Nobody said fighting climate change was going to be easy. But I didn’t realize how hard it was until I woke up in the middle of the night wondering why my right arm felt useless. Allow me to explain.
We have a swimming pool built to my mother’s specifications in the 1980’s. She lived a fantasy driven life and one of her fantasies was to have a pool that resembled a woodland pond that one happened upon.
There were many obstacles to the successful completion of the project. But one of the most glaring is that a chlorinated aquamarine body of water looks like nothing found in the deciduous forests of the Northeast.
Now that I think of it, several years after she left us, nature is trying to help her achieve her dreams by occasionally turning the water an earthy brown. The way it accomplishes this feat, against all odds, since I maintain the pool with ungodly amounts of chorine, in both liquid and tablet form, is to deposit as much of the hillside as it can during the torrential rainstorms that are becoming commonplace in this part of the world.
Fortunately, the entire pool isn’t surrounded by a steep embankment. Only one side of it is. So my thought was that if I could buy sandbags and use them to block the rain gods’ preferred route for pushing sediment into the pool I might be able harmlessly to divert the muddy sludge away and into the woods.
Knowing nothing about flood prevention I went online and discovered there exists something called tube sandbags. As unfamiliar as I was with the concept I’ve since discovered they’re commonplace, their uses including providing cars and trucks traction in snow and ice.
They accomplish this, I suppose, because of their magnificent weight, providing a nearly immoveable object. Sand, when stuffed into a long tube turns out to be extremely heavy. To be precise, seventy pounds each for the ones I was eyeballing at Lowe’s. And I thought I’d need a minimum of three or four of them.
I found them at their location off Fairview Avenue in Hudson, NY in some distant aisle in the cavernous store, approximately where planks of lumber large enough to build a house are stockpiled.
Maybe it was hubris. Or foolish manly pride, which I suppose amounts to the same thing, sparked by those soaring shelves of building material. But I thought better than to summon help, wrestling three of these unruly snakes into my shopping cart.
Besides, many of the employees at Lowe’s appear to be even older than I am, well past retirement age. So I don’t know how much assistance they’d be able to offer. Of course, then I had to transfer my purchases to the trunk of my SUV and from there down to the pool.
Long story short. I spent a good hour lifting, rolling, dragging and cajoling two-hundred-ten pounds of dead weight around until I finally maneuvered it into place ahead of that afternoon’s promised apocalyptic thunderstorms.
That’s only one theory why my right arm, that night, felt like it was hanging from a thread, and still does. The other is even stupider. That morning, before heading to Lowe’s, I escorted my grandchildren to the local playground. Other than having to pick them up and deposit them in the park’s toddler-friendly rubber bucket shaped swings, they posed no threat to my welfare.
The problem was that I couldn’t resist attempting a pull-up on some overhead bars made for that purpose. I was to discover, though only in retrospect, that the feature’s target audience is probably children or teenagers. Not a seventy-year-old man who already had surgery on one shoulder and will probably now need it on the other.
But back to those tube sandbags. They seemed to have done the trick. Either that or the promised storms weren’t as dramatic as forecast because the hill held and the newly opened pool seemed not to have gone from turquoise to depressing brown, requiring professional intervention, as it did a couple of times last summer.
But the season is still young. And does this mean that every time a thunderstorm threatens I’ll have to scramble the sandbags? I can’t leave them where they are and let them become a permanent fixture in the landscape, like the waterfall my mother also had built. They’re an eyesore but I haven’t decided how or where to store them. Or how to get them there. A cart? A hand truck? My 2017 Honda CR-V?
Yet any effort to intervene might only exacerbate the precarious condition of my shoulder, arm and the ligaments that connect the two. If it sounds like my attitude is similar to facing the risk posed by finding a cornered snapping turtle on my lawn and trying to transport it elsewhere you wouldn’t be far off.
On the other hand, every time it poured last summer and turned the pool into a brackish pit, it cost me a couple of hundred bucks in cleaning and chemicals. My tube sandbags are only a fraction of the price. Not counting the probable costs of surgery and physical therapy.
Plus, it remains to be seen whether they’d actually work in a torrential downpour. I also learned my lesson at the playground. It will be a while until I attempt another pull-up.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
