But these concerns it turned out were largely for nothing, we were thrilled by a glorious October, the warmest and driest in memory. The leaves had turned as always thanks to the annual miracle where the flow of chlorophyll is blocked in branches, the tree’s somehow holding the wisdom that winter and harm is about to arrive. The resulting landscape is now dominated by reds, orange and rust to be admired by carloads of New Yorkers. We were no more sophisticated and hooed and hawed like children at a firework display, the colors this year being particularly spectacular supported by a backdrop of an almost Mediterranean blue sky which greeted us daily and so it was the memory of these shimmering colors, the soft pinks and scarlet trees that paradoxically provided us with an assurance that nature will survive both outsmarting and outliving us humans.
And then came a mainly mild November where I took my daily silent walks up and down the mountain. With dry leaves crunching under foot, new information about our immediate landscape was revealed; the neighbor’s huts, a discarded refrigerator, and trucks tire impaled in the stream by a fallen tree and then suddenly darkness by 4.30 in the afternoon. More than anything I noticed the broken stone walls that had defined barriers between small holdings long forgotten and never memorialized. At the bottom of the mountain there are a few neighbors and the sweetish smell of a woodburning fire conjured a peaceful, contented domestic scene which is at odds with the people I see passing in their trucks with Trump stickers, ignoring the fire regulations in place during these excessively dry months and perhaps rejoicing in the new lawlessness they voted for. Their woodburning smoke trailed and lingered low to the ground, I noticed, and then again weaving through the pine trees held down by their waxy needles. But it is mainly the presence of a bear which alters our relationship with the landscape and now the quiet has a slightly sinister edge, most of the birds have flown south at this time with the exception of the harsh notes from the local crows, and so any sudden sound from the woods gets my attention. All logic tells me that the female bears will be in hibernation by now and the male ones will still be around peacefully for another month depending on how satiated they are already but it doesn’t help my nervousness. And the people up here, perhaps replicating these animal instincts, turn in on themselves and indulge their interior lives, long standing invitations for dinner parties are turned down at the last moment as if social skills are now forgotten or because it is too much effort, so we are left alone in our house with only the electric light of the moon to entertain us by floodlighting our yard in an unworldly white hue.
We have taken to driving 30 minutes to a small town in Sullivan County called Livingston Manor. The road takes us along a narrow, sometimes hair-raising, road first past “Small Pond” and then with satisfying logic to “Big Pond” before modest houses and airstreams announce our arrival into the town. One morning we had to break suddenly as there was unrecognizable roadkill being picked at by a large golden eagle which stared at us for a few seconds before slowly rising with what seemed like deep reluctance, its unwieldly wings a mess of feathers, before settling in a nearby bush then watched us with a look of impatience implying that this was a tiresome act of politeness.
In late October, early November we found ourselves back in the city for two ghoulish events, the Halloween parade and the US elections. As were staying in Greenwich Village it was an easy walk to see our friend who was dog sitting in a large apartment under the shadow of Washington Square. As the evening progressed more and more people dressed in costumes passed by as we sat on the steps as it was such a balmy evening and drank negroni’s. By the second drink our friend was drunk enough to heckle passersby’s which became increasingly alarming as we weren’t the only slightly inebriated people in the Square and there was only a flimsy fence between us and as we know, joy is only a thin veneer that can quickly turn into hostility in this city. On the walk home we were imprisoned for a while by the roadblocks and mass of spectators which always irritates me while the parade goes by with the normal intense racket leaving me reeling with the pointlessness of such occasions, it’s an event I look forward to each year and then belatedly realize that I would have preferred to watch it on television.
Our luck with the weather came to an abrupt end in the second to last week of November, a snowstorm came in and we spend the night awake listening to the sound of our flat roof being pounded. The silvery velvet view that greeted us when the sun rose was at once both magical and a little nerve wrecking as we scanned the immediate surroundings for fallen trees and branches. The Wi-Fi had gone out at about midnight then the power at 4.00am leaving us without heat, water, electricity and inadvertently providing us with an insight to what life was like here a hundred years ago. We lasted one night having secured a jigsaw puzzle and trivia cards in a local supermarket which we played later that evening wrapped in blankets in candlelight, shivering, distracted and if I’m honest, a little frightened. Two heavy duvet covers protected us from the cold, we nicknamed this our “iron lung”, but in the next morning when we woke again to no running water or flushing toilet, we made the easy decision to find a room in a nearby hotel. Sometimes you have to admit you are not really country people; resilient and hardy but instead that you value community and culture, require people around you even if they are slightly crazy, need basic comforts and the wail of a police siren, the pleading of a homeless person and a lunch interrupted by a hysterical person who had lost her phone; New York City in other words.
jnmanson 