Budget cut from my teaching job at the University, Patti and I sold our house on the east side of Milwaukee, loaded both kids, three dogs, and two cats in a tricked-out Dodge Tradesman van and headed east to New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1973.
Flush with cash from the sale of the house and an ascendant vision of ourselves leading some '70s back-to-the-land caravan, we ran out of hope right away. I'm embarrassed to say now that we lit out without first checking real estate listings back east. Turned out that $23,000 would barely buy a falling down barn in tony New Hope.
Young and undaunted, we spread a ripped Rand-McNally road map across the sloped hood of the van and eyed New Paltz an "upstate" college town I'd heard about. And several hours later, driving down the comfortably frayed-at-the-edges Main Street, we glanced at each other, shrugged, and silently agreed we could probably hang here for a while, maybe even a few years. This was a real town. A little gritty. Not Currier and Ives cute like New Hope. Not a faux hipster haven like Sedona or Brattleboro. A real town with real people, farmers, IBMers, truck drivers, rednecks, academics, hippies, beatniks who arrived in the 60s and never left.
We crossed the rusted steel bridge over the Wallkill River, cornfields and hayfields flanking the country road ahead, the Shawangunk ridge and Mohonk tower looming over it all...and instantly knew we could raise our kids here for a while, let the dogs run free, walk in the woods, have goats and ducks in the backyard. A place I could continue my aborted teaching career, the place where I'd write the next Great American Novel.
Then, of course, we'd move on.
Of course, you know where this is going. And, of course, we did not.
We bought a 200-year-old brick house on Coffey Road—just down the lane from the Coffey ladies' small dairy farm—and settled in. Purchased a riding mower for our two acres. Took the milk can up the road to Johnson's farm to buy raw milk. Listened to the sump pump drain the basement four or five times a year when the river flooded. Added baby number three, Addie, in 1974; joined the local Rescue Squad; wrote an unpublishable novel; got a job at a local community college; Patti opened a children's store in town. And by 1979 we had filled up the sweet brick house off Springtown Road with two more kids, Clover and Danny, born in the yellow wallpapered bedroom upstairs.
Which apparently was the cue to get moving again, time to pack up and leave. No reason, it was just time. 1979. Maybe someplace warmer, a place where I didn't have to climb down into the stone well to unfreeze the pipe. There were weekend fact-finding trips to Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, Wilmington, NC, over the next few years, but nothing ever felt homier or easier on the spirit than this frayed-at-edges college town.
So we stayed around just a while longer, built a house big enough for five kids in the middle of the woods a mile up the road. Put up a tree house between some pines. Nailed together a bus stop shelter out of rough-cut wood out on the road. Constructed a pole barn and then a gazebo ... and yes, surprise-no surprise, over the next three years welcomed two more kids into our increasingly complicated, unplanned, apparently unplannable lives.
At some point, we realized we were dug in, knee deep in the shale and clay, though it's still not clear when it happened, or who—or what—had been doing the digging.
This fall we will have lived in New Paltz for 50 years. So long that we've known the Town Judge and County Commissioner of Jurors since they were on the same nine-year-old little league team with our oldest son, Cael; the Chief of Police since he was in high school with our oldest daughter, Nancy; the Ulster BOCES Superintendent of Schools since he was in kindergarten with our daughter Clover. The mayor's brother played center forward on my little league soccer team. Addie's friend since 3rd grade is now Nancy's doctor. And if that's not enough, four of my kids married people they met in school. One, Clover, married the 97-pound boy she first dated in 8th grade,
Despite all the changes wrought over decades by the gentrification carpetbaggers, this is still a real small town, not some BS Hallmark creation or a fictional village concocted by some angry country singer drunk on the Trump Kool-Aid. The farmers, IBMers, truck drivers, rednecks, academics, hipsters, weekenders I run into at the Bakery or at the post office or walking along our dead-end road, still pretty much abide each other in a kind of edgy working harmony.
And the spectacular view I still see crossing the Wallkill River every day, hayfields and cornfields on the other side, the Mohonk Tower up on the ridge, is pretty much the exact scene that Patti and I saw through the dirty windshield of that Dodge van when we first drove through town. Achingly beautiful. And just as it was in '73, there are still tractors slowing me down on Springtown Road as I head home into the woods where I can still take a breath, look out any window and see bears, foxes, coyotes, deer, fisher cats...wandering freely across the yard.
So yeah, we're dug in. In fact, we're so dug in after 50 years, that although we find ourselves at the precipice of being too old to keep up—much less afford—this rather homey (read: well-lived-in) seven-bedroom home with a sweeping front porch in the middle of 20 acres of woods, Patti and I decided recently that rather than sell—clearly the sanest next move, financially and otherwise—we'd rather go broke than move away.
As Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim told us, so it goes. We simply can't find it in ourselves to turn away from this sweet and not-so-sweet small town. It's tempting to say something schmaltzy and predictable here about leaving the place where our kids grew up, but that's not our story to tell. For Patti and me, New Paltz is that serendipitous dot on a ripped roadmap that has somehow taken root in our DNA. The place where we will live out our lives in ways we never imagined for ourselves.
