Green Acres - a New Yorker describes the experience of buying a country home - Brief Article

National Review, Nov 8, 1999 by Richard Brookhiser

Mr. Brookhiser, an NR senior editor, is author most recently of Alexander Hamilton, American.

As it does for many New Yorkers, the time came when I had to have green acres. So I bought 20 in Ulster County. There, I imagined, two or three times a month I would become a different man. I would observe the movements of constellations and toads. I would read Virgil, Frost, and Wendell Berry. When my neighbors upstate make noise, it comes from their sheep, not their stereos. Instead of high heels on the ceiling, I hear hickory nuts on the roof. When I go upstate I trade roaches for flies, ants, wasps, spiders, ticks, and daddy longlegs (that is a better deal). You can still get shot in the country, but your killers will have been aiming at deer. I vowed to have no television-my own private Fort Sumter, seceding not just from the city, but from the age.

Buying a country place seems like belated adulthood. I go to stores to look for things I need, not to look at things I might like (lesbians, I notice, nest at Home Depot; gay men decorate at IKEA). Having a country place requires things that most Manhattanites never do: paying a mortgage, and owning a car. As a conservative I always had a theoretical belief, rare among my fellow citizens, in the importance of property rights and tax rates. Now I will feel it in the bone.

A week after the closing, I experienced a real-life haiku that justified every nickel. I was lying in the hammock that overlooks the clearing that occupies one of my acres. High and silent, a jet crossed the sky, sliding from north to south, probably following the Hudson River to New York, or someplace farther down the coast. At the same moment, a migrating monarch butterfly crossed the clearing, fluttering in the same direction. The airplane was faster, but the insect was going farther, for monarchs winter in Mexico.

Zen is fine, but life goes on. Very soon I discovered that my occasional exiles were not as complete as I thought they would be. I wanted to stay plugged into the city, even when I was away from it. I began checking my phone messages, then rashly gave my country number to my colleagues. Now they leap the miles with queries. I also take a laptop and check my e-mail. I know the Internet is supposed to be everywhere and nowhere, the ultimate abolition of city and country both. Maybe pornographers and political dissidents use it so, but I log on to write brief notes to Manhattan friends. I could go cold turkey on one Gotham-related small screen, not two.

I also found that, to a surprising extent, the city has transplanted itself upstate. Tempo and density are different, but the hand of Manhattan stretches over the hinterlands. Every gas-station convenience store up there sells both the New York Times and the New York Post. You can live in the woods and never miss A. M. Rosenthal or Amy Sohn. The Times has been encouraging New Yorkers to go north. A story in late summer hailed the Catskills as the coming weekend place. The day after it appeared, a man at the next table in my favorite country restaurant was calling realtors on his cell phone and puzzling over a road map.

Lots of city people have long lived up there. In 1992 the Jerry Brown campaign held a rally in Union Square before the New York primary, and I thought they had emptied Vermont to bring in so many old hippies. But I had not reckoned on the transplanted city people of upstate. One of my new neighbors lives in the 200-year-old barn of a former dairy farm. Her acres include a beaver pond, apple trees she lets us harvest, and the site of an old sweat lodge she built. She told us hopefully that the Jewish New Year was 5760, which means we all have a chance to live the '60s again. Another neighbor, who has educated me in circuit breakers and log splitting, and introduced me to his dog, a mix of bear hound and coon dog, is a sculptor who designs the interiors of stores in Soho.

New York City and the Hudson Valley alter consciousness in related, though different, ways. The city is a stimulant. Everyone in it, even Mormons and Christian Scientists, is on a perennial caffeine rush. The Hudson Valley is a narcotic. When the storm clouds pile up, and the bugs drone, anyone would join Rip Van Winkle in a 20-year snooze. Both atmospheres probably derive from the buried Dutchness. If the key to Dutch life is intense privacy, in the countryside that means isolation, while in the city it produces laissez-faire.

Our last trip upstate lasted five days. That may have been too long. I began looking suspiciously at the millions of trees, and thinking, "What are you up to?" Our first day back in town, we rose at a civilized hour, and went downtown, where each block had more people on the sidewalk than live in our new upstate village. We window-shopped, had lunch at four, and listened to a man on Greene Street yelling passages from Thus Spake Zarathustra.