the letter M

what i learned today is that my knees, hips, and feet really need more time to recover from my little adventure in maine.

but flask, i hear you say. aren't you home? weren't you going to show us pictures and tell us stories?

why, yes. i WAS home, but then i went out again and am now wandering happily (ok, maybe not exactly happily) around southern vermont, cranking back and forth on route nine. see, all you really need to know about travel in southern vermont is that there's only one road that goes across. this is on account of the mountains. if you're trying to imagine an elevation profile along route nine between brattleboro and bennington (two cities that are forever irritated when people from away can't remember which one is which, which is kind of like the towns of pittsford and pittsfield, which are on opposite sides of the mountains and although they're not far apart, you can't get from one to the other on account of no road over the mountains...)

...uh, anyway. if you're trying to imagine the topography of route nine, it is a lot like the letter M. you go up and up and up and then down a little and then up a little and then down and down and down. there are runaway truck ramps at disturbingly frequent intervals, and mashed guardrails at even more disturbingly frequent intervals.

in the flooding from tropical storm irene we lost huge parts of route nine and the best advice for how to get across southern vermont was to go down into massachusetts  and use their roads.

speakin' o' which, it's three years on and here in wilmington they're still doing reconstruction. i know, yeah, i keep telling you i'm going to post picctures and tell you about that time i came down here and did demo work the october after, but i keep getting behind in adventure telling.

so yeah, i'm in wilmington at the moment, which is pretty much the middle of the M.

which sort of explains why the flooding was so bad.

here in the middle of the M it has been raining filthy soaking steady rain all day. if i had known it was not raining for most of the day down at the feet of the M, i would have gone down there and enjoyed dryness earlier in the day.