High Water, Tall Tales

Here's my basement. No, just kidding, though we did have quite a river babbling down there this week, and trees just like this one are what our old house is built from. When the bedroom was upstairs one could lay in bed and look up at the bark covered beams, hand cut over 200 years ago. The downstairs is slightly less rustic. The basement...well, the basement has a mud floor, stone walls and a river running through it, so you can imagine what it must be like. Frogs live in our basement. I only venture down there when it's absolutely necessary, about once a year, and the rest of the time I pretend that it doesn't exist. Apparently all the previous owners of this house did much the same throughout the centuries.

Much of Rhode Island, my native state, is underwater tonight and I was shocked to see images of submerged cars and people rowing their boats down the streets on the national news tonight while I huffed and puffed through my workout at the gym. My brother, who is in the somewhat less waterlogged northern part of the state, has promised to send some photos tonight - perhaps I'll post them. Here in the hills, everyone who was complaining about the snow a month ago is now complaining about the rain. A few months from now they'll be complaining about the heat and humidity. "Don't knock the weather" someone once said, "if it didn't change once in a while nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation." There's some truth.

Speaking of truth, I just caught up on an article posted in the local newspaper last week, For Some, Catamounts a Hilltown Presence. I would love to link to the piece, but ridiculously, the newspaper only allows subscribers to access the online archives. The gist of the article is that more and more people are claiming to have encountered mountain lions in this area but the State Department of Fisheries and Wildlife continues to deny the claims without solid evidence — scat, or a photograph. One woman professed to spotting a half-eaten deer carcass in the branches of a tree, too heavy to have been the work of a bobcat. Needless to say, the thought of encountering something large, strong and hungry enough to drag a deer up a tree will linger with me during my walks in the woods, joining the already intimidating images of rapacious coyote packs, ravenous black bears and rarely-seen-but-entirely-possible poisonous snakes. Another quote, "Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed." I have pictures of catamounts and copperheads coming out of my darkroom, how about you?