Deb and I had been holding forth in Virginia since early May. For the first time in years, I didn’t come north for my annual spring fishing trip. We stayed south to help my mother tend to my ailing father, who remains stricken with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and congestive heart failure. His slowly declining condition has been considered week to week for going on five months. My mother, bless her heart, suggested we head north for a while and have some fun.  vercoming our guilt, we announced on Aug. 23 that we’d leave for camp on Aug. 30.

Stressed out from making the difficult decision to abandon my mom, I laid down on my bed at 1:45 p.m. for a short siesta. Just as I nodded off, my netherworld began shaking. At first I thought Deb was mixing a batch of pina coladas in her new 60 Hp KitchenAid five-speed blender. When that baby starts chewing ice cubes, the cats disappear for three days. Next I thought I was back on the USS Shangri-la, lying in my bunk under the number three wire, with aircraft recovery in progress. Finally, I heard Deb yell, it’s an earthquake. I rolled off the bed and hustled to the back deck just in time for the quake to end. Our neighbors were gathering out in the street checking for body parts and nervously relating personal earthquake horror stories.

Turns out, the epicenter for the 5.8 magnitude quake was Mineral, Virginia, 95 miles southwest of our home in Falls Church. We pretty much got the full Monty. Several houses on our street suffered cracked chimneys, and the nearby National Cathedral and Washington Monument sustained substantial damage. Our damage consisted of twenty of Deb’s rubber stamps tumbling off their decorative shelves. Several aftershocks up to a 4.5 magnitude were reported, but I was sleeping when they hit and I could’ve cared less.

How weird, a Virginia earthquake extending all the way to Inlet. Ho, hum.

The next day I forgot about the quake and started our week long go-to-camp house shutdown. Stop the Sunday Washington Post. Change our Post Office address. Change our NetFlix address. Schedule our lawn mowing service. Store the lawn furniture. Take down the cats’ bird feeders. Eat one last Peruvian chicken from Pollo Rico. Run around like idiots. You know all that last minute peace-of-mind kinda stuff. Foolishly, we decided to watch the news instead of a Law and Order rerun, and bam, the weather guy mentions someone called Irene.

No problemo. The first “models” had Hurricane Irene taking a hard right at the Bahamas and eventually sloshing ashore on Greenland. That’s cool. Our hurricane experts know their stuff and not to worry. On we went with our get-a-way preparations. For the next three days however, Jungle Jim Cantore and his egghead cohorts at the Weather Channel became increasingly excited about the possibility of posing in front of underpaid cameramen in gale force winds along the entire length of the east coast. We’re trying to pack up to leave and Jungle Jim is now telling us to batten down the hatches and get ready for a Biblical catastrophe. Irene slammed us on Saturday, Aug. 27. She sat off the Virginia/Maryland coast for 20 hours, spewing rain and wind inland as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains. We had five inches of rain and wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour. Predictably, our power went out at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28. Air temperature 85 degrees, humidity 2000 percent. No A/C, no P/C, and no TV. I could read my Kindle with my LL Bean LED headlamp.  

Fortunately, Dominion Power was on the ball and we had our power back on by 10:30 a.m. on Sunday.       

Monday broke sunny and cool, perfect for cleaning up hundreds of downed sticks and limbs, courtesy of Irene. At least we still had a day left for packing the car for our escape to the Big Woods. But once again the experts choked. Irene wasn’t turning for Long Island and the Maine coast as promised. No, she was headed for Albany and the Adirondacks.  

Are you kidding me? Floods, 200 year old covered bridges demolished, famine, pestilence and locusts now threatened to block our travels northward. Maybe our decision to sneak away for a while was negatively influencing our karma. In my heart I knew my dad would head straight for his beloved Adirondacks if he could. He actually smiled when I told him we were going to check on his camp. We aren’t inherently bad people, honest.   

So we held to our plan. We left for camp at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 30. We made it around the dreaded Beltway and up I-270, scoffing at all the poor slobs in the southbound lanes, who were stuck in their daily stop-and-go commutes from hell. Everything was fine until we hit Emmitsburg, Md., where our psycho-cat, Bogie, decided it was time to poop and puke in his cage. Cleaning up his mess cost us a half hour. From there, we sailed up to Harrisburg to I-81 and all the way to Syracuse. Bam, our fast route along the Thruway to Verona was shut down due to Irene. The alternative, Rt. 31, turned out to be pretty nice. We lost a little time, but Deb discovered another stamp store. How nice.   

We arrived at camp at 4 p.m. Our neighbor and caretaker, Sean Manzi, had our lawn mowed and trimmed and the camp was in great shape. Sleep came easy that night.  Maybe our karma is okay after all.  

Since we arrived, we’ve been swimming in Seventh Lake, had great veal parmesan at Frankie’s and a Larry Burger at the Tavern, seen Paul Case and the Nards and fireworks at the Old Forge waterfront, and made up for lost time with our local pals.

We ignored Tropical Storm Lee, that Labor Day weekend cold front that dumped buckets of rain on the Raquette Lake end of summer party, and the threat of dastardly Hurricane Katia. Like my father always said, make the best of every day you’re in the Adirondacks, come rain or shine.  

That’s good karma, Boppa.