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the driver of the mystery pickup
Monday, August 31 2026
location: rural Town of Hurley, Ulster County, NY
Late this morning Gretchen was off at work and Neville had decided to go outside to sun himself in the driveway, so I was out there with the dogs when an old pickup truck with fishing poles sticking up from it cruised slowly past on Dug Hill Road. The truck stopped when the driver saw me and he hollered out, "Gus?" I couldn't see him so I acknowledged that yes I was Gus and then went through my mental Rolodex to figure out what hillbilly-adjacent friends or acquaintances I have in the area. The truck then awkwardly backed into the driveway, almost hitting a metal post in the process. By then I was pretty sure my visitor was Mark G., whom I had not seen since 2016 or 2017. Mark married into Ray's friend group and used to live in Brooklyn, but they had (I'd recently learned) moved up to the Hudson Valley. Mark used to routinely show up at the house unannounced when he was up from the city and then try to get me to spend the day smoking pot, drinking beer, and watching Accept's "Balls to the Wall" on YouTube. Gretchen couldn't stand him, but occasionally I could appreciate the break from normal life that would happen when he showed up. It was a little like being back in my early 20s in the Shenandoah Valley and hanging out with Josh F. One day, though, Mark randomly (and extremely awkwardly) showed up while we were having a dinner party with a completely different group of people, and the experience was so mortifying that he never communicated with me again. And I'm such a terrible friend that I was content to let him drift away, never reaching out on my own. But now here he was in his driveway. His first remark was that my hair had turned grey, which it had evidently done since the last time he'd seen me. He looked pretty much the same, though now he had a scraggly pony tail and that remnant stump of an upper incisor was down to just a token crescent peeking out beyond the gum line. In keeping with his affinity for trollish conspiracy theories, he wore a red teeshirt with the slogan "Make Earth Flat Again." I saw Mark had a dog with him, so I asked if she could come out and meet my dogs to get rid of that tension, so he did. She was some sort of chow-maybe-shepherd mix with mostly white fur. Mark was still the same guy I'd known ten years ago, and things picked up where they'd left off. There were no hard feelings or anything, since we'd sort of forgotten how it was we'd come to be estranged. Mark looked around and marveled at the overgrown yard and garden (I eventually gave him a cucumber) and then told me about a "70s house" where he lives near the east end of Glenord-Whittenberg Road. Like me, he's unemployed, though he apparently does odd jobs and a lot of fishing. When I mentioned having a cabin on a lake, he asked if I go fishing. I said no, that, remember, I am a vegan. "I don't eat them," he said, "I throw 'em back; I just want to meet them!" And then I said something about giving them lip piercings. He didn't stick around long, though I got a chance to show him the chainsaw stool I am carving and we exchanged numbers (which is easy for me to do, since I never check the messages on my cellphone).
This evening Gretchen wanted us to have dinner with our friends Lynn and Gregg at the Garden Café, something that isn't as easy as it used to be when Neville wasn't being treated for heartworm. So she arranged with our baker friend Colleen to come stay with our dogs during dinner time. Apparently Colleen needed a little break from her homelife and so intended to stay the night (well, until 2:00am; she's a baker, remember). She arrived at around 5:00pm and after discussing a few things, I set off for Woodstock.
Gretchen had just gotten out of a Zoom meeting when I encountered her on Tinker Street. As usual, dinner was sort of a bore for me, something I do only because I am a good husband. Lynn and Gregg had just gotten back from a vacation in Switzerland and Alpine Italy and had stories about that, the same sort of stories we would've told had we been the ones coming back from vacation. I feel like we're boring when we tell such stories and that the listeners are just going through the motions of listening. My only real coontribution to this part of the conversation was asking, "In Switzerland, they drive in the middle, right?" Later the conversation lingered for awhile on Gretchen's march organizing, where there weren't many juicy stories to be told. Then the topic landed on the perception of stress. Lynn told us about a study that was conducted to see how subjects reacted to disgusting imagery, in this case incest. Interestingly, it was discovered that a group fed ginger prior to seeing the images had much more tolerance for what they were seeing than a control group that had not. This was apparently due to ginger's calming effect on the stomach, which our brains use to judge how strong our emotions are. This reminded me of something I'd read about people without a sense of feeling in their bodies (perhaps due to nerve damage) experiencing much shallower emotions than people with intact sensory systems.
Back at the house, Colleen eventually went to sleep downstairs and I slept on the couch with Neville. But for some reason he was very restless and kept wanting to either go outside or go somewhere else in the house. Tonight was the first night he'd ever indicated he wanted to go upstairs. So I carried him up there and turned him loose, and he went to join Charlotte on the laboratory bean bag. Since there was no room for me, I slept out on the teevee room couch. Later when Neville wanted to climb in bed with Gretchen, I followed him there. It then turned out, as I'd suspected, that nobody had given Neville his evening pills, accounting for the unusually high level of activity.
A deer on the sidewalk outside the Garden Café as Gregg (left) looks at Gretchen (right). Click to enlarge.
The deer crosses the road.
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