Just a recording of a couple minutes spent with Lilo "Liles" Jones, the four-footed person near the beer can, on the back step during one of the classic brief Moose River rains.
To toss away the concerns of people who find themselves unable to avoid being concerned: Lilo did NOT drink the beer. No one in the making of this video drank the beer...shockingly, to some. The PBR can was picked up along the road as I was raking and was picked up by me (environmentalist-slash-free-nickel-advocate) and set on the ledge, awaiting its redemption at a local grocery store. The resulting five cents may have been put toward a fund to buy a six-pack. Or maybe not; I'm not one to account for such things in extreme detail.
Anyway, it was sunny, then it rained, then the sun returned. Somewhere in the middle of all that we sat on the Central Stoop and dug this.
Two friends on a step, loving the rain, with birds a few feet above us. Moose River Settlement, New York, June 28, 2020.
-MJ
As many times as I have stood on this little plot of land, and as much as I THINK I'm thinking about things, the joint never fails to startle me when I note (which I do, sometimes) my cluelessness.
This water, or the water that you see here finding its way downhill, begins its trip away pretty much within the confines of this video. Raindrops fall and springs rise and gather until something compels them to move. I suppose it's gravity, but who am I to say for sure?
The collected drops gather and slide downhill, passing from the Bog under Lilo's Bridge to join the Fen. And here's where things seem to look stable; where it seems the water has settled. But Nooooo!, as John Belushi would admonish; it doesn't stay long--not all of it anyway--but continues back past property lines and other imagined boundaries. Somewhere back behind any place I've ever been it gathers and becomes Fall Brook. Then it gains friends on the further slide downhill to the Black River. Upon arrival at that meeting spot it moves west in relative calm for a while, but not for long; the whole bunch soon meets with forces even its incalculable tries at straight-ahead haven't managed and turns north. It rolls through (sometimes roars through; sometimes floods out--to the occasional unhappiness of the unexpecting and not-yet-appreciative) the valley that bears its name. It moves north, skirting the western edge of Tug Hill...meanwhile picking up untold gallons of hopeful momentum on the way. At Lyons Falls the Black and Moose rivers do the confluence thing, offering a great example of teamwork. (When they join, it is a SCENE, man!) They continue north for a while, mostly at an easy pace in the eyes and minds of anyone who's never had to stop the travel, which is almost everyone so it's cool. And near the end of the narrower part of the water's ride it turns left for a bit and heads out toward Lake Ontario, where it joins all the Great Lakes water awaiting its arrival before and heads east again up the St. Lawrence River, east and a whole big bunch of north as it goes past the top of New England and finds the Atlantic Ocean, wherein each droplet you see in this video, barring evaporation or sipping along the way, could conceivably end up a whole lot of places I lack the skill to consider.
It blows my mind. I like that.
But here's some more fun: about fifty feet from the farthest vantage point at the beginning of this video is something like a ridge. And one inch past the edge of that edge, raindrops will drain directly into the Moose River, head to Lyons Falls on the express route, and cut a bunch of miles off of their journeys.
I realize that none of this information really matters; it's not like considering it changes anything in some material manner. But thinking about it is pretty cool if you ask me. I never, until maybe twenty minutes before I started typing this, thought about the Black/Moose Divide. That seems impossible and yet it is absolutely true.
The world can get you down, but sometimes you just have to love it. -MJ
After twenty-plus years noticing things in Moose River, I never saw a chipmunk (OK; HAS to be a Wilson by attitude and fortitude and gumption and/or something) drink from the wheelbarrow. But now I have. And now you can too. Behind The Cottage, Moose River, New York, October 19, 2019.
