The Water Lover

Thursday morning I drove to Brockport in order to sell Jill's car and give her mine. I got there before noon and we headed to a ‘mobile DMV’…BEST THING EVER…we only had to wait about 10 minutes before being called and taking care of everything. It was all just a reminded to me how much I try to avoid going to the the DMV. Even scarier is the fact that I am good at dealing with all of their bologna makes me even happier that our estimated time of departure is getting closer. I heard several people feeling the same way and when they left they basically said "I Hate New York!" It went fairly smoothly although there was some kind of insurance confusion with the buyer, but it was nobody’s fault, and by noon Jill’s Subaru was sold.

After the DMV Jill brought me out into her field where she works because she had to take care of some things before coming up to the boat for the weekend. Originally we were going to do stream measurements, but her professor had some of the equipment so we ended up filling in some loose ends and showing me around. Apparently I wore the completely wrong attire for this event. I came in shorts and my sandals, Jill questioned this because apparently she normally goes out in pants and boots; for good reason. On our adventure we went through weeds and grasses that were about 3 feet tall, then we went through a farmers field which I am pretty sure was recently fertilized, and climbed down some pretty steep slopes. A normal day in Jill’s field work, luckily she didn’t bring me through some other places she had planned on going.

Here is a picture of Buttermilk falls, not the actual Buttermilk falls in Ithaca. Walking up to this was very weird because it was all flat and you would never know that there was a 90ft drop here. The only hint to the falls was the sound of the water and the mist as we approached them, and then came out of a clearing and WOW it was amazing. Normally, doing her research Jill climbs to the bottom of the falls to collect samples of the water coming out of the bedrock, but because of my attire we stayed up top. The bedrock that Buttermilk falls is cutting away at is the Onondaga limestone which is the formation that Jill does her research on. The formation has lots of fractures, which I saw, that alter the groundwater flow in the region; normally water would be flowing north here, but instead it flows east. Jill was explaining to me at different locations that it is important to understand the groundwater here because in 1970 a train spilled with 30 tons of Trichloroethylene, which is a highly carcinogenic cleaning agent used in factories. The train spilled all of this into the ground and polluted hundreds of homeowners’ wells, who had to get special carbon filter systems from the state or go on public water.

This was very interesting, I am glad I got to go see what she does.