visitors

I.
Every day since I arrived, once a day, I get in the car for some small errand - groceries, a coffee - and wind up lost instead.  Not that getting lost is really ever a surprise.  Cell phone reception out here is indifferent at best, and I have only the slightest idea of local geography.  I always assume that if I just stay on a road, I will eventually find that supermarket or cup of coffee, but that rarely happens.  Endless blue asphalt roads beget only another felted valley, an occasional cluster of houses hugging the street, more endless blue asphalt roads.

I've found other things, though.   A weekly flea market spread across a valley floor.   Yard sale after yard sale.  (I browsed at one estate sale, ignored by the local women chatting amongst themselves, until a sour-faced man drove up, complaining fuckfuckfuck.)  A commune, tinged with cultish shadows, all the members arranged in a half moon of chairs.  (A sign told me I was welcome to join.  I sped up.)  An old protestant church patronized by historical re-enactors in costumes instead of parishioners.  Deserted summer camps, some clearly abandoned for decades, and others, even more disturbing, that look simply as though someone had gathered up all the campers, all the staff, and evacuated them in one afternoon.  A dead-end dirt road where a brown lab emerged from behind a pickup truck to warn me away.  Catskill Creek, more stone than water.

Usually I find my way back through the hamlet of O-- H---, which is so heartbreakingly lovely, its collapsing porticos and Doric columns and gingerbread such a sweet expression of small-town nineteenth century optimism that you want to furnish each house with characters - the pompous judge and his bustle-skirted wife!  The mustachioed grocer!  The eager young farmhand in love with the doctor's daughter! - and write the script for The Catskills: The Musical.  (Though I suppose that's already been done.)  At first glance, half the houses have been abandoned; but then you see that it has simply been many decades since there was enough local prosperity to repaint the facades.  Five minutes in the other direction, the hamlet of M----- may not be dying like one of the Drowned Towns to the south, and there's no sign that it's been overrun by gangs or meth like some towns along the Hudson.  But it is silent, so still that if I hadn't seen a golden retriever outside one afternoon, I'd assume no one lived there.  The only motion is the slow sinking of each wood-framed house.


II.
I now work near Times Square, where I must daily navigate through slow-moving crowds of people.  Adding to my frustration is that these tourists have traveled all the way from Kentucky or Kiev in order to stand in the least interesting part of New York, taking selfies of themselves next to violent cartoon characters, Naked Cowboys, and girls wearing thongs and body paint.

I imagine that the locals around here must view people like me with that same incomprehension.  We visitors fetishize the countryside - driving too slowly when the road opens above a valley or when a field displays horses, instagraming all the tractor x-ing signs - while neighbors barrel by in pickup trucks at sixty miles an hour.  We covet these old, uncomfortable wood-frame houses.  The new houses, I've noticed, are very new: modified metallic trailers, or else suburban, well-maintained, with big green lawns.  Their owners ride lawn mowers and wave at me when I run by.

III.
I'm now sitting back on the porch, which I share with at least four disoriented moths that flew in during the night.   (The screen door hangs limply and will not close flush.)  One moth is luminously beautiful, wearing a white ermine cape spotted with black; another has delicate brown and black paisley-patterned wings.  Yesterday afternoon I captured in a cup a carpenter bee who had been thudding peevishly against the screen and released him outside while he buzzed in outrage, but I fear the shock of their rescue would kill the moths.

A groundhog ambling across the front lawn bolted upright when he sensed my presence and appeared to purse his lips - do groundhogs even have lips? - and scurried away, displeased.

IV.
Update: one by one, I took my cup and saved the moths, all of whom were hysterical, and none of whom thanked me.  The spider hangs hungry and patient in her corner.  She may have some visitors yet.