The Western Farmlands

I had been saving for rural land for the past four or five years. Now sick, I had an unexpected source of funding. Money given for my health is collecting, from work, from my parents, from myself. I had saved 95% over the last five years and the last yard, the added medical support, pushed me over my savings goal, $100,000 cash. A healthy sum for land that will now pay for disease imagined, invented or otherwise. 

The moment that I hit my goal it’s original purpose was voided. The land fund was diverted into my health, something that I had faith in all of my life. I hated this. I did not want to spend it. I worked for that money and it hurt to let go. 

Since, it’s dropped like my O2. Now, after psychotherapy and psychiatric consults, the balance is probably $98,000, it will drop to $95,000, then $92,000 and after three emergency department visits it will be at $90 or below. 

Oh and, its emergency department, not emergency room. If you are a healthcare provider you know this. You don’t correct the public who watched 90’s hospital procedurals, you just say it correctly. 

We notice. 

We understand it’s more than just a room, that it’s a collection of rooms that are connected through automatic door openers and oxygen pipes run in the ceiling. I have only been in one room for the last four weeks. The word room, still has some dignity, I am not sure you gained with department. 

You all are organized and got it together, we trust that. We appreciate you. We clap for you at 7:00pm. Let me be the only person in the world to be frustrated with you. With your access to testing, with your inability to recognize my need, your dismissal of me as anxiety rather than patient. I understand you and don’t blame you. But, you all don’t hear me in your department, maybe if we were less distant, you know, in a room. 

The full bank balance marked a moment in life where I realized life was achievable, that adulthood takes work. I understood that effort takes years. It was when I was atop a mound of cash that I realized it didn’t matter. After the emergency department, the balance will dip in tandem with the world’s collective O2. 

I started looking at real estate online to social distance my mind on my birthday, March 25th. 

I always asked Jeffrey to look around Andes: in Bovina, Bovina Center, Kortright, Meredith, but never really Andes itself. He lives in Andes and tries to sell it to me. He does it in his kind attentive and brief manner, giving as much of his attention as he is willing to reveal. He doesn’t say much, he says just enough. I like this.

He says the things that you want to hear. That the barn had recently been completed and a new roof added. That it was perfect for me as an architect. That I have appreciation that others do not for raw space. But there are the things that he doesn’t say, more guarded moments when you ask him about the health of the market in spite of the decay of the world around us. It is as if he doesn’t hear you, as if he stepped out of the room for a second. 

Virus real estate is not possible. Especially for someone so politely guarded as Jeffrey. He reminded me of this a few times: I could lose my license, I could lose my license, travel isn’t advised. All stated in his guarded polite appealing way. Always kind, staked down with the proper.

Real estate was never easy near Andes, it was the site where undersheriff Osman Steele was killed in 1845 by a group of rebels dressed as Calico Indians. The death marked the informal end to the Anti-Rent wars, a rebellion of tenant farmers who stood up to the feudal land system that was a holdover from early colonial occupation. As the band of rebels were served papers, they confronted the group of lawyers and shot undersheriff Osman three times. Land in Andes wasn’t buyable, it was granted to feudal patroons by the crown and remained so nearly seventy years after the American Revolution. The uprising was a second stand for American liberty and its among this history that the beauty of the place must have played a role reinforcing their fervor. Even today, the shooting is remembered and sides are forged along political lines on whether the Calicos were rebels or patriots.

In 2020, I knew this sitting in the bed of the first apartment I was escaped to. The bed of my beautiful girl friend Emily, but for the moment paging through Zillow, vacant piece of land after vacant piece of land brought me back to a dream that paused when my health became apparent. 

I sent Jeffrey three links. The first, $148,900 for a 50 acre parcel and a barn. It was near Bovina. The owner removed it from market. The parcel off of route 28, also, the owner realizing, that the trailer from the 1970s minted in tangs of green and orange was a safe retreat. My initial thoughts: 

“The place is tilted but beautiful.

It has a collection of landscapes, open meadow, talented views, wooded hill, and carriage roads that lead to a mobile home that was built in 1975. It's hard to talk about a place without having been there, but Jeffrey has let me know that its off the market, for the time being. The owner wanted to harvest its woodland and "adjust" the property before selling.

I am worried that whoever it is, he or she, will trash the trailer. It's lovely in images, clapboard walls and laced window skirts, it’s dated. It's easy to imagine a layer of smoke covering the walls, that the carpet, if there is carpet, holds life, but in images it’s a window into another time. I say, keep it.”

The last parcel, the only one I could afford is beautiful and $88,000. It has been on the market for a long time and Jeffrey didn’t know much about it but offered to inquire. 

The next day, there was a 10:00 pm email. I remember now I didn’t feel nearly distraught about my health as I do now. What did happen was that work dropped our salaries by 25% across the board. I didn’t see this coming. Architecture felt stable, large projects that take a long time to complete with big budgets. They are barges that are difficult to redirect. Yet it came. 

I emailed Jeffrey and let him know. Graciously, he was used to my flakiness. I thanked him. 

As you leave Andes driving north you round the contours of the mountain range, vistas present themselves here unlike the rest of the Catskills. They are sinuous and pastoral, maybe even rolling. They evoke Ohio and the landscapes I grew up around, only wilder. They aren’t crevassed with dark cleaves, valleys or notches like hamlets further east such as Pheonica or Woodstock. They are open and feel wide. 

As you get to Bloomville along route 10 you’ll come to a crossroads where River St. and 10 meet. Built to the edges of both roads is a four story farmhouse that housed Table on Ten, a famed boutique restaurant and lodge. Brooklyn in the Catskills, the chef Inez Valk-Kempthorne, brought the farm to table movement to New York State. She did it by surrounding herself by farmlands, making simple food and curating it for a growing population of expats. It was an authentic restaurant, unassuming with a few AirBnb rooms stacked atop of it. 

From the vantage of my bed, for a moment I lost my Covid breath as I realized it was on the market for dirt cheap, furnishings, kitchen equipment and all. I realized that Jeffrey knew of my dream for land, but I forgot to tell him about my favorite restaurant. Now with my lungs tight, my pocketbook shrunk, and a global economy that has vaporized, opportunities present themselves, but few of us can take them. 

Me with the cramp in my lung. You who forgot to save. We’ll leave it to someone who escaped both to live that dream. It will be someone who is fortified enough that purchasing a turn-key business with strong client base (who can’t leave home) would be an adventure and not a colossal risk. 

The countryside appears like a savior. Social distance there is measured in miles not feet. Owning a brunch place along a country road couldn’t be so bad. 

At least the air would be fresh.

My SpO2 is 97% my PRbpm is 85.

Introduction to the Inaccessible.

I am sitting in a bed in an apartment that isn’t mine. My head only knows one place to go and that is into the depths of my body, it is its own ekg, oxi-monitor, and pulse sensor. All of it comes built in, but they have been calibrated through five weeks of syncing with their electric counterparts, as I sought to determine whether it was Covid-19 or anxiety. 

Even now as I write this, I am measuring my breaths against the stroke of the keyboard. Do I hold my breath as I write? Does my heart beat to the rhythm of the apple keyboard and palpitate when its butterfly keys stick, or is it strictly married to whatever is inside me? Whatever the physicality I exist in, it doesn’t matter. I am here in an unknown place. We relocated here over three weeks ago, after Emily’s apartment was requested by her roommate for a week. We fled to a friend’s apartment who had fled weeks earlier to Vermont. 

Originally, as we viewed their exodus through Instagram, we were jealous that they escaped hell. Later, as we moved the two bags of clothes and a computer workstation that our lives had been reduced to up their four flights of stairs, we were eternally grateful. It was in that moment of transplant that the world ceased to exist. It digitized, becoming only accessed through glimpses of others, through video chats and teleconferences with doctor’s offices. 

The moments I do get out are in panic. They are to places labeled either urgent or emergency and are stationed with people fearful of being next to me. Of being next.

My home is abandoned. It sits there in the Upper Westside where the neighbor who drove me away still resides. She is now alone to use the shared bathroom at her disposal. She is alone, I am isolated, you are distanced, others are quarantined. We have shed place and become thoroughly nowhere.

In my case, place has shrunken to maybe 80 square feet and its adjoining bathroom in Bedstuy Brooklyn. The apartment is on the street where Biggie Smalls' portrait marks the corner of the block and the building itself is nondescript, new and uninterested in matching the character of its neighbor. My room, Zach and Nancy’s room, faces an interior court that is more suburban and has more trees than I would have imagined from the front. 

I am not immune to confined spaces, my apartment itself is one, its 132 square feet. The mind can expand the smallest space, magnifying details that were invisible before. The seafoam tone of the masked light on the air conditioner. The tree out the window where all the birds in the neighborhood fuck. I could do that for you. I could describe the intimacy of every detail, but the countless folds in the duvet cover do not deserve it. They sat there unwillingly to accept my sweat and chills during the night. They are cureless

My cure is in putting my mind back where it belongs, in the open, in space rather than its vacuum. The plan is to tell you stories of places that exist but I can’t get to. They are places that I will imagine, but are real. They are places that I will Google, but will not taste smell or see them. You will experience these places, through how I experience everything now, a conjuring. These stories will be a travel guide out of your inner confines and into an inaccessible world. Our landlord, the virus, has requisitioned our permits of place and free travel. This is an effort to take them back. 

Stay with me. Let’s see how this goes and don’t worry I’ll keep you at a distance.

My SpO2 is 97% my PRbpm is 77.