PINE PLAINS: APRIL 8
Pine Plains is a few blocks each side of a crossroads. Houses are white weather-board in lawned yards, upstairs and downstairs, a few pillars, shaked roofs, sash windows and dormer windows - cute to an American - and to me. The brick restaurant on one corner of the crossroads is French owned. The food is reasonable.
Nothing much happens in Pine Plains (nothing much happens back home in Colwall). They are good sane places in which to sink roots.
I ride in sunshine. My hands are warm. The Honda purrs contentedly as we coast the country road. In my early youth this was a land of small dairy farms. A hundred or so years of toil won fields from hillsides. Dry stone walls protected the fields. Agro-Industry has put the farms out of business. Hill fields have surrendered to second generation birch woods spotted with weekend homes. Valleys are given over to hobby farms and horse farms. White painted post and rail fences enclose horse paddocks, white houses, white painted stable blocks. Even the dirt has been deodorised.
Why so bitter?
Not bitter, sad.
Sad at the waste of labour dedicated to future generations, a cold funeral pyre of dreams for a better life.
Such was New England...sacrifice to avarice.
Showing posts with label Millerton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Millerton. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
ROBERT SHECKLEY
UPSTATE NEW YORK: APRIL 8
I feel the Hudson river as a frontier between old and new, between the United States that is foreign to me and the United States with historic and cultural ties to Europe. I take the correct road round town to the Hudson River bridge. I am home East of the river. Anya and I have toured every lane, visited each small town - Rhinebeck, Red Hook, Millerton - stopped for coffee here, shopped there, visited Anya's doctor, browsed the bookshops, collected a cat from the vet, ordered a Chinese takeaway.
Anya's genetic father, science fiction writer Robert Sheckley, passed his final years in Rhinebeck. He is buried in the artists' corner of Woodstock cemetery. Anya and I visited his grave at Christmas. Snow covered the cemetery. We parked and watched as two deer broke out of the trees and bounded uphill across the gravestones.
I am indebted to Bob for his teaching. He was a fine writer and a great teacher of writing. Largely forgotten in his own country, Sheckley remains a hero to those who live in what was the USSR. Soviet censers failed to recognize dangers in Sheckley's anarchist take on society; collections of his short stories sold in millions. To quote a leading literary critic in the Ukraine: "We were safe in a sort of intellectual stupor. Bob kicked our minds out of neutral".
I feel the Hudson river as a frontier between old and new, between the United States that is foreign to me and the United States with historic and cultural ties to Europe. I take the correct road round town to the Hudson River bridge. I am home East of the river. Anya and I have toured every lane, visited each small town - Rhinebeck, Red Hook, Millerton - stopped for coffee here, shopped there, visited Anya's doctor, browsed the bookshops, collected a cat from the vet, ordered a Chinese takeaway.
Anya's genetic father, science fiction writer Robert Sheckley, passed his final years in Rhinebeck. He is buried in the artists' corner of Woodstock cemetery. Anya and I visited his grave at Christmas. Snow covered the cemetery. We parked and watched as two deer broke out of the trees and bounded uphill across the gravestones.
I am indebted to Bob for his teaching. He was a fine writer and a great teacher of writing. Largely forgotten in his own country, Sheckley remains a hero to those who live in what was the USSR. Soviet censers failed to recognize dangers in Sheckley's anarchist take on society; collections of his short stories sold in millions. To quote a leading literary critic in the Ukraine: "We were safe in a sort of intellectual stupor. Bob kicked our minds out of neutral".
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