It’s the clouds that sparked the memory. A flotilla of cumulus, high and loose—classic puffballs sailing across a cerulean sky that reminds me of another bright spring day over 30 years ago. And not unimportantly, a brighter, springier version me—who might just have been a bit high and loose at the time as well.
We were driving over the Ashokan Reservoir, travelling from the SUNY New Paltz campus to Corey’s mom’s house in Margaretville, or some other obscure hamlet nearby. Corey was my roommate and coconspirator in various hijinks and minor misdeeds known to a certain mischievous set of male college students and the authorities they inevitbaly come into contact with. He drove a white Peugeot station wagon—a car roomy enough to ferry eight people to a revival screening of Fantasia (including three in the back tripping on acid) yet slim enough to squeeze across pedestrian bridges on campus in the wee hours of the morning.
The semester was still in session, so it must have been late April or early May. The year was probably 1991. For those of you not old enough to remember, 1991 was the year the Soviet Union collapsed (Bush the Elder gave his “New World Order” speech); coalition forces booted Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War (the US’s beef with Saddam would flare up again soon); the Coen brothers released Barton Fink (starring SUNY New Paltz alum John Turturro); Bret Easton Ellis published American Psycho (completely misunderstood at the time, especially by me); Nirvana dropped Nevermind (hot take: overrated); and most importantly, I turned 21 in November, which had the salutary effect of turning my illegal “underage drinking” to plain old legal drinking in the eyes of New York State.
Despite attending school only 20 miles away, I had never seen the reservoir, this engineering marvel that provided the ancestral Mahoney estate in Queens with some of the world’s finest tap water. Coming upon 12-mile long lake after shooting through the woods of Marbletown and Olivebridge was a revelation. The expanse in front of us opened wide and Catskill peaks ringed the scene, a painting we were driving into. Corey, whose family had lived in the Catskills for generations, told me of the deep wound the building of the reservoir had caused to the displaced communities and of the locals’ ongoing aversion to New York City and its precious water.
We had the windows down, the wind whipping through the car, my head out the window like a dog, trying to take in all the visual inputs. No doubt we were high, because we were almost always high back then. We were listening to Fisherman’s Blues by the Waterboys on cassette, a tape of Corey’s that had been rattling around in the console. The fourth album by the British-Irish folk rock band, Fisherman’s Blues signaled a move away from an earlier bombastic rock sound and toward a more traditional Celtic-tinged folk rock.
Now listen: I’m no fan of the traditional Irish music I was force-fed as a child, the repetitive tweedley-deedley bullshit of “The Irish Rover” or the weepy “Danny Boy” bullshit or the chest-thumping, reunited-Ireland bullshit of “A Nation Once Again.” Love Ireland, hate the music.
But Fisherman’s Blues—despite having a number of straight-up traditional tracks on it—was closer to Thin Lizzy than the Clancy Brothers. And as we shot across the causeway, the last track on side A, “Sweet Thing,” began to play. (It’s a cover of a Van Morrison song from 1968’s Astral Weeks, but I was years away from discovering Morrison’s mystical reveries.)
I’m a sucker for a slow-building crescendo, and “Sweet Thing” delivers. It begins with an acoustic guitar followed by violins slow and languid, then a bit of propulsion from the drummer before Mike Scott starts singing, working himself into a lather over seven minutes, scatting delicious nonsense between Morrison’s ecstatic poetry: “And I will walk and talk / in gardens all wet with rain / and never ever get so old again.” I’d even go so far as to say that the song grooves, which is something no one ever said about “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
I wasn’t thinking that at the time, of course. Probably not thinking much at all. But I was feeling a sense of the seemingly limitless possibilities of life. My own potentiality humming in me. (You feel it at 20. You remember the feeling of feeling it in your fifties.) The air, the water, the sky, the cloud, the weed, the music all added up to something much more than just a couple of dudes driving across a bridge. I mean, “limitless” had its limits. I wasn’t going to be president—or perhaps even graduate from college in the knucklehead way I was going about it—but I might meet a girl, or write a good poem, or hear more music as wild and captivating as what was filling my ears.
I think of this moment on sunny days like today. And of something that the illustrator Saul Steinberg wrote about taking LSD, for the first and only time, at the age of 51, at Timothy Leary’s place in Millbrook: “A day of such happiness that the memory of this possibility existing in me makes everything else unimportant, reduces miseries to their proper scale.”
Housekeeping
It’s come to my attention that some readers of the print version of Chronogram are unaware that we publish articles nearly every day on Chronogram.com, most of which never appear in print. These pieces are similar to the stories you’ll find in the magazine—our effort to record the grand narrative of the place we call home—and, in fact, much of the content in the print version is first published online. The profile of the pasta-making couple Steve Gonzalez and Kate Galassi at Via Ravioli in Coxsackie being one example (page 16).
These stories, along with the rest of our print content, are packaged into our email newsletter, which goes out four times a week and contains our latest and greatest discoveries of doings around the region. If you want to know what we know, all of what we know, you can sign up for the newsletter at Chronogram.com/newsletter.
The June issue contains another installment of the blockbuster Summer Arts Preview (page 65), which Arts and Culture Editor Peter Aaron has wrangled expertly yet again. Take a look at the abundance of programming this season—from Berlioz to Banksy and all that lies in between—and start planning your cultural forays. Tickets go fast, and fall will be here before you know it. We’ll be kicking off the summer season right here in the event space below our offices in the Fuller Building in Kingston on June 11 from 5:30-7:30pm with our Summer Arts networking event. It’s a chance for those involved in the local cultural sausagemaking to get together before the season begins in earnest. The evening is presented in partnership with Upstate Art Weekend and all are invited. For some bonus programming, Sonnenberg Gallery will be hosting a pop-up exhibition in the Fuller Building event space, a three-person show, “Byways,” featuring the work of Jenny Snider, Joe Concra, and Thom Grady.
Speaking of the Summer Arts Preview: We’ve been selected as a finalist for an Association of Alternative Newsmedia award for Special Section for last year’s Summer Arts Preview. The winners will be announced at the AAN convention in Charleston in July. Keep your eyes on this space in the August issue for either unseemly boasting or wounded accusations of cheating.
A final note: We are excited and proud to publish the 2024 Guide to Pride (page 34) in this issue, produced in partnership with Big Gay Hudson Valley. As allies, it’s one small way we can support the LGBTQ+ community and promote the values of love, tolerance, and inclusion. Thanks to Big Gay’s Stephan Hengst for helping to pull this fabulous supplement together.
This article appears in June 2024.
Wonderful read. Thank you.