Helping a friend and neighbor...

Helping a friend and neighbor...  I've written before about Tim D.'s health challenges.  One of the consequences of his current state is that he's no longer strong enough to move his irrigation pipes.  These are “hand line”: 3" diameter, 30' long pieces of aluminum pipe that weigh roughly 40 pounds each.  That weight is a little misleading, though, as generally when one goes to pick up a piece of pipe it's still full of water.  To empty it, you lift up one end – and that weight is more like 100 pounds.  Tim uses about 25 pieces of this hand line when irrigating.  It takes 6 days to complete a cycle of watering, each day moving the pipe to a new location in the fields.  Then after around four days of no watering, he starts the cycle of watering all over again.

So this is a non-trivial amount of work.  One adult, working alone, can move all the pipe in around two hours (including time for clearing clogged sprinklers, walking to the edges of the field to turn valves on and off, etc.).  During that two hours, you might walk a couple of miles in addition to all the weight lifting.  You'll also get soaked when fixing sprinklers, and your feet and jeans bottoms will be covered with mud. 

Tim can't do this, so what happens to his fields?  Nothing!  That's because his neighbors (including me) are moving his pipes for him – cheerfully, happy to be of service to Tim.  Three adults and a bevy of kids are doing it.  If we needed more, there would be a small army volunteering to help.  This is so heartening to see!  And I get great satisfaction from being a part of it...

Day 6...

Day 6...  AKA “Escape from New York!"”  We spent way too much time on the New York State Thruway, otherwise known as I-90.  The tolls on this road beggar belief.  If someone tried to do this in the Rocky Mountain States, I'm fairly certain the population's reaction would include as much high-velocity lead as was required to eliminate it.  In the Empire State, the sheepish population just pays...

We got off the Thruway at Utica, and made our way on back roads across the rest of New York, all of Vermont, and into Plymouth, New Hampshire where we checked into the delightful Tea Rose Inn.  At right was Debbie's favorite part of this B&B: the feline greeter.  :)  The scenery on our drive today was beautiful: the best of New England's rolling hills (which for some reason they call “mountains”), excessive amounts of chlorophyll, rushing streams, and lots of lakes and ponds.  This was Debbie's first time ever seeing the northern Appalachians.  I was a bit surprised by the relative poverty of most places we drove through – I guess the heyday of the Adirondacks is over.

We went to bed tired of being in the car, and preparing ourselves for tomorrow's descent upon the south Maine coast...