The Susquehanna River
Nichols, NY -- During a particularly bad patch of rain on Tuesday, I stopped for a chocolate bar and took some pleasure in turning down a concerned older woman who offered me a ride through the downpour. I told her, somewhat smugly, that I didn't mind getting wet and rode on along the swollen Susquehanna River for the rest of the day.
When I got to Nichols, the in-laws of my Margaretville host were expecting me to camp on the lawn so I knocked to say I was going to pitch my tent. Patty told me to bring my bike up to the porch and come inside. Feeling tough again, despite the rain, I said that I had a good tent and was happy roughing it in the yard. "No," she said, and pointed across the road to the river, still running high and fast. "You don't understand. It's going to flood. Come inside."
It didn't flood that night, but on Wednesday morning after Patty left for work, I was standing outside with her husband, Bob, and watching the water lap at the road in front of their house. It crossed the road at a dip a few houses down early on, and from there flooded all of the block's low-lying back yards. We stood near the yellow line until water was coming at our feet from the river on one side and the yard on the other, and since the electricity was out, we started drinking the beer in the fridge. He told me about how taxes and insurance were making it tough to run his business and about the racetrack, Tioga Downs, that had opened down the street. It was probably 85 degrees and sunny.
I grilled a burger for lunch on the back deck when the water was about 36 inches deep in the yard. One of the neighbors, whose boat had floated out of his garage, came by hip-waders to tie it up to a basketball hoop. A neighborhood cat made it onto the porch and hid under the grill. The burger was good, and I noticed I was getting a sunburn. I spread some of my damp things out to dry on the deck.
There was no shade left on the road, so Bob and I sat on the front porch. We had a couple more beers and talked a while. People in pickups splashed down the road from time to time, and each one came closer to getting stuck in the water. "There's just nothing you can do," Bob said. It flooded last year -- I saw pictures -- but the water was already higher than it had been and it was only mid-afternoon. The water was the color of coffee with milk and you couldn't see it rise, exactly, but every ten minutes or so, another knot on the porch or another piece of neighbors' RV would be underwater. But there's nothing you can do. We sat and watched it. Bob said it isn't often you get to go to the beach in New York.
We waded down the street a little ways to a house on slightly higher ground. Mike and Kathy, friends of Bob's, were pumping out their basement and trying to keep up with the incoming river. Their pump was falling behind and they were calling around, trying to find another. We helped put their new TV on raisers to get it further above the water line and Kathy made me a sandwich, gave me a beer, and wished me a happy birthday.
Billy, a guy my age, came up the road to try to gauge how soon his house would flood, and started up a conversation with Bob. He joined us at Mike and Kathy's for a while, and then the three of us and Kathy went back to Bob's to check on the dog. The water was lapping at the porch by now, only a few inches from the level of the door, and bugs were crawling up our legs to get away from the water.
Things were still strangely normal, though. Billy and I talked about jobs and bars, and he told me about how his girlfriend was expecting their first child in October. Bob thought he might be able to use the help doing construction, and Billy doesn't like his job driving buses, so he was excited at the prospect of different work. He said that Bob was really niceto share his beer and cigarettes and that he'd be sure to come back and hang out after the flood.
When we went back to the Mike and Kathy's, they were trying to get what they could out of the basement, where the pump was still running but water was pouring through the walls. Mike said to me, on the porch, "Man, you work your whole life, you know?" I think I said, "yeah," but I don't. At that point, my things had sun-dried nicely and I had packed them back into my bags.
The fire department started bringing a boat around to the houses that still had people in them a little while after that. The water in Bob's front yard was about belly-button deep and the carpets had started to float. I threw both my bags into the firemen's row boat and carried my bike up the street to higher ground. Bob stayed behind with his dog and Billy and his girlfriend went back to their house, where they figured they could wait out the water on the second floor if they needed to. The Assistant Fire Chief brought me back to her house (she's married to the fire chief), where I spent last night and the day today. Her daughters took me to meet their horses just after I got here. They live on a hill near some other hills and other than there being no electricity last night, there are no signs of water.
The flooding in Binghamton, upstream, has been on the national news, and there's serious damage all over the area. The major east-west road around here, the Southern Tier Expressway, probably won't reopen for another couple days, and even some people without water in their homes might not have power for longer than that. The Binghamton newspaper hasn't delivered since Tuesday (It's unclear to me if they've even been printing it) but its website is devoted to flood news, so for the next few days you can get some of the regional picture from the The Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin.
Bob's all right. He and the dog got out this morning, but there's just under a foot of water in the house and they can't get back in until it goes down. I'm going to go by tomorrow morning to see if I can help out. Bob thinks for now they just have to wait for the water to fall and the insurance agent to arrive. No one on their street got much insurance money after last year's flood, it seems, but there's really nothing you can do except wait for the Susquehanna to go out of the house and back the way it came. There's just nothing you can do.
I thought riding my bike across the country was mostly going to be about riding, and though that clearly isn't the case, I don't have many other options right now. There's really nothing I can do, aside from whatever work I can put into the clean-up, except keep moving. There's just nothing I can do.
Margaretville is a few hours' drive north of New York, but riding here, I saw a lot of signs declaring land and buildings to be the property of New York City. Most of them also say, 'No Trespassing.' It turns out, this is where the City's water comes from, and at no small impact to the area, according to the Catskills residents I've talked to. As late as the 1950's, five towns up here were flooded to provide additional reservoir capacity, since the huge Ashokan Reservoir, built by flooding nine villages and finished in 1914, was no longer enough. And after the reservoirs are built, their watersheds must be protected, of course, which is why there are all these signs. New York City has bought a lot of watershed land up here (contributing to the growing problem of property values rising beyond the reach of locals, my host tells me) and restricts the use of it heavily. It's also built sewage treatment plants for the towns around here, which used to send their wastewater directly into the reservoirs' watersheds. Mostly it tears down buildings, though, on the watershed land it acquires. That improves the quality of the watershed, but also reduces the land's assessed taxable value in Delaware County. Interesting story.