As most of you know:
John Halle and Marka Gustavsson and
Ben
now live on
41 Garden St.
Red Hook, NY
12571
We have
mixed feelings about having joined (albeit belatedly) the exodus from big cities
where we have lived for almost all our adult lives.
This classic article in the New Yorker itemizes the basis
of a lot of our misgivings.
But what is
life in the new century about if not living in a more or less perpetual state
of denial!
So a few
words about the Hudson Valley which is truly glorious, as I've discovered in
the year since we've been here.
We are not
far from Hyde Park and the Franklin Roosevelt library where visitors are
greeted on their entry with the most radical statement ever made in a state of
the union: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
"Freedom
from fear" was, of course, quickly shunted aside first during the Cold War
and now by the Global War on Terror which markets the same rancid goods in new
packaging.
A visit to
Hyde Park is a bracing reminder that political power need not serve exclusively
to comfort the comfortable and afflicted the afflicted-one increasingly
necessary in this most cynical of epochs.
Speaking of
cynicism, Red Hook is next to Barrytown-memorialized in song by Bard College
dropouts Steely Dan. It is also the former residence of Gore Vidal from which
he would come close to being elected to the US Congress, having received the
endorsement of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Red Hook,
unlike the nearby Rhinebeck-a favorite weekend getaway of New Yorkers-is a working
class town whose history goes back to a feudal aristocracy three centuries ago. The history lives on in the form of
class antagonisms which we are only now beginning to get some inkling of. A
gaggle of addled descendants of Astors, Livingstons, and Vanderbilts or still, so we are told, manage their
old estates along the river, with whatever funds their ever dwindling
inheritances provide.
What this
means is that the surrounding area has largely escaped the metastasic pox of
subdivisions which are among the most conspicuous feature of ex-urban
perimeters. Red Hook is surrounded by landscapes which make one feel one has
walked into Martin Heade, Frederick Church or Thomas Cole painting. It is an open question how long the will
be able to be maintained.
My guess is
not much longer which is why everyone should visit us.
Here's
where we live:
Front
porch-needs rocking chairs.
Back yard-needs sheep or goats.
There he goes!
Barn/studio/guest house-for guests. (Dog visit optional.)
