by Jeffrey MacIntyre

What could be better than making it in New York? Try leaving it. We did.

It’s no secret: high atop the list of quintessential rites of New Yorkers, natives and newcomers alike, is sewing periodic escape. Country weekends, second-home summers, holiday sublets-people of privilege, you affluentials and your toothsome spawn, I salute you to enjoy your view while it lasts. For my wife and I, your countrytime staycation has become our new year-round rural roost.

Here’s how local self-exile works. Three months ago, on a cockeyed dare to ourselves, we picked up sticks in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn and drove 60 miles north to the single stop-light village of Cold Spring in the lower Hudson Valley. Our search was brief, our requirements plain: a fully walkable, commercially low-key community within umbilical cord reach of the city and hailing distance of nature. In short, all the postcard pastoralism a hayseed urbanite can claim. After logging 15 years in New York, and taking full measure of the requisite, generationally-appropriate Brooklyn love affair, a growing hunch had us wondering if it all weren’t a bit played out, an overlooked alternative waiting just round the Hudson Line bend. Maybe the escape artists of New York have it exactly backwards?

Awaiting us in Cold Spring was a carriage house rental 40 paces to the Hudson, and another 400 to the rail station. We went from a brownstone block festooned with Guggenheim and MacArthur winners, smart-talking African- and Caribbean-American retirees, giddy sidewalk chats with pre-Pomona Jonathan Lethem and walking distance to ten subway lines and a dozen minutes to Manhattan to a blue-green speck of hamlet in the Hudson Highlands, an hour and change to Midtown and precious little else. Cold Spring claims two thousand residents yet my tally-the same 45 in rotation, in fresh trousers-disagrees. Of course something is lost in this move. Oddly enough, we haven’t quite felt it yet.

Let’s shortcut the suspense. This Hopper-flecked Winesburg, Ohio scene has hit us full in the heart. You could have guessed that. We’re in its honeymoon grip. But no matter what you hear, no: it’s no Brooklyn. Which, for us, is entirely the point.

Something in our lives had us primed to come happily unglued in a place like this. Tales of going off the grid are catnip to the info-glutted. Urban escape is, after all, essentially a class fantasy. If we came up short on the north-of-Rhinebeck Shteyngart criterion for a digital cleanse, there are consolations prizes here. Like Internet grocery delivery.

Questions remain. Can we muscle the commute? Will we become self-important arriviste locavores? Local honey-purveying hippies? Creepy childless pariahs? Republicans? (The Ailes and Pataki clans are local gentry.) Our precious city frailties don’t stand a chance of lasting the year, which might resonate brightly if I hadn’t Netflixed that Wicker Man remake this spring. An early lesson: there are many ways to lose your cool in rural parts, and maybe two to keep it. Option one, you find new feral grooves and adapt with what grace you muster. Option two, beat back the wilderness with your CSA basket, WiFi and New Yorker subscription. As the temperatures drop and tourists scatter, certain comedy awaits. Reared in suburbs, grown adult in cities, we don’t know our way around small town manners, its (plentiful!) intrigues or single-pane glass. Banana peels abound.

Can’t spot a reclusive hick for miles around? Safe to say, it’s probably you.

One hundred days in to our country living gamble, the sights are fine, fresh and undiminished by our 30-something Brooklynite slouch. We’re waiting on the city people things that will be first to fall away, even as we name them for the first time. For us, deep in a blue highways Americana nowhere is thrillingly more than somewhere enough.

Jeffrey MacIntyre is a freelance writer and consultant. His writing appears widely.

Cold Spring photo by Jon Dawson from Flickr. Green door photo by Tony the Misfit from Flickr. Hudson photo by Craige Moore from Flickr.

Autumn in New York is generally brief, but at least you get it scattered over a series of non-consecutive days. So please do enjoy the absolutely perfect weather while you still can: Come the weekend we’re all going to be bitching about rain and heat or cold or whatever.

Unintended consequences: Having banned smoking from their festival tents, the organizers of Munich’s Oktoberfest are trying to figure out how to mask the odors previously obscured by cigarettes, including stale beer, food scraps, and doody from the porta-potties. (Also, probably, vomit.) “To fight the putrid smell, some beer tent organizers plan to pour a solution with special bacteria into the floorboards of the tents and other potentially smelly areas, such as the aisles between tables and toilets. They hope that the bacteria, once it seeps into the floor boards, will eat up the offending odors.” I’m telling you people, you’re going to miss us smokers when we’re gone.

It would be a shame if the New York Post’s astounding Ground Zero human remains map overshadowed this equally remarkable lead from the paper’s report on the stunning ticket sales for the fall’s Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino.

It’s Rosh Hashanah — but the only Jew on Broadway who’s celebrating is Shylock.

I… just… yeah.

Rampant insane bodysnarking at the Daily Beast today, as the web paper goes all SEO-in on “FAT MEN DO BETTER IN BED.” (Which, you know, many of us already knew that before the insanely specious and anecdotal and flawed science came in.) Their “fat men” include… Chris Noth and Vince Vaughan. Both, to be sure, towering, imposing men! Not anything like fat however! And then they move on to Tom Colicchio. Wacko! Speaking as a former gym-goer of Mr. Noth’s, this is crazytown. Emaciated liberal coastal elites wouldn’t know “fat” if it sat next to them on a Greyhound bus.

“Yale’s endowment may have shed nearly a quarter of its value last year, but three of the men charged with managing it earned a combined $10.1 million in salary and benefits during the same time period, according to the University’s most recent tax filings.”
–Business is good even when business is bad at Yale. Meanwhile, Harvard has, unfortunately, painted over the graffitied walls of the women’s room at Adams House, which documented young womens’ “fears, phobias, and questions in different colors.”

Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, whose 1961 collaboration The Phantom Tollboth has enchanted generations of readers (including at least one Awl contributor), have returned with a new book called The Odious Ogre. There’s an excerpt here.

The New York Post goes big on 9/10 glory with this map that explains where all the human remains were found downtown on 9/11. This isn’t just a public service-it’s also an argument about the appropriateness of having religious and community centers located downtown. Well we made their map better. Human remains: YOU’RE SHOPPING IN IT. You’re BOXING IN IT. You’re DRINKING IN IT and ATTENDING CUNY IN IT and you’re GOLDMAN SACHSING IN IT.

“A survey conducted by Harris Healthcare and HealthDay asked respondents to provide their body-mass index, or BMI, which is a ratio of height to weight. They then asked them to evaluate which weight stage they were in. The results showed a lack of self-awareness about one’s weight. Thirty percent of those measuring in the overweight class said they were in a normal weight, and 70 percent of obese respondents said they were only overweight. Sixty percent of morbidly obese respondents said they were merely obese.” Also, they all think they can be millionaires. Don’t let anyone say that this country has lost its optimism. We eat optimism for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and fourthmeal!

Pictured: the front page of the New York Times before I flipped out and slammed my computer shut for the night. “When a Fringe Figure Becomes News” INDEED.