Reality is a Beautiful Place
So Why Do We Run From It?
Two years ago, I left the beauty of mountainous upstate NY, where I resided for over 30 years. With the Adirondacks to the north, Catskills to the south, and Green Mountains of Vermont to the east, mountains became central to my life. During my last ten years in the region, I lived in the foothills of the Helderberg escarpment, the northeastern extremity of the Allegheny Plateau, where I could roll out the front door on my bicycle and within a few miles grimace my way up unforgiving 800 foot climbs, then descend at unnerving speeds, touching 50 miles an hour, after carefully learning every imperfection in the pavement. Often, when I endured this self-chosen discomfort, I questioned my sanity as I burned and sweated, only to beg for more, addicted to the crest of a hill, the expansive view, and the reward of those fast descents. I found riding the mountains to be a metaphor for life, sacrifice and reward, hill after hill.
History became central to my life as well. When I moved upstate in 1987, I lived further south, in bucolic Columbia County, characterized by lush, rolling countryside, sprinkled with 19th century villages, and imbued with revolutionary American history. The Hudson Valley is where America started, after all. I took a job as a graphic designer for an ad agency in the middle of nowhere (literally down a dirt road they liked to brag), a few miles from the early 1800s village of Old Chatham, where there stood a roadhouse in which I sometimes drank too much after softball games in a local league, a whitewashed country store with huge glass windows, and a low roofed post and beam post office. The country store was filled with the produce of local farms, and luscious food made by people in the community. The jams, pies and carrot cake were to die for, as we like to say.
Being just a few hours away from New York City, Columbia County was a destination for those with money, the famous and the not so famous, looking for peaceful escape. They purchased historic homes and horse farms, which they restored to great beauty. A friend I made early one November morning by skidding on a patch of black ice at a critical apex, and crashing my sports car into her yard, knew some of them. Carly Simon was one, and so was one of the Carradine brothers, although I don’t recall if it was Keith or David. The ad agency I worked for was started by a NYC refugee, and I gave drawing lessons to a little boy whose family’s wealth allowed them to purchase of a beautiful, secluded, country retreat.
Just a little to the east in the Berkshires of Massachusetts (where it was obligatory as a cyclist to ride over Petersburg's Pass), lived the musicians James Taylor and Natalie Merchant, who were incredibly generous and present during my regional NPR station’s fund drives, giving both time and money. Pete Seeger was often interviewed on the station, imparting his gentle wisdom as a life-long defender of human rights and the environment. My car crash friend, a vivacious young woman who ran a small horse farm, used her diverse menagerie of animals — turkeys, chickens, ducks, cats and dogs, a mini cow, a pony — and of course horses, to reach otherwise unreachable autistic children. She was known and loved widely for her huge heart and smiles, and sometimes the wealthy city folk gave her a hand when she ran into hard times doing her selfless work.
I had one of the worst jobs of my life, but was also experiencing, possibly, the best time of my life, as well.
My job was honestly terrible, the place with such a reputation that they had to hire from hundreds of miles away. Sometimes people literally quit within days, or even hours. When I signed a lease for my first apartment, the owner asked where I worked. When I told him, he said, “Oh, you’ll want a six-month lease then.” Every week for the first couple of months at this ad agency, there was a drunken send-off party for some fleeing art director, designer, or writer at the roadhouse. One guy named Dave was so happy he rolled his car on the way out of the village on an off camber downhill right, just past the country store. Fortunately, being well lubricated, he wobbled away unscathed. I however, hung onto my job for four years, beguiled by the beauty of the area, the hiking, biking, and bumping down rocky Kinderhook Creek in a truck inner tube.
Living there changed me from a city kid to a country boy. I found I much preferred hearing the rhythmic singing of frogs at night, to the wail of sirens in a city. I preferred the wonder of the sky slowly revealing her shining secrets at midnight, given fifteen minutes of lying on a floating platform in the middle of a swimming pond, staring into the expanse, the same pond where small mouth bass would come up and gingerly bump me, to see if I was possibly edible, as I floated in my tube on hot summer days.
Those were some of the gifts of caretaking an historic home on 54 acres, thanks to my lovely car crash friend who knew everyone in the area, as were the fox and deer, shimmering under the full moon, and the frogs who sang away every night, my doors unlocked, while I waited for the comic bullfrog to let out his rude burp during still passages in the serenade. His joke never got old, and my dreams flew on the wings of dragonflies.
I had one of the worst jobs of my life, but was also experiencing, possibly, the best time of my life, as well. I’m thankful that the job market where I graduated from college was poor, or I would never have made so many discoveries about what’s important.
What’s important in life is time and maximizing peace. I suspect comparatively few human beings have had the privilege of experiencing what I did in my 20s in Columbia County, NY. I was lucky, and know only through the sacrifices and generosity of others do I now get to cherish these memories. I must thank my father and mother, their struggles and sacrifices, and that lovely lady who became my friend after I skidded into the trees of her front yard. There are many others, of course. Truly, the randomness of life was demonstrated in that crash. Had I not met Lynn, I would have not met Siri, who needed a caretaker for her home when she vacationed in Mexico. I would have never floated in that pond, feeling the wonder of infinity and humility conveyed by an uncorrupted night sky, a sky we revered until recently. Although I didn’t completely grasp it as an immature, young man, I was learning about what makes a good human life. It’s not toys and shopping.
As our inept, corrupt governments fund late and inadequate technological “solutions” that cause more environmental harm in an effort to maintain the status quo that brought us here, I just shake my head.
Those who read me enough know my primary concern is the #ClimateEmergency. It truly is an emergency now, as evidenced by the hottest July on record ever, and a year projected to be the hottest humans have ever experienced. One million Chinese people have lost their homes to floods this summer, and Canada has already surpassed all records for hectares burned this year. There have been the horrendous wildfires of Greece and Italy as well, deaths from the western and southern heatwave in the states, and the furious burning down of Lahaina, body count incomplete. These events of course are nowhere near a comprehensive list of what we have experienced this summer, as Hurricane Idalia bears down on Florida, the state’s coral reefs already bleached by 101° F degree water temperatures just weeks ago, and the storm likely to carry extra water and move more slowly, adding to its power, from an overheated Gulf littered with thousands of oil rigs and platforms.
There is also news today of massive and irreversible depletion of the groundwater we depend on for agriculture. Many places are going to run out of drinking water. This is happening, right now. Civilizations collapse when the environment collapses. Our arrogance and greed are coming for us.
Behavior has been a central message in my articles. As our inept, corrupt governments fund late and inadequate technological “solutions” that cause more environmental harm in an effort to maintain the status quo that brought us here, I just shake my head. The fundamentals we must address are being ignored. We must stop burning oil and coal. Now. That is number one. Whatever it takes, no matter how hard, because continuing to burn fossil fuels will only make what is becoming ugly exponentially worse. This is the most dangerous situation humanity has ever faced, with an outcome more inevitable than nuclear war, as we nibble at the edges of the problem. We were warned by science more than 50 years ago, but greed, ignorance and liars won. We became addicted to this matrix, this unsustainable illusion.
Where is the leadership? Who is declaring the emergency and calling all of us to come together in a united effort to make the necessary sacrifices? The ideas advanced so far are completely inadequate. We need to live smaller on the planet, there is no other way. The irony is, smaller makes life better. That’s one of the lessons I learned all those years ago in Columbia County. All I needed was a pond and a bicycle to be happy.
Have we lost our way? I would argue we never found our way. In manipulating the Earth, our real spaceship, while dreaming of other worlds that couldn’t possibly be better than this one, because we evolved here together, we are now teetering on an environment that will kill most of us in a matter of decades if we don’t change course.
We are a vain species, believing we are superior to all others, with the right to do whatever we please to them and each other. We are a disturbing mix of self-awareness and blind, instinctual rage. Which will win out? To this day, we persecute and murder each other for the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, who we choose to love, and how we worship. Will we ever recognize that we are just another animal on the planet that must live within its confines? Will we ever recognize our responsibility as the most powerful creatures to take care of this Earth wisely for our souls and survival? That’s where our meaning lives. That’s where joy lives, in being part of this world, not trying to be above it.
I suspect our psychic problem lies in the dichotomy of our brains, clever frontal lobes often controlled by the deeper layers of primitive instinct. This it turns out to be a fatal flaw, because those two brains are connected to hands and opposable thumbs that have allowed us to construct an unsustainable way of living. There is little doubt in my mind that other large mammals without hands also have intellectual lives and deep emotional bonds. Dolphins and whales come to mind, even the so alien octopus, as do elephants who visit the bones of their deceased relatives. Why do we dream of alien life, when alien life and all we need to learn is here?
The planet shapes us. Our very moods change with the sun. We do not shape the planet. Trying to do so is folly. All the wonder and beauty we need are here. Will we learn this in time?
We lived so closely to nature for virtually all of our existence on the planet until fossil fuels took over. My gut tells me that much of our psychosis as a species is from becoming so remote from it. I'm glad you enjoyed the essay. Thanks.
Geoff: This made my day. Thank you for sharing some of the wonderful experiences that shaped who you are. The serendipity nature of life is so impactful. Son #'s 2 & 3, have moved away from the USA, citing concerns with the country's direction and the 2024. election. One is now living in Germany and the other in Mexico. As I consider next steps- not a bad idea! Your insights are always heartfelt and appreciated. Enjoy the Labor Day weekend!