You’ve read my take on leaving city life for the country a thousand times, but check out my husband’s version. He belongs to a toastmaster club and had to write a speech. This week he chose to talk about our move upstate.
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Let this serve as a cautionary tale to anyone thinking of relocating to the country – The Horror.
Back in 2002 my wife Phyllis and I decided to move to the country and get out of the NYC rat race. We had bought a house in the Catskills near Kingston in 1999 and enjoyed our weekends and vacations surrounded by the woods with access to a trail far from the closest roads where we could walk our two dogs around a pond that lead to an old beaver dam. On Summer nights there was a cacophony of frogs calling from the pond.
Eleanor, the previous owner of the house was an elderly widow who lived close by. In fact her house was the only one within sight where she lived with her spinster sister Edna.
The reasons we decided to move were various but they included the over gentrification of our Brooklyn neighborhood, Park Slope and getting burnt out from work.
We packed up our things in a U-haul van and headed North permanently in September, 2002. Our two dogs were in heaven. Instead of only getting to run around the woods once every two weeks they now could go crazy every day.
The first thing that put a damper on our move was our neighbors Eleanor and Edna. Whereas before we moved we were glad to have someone with keys to watch over the house, now we had someone with keys and a mandate to keep an eye on us. Everything we did or every move we made might come up as a topic of conversation. “Oh, you were out shopping this afternoon. We saw you taking the bags from your car.” If we wanted to take an afternoon nap we had to worry about them coming over and peering in our living room window and starting the dogs barking and letting themselves in if we didn’t respond in time. They even had a pair of binoculars to spy on us, which Edna forgot to leave home one day when she stopped by to check out the job the tree guy did…before we got out there ourselves to have a look.
I tried to get involved with the locals and signed up for the volunteer fire fighters. But this was just met with suspicion by the long term members and there were never any real emergencies, which might explain why we never really trained for one.
After living in the woods for a while we realized that nature is not as benign as we first thought. There was the time our dogs disappeared while we were grilling outside. When we went to find them we realized they were not so dumb since they were steering clear of a black bear foraging in the woods near the house. After eye contact with the bear, we quietly backed up and hightailed it back to the house.
The Spring thaw brought shad fly and mosquitoes which kept us indoors more than we liked. The natural order up there, with man as the main predator and neighbors too lazy to travel to hunt, meant intruders with guns on our land during hunting season and the discovery of a headless deer carcass.
When you live in the boondocks, the only way to travel is by car, even for milk or a newspaper, and with driving comes the hazards of creating road kill ( frogs, snakes, chipmunks, squirrels to name a few) and white knuckle driving on snow and ice until you get to the highway.
The result was after a year and a half of living the bucolic life we decided we needed to move closer to civilization, culture and takeout Chinese. So we first moved to Beacon (halfway between the city and Kingston) before the city, or Brooklyn at least, sucked us back in. Now we can remain anonymous in the crowd and the only danger from animals is that a stray cat will come looking for a home.
