“En garde!” the director called. The gym echoed with the clang of blade on blade, and the squeak of shoe on polyurethane. My heart hammered in my chest — was that nerves, or just the tight embrace of the fencing jacket I hadn’t tried to squeeze into since 1998? One point, I prayed, with fervor. Don’t fall, don’t die, don’t be a wreck. Just land one touch.
In a normal year, Republican Chris Tague would be a shoo-in to succeed Pete Lopez in the 102nd Assembly District. But nothing about this year is normal. Democratic voters are more invigorated than they’ve been in generations, a key factor in a April 24 special election that is likely to draw only the most fervent true believers to the polls. And then there’s the independents, who make up fully a quarter of the district’s registered voters. If they’re looking for a Trump surrogate to punish, Tague — a Trump delegate back in 2016 — is conveniently at hand.
A hollow place in the ground, a ring worn down by bare feet, a shaft hitched to a stone that grinds on and on. The story of the Wench Mill has no moral, except that it should never have been at all.
Hikers sometimes call it “shoulder season,” that awkward stretch of winter-adjacent weather that can’t seem to make up its mind. In the Catskills we tend to call it like it is: mud season.
Environmentalists, local governments and landowners’ associations don’t generally see eye to eye on local land issues. It takes a truly terrible idea to get them all on the same side and sending joint lobbying delegations to Albany. Something like, say, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal to reinvent the way state forest land gets taxed in the Catskill and Adirondack Parks.
It’s Maple Weekend across New York State this week, and sugarbush tappers are opening their saphouses to celebrate the harvest. On tap for the weekend: pancake breakfasts, leaf-shaped candies and clear bottles full of sweet amber, a taste of fresh sap out of a bucket. It’s about as traditional as it gets. But if you look closely, the landscape is shifting. As the climate changes, the trees change too — and tappers follow.
It is difficult to begin anything ambitious in the spring. The ground is too gelatinous for landscaping, the weather still too chilly and unpredictable for the biggest of your home renovation projects. Still, if you want to actually get anything done this year, it is important to have a plan of attack, especially if you need to call a guy.
It takes some fortitude to decide to pay a small cost yourself, rather than shuffle a larger one off to a stranger in a community far away.
A new text-alert system can reach 800 residents in 20 seconds. But most of our rural Catskills towns are sticking to the old ways. We have our own systems, official and otherwise, for making sure our neighbors are okay. Popular forms of official disaster response include “driving over to check on that old guy down the road,” “not having town email addresses,” and “it’ll be fine, people are tough around here.”
If my nine-year-old is going to have to walk past a cop every morning to get into her school building, I’m glad it’s Sheriff DuMond they’ll be reporting to. But my first thought was: This is not what I signed up for.