum cleaner, a stuffed bunny, connecting blocks, a bag of bows, Christmas lights, a rake… To use a cliché, the above list could be what makes up the fabric of our lives, or someone’s life. Other words would be devastation, destruction, people ripped apart…dramatic? Perhaps. Although those words generally describe disasters many, many miles away, somewhere else…another country, another world…not here. Yet there it was, and here it is. Indeed it was practically in my back yard. The Schoharie River Center, in Esperance, NY, just one of the many places pounded by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. (http://www.schoharierivercenter.org/) I spent this morning with my friend helping to clear away debris along the river bed and into the woods where once were many lovely hiking trails, so I am told. An avid hiker, I am sorry to say I had not been there yet, but hopefully next year. I wonder how many people without homes are saying, well, hopefully next year. I felt and still feel quite helpless to those who are in such dire need, and who have lost so much. I am told by people in charge, Red Cross and such, that we are limited to how we can help and FEMA and others will hopefully help displaced people re-build. Did I help any of those people today, by cleaning up around the center? Well, the short answer is no, sadly I did not. That being said, what use is it to clean up an Environmental study center? I guess, for my part, if I can’t help the people physically or economically, the thought of doing nothing was much worse. To give perspective to one’s life is always an eye-opening experience and usually unexpected. I did not expect to see such utter devastation. You pick up one piece of plastic or metal and turn and there will be twenty more to take its place. It felt like trying to clean off the beach of sand and shells. Indeed there was many feet of sand and silt that had been dumped in the woods, making the work that much harder. People worked almost in utter silence, save for the sound of a chainsaw. The mosquitoes were relentless, but the sky was as blue as it gets, the foliage perfect. Truly, what could you say? For every complaint I was thinking, and did utter a few, I thought about the item I found. These ordinary things were people’s lives, and I was putting them in plastic bags, to dumped somewhere. With every piece of “something” that you picked up was a wonder of who it belonged to. This debris was once someone’s house and someone’s treasures. I actually gasped when I pulled out the stuffed bunny, almost too much to bear. Most of the photos were rubbed out blurs, no people that you could see. Although some people found one or two pictures that we hope will be given back to their owners. The snowplow shovel looked as though a giant hand had crumpled it, like a pack of cigarettes. Debris hanging in trees, up so high I could not reach it with a five long foot stick. I am told that the water reached eight feet high in this area. How can you see these things and not be affected, but you try to soldier on and just keep picking up more things to shove into plastic bags that will be taken I don’t know where. Then, if you stopped thinking of the lives destroyed, there was the magnitude of what actually came through this area in August; you can see and hear the river, still muddy, seemingly higher than it should be for this time of year. Again I know there are places throughout the country that see natural disasters more frequently, and plan for this kind of thing. However, I think in our small area, Irene gave us a sucker-punch that we won’t soon forget. One of the workers, a lovely gentlemen whose name I am sorry to say I did not get, said something to us while we were exchanging places of origin, etc. He was surprised that we had come from where we had, and I told him, hey you’re our neighbors, you know? He said, “you know I am amazed at the power of nature, “ and he looked around and with a huge smile said, “but people are pretty powerful, too.” He went on to explain what the area had looked like two, three and four weeks prior. He told me kids from schools (there was a Duanesburg wrestler there today!!) were just hauling huge pieces of houses and throwing them into the “FEMA pile”. I was happy to hear that there were people working to clean up the mess, very simple. So, to conclude, my part was infinitesimal , compared to what the people actually need, but since I could not help them, I did whatever I could do to at least help the area around me. Simple, indeed.