In Like a Wildebeest

View from the dike path. See all that blue water?
Sea Street and people’s yards are under there.

March that is. In like a rabid, crazified wildebeest with serious, distinct notes of Tazmanian Devilness – out like a newborn, housebroken baby kitten, hopefully.

View from our porch on Friday – Bomb Cyclone Day

It's Day 3 of Mother Nature Strikes Back: Valhalla Gets Zapped. I woke yesterday morning, hoping beyond hope that during the night, the magic electricity fairies would've fixed the lines and we'd have light and heat once more. No such luck. Also too, unlike past flooding storms, the waters did NOT recede at evening's low tide. Nope.

From a column in the local rag, the Patriot Ledger:

Houghs Neck was an island all day Saturday (Ed. note: Friday too), as floodwaters remained on all the roads in and out of the peninsula neighborhood, cutting off both vehicle travel and power.

So the Neckers* took to the dike — the walkway from State Street off Palmer Street up to the main part of Houghs Neck. Tugging wagons laden with gas canisters, lugging bags laden with food and beer, they made their way in the hundreds back and forth from the peninsula.

That "walkway?" It's a mile+ long thin, deeply rutted, unpaved path. I've triked it a lot – it's a beautiful, wooded way to get from home to my boss's house in Germantown. Still, even on dry days, mountain trike tires (versus street) would be much more appropriate. Smooth is NOT the adjective to use here.

Hygiene by candlelight – how romantic!

Not knowing how long Sea Street, the only road on and off the Neck, would be under water (and NOT knowing that the local elementary school had set up a shelter with coffee and electrical outlets), I suited up, grabbed one of The Amazing Bob's canes and set out in search of an electrical outlet that worked AND a cuppa coffee.

Coco, who could hear the storm,
has been scared and insecure and in need of lots of loving.
OF COURSE!

Lemme just say this, I rely on the kindness of strangers. Triking the jarringly bumpy and furrowed dike path and walking it, especially in yesterday's still très muddy state, are two entirely different things. At exceptionally nasty points (ones where I could clearly see my coming  fall, resultant sodden, boggy clothes AND a full on inability to get my pins firmly beneath me again), fellow walkers stopped, gave me their hands and shoulders to hang onto and helped me through. People can be awesome.

Between the dike path, a few attempts at other, less dangerous but sadly flooded streets and then, once on dry land in Quincy proper, I logged 4.5 miles worth of hard walking. Not bad but, OOF, such a challenge.

What about our hero, Jen? She was unable to get home from work Friday as, by noon, we'd already islandized. She'd intended to park on a side street and walk the dike path home but the winds were still insanely high. She drove to her mother's in Plymouth for the night and made it back to Valhalla by noon yesterday.

We're still without electricity and heat BUT the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers have been out. The Neck is no longer an island. Yea us!

Jen just texted to say that she got a message from National Grid saying that we won't have power back until Tuesday night. Joy. It's like camping and, as y'all know, I HATE camping!

*Neckas! That should be Neckas. Clearly the journo's not from these pahts!