Stray pharmaceuticals

I am imagining the scene:
The walker returns to her home after a brisk morning constitutional on the Old Croton Aqueduct during which nothing unusual happened unless you consider four white–tailed bucks –sporting their velvety springtime antler nubs - grazing by the path as unusual, and sadly for the gardeners among us, the white-tailed deer are as common as a cold. The walker pours herself a cup of coffee, sits at her kitchen table and prepares to read the latest issue of Backyard Poultry. She has heard a lot about chickens lately and has decided to acquire a pair of Rhode Island Red hens. Then the pain strikes. She doubles over as the terrible constriction spreads across her chest. But she recognizes the pain as angina and knows she has a solution: in her pocket she always carries a small bottle of sub lingual Nitrostat 0.4, otherwise known as nitroglycerin. Those little pills placed under the tongue work remarkably quickly to ease the pain. The walker reaches into her pocket for the reassuring bottle, and instead, discovers that whatever small hole was there before is now a full-grown hole, through which her tiny bottle must have escaped. Because the nitroglycerin is not there, even as the pain worsens.

This is as far as I have imagined. Because his morning while I was out walking on the aqueduct, between Washington and Pinecrest and a few dozen yards north of the ventilation tower inscribed with MARRY ME JOEL, I found a small bottle of the above-mentioned nitroglycerin. And it disturbs me to imagine that I have in my possession the means to alleviate the pain and suffering of the angina-stricken walker who preceded me on the path.
I have already called our local constabulary to alert them to my find. No ideas.What to do? Is this the same nitroglycerin that blows things up?

*"Angina is a medical term derived from the classical Greek word ankhon (ἄγχω) meaning to strangle, throttle, or choke. It may refer to a constriction in the airway or, by extension, a restriction in blood flow."

What is permissible? & Little Blue Book #556

I’ve seen a lot of human/canine interactions and many unexpected things on the aqueduct: fucking bunnies, a proposal (Marry Me Joel) a drug dealer’s pit bull, a porn star’s mother, a lost and possibly rabid skunk, a very short man with a metal detector, families not speaking to each other, terror and longing. But I have never before seen a butterfly net.
Today I saw a man with a net. And I couldn’t help myself. I asked him what it was for? I didn’t think it was necessarily for butterflies because it feels (to me) early for butterflies and also because I am under the impression that butterfly collecting has gone the way of stamp collecting (lamentable). Though in the case of butterflies, this is not because of email but because Science values experimental biology more than classification these days.
He said he was out to catch butterflies.
I said, Are there any this early?
And he said, Yes, the cabbage whites. [Pieris rapae; nonnative in North America, considered a pest on cabbages]
I stopped there.

I wanted to ask why he wanted to catch cabbage whites and what he planned to do with them, and if he had an existing collection of dead butterflies pinned to heavy pieces of paper and shedding their dusty flecks of color.
But I didn’t, unsure of what is permissible. How much is it permissible to ask a stranger questions that may or may not turn out to be personal?
I was troubled enough to consult Emily Post’s Blue Book of Social Usage and other volumes of Etiquette. As many of you know - and have had occasion to consult - I have several of these, including Miss Manners, Charlotte Ford, Manners for Millions & Society Small Talk , in the downstairs powder room.
Though happy to address such important issues as eating artichokes, afternoon tea, chaperons, chambermaids, forks (8 index entries), uniforms for servants, eating squab and jelly, Emily says nothing at all about nosy questions, or impertinent questions, or rude questions or when a perfectly reasonable question is nosy, rude or impertinent, and when it is not.
Which, frankly, is the kind of help I could use.

And I was wrong about it being early, at least it’s not early for Cabbage Whites, it is never early for Cabbage Whites.


And what am I to make of the hidden makeshift room about 20 yards from my short cut down from Draper park to the aqueduct. Someone, or some ones, have laid out a square floor, about 12’ x 12’ of interlocking green plastic, and on top of it at one end is a red molded plastic picnic table and seats, and on the opposite end are two tires placed symmetrically. In fact seen from above the tires could look like eyes and the red picnic table like a mouth (not smiling though, grim, serious) on a green face. No nose though.

Not that this has anything to do with a butterfly net on the aqueduct, but since I brought up etiquette, I would like to share a tidbit I just read in Hints on Etiquette (Little Blue Book #556) by Esther Floyd, who was a vegetarian but most avowedly not a naturist: “Without food we die. Without clothes we were better dead.”
She also has harsh words to say about “little finger crookers”.

Battling the Earworm

I am just now returned from a walk on the Old Croton Aqueduct featuring a newly dead garter snake and a possibly, but not very likely, missing girl. As I came down my usual shortcut, I noticed the girl leave her backpack in the foliage just in front of the quarry gate, and then go off on a run. Later, past Pinecrest drive, I saw a couple standing to the side of the path, looking at the ground in the oddest way – for a moment I thought the man was retarded and the woman was taking him for an outing and humoring him. But no, they were looking at the garter snake. The man said that a bicyclist had just run over the garter snake – and indeed I could see the tire tracks right across his middle – but the couple weren’t sure if the snake was dead or not. Noting the ruby-like beads of blood around its mouth and head, I said I was pretty sure it was very dead. The man said they hadn’t seen the blood. The woman stood back with her hands over her mouth, looking as if she was either afraid of snakes or distressed by the death of a snake. Or perhaps both. As garter snakes go, it was a good size.

Half a mile later, just before I was about to go back up the hill and take my shortcut home, I saw a police car parked on the aqueduct. There are no vehicles allowed on the aqueduct and I always take it amiss when public officials consider themselves above this rule. Then I saw on top of the police car’s hood were a jacket and a backpack. They looked like the backpack the girl had earlier left in the foliage. Why was it on the police car’s hood? Apparently another aqueduct walker had noticed the backpack and called the police, and now he was looking for the girl. I told him I had seen her go running and she looked just fine.
I did not mention to the officer that I am just now reading 2666 and am smack in the middle of the fourth part which is all about the murders of young women in the Mexican border town Bolaño calls Santa Teresa, and which are based on a real string of murders, because it would have been very morbid and not at all helpful.
(I loved the first section of the book about Archimboldi and the literary critics, and at first I wasn’t sure about this section about the murders, but now – have I mentioned it is a very long book? 900 pages long? – I am completely sucked in.)

My intention in going for a walk, other than enjoying the weather and checking to see if the bees were bringing in pollen (they are), was to clear my head of the Beatles’ song, Paperback Writer, which was been my constant earworm since a couple of days ago when I played the answering machine and heard this from CSB’s ex-wife: “I know you’re really busy with the pornographic writer and the bees – O God, wouldn’t your father be horrified – but you call me back or you will see me in 40 minutes.”

At first I had no clue why Paperback Writer showed up in my brain. It wasn’t even one of my favorite Beatles songs. Then I realized that the song playing in my head had become Pornographic Writer, and - finally - I made the connection with the message on the machine.
What I had forgotten was this lyric:
It's the dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn't understand.

The whole point of clearing my brain of the Pornographic Writer earworm was to move forward and be able to describe in all its autumnal glory our walk last week around the former ammunition depot as I tried to explain to Dad that the Trojan War really was started because Paris stole the oh-so-beautiful Helen from Menelaus. But now it’s time to beg a poor bee to sting my little finger and give up her life in the process.

TBMs, the wonder of, plus Saint Turibius

Those of you who are among the cognoscenti of heavy machinery (the sort of thing I associate with the precautions on my Dramamine bottle, as in “Do not use Heavy Machinery when taking this drug.”) have surely heard of the TBM, Tunnel Boring Machine.
But it is, was, new to me and 2 days after my introduction to the TBM the awe and wonder of it persists.
Sunday I attended a lecture at the annual meeting of FOCA (Friends of the Old Croton, my beloved, Aqueduct) about sandhogs, given by a veritable sandhog. He told us that yes, he has a PhD in Geology, but sandhogging pays better.
His PowerPoint included photographs of the above-mentioned TBM,
a machine so huge, so expensive, and so powerful that it can bore through 115 feet of rock a day. This, as compared to the 35 feet that can be accomplished in a day using the old Drill and Blast (D&B) method.
But how, you may well, ask, does the TBM get down into the tunnel? It is dismantled, taken down a 20 feet diameter shaft and then reassembled, subterraneally. As our lecturer pointed out, this guarantees employment to the assemblers and disassemblers.

At the front end of the TBM is a large shield with a rotating cutting wheel on which there are numerous cutter heads to chip away the rock, and behind or around the cutting wheel are rotating buckets that remove the excavated soil. An enormous hydraulic earthworm moves the machine forward, in mere hours gnawing its way through the rock that took billions of years to form.
Our lecturer described his work in the tunnels under NYC, which is enough to give one pause next time you step on the subway or drink tap water but of course there are TBMs tunneling under the Yangtze River in China, in the Gotthard Tunnel in the Alps, all over the world. For more pictures, go here and here.



Back when the Incas and their llamas were walking up and down the Andes there were no tunnels to shorten their route, and things were difficult in other ways as well. The conquistadors came. Which brings us (Yes, it’s a leap) to Saint Turibius de Mongrobejo.
For those interested in the history of New World canonization (See my new book, Absent a Miracle! Buy it! No one will be canonized! ), as I am, Turibius of Mongrobejo is not to be missed. According to Butler his feast day was yesterday, the 27th, but everyone else gives it as March 23, the day of his death.
More to the point is that in a pantheon filled with luminaries whose claims to sainthood are apocryphal, dubious, gruesome or weird, Turibius seems to have been a genuinely good and incredibly busy person.
He was sent as bishop to Lima in 1581 to clean up the mess (corruption, slavery, terrible abuses against the native population) made by the Spanish Conquistadors. Initially, he resisted the appointment on the grounds that he wasn’t even a priest, never mind a bishop. That technicality was quickly dealt with, and he sailed to Peru.
As soon as he arrived in 1581, he started reforming the rapacious and venal clergy he found there. This did not make him popular in certain quarters, but he persevered. He traveled tirelessly though his diocese, which consisted of all of Peru. He learned several Indian dialects and was able to speak directly to the people. He died in 1606, leaving all his property to the poor. St. Rose of Lima (another perpetual virgin, she rubbed her face with pepper and lye to disguise her beauty) was the first New World saint, but Turibius was the one who confirmed her.