Tag: rain

Collectanea 29.25 Topography-Hell-Cubs

/ Derek Mueller

Week of July 14, 2025

Travel

We traveled to Michigan this week, Sunday through Thursday, so Collectanea slipped from routine to resting pose. Laptop in backpack. Vary your compositional yoga. Trip was two very different Airbnbs in and around Washtenaw County, winding routes through Dexter, Chelsea, Manchester, Saline, and Milan, then through Pinckney, Gregory, and Unadilla. A swim at Pickerel Lake. Ice cream in Hell. A just so-so “glop” taco salad in Depot Town. A Zoom meeting from a cafe. Catching up with friends and family as much as time and coordination allowed. Great to see some yas; sorry to miss some yas! And then back to Virginia, across Ohio and for too long stormed upon in West Virginia.

Airbnb #1

Figure 1. Der hund, relieved to be out of the car.

Ice Water

Figure 2. Shifted plans and there was Sweetwaters delivering cool-off refreshments.

Anecdoted Topography of Ann Arbor Chance

Figure 3. Before brunch, Zola Bistro. Outdoor options, calling ahead to learn which places were easy-agreeable to Feta’s companionably sitting sidetable: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Jolly Pumpkin, Hell Saloon, too, were welcoming.

Airbnb #2

Figure 4. Portage Lake near Pinckney. Much to say about this place, but for that very reason, I’ll let it go, unsaid and unreviewed. No comment. No stars.

Take A Stick! Do Not Take A Stick.

Figure 5. Feta passed on Hell’s Doggie Library, perhaps because the offerings were not as appealing as the many sticks back at home, perhaps because she determined that this is exactly the sort of conditional enticement an officer of the devil would place before an unsuspecting canine. 😈

Downpours of Charleston, WV

Figure 6. Thunder and lightning and downpours and slow-downs for what felt like hours on the drive back to Virginia.

Cutie-pies, Cerberus

Figure 7. Back at the holler, Friday morning, this pair of black bear cubs playfully sauntered over the creek, along the yard, pausing, hummingbird nectar I smell?, at the walnut tree before heading up the embankment behind the mailboxes again.

Now What

The rest of July is a heap of review tasks and further syllabizing ENGL3844 into existence, plotting out two fall conference presentations, painting some more of the shed, keeping the hummingfeeders nectared, the tiny birdkin fueled, fed.

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the eighth in this series from Week 29 of 2025, or the Week of July 14). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

The vulture guardian, Hell, Mich. #travelogue #rollcall

Helene Says

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
“Tropical Storm” Helene waterblading inland on Friday.

Always understood Wonder Hollow to be a soil course, a place where the mountain’s old and crumbling footings hold loosely: clay, rock, rubble, roots. With enough rain, the ground softens to mud. Add even more rain, the mud pushes back and water surfaces. Multiply by the slopes and angles, and, well, I guess the equation is water makes way and a soil course is just a relatively drier version of a water course. TropSto Helene made its way inland overnight. By now, noontime on Friday, its outspun ribbons are with wind and spray lashing at SW Virginia and lots of other places not especially well landscaped for giving water anyplace to go. The mood here is medium suspenseful; every little while wondering, is this the worst of it?

Rainwater collecting next to Side Shed at Wonder Hollow.

Lost power at home around mid-morning when I was making way to campus for office hours and figuring I could get a few things done here in Blacksburg. Raincoat, overshoes, umbrella. The Appalachian Power notification said the estimated restoration time was Sunday night at 11 p.m., but once I checked the map and saw we were part of a 1000+ outage, the scale gave me hope, and the power was restored within two hours.

Rare rapids at the French drain.

A. took a few photos of the holler-turned-river, the highest water we have seen in these three years. The four pullets had to be moved, as the chicken tractor happened to be parked in the middle yard as the waterway formed. Wisely they’d taken to their coop, which is I guess 30 inches off the ground, so while it was alarming, no lasting harm came of it.

More rainshed, mid-yard.

The one lasting harm of the day, so far, is that Helene toppled the century-plus oak at the back of the holler, near the phone of the wind. It was massive, healthy, a leaning elder and a friend back there, its branches patting me on the shoulder when I mowed, else giving shade to deer who often gathered under it. Can’t come up with much more to say about it, so witness it, sit quiet in that witnessing, rehearsing its wonder so as not to forget it too quickly. In this era of intensifying weather, what?, is AI gonna plant a new one, flex its might and set it vertical again, restore its roothold? Right, quiet, witnessing.

And otherwise safe, if soaked.

Still more rainshed, mid-yard.
On its side, the century-plus oak at the back of the holler. Maker only knows how the see-through catalpa next to it held on.

Hail Possible

/ Derek Mueller

Figure 1. Office window during a heavy rainstorm.

Shanks 315, a Thursday afternoon, sideways rain crosshatched with 45 degree angled rain crosshatched with vertical rain crosshatched with my own break from letter writing crosshatched with a curiosity about whether this WordPress app I’ve had my my phone since forever will actually Thunder! Lightning!

Brought my umbrella, good thing. Will walk home between 5-6 after the rain has passed, good thing. App works for posting, good thing.

“Rain” AND “Routes”

/ Derek Mueller

Imagined Geographies

A Wednesday morning. 9 a.m. An hour into the day’s office hours. This is the first rainy day of the semester; high humidity makes for a muggy Equinox Eve. Soon I will pack my things and walk a GPStimated three-quarters of a mile across campus to teach my first class of the day, ENGL326: Research Writing, in which we will develop short lists of Halavaisian engine-searching precepts and then step through the setting up of Google Search Alerts via RSS.

The rain will make today’s walking sloppier–a puddle-dodging trek past the library and the science building. This is a new problem intensified (potentially) by the temporary relocation of our campus offices. On teaching days this semester I walk almost three miles back and forth across campus: Rackham, Hoyt, McKenny, Hoyt, Rackham, Bowen Lot. When the weather makes clear skies and 68F, all of the back and forth is fine. But when it rains. But when it rains.

And then there’s an unexpected umbrella frailty, or umbrailty if you are still in the mood for new words on this gray morning: my finest umbrella, an old and sturdy stand-by since my time in Syracuse, is failing. The handle slips off from time to time, and now it will not close up for stowing. The clasp does not catch. The canopy wants always to be open (a sure sign of its late-life wish for vigor and lasting purpose), and this makes some people think my unkempt umbrella is the cause for today’s showers. I have a second umbrella. Green and free (a gift from REC/IM), it does not withstand winds like the aging gear I just described. For today, at least, it might be enough to keep me dry and out of scorn-shot from the superstitious out there.

First Soccer

/ Derek Mueller

Getting Organized

Conditions were unkind cruel Saturday for Is.’s first soccer outing of the spring: 45F, gusting winds, light rain, swampy pitch. For a first-time experience, I would call this one heckuva difficult test–a hard check of their pre-K grit. Just forty-five minutes out there proved some admirable soccer stick-to-it-ness for these kids and their families. They typically run a 30-minute practice followed by a 15-minute game, but Team Green, our “opponent,” wanted to start the match early because their parents and kids were mutinous with complaining about the elements. We got the game underway without much if any practice session. Having served many seasons as Ph.’s coach, I am strictly a parent this time around (yeah, I’ll volunteer to hand out the shirts or distribute snack, but no coaching). Is. is three-almost-four; Ph.’s soccer rounds helped us put youth sports in perspective years ago. And so Saturday was a lot of fun. Is. ended the session with a smile, and she has asked to kick around several times since.

Reflecting on the event, Is. said, “I’m on the blue team.”