The Blurred Highway
We set out at dusk on the blurred highway, a congested, windswept corridor where no one in their right mind travels after sunset. Dusk is a weird time, it's elegant but at the same time mysterious. This is a time when the normal people are settling down in their hotel rooms, watching a movie, or going over itinerary for the following morning. Our only notion was to put miles behind us.
The climate of the times has become tense and unpredictable. It seems during daylight hours people are worn thin, edgy, volatile, and prone to random acts of madness.
The echoes of smashing TV’s over rigged football games shattering the quietude of the night is common these days. The hipsters can no longer afford good cocaine and it is probably better off. The suburbs, once safe-havens from the sleaze of the city are now grim and dangerous. There is always the heavy feeling that you are being watched. Another CEO has jumped to his death from a $30 million dollar Soho loft. Another politician resigns, looking at jail time for being a creep.
We decided to get the hell out and headed for the mountains, somewhere in upstate New York, far away from everything, near Saratoga where our mother used to take us to bet on the horses - a place of dirt roads and dark woods; no internet, no heat, flickering electricity, nighttime silence, pitch black, the only sound is the wind, the guttural croak from an occasion frog or the eerie, blood-chilling howls of a marauding band of coyote.
Austere former hunting cabins, their walls adorned with the heads of slain deer, bear, elk, and dirty local politicians. Old yellowing newspapers rest beside a fireplace, the scowl of Harry Haldeman circa 1974, staring at me, making me feel guilty, of something. Up the nameless, winding mountain road, growing further and further from civilization, the paved lanes giving way to dirt and gravel. A shriveled gray-haired lady on the side of the road with her hobbling dogs watches us go by. She doesn’t wave or smile. Only observes apprehensively. We are outsiders. And that is fine with me.
“A thousand mosquitos bounce against it as if trying to break through, liked starving lions no longer interested in the surreptitious pursuit.”
We are deep into summer. It is damp and cold up here in the mountains. We find some dried logs stacked under the house. 30-year-old wood. We brush the spiders off and build a fire to chase the chill from the air. It is place like this that time barely remembers, and when it does, it can’t recall the name. Stories etched into trees and weathered epitaphs.
The musky, moth-ball smell of years and dimming memories. I sip a Manhattan and light up a cigar on the screened porch. A thousand mosquitos bounce against it as if trying to break through, liked starving lions no longer interested in the surreptitious pursuit. I felt like Lemuel Gulliver surrounded by cannibal Lilliputians.
“This place has an eerie aura when the weather blows in like this,” my father said, also puffing on a good cigar. “It is like this in the fall. We haven’t had much of a summer this year. Not here. By now, the rotten bugs are usually long gone.”
And in a weird way, I like it, the haunting rustling of the leaves and the moan of the wind, the distant thunder, and the blue glow of the lightning. My girlfriend walked out onto the porch, all bundled up and sipping on a glass of sauvignon blanc. “This is my kind of summer,” she said. She has thin blood, mine is thicker, more akin to a warmer climate and humidity, but you’d be a fool not to find the place enchanting and cozy once in front of a raging fire.
It is those simple pleasures that we take for granted that make the world seem like it isn’t ready to implode at any moment. The world has always been fine. Especially a place like here, sparse of putrid humans.
The ones that live here all year round, in these woods, on this mountain, a raw and hostile environment are a different breed. Come the winter season it's each family for themselves. Snow falls for months, sub-arctic temperatures, and stretches of such grotesque cold, gray, and misery, it seems that hell has finally frozen over. The life experienced by these people is noticeable in the 1,000-yeard stares that develop as they describe the unforgiving winters that only they understand.
One hundred and fifty to two hundred years ago, German settlers moved into the area when it was still teeming with Native Americans and in the final throes of an ancient ice age. Back then, the snow fell twelve feet high, and the wind chill went down to minus 80, or so they claim. I don’t know if those people were tougher than they are today, probably not. But they did have previous experience surviving the horrid German winters in the Bavarian Alps so their first winter in the mountains here, would have been somewhat nostalgic, I imagine.
There is no place that one can recuperate better from the chaos of the outside world than a place like this, hidden far from the rest of civilization, high in the mountains near the clouds where time slows down, the air grows thin, and the world can quietly forget about its troubles.
