I was headed toward New York City, but I’d never reach it Manhattan was 107 miles away.
I was thinking of him as I hiked up a ridgeline in the Catskills in three feet of snow last February. One soldier, Captain Thomas Parker, describing the march to the Battle of New Bern, wrote of the “ muddiest mud ever invented, being knee-deep and of a black, unctuous, slippery character.” Greek historian and biographer Plutarch wrote in his biography of the Roman general Gaius Marius that “extraordinary rains generally follow great battles,” and well over a thousand years later, soldiers in the Civil War believed this as they slogged through the muck and mud of battlefields, attributing the rain that had made the mud to the booms and blasts of battle. Or, at least, a side effect that slows the advance of enemies. Weather modification has long been a dream of armies, mud being a weapon of war. It starts here and you can read more here: It brought flooding, and extended from these hills later to Laos and Vietnam, and it was developed in part by Kurt Vonnegut's brother. Harper’s ran my essay on snow, rain, the city's reservoir system and how one Cold War weapon called on Kepler and changed my village. The nature of ice and snow, Johannes Kepler, war, water and weather modification - all as it centers around one tiny village: Margaretville, NY.
