along the southern tier

I think one of the most interesting, and one of the most dismaying, things I have noted on this trip, especially as I've traveled the noninterstates, is the number of abandoned houses. there are, of course, a lot of homes up for sale, but you can always tell which are those because the lawn is mowed and free of ornament.

but the abandoned places are often goodlooking places, or places that were at one point goodlooking, sometimes with trees growing through the porch, sometimes the windows boarded up, sometimes a part of the roof caved in, almost always with the grass grown 3 0r 4 feet high and the lawn reaching all the way to the road.

this afternoon I drove 23 west from hudson to oneonta to connect to 88 south to 17 west to the corning inn where my wife had gotten us reservations for the night--and what was borne out to me over and over again was the number of abandoned places. perhaps 1/3 of the places I passed on 23 were abandoned. and as I drove along I couldn't help wondering if so much of the homeless problem could be solved or alleviated by relocating people into these abandoned places. what would such a thing take?

"snitches get stitches" II

yesterday I was chitterchattering with ron who runs the local museum and who filled me in on some of the backstory to the recent murder.

the kid who lived in austin, it turns out, practically did move around town incognito as ron says almost no one ever saw him except as he was driving his dad and mom to the post office on a daily basis. "the only thing you ever got out of that kid was 'good morning' and 'hello' and 'sir.' seemed like a fine kid if a little lonely. but boy, the local kids saw a whole different side to him." [my mistake, too, on mentioning his assertion he was a crip on his facebook page; I was going by memory and as you can see on the link he very much identifies as blood. both are, of course, fantasy.]

as to the kid who is accused of having pulled the trigger: he, it turns out, is the nephew of a woman whose bed-and-breakfast my wife and I stayed at some years back. the boy's father and he moved out from salt lake city where, the father told him, "he had a run with some bad associates." the kid was almost immediately in trouble with the local law and had to put in some community service. ron took him on at the museum. "he was a pretty okay kid, I mean he did the stuff he was supposed to do and he did a good job, mowing the lawn and painting the porch. but you couldn't tell him he did something good. he'd do something and I'd say, 'great, that's a great job,' and he'd just look right through you or look at you like you'd kicked him. he just finally stopped coming by a few months ago and I had to tell his probation officer, 'I just don't know where he is, he hasn't been coming here.'"

and as to the 15 year old girl: her mom was a physician's assistant and doing pretty well until she started using the drugs she was supposed to be prescribing, and then she lost her license and did time and nothing's been the same since. ron had much to say about that story too as it turns out he's related, like almost everyone around here is, to that family. "I feel for her grandmother, but her grandfather, her father, they've been in and out of prison for molesting their own kids, and her brother, when he got out, he was making to do it again and this guy whose son he'd molested just came up and put a gun to his head and now he's due to get out in a couple years. there's just nothing but bad news for that family, and it's not even the whole family just the family in that 1 house. all of them, just makes the whole family hurt."

"it is just 1 big mess," ron says, "and it hurts whenenver something like this happens. it just hurts the kids and it hurts the people around here and makes it harder to grow up here. it's just bad news all around. no one escapes it."

a palestinian gandhi

"some people think that satyagraha is weakness; they believe that the angrier you are, the stronger you will be. this is their great mistake.

"causing someone to suffer the same price you have paid will never ease your pain. it doesn't help much to be right. you damage your right by just being right. one usually wants to be right only because he or she can't be honest. give me a solution...where my right is in harmony with my humanity and their right is in harmony with their humanity. nonviolent protest is where you invest your pain, a place where this pain becomes active in accordance with your humanity. you cannot practice nonviolence without listening to the other side's narrative. but first you have to give up being a victim. when you do that, no one will be able to victimize you again. I don't want the world to feel pity for me; I want the world to take responsibility, as I do."

--ali abu awwad quoted in "salt march to the dead sea: gandhi's palestinian reincarnation" by david shulman in the june, 2011, issue of harper's magazine

"snitches get stitches"

the wireless connection in austin has been getting less and less certain so I'm traveling around the thick visiting different town libraries to use their wifi services, and to get out of the house. I've been with him nearly a week and am not impatient with him yet, but I suspect that is because I am getting away every few days.

today I am in emporium, a town that to get to I needed to drive up and over a mountain, passing through flyspecks like keating summit and portage, unincorporated areas with few yearround residents but many camps and cabins and lodges, most of them looking abandoned in early summer. the library here is on the main street but I passed it 4 times before finally locating the sign camoflaged into the surrounding wall.

about a week before I arrived a teenager's body was found in prouty run, the creek running through the edge of austin. the kid was 18 and had been there a week. he was almost immediately identified as were his accused killers. it's made for interesting reading for me, and here are some articles.

of the 3 people charged, 2 lived in coudersport and 1 in austin. no one I've spoken to admits to knowing the kid from austin, though it's a tiny enough borough he'd have to have been living under a tin sheet in the woods and come out for 10 minutes at a time, and then wearing a tattooed dog costume, to have been so utterly unknown. the 15 year old girl, however, is related to a friend of my father's, or her grandmother is.

the kid from austin bragged on his facebook page of his affiliations with the crips although that seems to have been at best fantasy and at worst self-destructive delusion. that's what's gotten me thinking harder about this situation. this little area, a godsend for people like my dad and my cousins and, to some extent, my wife and me, is a hell for kids to grow up. the old refrain "there's nothing to do," heard everywhere by every kid no matter the situation, crops up even more handily here. sure, there are places to hunt and fish and ride 4-wheelers--this last an aural invasion to those living in town and within spitting distance of the street--and woods and creeks and hollows to explore and bikes to ride and so forth. and there's tv and internet connections and dvds and books (although precious few of those), and there's alcohol when all those don't make it and meth and some pot.

but there's not much else. there's sports and music and plays when school is going but a lot less of those with budget crunches. there are libraries available, but less so as money dries up. there are ymcas and boys and girls clubs and the such but you often need your own car or your mother to drive you to those places. cycling and walking to many places have become less prominent the more adults worry. the sad truth is there are fewer and fewer places for kids to congregate with other kids where there is no pressure on them to spend money or behave like anything other than kids.

that might not have had any effect on this case. for all I know, kaylyn and her salt lake city boyfriend accused of pulling the trigger may have met as part of a church group. but that these kids managed to find one another in such an otherwise huge expanse, and that the 2 planning the murder could talk about it publically for a couple weeks and have it not somehow make it back to the target of their talk, and how they could have come together without the benefit of cars and cell phones and the internet and a .22 rifle, I can't say. another sad truth is that sometimes kids commit destructive acts no matter what's available to them.

echoing myself from the other day, sometimes the honest answer is "I don't know," and I think when it comes to such experiences as an 18 year old shot in the head by a couple guys and a 15 year old girl because they suspected him of being "a snitch and arrogant"--the girl's boyfriend having warned her off telling what they'd done because "snitches get stitches"--in such circumstances "I don't know" may be the only possible answer.

teach naked

I'm sitting in the coudersport public library where I have a solid wireless signal. reading last sunday's nytimes I came across this essay in the "week in review" section and was absolutely charmed by it. what does it mean for author tim kreider to say, "I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things"? it means that there is some only partly acknowledged thrill to being the only one on your block--or in your county--to know of, let alone appreciate, the wizardry of devo or david bowie (to my knowledge there was only 1 other bowie afficienado in my high school and we argued fervently which was better, early ziggy stardust bowie [my position] or later thin white duke bowie [his]). when I was a student of secondary education I was told by a professor that the 3 most important words a teacher could say were, "I don't know," followed years later in grad school by the advice of my mentor that the 2nd most important words were, "you should find out." the years between are probably the important ones.

a little grocer humor

I was sitting at the counter at the store drinking coffee with my dad and my cousin who were talking about local gossip and the conversation eventually came around to the cost of things.

my dad said, "the price of everything keeps going up. I used to bring home a paycheck of $100 for 2 weeks and that was pretty good money. I raised my kids on that and what little myra brought it."

my cousin said, "well, it's like they say, a winchester rifle used to cost a week's wages, and it still does. it was $69.95 back then and it's $695.00 now. still a week's wages."

I said, "I remember when you could walk into a grocery store with a $5 bill and walk out with a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, 5 lbs of potatoes, a pound of butter, a rasher of bacon, a magazine, a bag of onions, and still have change left in your pocket. you just can't do that anymore." I took another drag off my coffee. "now everybody has security cameras."

cookies

you could get carpal tunnel waving to people in this town. I've been in the thick since 11 last night and it seems that, besides listening to my father tell me variations on the same local news he told me during my last visit here, is all I have been doing.

he's known here, though, and that's important to him. not as some local celebrity but as "uncle harold," a regular and constant, consistent presence in the village. I've written previously about the effect this has on him, this being acknowledged and recognized as a member of the community and that hasn't lessened with my mother's death, only increased. we sat tonight on the porch of the local store and I counted at least 2 dozen cars and trucks whose drivers lifted a hand at sight of my dad (not a one in the direction of my cousin or his wife, owners of the porch we sat on, and sitting on the other end; my dad remarked later on that, saying, "well, they don't wave or say 'hi' to any of those people so I don't know what they expect otherwise").

last night, before I arrived, his new neighbor got drunk and tried using the mailbox on the corner like an atm (or so my dad interpreted his shoving his bankcard in and quickly out several times) and before anyone else could see he brought him up onto the porch to sit and chitterchatter until he sobered, and failing that took his hand and walked him to his trailer where my dad called his wife out to take him inside, telling her he "ought to lie down for a while". today the neighbor came by with a sheepish look and a plate of stillwarm homebaked cookies.

at 1 point in my life I fantasized I could live in a village this tiny and empty. I don't know now if I could, but I could live with stillwarm homebaked cookies.