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flappin' yer yap
Friday, December 5 2008
I'd been down at the greenhouse tinkering with this and that and when I went back to the house, I found Gretchen in a rage. She'd just had a bad encounter on the "farm road" that goes past our property on its way to an old farm whose owners have encouraged us to walk our dogs there. The farm road crosses a number of properties on the way to that farm, starting with our uphill neighbors, with whom we cooperated on the purchase of 15 acre tract a year or so ago. Further in, the road crosses property belonging to a Jοhn Rosα who lives in Saugerties. Rosα owns lots of forest in the area, and we actually ran into him along the Stick Trail a couple years ago and he gave us permission to walk on his land. So all that should have been settled history. You can imagine, then, Gretchen's surprise this morning when a hunter along the Farm Road accosted her and demanded to know who had given her permission to be on the farm road. Taken aback, she asked who he was, adding that she had permission to walk at the old farm. The hunter huffed that he was Jοhn Rosα's son, adding that she'd have to find another way to get to the farm. So then Gretchen explained how she'd run across Jοhn Rosα and he'd said she could walk on his land. That should have been the end of it, but then the son tried to call his dad to confirm this, but his non-iPhone wouldn't cooperate, mustering only a single lousy bar. As Gretchen walked away, she muttered something about how there were people starving in the world and here he was worked up about this. "Stop flappin' yer yap," said the huffy hunter. At other points in this conversation, the huffy hunter alternated between saying he "might shoot" Gretchen, threatening her with arrest for criminal trespass, and claiming to be some sort of officer. (Gretchen suspects he's a member of a volunteer fire department and suffers from a lack of manly endowment several standard deviations short of the mean.)
While normally Gretchen handles social situations better than I do, I got the feeling that she'd been a little too snappy in this exchange, particularly given the isolation of the environment. This Rosα son seems like a real red state hater, a guy with lots of resentments around which he can formulate no coherent explanations. Such guys often love Sarah Palin but hate women. He'd probably accosted Gretchen in hopes of being able to play the dominating man, but instead he'd brought out her hard ass side. It hadn't played out the way he'd expected, and now we have to deal, temporarily at least, with the concentrated beam of his red state resentment. Happily, though, this was the first time either of us had encountered him in six years of walking on his daddy's property nearly every day. Outside of hunting season, he's as rare as an Ivory Billed Woodpecker. And someone with this sort of anger never focuses his anger on any one person for long, particularly at the onset of a World Depression II.
This evening Gretchen invited over a new couple to partake of our pizza party ritual. The female half of this party was a photographer whom Gretchen had met on a Chronogram photo shoot. Her husband was unusually simpatico with me. For example, we talked at length about wood stove technology and the creosote danger of 90 degree turns in the pipe (we don't have any, but he has two). Later we gave a tour of the house and we even showed our new friends my urinal system, something we only show the people we think will get it. The pizza, by the way, was a real standout of deliciousness.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?081205 feedback
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