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Here’s the thing about my 300-mile, straight-line, virtually-no-hills, extremely boring commute:
New York State is stupid gorgeous. Nobody really knows that, because we’re really only famous for the city, but I swear to Christ, the whole fuckin’ state is this ridiculous swathe of green shit and scenery. Out west it’s mostly flat but toward the southern tier it gets all rolling, and it’s got glacial lakes and microclimates and shit. East, the geology’s way more interesting, and there are these absolutely ridiculous vistas that unfold around you as you stare blankly at the same two fucking lanes each way. As you get close to the capital, the Mohawk River comes in and does ridiculous pretty shit with the foothills of the Adirondacks and so on, and it’s just– you can’t look at it and drive, but it’s so stupid.
cut for a lengthy attempt at poetic description of chasing a thunderstorm for 100 miles:
There’s this one really dramatic bit where the Mohawk River bisects a mountain and there’s a curve and the Thruway runs right down in the river bottom, and the train tracks come in on the other side of the river, and I cannot find it on a fucking map. I hit Maps as I drove through, and got Sprakers, but I can’t find it in the street view of the hamlet of Sprakers, so I can’t be sure. It’s a ways before you get to Canajoharie, anyway. I think. I can’t remember. (There’s a sign that says Albany– 42, but I’m not sure where that really puts it.)
So here’s the point of my story. I came out of sunshine and 80 degrees out in Buffalo, and as I drove east I could see that the sky was darker, and there were some weird sort of… rays? The sky clearly had darker parts, and as I kept going past Rochester, into Syracuse, I could see that the whole southeast quadrant was dark, and there was a sharp line of light bisecting the sky. By Syracuse the roads were wet, so my suspicion that I was chasing a storm was confirmed– weather here goes very predictably from west to east, most of the time, and so does the Thruway; I’ve raced storms before, watching them in my rearview and being afraid to stop for gas lest they catch me. This time, though, it was ahead of me; there was nothing but sun behind, fluffy clouds and sun going from yellow to gold as the evening came down.
East of Syracuse, the weird ray effect in the sky got stronger, and just before Utica, one of the rays solidified into a chunk of a rainbow. It was a straight chunk, no curve or arc. I kept watching it intermittently, as the road got wetter; I was getting road spray now, but no rain was falling.
The Thruway, of course, doesn’t go perfectly straight east-west all the time. It curves in a few places– toward Rochester, back down toward Syracuse, and of course, as it picks up the Mohawk it starts to follow the river’s curve a bit. So as I curved gently southward, I suddenly saw another hunk of rainbow, as the sky straight east grew darker and more foreboding– and I realized, it was the two ends of a giant rainbow arc, that if I could see it, would fill the entire east quadrant. It was the rainbow’s feet. But the rest of the rainbow itself was swallowed by the dark stormclouds, that now were starting to have flickers of lightning in them.
Now, I’ve long felt that the vista to the southwest as you come down the long hill between Utica and Ilion is possibly the most beautiful view on the Thruway (closely contested, of course, by the bit over by Auriesville I think, the bit with the whole valley thing, but that view’s one thousand times better from Rte 20 a little ways up the hill). Today, as I came down that hill, I could see rain trailing from some clouds, and it spattered the windshield and fogged the vista in weird trailing shrouds, and the lightning was forking between clouds more than it was hitting the ground, by then. I thought I was really in for it; the sky overhead was starting to be dark, now, and the sun in my rearview was harshly glaring off the wet roads and sparking off raindrops and such.
But as we bent back northwards a little bit past Canajoharie toward Fonda, we swung back up out of the thick of it, and I lost the rainbow’s feet in the clouds again.
The lightning intensified as I got in toward Albany, and was extremely dramatic. I lost the last of the sun as I bent south again to Schenectady, and it was full dark by the time I got off 90 and onto 87. It rained on me the rest of the way, but not hard, and I watched the silent lightning the whole way east on Rte 2, through detours in Troy (the rte 2 bridge underpass where it goes under the Sage campus downtown was closed, which irritated me because I don’t know Troy that well, and it was only because a flash of lightning silhouetted the steeple of the church on the corner that I realized I’d gotten redirected right to the street Farmbaby’s pre-k program is on– I still took a wrong turn, but at least I knew where I was).
It was still raining when I parked at the farm, but not so hard I couldn’t make it to the door relatively dry.
In my head this was very poetic. I was trying to compose something beautiful, about the thick gold of the sunset in my rear-view vista, and the heavy black in front of me, the rainbow’s feet either side of the lightning-studded clouds, and the brilliant, ridiculous, ravishing green of mid-May all around, and cows and clouds and whatnot, but it’s not coming out exactly as I meant.
Anyway here’s Canajoharie on Google Maps, if you zoom out you can follow Rte 90 and get some idea of what I was talking about with the curving and whatnot. I don’t know if you can Streetview the ridiculous vista over Ilion– but here’s some trivia, even at night there’s something to see, because Ilion proper is the home of the Remington factory, which even if it’s closed now, is still lit up at night and you can see the little city’s streetlights all laid out in a grid like jewels in velvet as you come down that hill.
I’ve never been there, I don’t know if it’s nice or shitty, but I have looked at it a lot, and you’d think I’d be tired of it, and I am, God how I am, I wish I didn’t have to make that drive. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid pretty.
I almost pulled over at the Indian Castle rest stop to get a shot of the rainbow, the gold, the sunset, the lightning, but there’s a gorgeous view that the rest stop is just out of sight of, and I could tell that, and I didn’t need to stop for gas and I didn’t want to interrupt my flow. I learned about half a dozen Stan Rogers songs on this ride (that’s what I do on long car rides, I learn songs) and I was super into the Jeannie C just then. I knew I couldn’t get a good shot of it anyway and I’d’ve just gotten mad about it.
So anyway– have some incoherent blathering. Mostly I’m just pumped I’ve made it here with both wallet and credit card intact. There’s still time for me to fuck that up, but so far I’m ahead of my average record.
(The Jeannie C., by the way, what the fuck. It’s a beautiful song, and actually suits my range really well which I didn’t expect, and the haunting little refrain, it’s not a chorus, just an interjected line, I’ll go to sea no more, it’s so pretty, but jesus Christ the whole thing is an elegy for a boat, right, that sank, and that’s sad, your dad built it and it’s named for your mom and like, I feel you, but within the narrative of the song a man dies, and the song deals with it pragmatically– oh John’s dead so you gotta bail– and then goes on and on mourning this fucking boat, and meanwhile a man is dead you guys. What a song. I’ve learned it and now I have to find a seisun again so I can perform it and be like, guys, this song, this fucking song, it’ll bring you to tears over a boat but a man is dead for the love of God. “John Price give a cry, and pitched over side, and it’s forever he’s gone under”… Bro, your boat straight got fucked-up, and it’s sad but that boat was fucked, every seam was pouring water, right, I’m sorry you couldn’t save it but a dude straight drowned and you’re sad because you couldn’t love another keel? Christ.)
Here’s the thing about my 300-mile, straight-line, virtually-no-hills, extremely boring commute:
New York State is stupid gorgeous. Nobody really knows that, because we’re really only famous for the city, but I swear to Christ, the whole fuckin’ state is this ridiculous swathe of green shit and scenery. Out west it’s mostly flat but toward the southern tier it gets all rolling, and it’s got glacial lakes and microclimates and shit. East, the geology’s way more interesting, and there are these absolutely ridiculous vistas that unfold around you as you stare blankly at the same two fucking lanes each way. As you get close to the capital, the Mohawk River comes in and does ridiculous pretty shit with the foothills of the Adirondacks and so on, and it’s just– you can’t look at it and drive, but it’s so stupid.
cut for a lengthy attempt at poetic description of chasing a thunderstorm for 100 miles:
There’s this one really dramatic bit where the Mohawk River bisects a mountain and there’s a curve and the Thruway runs right down in the river bottom, and the train tracks come in on the other side of the river, and I cannot find it on a fucking map. I hit Maps as I drove through, and got Sprakers, but I can’t find it in the street view of the hamlet of Sprakers, so I can’t be sure. It’s a ways before you get to Canajoharie, anyway. I think. I can’t remember. (There’s a sign that says Albany– 42, but I’m not sure where that really puts it.)
So here’s the point of my story. I came out of sunshine and 80 degrees out in Buffalo, and as I drove east I could see that the sky was darker, and there were some weird sort of… rays? The sky clearly had darker parts, and as I kept going past Rochester, into Syracuse, I could see that the whole southeast quadrant was dark, and there was a sharp line of light bisecting the sky. By Syracuse the roads were wet, so my suspicion that I was chasing a storm was confirmed– weather here goes very predictably from west to east, most of the time, and so does the Thruway; I’ve raced storms before, watching them in my rearview and being afraid to stop for gas lest they catch me. This time, though, it was ahead of me; there was nothing but sun behind, fluffy clouds and sun going from yellow to gold as the evening came down.
East of Syracuse, the weird ray effect in the sky got stronger, and just before Utica, one of the rays solidified into a chunk of a rainbow. It was a straight chunk, no curve or arc. I kept watching it intermittently, as the road got wetter; I was getting road spray now, but no rain was falling.
The Thruway, of course, doesn’t go perfectly straight east-west all the time. It curves in a few places– toward Rochester, back down toward Syracuse, and of course, as it picks up the Mohawk it starts to follow the river’s curve a bit. So as I curved gently southward, I suddenly saw another hunk of rainbow, as the sky straight east grew darker and more foreboding– and I realized, it was the two ends of a giant rainbow arc, that if I could see it, would fill the entire east quadrant. It was the rainbow’s feet. But the rest of the rainbow itself was swallowed by the dark stormclouds, that now were starting to have flickers of lightning in them.
Now, I’ve long felt that the vista to the southwest as you come down the long hill between Utica and Ilion is possibly the most beautiful view on the Thruway (closely contested, of course, by the bit over by Auriesville I think, the bit with the whole valley thing, but that view’s one thousand times better from Rte 20 a little ways up the hill). Today, as I came down that hill, I could see rain trailing from some clouds, and it spattered the windshield and fogged the vista in weird trailing shrouds, and the lightning was forking between clouds more than it was hitting the ground, by then. I thought I was really in for it; the sky overhead was starting to be dark, now, and the sun in my rearview was harshly glaring off the wet roads and sparking off raindrops and such.
But as we bent back northwards a little bit past Canajoharie toward Fonda, we swung back up out of the thick of it, and I lost the rainbow’s feet in the clouds again.
The lightning intensified as I got in toward Albany, and was extremely dramatic. I lost the last of the sun as I bent south again to Schenectady, and it was full dark by the time I got off 90 and onto 87. It rained on me the rest of the way, but not hard, and I watched the silent lightning the whole way east on Rte 2, through detours in Troy (the rte 2 bridge underpass where it goes under the Sage campus downtown was closed, which irritated me because I don’t know Troy that well, and it was only because a flash of lightning silhouetted the steeple of the church on the corner that I realized I’d gotten redirected right to the street Farmbaby’s pre-k program is on– I still took a wrong turn, but at least I knew where I was).
It was still raining when I parked at the farm, but not so hard I couldn’t make it to the door relatively dry.
In my head this was very poetic. I was trying to compose something beautiful, about the thick gold of the sunset in my rear-view vista, and the heavy black in front of me, the rainbow’s feet either side of the lightning-studded clouds, and the brilliant, ridiculous, ravishing green of mid-May all around, and cows and clouds and whatnot, but it’s not coming out exactly as I meant.
Anyway here’s Canajoharie on Google Maps, if you zoom out you can follow Rte 90 and get some idea of what I was talking about with the curving and whatnot. I don’t know if you can Streetview the ridiculous vista over Ilion– but here’s some trivia, even at night there’s something to see, because Ilion proper is the home of the Remington factory, which even if it’s closed now, is still lit up at night and you can see the little city’s streetlights all laid out in a grid like jewels in velvet as you come down that hill.
I’ve never been there, I don’t know if it’s nice or shitty, but I have looked at it a lot, and you’d think I’d be tired of it, and I am, God how I am, I wish I didn’t have to make that drive. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid pretty.
I almost pulled over at the Indian Castle rest stop to get a shot of the rainbow, the gold, the sunset, the lightning, but there’s a gorgeous view that the rest stop is just out of sight of, and I could tell that, and I didn’t need to stop for gas and I didn’t want to interrupt my flow. I learned about half a dozen Stan Rogers songs on this ride (that’s what I do on long car rides, I learn songs) and I was super into the Jeannie C just then. I knew I couldn’t get a good shot of it anyway and I’d’ve just gotten mad about it.
So anyway– have some incoherent blathering. Mostly I’m just pumped I’ve made it here with both wallet and credit card intact. There’s still time for me to fuck that up, but so far I’m ahead of my average record.
(The Jeannie C., by the way, what the fuck. It’s a beautiful song, and actually suits my range really well which I didn’t expect, and the haunting little refrain, it’s not a chorus, just an interjected line, I’ll go to sea no more, it’s so pretty, but jesus Christ the whole thing is an elegy for a boat, right, that sank, and that’s sad, your dad built it and it’s named for your mom and like, I feel you, but within the narrative of the song a man dies, and the song deals with it pragmatically– oh John’s dead so you gotta bail– and then goes on and on mourning this fucking boat, and meanwhile a man is dead you guys. What a song. I’ve learned it and now I have to find a seisun again so I can perform it and be like, guys, this song, this fucking song, it’ll bring you to tears over a boat but a man is dead for the love of God. “John Price give a cry, and pitched over side, and it’s forever he’s gone under”… Bro, your boat straight got fucked-up, and it’s sad but that boat was fucked, every seam was pouring water, right, I’m sorry you couldn’t save it but a dude straight drowned and you’re sad because you couldn’t love another keel? Christ.)
