I make a brief scenic turnout below Cobleskill to stretch my back (my coccyx has now begun aching). Leaving Paul in the seat, I climb out into the little breezy lot and walk to the sandstone parapet beyond which the luminous Pleistocene valley leaps out stark and vast and green and brown-peaked with the animal grandeur of an inland empire any bona fide pioneer would’ve quaked before trying to tame. I actually climb onto the wall and take several deep clean breaths, do several strenuous jumping jacks and squat thrusts, touch my toes, pop my fingers, rotate my neck as the sweet odors float in on the watery air. Beyond me hawks soar, martins dip, a tiny airplane buzzes, a distant hang glider like a dragonfly wheels and sways in the rising molecules. A door in a far-off, invisible house slams audibly shut, a car horn blows, a dog barks. And visible on the hillside opposite, where the sun paints a yellow square upon the western gradient, a tractor, tiny but detectably red, halts its progress in an emerald field; a tiny, hatted figure climbs down, pauses, then starts on foot back up the hill he’s tractored down. He moves for a long, slow ways above and away from his machine, turns and goes a distance along a curved rim top, then resolutely, undramatically goes over, disappears at his own pace to whatever world’s beyond. It is a fine moment to savor, even alone, though I wish my son could break loose and share it. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him sing opera.
I stand and stare a while at nothing in particular, my exercise ended, my back loosened, my son entombed in the car reading a magazine. The yellow square begins gradually to fade on the opposite hillside, then moves mysteriously left, darkens the green hayfield instead of lighting it, and I decide — satisfied and palpably enlivened — to pack it in.
Somebody has left a plastic bag of Styrofoam “popcorn” half out of the trash can — the pale-green kernels that Christmas wreaths or your repaired Orvis reel comes boxed in. A new warm afternoon breeze is shifting wispy kernels here and there around the lot. I stop before climbing in to jam the bag down farther and to police up what bits I can with two hands.
Paul looks up from his New Yorker and stares at me where I’m tidying up the asphalt around the car. I merely look back at him from my side of the window, my hands full of clingy green stuff. He fingers his cut ear under his Walkman, blinks, then slowly makes his fingers into a pistol, points it at his temple, produces a silent little “boom” sound with his lips, throws his head back in terrible mock death, then goes back to reading. It’s scary. Anyone would think so. Especially a father. But it’s also funny as hell. He is not so bad a boy.
Short-term destinations are by far the best.
Paul and I skirt the outskirts of Oneonta a little past five, turn north on Route 28 along the newly rose Susquehanna, and in truth are almost there. (Geography, while instructive, is also the Northeast’s soundest selling point and best-kept secret, since in three hours you can stand on the lapping shores of Long Island Sound, staring like Jay Gatz at a beacon light that lures you to, or away from, your fate; yet in three hours you can be heading for cocktails damn near where old Natty drew first blood — the two locales as unalike as Seattle is to Waco.)
Route 28 takes a pretty hickory-and-maple-shaded course straight upriver through tiny postcard villages, past farms, woodlots and single-family roadside split-levels and ranches. Here is a cut-ur-own Xmas tree lot, a pick-ur-own raspberry patch and apple orchard, a second-echelon B&B tucked into a hillside sugarbush; an attack-dog academy, an ugly clear-cut bordered by a low-yield hay meadow with Guernsey cows grazing to the edge of a gravel pit.
Here you’d expect to find no planning boards, PUDs, finicky building codes, septic standards, sidewalk ordinances or ridgetop laws; just an as yet unspoilt place to site your summer cabin or mobile home where and exactly how you want it, right down the road from a good Guinea restaurant, with its own marinara and Genesee on tap, and where a 10 a.m. night owl’s mass is still celebrated Sundays at St. Joe’s in Milford. It’s the perfect mix, in other words, of small-scale Vermont atmospherics with unpretentious, upstate hardscrabble, all an afternoon’s drive from the G.W. Bridge. (Dark rumors may now and then surface that it’s also a prime location for big-city muscle to off-load their mistakes, but no place is without a downside.)
Meanwhile, my spirits have taken a strong upward turn and I’d now like to try hauling Paul into a planned off-the-cuff give-and-take squarely on the notion of Independence Day itself, and to point out that the holiday isn’t just a moth-bit old relic-joke with men dressed up like Uncle Sam and harem guards on hogs doing circles within circles in shopping-mall lots; but in fact it’s an observance of human possibility, which applies a canny pressure on each of us to contemplate what we’re dependent on (barking in honor of dead basset hounds, thinking we’re thinking, penis tingling, etc.) and after that to consider in what ways we’re independent or might be; and finally how we might decide — for the general good — not to worry about it much at all.
This may be the only way an as-needed parent can in good faith make contact with his son’s life problems; which is to say sidereally, by raising a canopy of useful postulates above him like stars and hoping he’ll connect them up to his own sightings and views like an astronomer. Anything more purely parental — wading in and doing some stern stable-cleaning about stealing rubbers, wrecking cars, kicking security personnel, braining stepfathers (who might even deserve it), torturing innocent birds, eventually hauling up his court appearance and how that might correlate inversely with coming to Haddam to live with me and after that with his chances of ever getting into Williams on a “need scholarship”—simply wouldn’t work. In the dizzyingly brief time we have together, he would only retreat into raucous barking, furtive smiles and sullener silences, ending up with me in a fury and in all likelihood ferrying him back to Deep River, feeling myself to be (and being) a ruinous failure. I don’t, after all, know what’s wrong him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn’t just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another — we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better.
Paul has stashed his Walkman back in his bag and set his New Yorker on the dash, where it reflects distractingly in the windshield, but he has also grabbed up the slender green-jacketed Emerson off the back seat, where it’s been on top of my red REALTOR windbreaker, and begun giving it a look. This is better than I could’ve planned, though it’s clear he hasn’t cracked the copy I mailed him.
“Do you think you’d rather have a child with Down’s syndrome or a child with just regular mental illness?” he says, leafing casually backward through Self-Reliance as if it were Time.
“I’m pretty pleased with how you and Clarissa turned out. So I guess I’d rather have neither one.” A mental mug shot of the little feral Mongoloid back in Friendly’s hours ago opens a cruel vein of awareness that Paul may think he’s that or heading that way.
“Choose,” Paul says, still leafing. “Then give me your reasons.”
On the right, outside pretty little Federalist Milford, we cruise by the Corvette Hall of Fame, a shrine Paul, if he saw it, would vigorously insist on touring since, for reasons of Charley’s Old Greenwich tastes, he’s claimed the Corvette as his favorite car. (He likes them, he says, because they’ll melt.) Only he doesn’t see it because he’s looking through Emerson! (Plus, I’m now headed for the barn and a tall, stiff drink and an evening in a big wicker rocker made by native artisans working with local materials.)