As I write this I have the pleasure of watching water waft across the asphalt in front of my house – water that used to be in the crawl space under my house, that is. I watch it collect in the gutter across the street, right where the curb has a cut for a driveway. (Its cut being so filled with silt that grass is growing in it, the driveway is for cars that no longer visit the house across the street, which is empty and rumored to be soon condemned by the city.)
That side of the street is graded toward the south end of the block, and my side of the street is graded toward that side of the street. People in my neighborhood are self-taught experts in the meaning of that phrase, “is graded toward.” I live in Ponckhockie, a neighborhood that few people outside of Kingston seem to know about, but the people who know it have two associations with it that are both pretty darn accurate.
Clik here to view.
One is that Ponckhockie is charming. Upon hearing that I live there, they saw “Ohhhh” the way they might if I told them I just bought a Volkswagen Beetle. Ponckhockie is special to anyone who has ever seen it. Often they will quickly add, “That’s right by the water,” in that adverb-of-degree sense of the word “right,” ripe for creative inflection.
We are indeed rrrrright by the water. There are precious few houses around here that weren’t built into a hill or next to a flood plain, and that don’t need some ingenious form of drainage, and many of them are downhill from somebody else’s ingenious way of grading water away from their foundation. And because it is and always has been a working class neighborhood, solutions have always come on a budget. On evening walks we find ourselves saying, “Hey, look what these people did with PVC pipe and wire.” “Nicely done!”
A year ago on the day before Christmas Eve, rain clogged the Rondout Creek, and high tide on the Hudson came up to the doorsteps of the house across the street and down the block. The Hudson is tidal. In Lenape its name literally means, “the river that flows both ways,” and there are hollows all over the reedy woods where you can watch the swampy water flowing one way in the morning and the opposite way in the afternoon.
You can see the Catskills from Kingston. The Target parking lot has an especially uplifting panorama of them, just ten minutes from here. If you drive the 45 or so minutes from Hunter Mountain to Ponckhockie on a summer night, you pass from an airy mountain atmosphere, through a steep valley to the humid, Tristate-area-feeling Hudson basin, and then down again to a positively Mid Atlantic wetland that evokes South Jersey.
Clik here to view.
This week, as one of the biggest rainstorms of the year pattered on the roof, I took a deep satisfaction from the thought that the work-in-progess pumping system in my crawl space was going to trounce this Flood Watch storm. Coincidentally, I was reading a book called Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, by Cynthia Barnett.
She points out that Jonathan Swift made the first use of the phrase “raining cats and dogs” that we know of, in 1738, although a playwright a hundred years before that used the phrase “raining dogs and polecats.”
“Cat-and-dog cloudbursts seem practically ordinary compared with ‘raining young cobblers’ in Germany. It rains shoemakers apprentices in Denmark, chair legs in Greece, ropes in France, pipe stems in the Netherlands, and wheelbarrows in the Czech Republic. The Welsh, who have more than two dozen words for rain, like to say that it’s raining old women and walking sticks.”
Well, it rained old women and walking sticks here in Ponckhockie this week, but the sun is out, and high tide has come and gone a few times, and life goes on.
