Change is constant in life. It can happen slowly and subtly so that you barely notice (if you notice at all) until months or years have passed and you one day ask yourself something like “What the hell happened?” At other times change is clear and undeniable, circumstances changing in a single moment, after which nothing is quite the same. Birth and death are like that, but on a less consequential level turning points happen on a regular basis: you leave your home town without looking back, or emigrate from a war zone under dramatic conditions, or swear off alcohol or dump your lover of six months or ten years for good.
The possibilities for change are endless, and it might be a good exercise some time to look back at your life and plot them out, just to get a grip on where you’re at in this moment and what it has taken to get here. Sometimes turning points happen but are not clearly that until some time later, which then might be an epiphany.
Events from the past week around here have been much about the kind whereby you close the book on a place, for good, and you know this in your heart. In its way this parting is of huge consequence and meaning, even though it took place in the most undramatic way, with hindsight suggesting it was probably all quite inevitable.
The place of which I speak is that vague entity known as upstate New York, which to most of the world means anyplace “New York” that is not the Big Apple. In fact, most of the world says “New York” without intending any reference at all to the 55000 square miles of the Empire State, with its 933 towns and 61 cities, after which you can break it down further into villages and hamlets. Yes, hamlet is an official place designation in the state of New York.
My wife and her sister were born quite awhile ago in a village, down there on what is known as the New York “southern tier” Their father died too young but their mother stayed on for the rest of her life in that same village, while my wife came to Boston after college, for good. Her sister, not drawn to city life, drifted up to what is known as the “north country” in the central part of the state to raise a family in a hamlet on a river. To add to this general complexity of cities and towns and villages and hamlets, there also happens to be no central or northern “tier” though the northern tier of Pennsylvania and NY’s southern tier are sometimes known as the “twin tier” area, at least to a few Wikipedia contributors, though not to my wife. It is possible there is such a thing as too much geography.
Whereas my own ambitious wanderings and those of my sister – along with my transplanted parents’ love for the west coast to which they migrated from the Midwest in ancient times – led to a 3000 mile separation, my wife’s family was always ten times closer and a considerably shorter trip that one can make by car. The upshot of this is that once I joined her family, we made countless visits to upstate, both southern tier and northern country, with more than a few epic journeys to both regions at once.
We’re talking all seasons and all weathers – Christmas and Mother’s Day and Labor Day and Thanksgiving and birthdays and emergencies and whatever – six or seven hours out the Mass Turnpike and the NY Thruway in all manner of traffic and driving conditions, and if you’ve never driven smack into a whiteout at Christmas time, where the whole view up ahead looks like someone has dropped a grayish curtain across the scene and then WHAM visibility all but disappears in one thrilling moment – you haven’t lived. And one might not live too long, period, if it happens often enough, which I guess in our case it never did.
Aside from such rare moments, our routes and destinations featured endless vistas of rolling farm country for the most part, with Utica-on-the-Mohawk the only urban element. Upstate NY has its share of well known cities-that-are-not-the-Big-Apple, of course, Buffalo and Albany and Syracuse and Rochester. It also has such worthy tourist destinations as the Adirondacks and Catskills and Finger Lakes, with their natural beauty and vacation appeal. But if one travels across the state on the NY Thruway (love the spelling!) or down the diagonal that is Interstate 88 (love the number! my unfulfilled ambition was to do it in a two-tone ‘56 Olds Rocket 88), you are looking at upstate as I know it, which is agricultural interspersed with stands of forest land in endless variety of gentle terrain. Cows and corn and woodlots is most of what there is to see, and we have seen it from the insulated atmosphere of interstates where it’s all just “scenery”, as well as the more intimate and interesting and far more beautiful aspect one gets on secondary roads. And we’ve occasionally experienced this on bicycles, which is the most intimate and satisfying mode of all, though on foot is obviously pretty good, too, despite not covering quite so much ground.
The focus here is place, so family history is peripheral, though related. I will only say that we stopped regular travels to the southern tier about ten years ago, and the final chapter that recently ended was all about that hamlet on that river in the county of Lewis. The town was Croghan and the nearest urban center was Lowville and their respective populations were 618 and 3470, which tells you how truly rural a place this is, and how special they were and will always be in my experience and in my heart. This is a world I never would have encountered except as part of some vacation, but even then vacations for most of us tend not to happen in farm country. Lewis county is the fourth least-populated county in the state of New York. It doesn’t get more upstate than that.
As mentioned, we’d travel there every season of the year, and one of my first encounters of how special this place can be was that first Christmas. I’d asked somebody if the outdoor thermometer by the back door, which read 30 below, was faulty, to which somebody grinned and noted that yes it reads ten degrees too warm. Perhaps they were exaggerating; one step outside suggested maybe they were not, though once it’s below zero making fine distinctions can get difficult unless maybe you’re Jack London. Nearby Fort Drum in Watertown happens to be the headquarters of the 10th Mountain Division for a reason, and local weather conditions are part of that.
Lewis County is bookended by the Adirondack Park in the east, which needs no introduction, and an undramatic but undeniable 2000 foot rise in the landscape that comprises Tug Hill in the west. Tug Hill also lies at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, which means it gets an inordinate amount of the lake-effect snow that is a special part of winter around the Great Lakes in general. Snow conditions on Tug Hill are so special that a key feature of driving north from Utica on route 12 at Christmas time was all of the pickups pulling big trailers full of snowmobiles.
If Lewis County has tourism appeal, it would be for the fishing and boating and general rural serenity of the area, but in winter it’s all about snow snow snow, and there is a local industry of lodging and eateries and bars for the snow sledders that is an economic engine. The cross country skiing is pretty good too and we did our share of that. One of my special memories is of skiing in the woodlot right behind my sister-in-law’s house and savoring the incredible quiet of a winter snowfall, only to have the moment explode into this cacophony of wingbeats in the trees above us; grouse! We also skied the Hill a few times, which reinforced the ways it is true wilderness, even though it’s not Alaska or the Rockies.
Tug Hill is also a key reason why the Maple Ridge wind farm is one of the largest such operations in the east, with 195 turbines that have been spinning since 2006. It’s all about location location location, plus the fact that farming in the area is such that getting extra income for leasing out space for energy has much appeal. And the wind up there is pretty reliable, coming in from a Great Lake. In Massachusetts, wind projects on the ocean have been resisted simply because they’d “spoil the view”; on the Hill I’d say they enhance the landscape’s beauty, but as always it’s in the eye of the beholder, especially if they’ve spent a fortune on obtaining an ocean view, one that can’t allow for a few turbines on the horizon instead of a sailboat or container ship. Farm views tend to be less pricy, God knows why.
The turbines are on farm land, somewhat away from the wilderness area, which in itself has a land trust to maintain its preservation. The appeal of Tug Hill as a wild place is that it co-exists with farms and local towns, has no special reputation or tourism value as “a destination” like the Adirondacks, and if you go there you will often have the trails and beauty all to yourself. The contrast with a place like Yellowstone, our wilderness vacation destination of the previous year with its postcard vistas as well as roads lined with vehicles and hordes of folks with telescopes and giant camera lenses, could not be more stark.
The same is true when it comes to bicycling. We always brought bikes and would wander the farm roads, which in other places would be “back roads” but in Lewis County they’re just the roads. The terrain is gentle and rolling with a good dose of hills, sometimes steep but never long, and a startling lack of traffic, for the east. Not everyone is enchanted by barns and cows and cornfields and woodlots, but as a biker it rates right up there with grand vistas and forests as far as I’m concerned, and the level of peacefulness outdoes a bicycle-destination like Vermont, where the hills can be killer and the traffic is relatively busier. And I love the smell of a farm, which you might not and your life is the poorer for that.
A lot of the farms in the area are owned by Mennonites, whose various sects are a strong and visible cultural presence. The most conservative of these tend towards Amish style simplicity, and I cherish a vivid memory of standing on the main street in downtown Lowville in a light snowfall when here comes this carriage driven by the usual bearded fellow all in black speeding around a corner so fast that it skids a bit even though the horse had no problem whatsoever. Rubber horseshoes? I ponder, along with estimations of the true velocity of such a rig moving at breakneck speed. Twenty? Twenty five?
There are also the occasional John 3:16 or similar “come to Jesus” signs on the roadside here and there, plus fabulous farm stands throughout the growing season selling produce and flowers and preserves. There are even stores here and there, one in particular that is grand enough to qualify as a supermarket, selling everything from sewing notions to handmade wooden toys to six kinds of peanut butter – and more!
I’ve left politics for last, and as a liberal city boy of long standing, spending time in rural working America that is not of the tourist-destination kind has been a needed reality check. Let it be said that the median income of the county is $34K and the per capita is $15K and times were likely better 100 years ago. There’s farming and forestry and maple sugaring and the services that supply such economies and the families that live there, plus some degree of tourism and a little bit of a boost from the needs of nearby Fort Drum. Some guy tried promoting Adirondack International Speedway for awhile, a paved “circle track” of a type common in the state, but success has not been ongoing. Global warming might not be kind to the skimobile economy in the long run, either. The opening of a Walmart and the invasion of Dollar Stores has been a curse on many local businesses, though a boon to folks of limited income, making it all a very mixed blessing. It is the story of rural America in modern times.
And the ancient story, of course, is that of the eternal cultural divide between the city and the country, which in America has evolved into multicultural liberal urban politics and economic power clashing with rural conservatism and more often than not, poverty at some level. This might also be true in China and India and Africa and even Europe, for all I know. We’re traveling to northern Europe soon and one reads about how city folks in Stockholm and Helsinki and Copenhagen feel little in common with the countrysides there and vice versa, in what are very homogenous cultures for the most part. Call it the human condition; call it kind of sad.
It’s not clear to me what the general opinion of state government in Albany might be around Lewis County, but as for DC, the numbers show that Obama received 45% of the vote in his two elections, while Donald Trump scored 70% in his two tries. So goes rural America in these times. It is also a fact that my sister-in-law was a tireless worker for the Democratic Party all the years she lived there; I will not call her a local legend in this regard but it is possible she was that.
She loved the peace and beauty of the countryside, and the local community of which she was a vital part. When her health started to fail, she was able to recruit a steady stream of local help that kept her at home almost to the very end, mostly people with whom she was familiar. As a social worker dealing with the elderly in Boston, I can tell you things of this nature in the big city tend to go a very different way, where trusting the caregivers who show up at your house is often not easy. Many of them arrived here from far far away and from cultures not at all like the one you’ve always known, and if you’ve lived a sheltered life and are becoming more needy and vulnerable, trusting difference can be a heavy lift.
She lived all those years around people she loved, and cherished the seasons and how driving the roads was an endless treat of beautiful and sometimes spectacular changes though more subtle often as not. She loved walking her dogs up behind her house in that hamlet, past the ponds whose history might have been industrial but which have gradually transitioned to a natural state. It was home, and visiting her all those years made it a place that was far more than its poverty and its politics and all that stuff a city boy might read in the newspapers about rural America, and I am grateful for that discovery.
