The mountains upstate are the tap, the fire hydrant, the wellhead for the city. Decades ago the thirsty megalopolis bought land to serve as gigantic offsite gutters and rain barrels. It evicted villagers and their cemeteries, dammed streams and drowned roads, and dug underground aqueducts to keep the millionaires and the slum dwellers a hundred miles to the southeast clean and refreshed. The water that remains unfunneled is a never-ending source of delight, every valley hiding some stream tumbling in a downward clownish course. The larger lower streams meander between farms and broken-down bungalow colonies until they too suddenly fall fifty or a hundred feet, then resume their stately pace until they empty, out of sight, into the big river (technically a fjord) that flows to the harbor, then to the Atlantic. Or so it goes, until — as happened this year — there is a drought.
Our friend the resort owner supplied the science. His property (four generations in the same family) has maintained a weather station for over a hundred years. This August, he told me with the authority of hand-noted data, was the driest in all their records, this September the fifth-driest.
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