I visited John Burroughs’ Slabsides on two separate occasions, and both featured the type of icy weather Burroughs would have confronted with the same violent gusto he confronted porcupines. Burroughs was a preeminent naturalist who produced a cornucopia of essays now considered to be tomes of nature writing. He scribed much of them while at…
About five minutes outside Hudson, NY, amongst the garish strip malls of Fairview Avenue, two women and a man stand facing the wailing traffic in a tight row. It is 45 degrees out, but the trio has dressed for the cold. They have been standing here every Wednesday morning for years, arriving in separate cars…
Wasting food is a pet peeve of mine. I go into internal fits of hysterics when I see people in restaurants leave two-thirds of their French fries behind, sentencing them to be interred in landfills, where not even insects can benefit from them. “Why didn’t they just doggy-bag it?” I’ll apoplectically seethe, beads of consternation…
I made a right off Tinker Street in Woodstock just before 10 a.m. into the office driveway of Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Beals, but had a moment of confusion when I saw the yellow two-story house in front of me. There were no cars in the driveway, and a sign post out front was lacking…
I stepped out of my car near Hasbrouck Park in New Paltz for the vigil 29 hours after James Alex Fields Jr. mowed down dozens of people counter-protesting an alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The murder of Heather Heyer and the injuring of at least 19 others was the acme of a day of mass…
The smell of sticky asphalt wafted into my car from the newly paved road as I rolled past a steady stream of pedestrians walking towards the 2017 Rosendale Street Fest. The town, a cluster of vibrantly painted shops on the Rondout Creek between New Paltz and Kingston, has a population of 6,000 on non-festival days,…
As I entered the vast interior of the Hudson Area Library, I could already see the altitudinous Ella Ghent rising above the other figures in the children’s area. She was conservatively dressed for the occasion, wearing an apron, thick stockings and flats. Besides her was a ukulele. Ella spends most of her time as Michael…
If you walk past the boutiques and antique stores of Hudson’s Warren Street until the boulevard terminates, then hang a right, you will eventually come upon a scene ripped from time: two rows of dusty shacks leaning over the water around a bay. The shacks are on stilts and are constructed with scrounged materials: roofing…
I am in a unique position to write this article, because I am neither a cidiot nor a Columbia County native. I was raised in Connecticut, but spent my 20s in Ulster County, which had its own cidiot vs. native feud. The difference in Ulster County was you were considered a cidiot only if you…
Names and certain minor details have been changed to protect the identities of the interviewees. Demian lives in a rustic house in a rural part of Dutchess County. Selling weed is his side-hustle; he has a legitimate job that takes up most of his time and passion, and selling is a way for him to…
The Other Hudson Valley 