Life Expectancy

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

---Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

The town of Roscoe sits at the confluence of the Willomec Creek and the Beaverkill River. It is tucked into a niche in the Catskills, a valley through which the Beaverkill traipses like a dancer. Unlike the Mississippi, say, or the Columbia, there is no sense that this is a river of broad, burly shoulders, pushing aside huge mounds of dirt on its way to the sea. No, this is a gentle river, home to thousands of lazy trout, and eventually, the river flows into the Delaware and eventually, Chesapeake Bay.
But back in late June, central New York state and northern Pennsylvania were drenched in ten inches of rain. And the tiny little Beaverkill became leviathan. Roscoe, Walton, Livingston Manor were under eight feet of water. People drowned. Houses were carried downstream. Roads were washed away.

The past two days, I walked along the river. It had returned to its pre-flood daintiness, and in fact, I was told that the river was now so shallow that you couldn’t take a canoe down it. You’d have to portage the canoe through the shallows.

The signs of the destruction were everywhere. Part of the motel where I stayed, a motel I’ve stayed at several times now because it sits on the banks of the river, had washed away. People told me how they’d watched the building run into the bridge, and then, smashed by the torrent, watched as it was carried miles downstream.

On the door to my room was a dark mark a foot or so above the door handle. It was the waterline. Inside the room, only the bare essentials had been restored. There wasn’t even a phone. Just a bed, and a couple of pieces of furniture that looked the worse for wear. The bathroom had been scrubbed clean, but the smell of bleach and mold was overpowering, sickening. In the corner of the bathroom grew a fungus that looked like kelp, something neolithic, as if it belonged on the sea floor.

So, I did a lot of walking. The sky was a shade of blue that would break your heart—so much deeper than forget-me-not, but not as dark as the indigo indications of an encroaching storm.

How to describe the ripple of water over stone? As I walked along the Beaverkill yesterday, the sun on the back of my neck, its warmth on my shoulders as if someone had draped his arm there, the water moved. The movement is subtle in most places; your senses tell you that it’s in fact, still, but the water moving across the stones dispels the notion of stillness. The sun glints in such a way off the angles of the water, the disruption on the surface as the water moves over stones. And the stones are testament to motion. The stones are not jagged. There is not a rough edge left on any of them. They are ovoid, softened by the caress of water.

I’ve noticed these changes in my face of late. My face is softening, like a baby’s face, the skin that used to cling so tautly to the bones beneath are letting go, sliding. Maybe I have smiled too much in my life. Perhaps I’ve focused on too many things out of my reach. The furrow in my brow now is a gorge, a chasm in the otherwise smooth plain of my forehead.

Michael Bouldin's piece about healthcare reminded me of a piece I wrote in December for my newsletter. I think it makes a good followup to Michael's piece, so I reprint it here.

Health insurance. Joy and I were discussing health insurance after hearing a NewYork 1 report that uninsured people were more likely to be turned away from an emergency room and sent to a clinic than insured people. Now, hospitals who DO turn away patients based on insurance rather than severity of the injury are liable to law suits, but we all know that the chances of a law suit changing things are small since those who don’t have insurance are unlikely to have much legal counsel.

What is wrong with our insurance system? Too many people are uninsured and because of that do not have adequate health care available to them. But, that is only one part of the problem. What about those who ARE insured? There are long waiting times to get an appointment. Often you don’t get to choose your physician. You often don’t have a primary care physician who follows you through the years and knows you. Care is determined based on a business model where profit (or at least minimal cost) takes precedence over what the physician and patient want or the injury requires.