A Catskills Day. Strangers in Good Company
First stroke on the arc of a Catskills day. Up at five-thirty to walk the stream. Like a Louvin Brothers song, if it begins in sweetness and ends in sweetness, the corruption between can be forgiven. The cows are not expecting you. This is the quiet time when nothing is asked of them, when they jostle and nustle, gossip, hump, chew the cud. Despite ten millennia of hopes dashed, they remain creatures of faith; that maybe, for once, even at this unlikely hour and with nothing discernible under your hat, you’ve come for a reason. Some fresh hay, a few slices of apple, an end to all this suffering. Despite knowing the chances are slim, that once again it’s probably nothing, they’re not proud and are okay with being wrong. They send their boldest emissary down to the water to make contact. The one with the most soulful, long-lashed eyes. The rest watch at a distance, hedging their bets on disappointment.
Morning sorties are sprung with these moments. The pregnancy of what you’re seeing compels you to be in it. The awesome, awful luxury of contemplation. If you had momentum, you’d slide by on your way elsewhere, hoping some of it stuck, like burrs on a country ramble. Or if you were far away, in Sicily, Brittany, on a dirt road near Timisoara, such interludes would constitute epiphanies. Here they just feel sad. A small-time Paradise Lost, where rooting under the cushions to find it again seems paltry and vaguely disgraceful. Another transplanted shadow forking the garden of nostalgia, wondering why the flowers don’t grow like they used to. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’. Sticking around too long can make a good man turn bad. We get in the car, me and Milton, drive to the Delhi Diner to temper our defeat with grilled ham and cheese.
Foggy days here, it can look like the cover of that George Harrison album. He’s on the lawn in wellies, hat and narrow-shouldered jacket, with an audience of gnomes. Nobody was ever so stylish or so alone. The Beatles are done, he’s poised at the foot of his own furrow. A glance from the window, a shed, a broken egg in the grass; invisible notes in the universe’s dispassionate hum. Yet suddenly a revelation. How it all comes together before it drifts apart. John Cage said ‘everything we do is music‘. Silence is a symphony. Waiting for music is music. The egg that fell from the nest is just an egg; ‘These are the facts of the thing. I see nothing else than these. Make what you will of them’. Or it’s everything you ever broke on the road that led you here. Bruce Bennett:
It’s not the liquid spreading on the floor,
A half a minute’s labor with the mop;
It’s everything you’ve ever spilled, and more.
The stupid broken spout that wouldn’t pour;
The nasty little salesman in the shop.
It’s not the liquid spreading on the floor,
A stain perhaps, a new, unwelcome chore,
But scarcely cause for sobs that will not stop.
It’s everything you’ve ever spilled, and more.
It’s the disease for which there is no cure,
The starving child, the taunting brutal cop.
It’s not the liquid spreading on the floor
But through a planet, rotten to the core,
Where things grow old, get soiled, snap off, or drop.
It’s everything you’ve ever spilled, and more:
The vision of yourself you can’t ignore,
Poor wretched extra clinging to a prop!
It’s not the liquid spreading on the floor.
It’s everything you’ve ever spilled, and more.
The music of the spheres is always melancholy. It has to be. It is groined from an eternity of cosmic indifference; you can hardly expect Pirates of Penzance. The cows know. That’s why they stare, shrug and meekly acquiesce to being dinner. Yet flashes of crimson cut the nap of a tapestry we’ve come to think of as just grey. The stream at dawn, the cow, the fog, the egg. Beauty, like all things, must pass. Isn’t it a pity? How we break each other’s hearts. Isn’t it a shame?
Morning gives way to a rainy afternoon, turns West Terry Clove into a scene from Fitzcarraldo. So we open the doors, sip backwoods negronis, roll garganelli round pencils, mash pesto, coddle apricots and shoot the long breeze into the evening. For breakfast tomorrow; arugula, eggs, asparagus and Greek orange wine, the warm sirocco of last night’s communion still blowing down the valley. Just Andrea, Marty, me; and a quarter of a century under the bushes, under the stars.
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