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ugliness of the people, beauty of the landscape
Tuesday, October 22 2002
setting: rural Hurley, New York
That strangely Neanderthal ritual last night with the wart seemed to affect my dreams. This morning I dreamed I was performing oral sex upon a blond girl I knew back in Oberlin. It's an indication of the weirdness of dreams that anything can be different from reality, sometimes while unexpected things remain the same. For example, in the dream, this particular blond looked exactly the way she did back then but she was regarded as being extremely beautiful. In reality, though, this person wasn't regarded by me or anyone else as being all that hot. In the dream I discovered that she was suffering from an unexpected crop of genital warts growing in the field between her vagina and anus.
In my walks into the woods with Sally and in my drives to Lowes to pick up supplies, I've been noticing the many differences between this landscape and civilization and the one I've left behind in Brooklyn. For starters, the rolling forested hills in full autumnal color are a spectacular thing to behold. There's a hilltop on 209 just north of 23 from which one can see several such colorful hills interfingered. One of these is crowned by a few radio towers and somehow they add more to the landscape than they take away, much like that tall building visible on the skyline of Mohunk ridge (west of New Paltz). Then there's that massive field along Hurley Mountain road creating a wide flat agricultural swath through the color.
But as beautiful as the forests might look, when one walks in them (at least near my house), one finds an ecologically bleak landscape. Back behind the house, there's a beautiful little streamlet and a system of stunning micro-gorges, but there is almost no soil in these woods. Here and there is enough to cover the stones, but compared to, say, Prospect Park, my part of the Catskills is little more than forested stone pile. Though, as in Prospect Park, chipmunks are common, here Sally cannot dig for them when she chases them down a hole. What's more, few of the trees seem to be any older than about fifty years. There's something subconsciously depressing about a forest of uniformly young trees, especially when the weather is cold.
Another thing that's taking some getting used to is the way people look up here in Kingston versus other places I've lived. Mind you, I grew up in and often return to a pretty culturally backwards part of the Appalachian South, but in modern times I haven't had the pleasure of living in a place with so many mullets and other anachronistic hairdo relics from the 80s. Some of the women one sees in the grocery store have blond helmets so bleached and so chemically stiffened that the strands of hair actually look as if they've been deep-fried in blond batter. I get the feeling that if I were to press down on their heads, the hair would collapse with an audible crunch like soft styrofoam. Beyond that, though, I keep noticing people in Kingston with more fundamental issues: strange bone structure. It's not uncommon to randomly see some guy walking down the street whose face appears to have been tweaked in a 3D version of Adobe Photoshop, perhaps the victim of birth canal trama or poor childhood nutrition. Such visual spectacles were rare on the far more populous streets of Park Slope, where, by comparison, everyone looked to be healthy, fit, and photogenic, even the old folks.
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