When I was 4 years old my father had quit a very good job at Monsanto (the same company you know, but not yet associated with Food Inc.) and we traveled by Datsun across the country from industrial Ohio, to the redwoods of Northern California. We stopped to climb every rock, and to hike every park a 4 year old could hike throughout the Rockies. We saw the Petrified Forest. We gazed down into the Grand Canyon. This was such a wonderful choice on my parents part to get me experience with the National Parks, and luckily for us the parks were not crazy with traffic yet as they are now. Still there was another part of this childhood adventure that sticks with me, and must certainly not be accurate, for the metaphorical significance is too obvious, and too much a part of my thinking now to have been literal. Coming through the vast dessert of tumble weeds and cactus’s we arrived in Las Vegas, which was still the city of sin, with only one exception, being the child friendly Circus Circus Casino, which was not far from the great casinos of legend. Still for me, Vegas was mostly lights, which were neon and spectacular, and a hotel pool, and a color television in the room. Here is where my mind must be playing tricks on me. In my memory the movie theater at the hotel was playing the Scorcese Film “Taxi Driver”. Though I had never been in a taxi, I remember this, because I did take a taxi in Vegas at 4, and my mom pointed out the marquee to me. The other thing I remember is that I watched a televised version of Disney’s “Bambi” from the bed of the hotel. This does not sound so exceptional, but the lessons of Bambi and Taxi Driver have never really left me, as I confront my love and hatred for both the city and the country.
By 2006 I had lived in New York for 11 years, and seen the transformation from the world that Travis Bickle deplored in Taxi Driver. I had seen the” scum washed away”, but like so many of us, understood that nothing ever truly gets washed away into nothingness. It just goes somewhere else. So as Time Square was cleared of overt prostitution, violence, homelessness and even dirt, most of us knew that there was a wasteland hidden somewhere out of site, and that out of sight does often indeed mean out of mind, and this can be very dangerous. Those of us who were young adults during the Giuliani administration disliked him, more out of this sense that he had done the cleanup, and we didn’t even know where the trash was. Even worse we were starting to get the feeling that what replaced the filth of 42nd St. was a different kind of perversion. 42nd St. became known as Disney Street, and the entirety of Manhattan got swept up in a Disney dream. Was this what Travis Bickle wanted? With all of this came high rents, high priced homes, and along with the “scum” that Bickle referred to, the artists, and the creative class as a whole left the city. Somehow Disney did for the people of Manhattan what it did for the wetland wildlife of central Florida. It just took over through city and state subsidies and tax abatements, and while we remained filled with anxiety like a hot afternoon on line with our kids for the Dumbo ride, we started to look outside to fill the newly fermented void.
My wife and I had a 1 year old daughter, and we had just spent a rather horrible year, with a couple of major exceptions. Mostly the exception was having the daughter, but also while I was being treated for cancer in the winter, my friends Jenn Gambatese and Curtis Cregan, brought us up to a little town in Delaware County New York where we could rest away from the city at their country home. It was a weekend of a huge snow storm, so it wasn’t exactly the wild life that impressed me, but rather the potential of it and nature as a whole. I had somehow gotten lost in the city, in my own sickness, and by some strange set of circumstances my parents actually moved to Disney World, or at least close enough in a Disney built town called Celebration. So a connection with nature had become skewed for me. The promise of the Catskills brought that back, and in the spring we started to look for a second home in that area. We didn’t have much money to spend, and we didn’t care. The point for us was to have the opposite of what our city life was. We didn’t (and still don’t) have a phone line (no cell service in the mountains), the internet or a television. We have the mountains. We found our small place during a rain storm (as you can see rather snow or rain, storms are not uncommon in the Catskills), on an unpopulated state highway in a valley of the Delaware Headwaters outside a small town called Roxbury. For the 3 other houses nearby, this stretch of valley is known as the tundra, as it receives more moisture than any other area in the state, or at least it seems that way. But it is absolutely beautiful. I healed there, and continue to go there for inspiration, and hikes up the mountains, and cross country skiing through the woods. I pick vegetables with our kind neighbor Vesti who along with her husband Chuckie have an amazing small organic garden, and it is connected to ours. We have wonderful friends in the Catskills, who have taught me a lot, and friends who like ourselves are weekenders in the Catskills who we would have never known without being up there. That said, I missed something crucial which was somehow in my blind spot, and I can’t now get it out of my vision. The poverty, the desolation that was missing in the city, did flow somewhere, and ironically that somewhere is to this very place where we get our drinking water from in New York. This is most clear when you drive one mile from our house, on the bank of a watershed protected zone, there are piles of tires rotting from a long ago bankrupted business. Just in the time we have been up in the Catskills we have seen this happen to fallen barns, farms, and old store fronts. We have seen the prices of houses cut in half. We have seen alcoholism on a level I have never experienced anywhere else, and we have seen all around desperation to survive during the cold winters. While I was peacefully composing music looking at the mountain, people not far from me who I cared about were trying to find wood to heat their homes.
Last year we went to live in Paris for a year, for what was the best year of my life. Just before leaving for that trip I read a bestselling nonfiction book called “The World Without Us”. The premise of the book is likely familiar to many of you reading this. It is basically how our planet would look after humanity disappeared. The big surprise for most of us was that without us, our presence on the planet would fairly quickly disappear. Cities would be buried and rapid decomposition would happen. Other forms of life would become more dominant, and others vanish. Really though the book was just a great naturalist read, reminding us that in the big picture of time we have taken up only a small spot. I finished the book, liked it, but wasn’t terribly moved, until I returned back to the Catskills from that year in Paris. Suddenly I saw that in many places nature had started to take back the territory. The depressing state of the region though, now seemed to me like a call for a different type of action than I had supported before I went to Paris. I likely had been so attached to the places and the people that I had not noticed fully the problems. Before I left I wanted to support local business. I wanted to bring farms, storefronts and factories back to the region. Now I realize that it is not only too late, but that perhaps the decay should even be embraced, and like so much of the country and the world, urbanization allowed to flourish, while nature takes back those places such as the Delaware Valley where we get our water from.
This of course leaves a major problem, and that is how do people who struggle to live inexpensively go to get work in more expensive urban areas? My wife Marine proposed a compromised solution which is eco-tourism along the northeast train routes. This is a reasonable start. I am skeptical about the eat local movement for instance because local usually means taking small amounts of food by pickup truck 3 hours, leaving virtually no environmentally positive impact. So if small rotating crop farms were along major train routes, it accomplishes two things; the food can be brought to the city more efficiently, and people can come to the country more easily. My suggestions come a lot more from my background as a technologist. I want to actually build back the cities that have languished recently, like my home town of Akron Ohio, by building a new type of technology workforce. The same could be said of nearby Albany, or Newark New Jersey. So, I give only vague answers I know, and am not sure if this blog gives an optimistic or pessimistic outlook on the future, but for me it is somehow possible and positive. I want the country to be the home of the real Bambi’s of the world, and our cities to have a little Disney and a little Taxi Driver, but a lot of people, clean drinking water and affordable living.
