In lieu of achieving world peace, or even Catskills peace, I’ve always wanted to write a local parody of “Oklahoma!” Clearly, the Farmer and the Cowman — er, the Local and the Transplant — should be friends. It’s like Aunt Eller says: I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else, but I’ll be danged if I ain’t just as good.
Culturally, the Catskills are a bright mosaic of urban and rural mores and values. But scratch the surface and we have all the problems of rural Appalachia: addiction, poverty, a greying population, a general purposelessness that siphons the brightest of our young people out of our schools and our communities.
Does Woodstock need traffic lights? Stop signs? Traffic cops? Tickets for double-parked trucks? To do nothing and let drivers and pedestrians figure it out?
For those of us who didn’t want to have to drive to Kingston for a market, it was a haven.
Want to help the local bat population? Put up a bat house. It won’t save the bats from white-nosed syndrome, but it ups the odds that surviving bats will reproduce.
Maurice took risks…In his research on mob-tinged dumping, Hinchey had to undergo a number of unpleasant confrontations. One of the more grim was the “handshake that wouldn’t end.”
Disaster can strike in a moment, but nature is full of slow-motion letdowns too. You can work with optimism and excitement all season long, only to stand by and watch the slow unraveling of all your hopeful prospects. And here we are getting into metaphor territory at last.
It’s tempting to get distracted from the boring business of local government by the increasingly terrifying gyrations of the national discourse. It’s even more tempting to dismiss things like bipartisanship, and cooperation, and talking across the political divide, as a chump’s game. But the truth is, with the highest levels of American government throwing off more toxic smoke than a tire fire, we need these things in our towns and cities now more than ever.
The reclusive, oft cantankerous soul “lived the way he wanted to live. Rest in peace, Eddie Diehl.
Swordfighting has woken me up to the joy of battle like no sport has ever done. It has given me valuable training in courage — a virtue you don’t hear about nearly often enough, especially in the context of women-people.