Visiting Charles in Upstate New York

Looking back, growing up I was friends with a lot of the weird kids. It makes me think - maybe I was a weird kid too? Let's table that line of thought for now, but along those lines, let me tell you about my friend Charles, who was a textbook example of ADHD before ADHD was even in the textbook. 

For the record, ADHD was added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM) in 1968. Coincidentally, that's the same year Charles and I met, and yes, he's an ADHD dude. A smart kid, he nonetheless never paid attention in class and typically spent class reading a comic book he had hidden inside whatever book we were supposed to be reading - when he even bothered to sit in his seat and pretend to pay attention. During our college years Charles attended something of a party school, where he focused more on party than school. As a live-at-home commuter student, I loved that I could visit Charles and get a taste of the over-the-top college partying I was otherwise missing out on. Needless to say, the guy who had little use for school ultimately had a meaningful career as a ... Special Ed teacher.

While we live far apart, Charles and I still see each other when we can. His primary residence is still in Brooklyn, but he also owns a country property not far from Oneonta, NY: ninety three acres, on which sits a ramshackle old farm house and barn. The last time I visited there was soon after he had taken possession of the place (how he came to buy it is itself a complex story, with which I will not bore you). The previous owner had abandoned the upstairs of the house, which had decayed badly due to long-term water intrusion through a leaky roof. The barn was stuffed with several generations worth of the previous owner's accumulated old junk, and the part of the barn which had held chicken coops years ago was a disgusting mess of age-old chicken droppings. When I first visited, Charles would sleep in the main level of the house, which was habitable (though also insanely cluttered), but I stayed in the  guest accommodations - two ratty old camping trailers which had been hauled onto the property. Charles told me they had made a lot of progress in renovating the property since then, but I really didn't know what to expect on this visit.

But first, a detour. I headed to central NY a day early so I could check out the Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods (the actual location of the Woodstock Festival, which despite the name wasn't in Woodstock at all). It's a very cool, well done museum. The exhibit starts with the cultural and social context of the times, and goes through the organization of the event, finally leading to the experience of Woodstock itself. The setting itself is lovely, and these days there's a big outdoor concert venue there - I'd love to go back some time to see a show.

At the site of Woodstock

The bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began

Peace & Love

From Bethel Woods it was an hour's drive on back roads to a strange but very nice little AirBnB where I spent the night. Basically, some folks with a house in the country added a little pre-fab shed unit which they had decked out as a bedroom. My accommodations consisted of one very small room - just big enough for the bed and dresser, with a nice front porch facing their pond. The shed had electricity (and hence air conditioning, a coffee maker, and fridge) but no plumbing. The bathroom was in the main house, about a fifty foot walk. The bathroom was private - there's an exterior door to the house which gives you access to that one room, and the door from that room to the rest of the house is locked. If you're used to camping, walking to the bathroom is no big deal, so I didn't mind this setup - and it was very inexpensive. I ate dinner (a rather good eggplant parmigiana hero I had picked up in one of the few actual towns I passed through along the way from Bethel Woods, and a beer I had brought from home) at the picnic table by the pond, then passed the evening on the shed's porch, reading my book and listening to the frogs in the pond.

My AirBNB cabin

View from the cabin's porch

In the morning I went for a run. It was nice to be able to run outside. For quite a while it had been too hot and sticky to do so back home, but it was cooler here. So, the temperature was nice but the area is HILLY. I actually had to stop and walk at one point because my heart rate was getting too high. Along my running route I passed a little farm stand, where I picked up a piece of maple pecan focaccia, which I later ate for breakfast at a local park along with coffee from the local Dunkin' Donuts. Eating breakfast at the park was nice too, except for being harassed by the world's most agressive squirrel, who really, really ,wanted my food. I actually had to whack it with the plastic container lid to fend him off.

View along my running route

I picked up breakfast here

Home-baked breakfast treats (very sticky and sweet and good!)

From there the drive to Charles' place was only 45 minutes. I hadn't mentioned my pre-trip to Charles, but when I showed up at 11 AM he took no notice, despite the fact that had I left that morning it would have meant that I would have had to have hit the road at 4:30 AM. I guess he thought nothing of it because that sort of thing is par for the course for Charles and his family (who had left Brooklyn at 5 o'clock that morning).

"They?" Who is "they", you ask? Why, Charles and his 88 year old father Bernie, that's who. Yes, I got to visit not just with Charles but also with his dad. Bernie has been part of my life since 1968 as well. He's a retired New York cop, a detective who to this day always wears a pistol on his hip, even at the breakfast table. Bernie has that 1970's in-your-face cop attitude - think Kojak, Baretta, Columbo. He's always been an overbearing presence; however at age 88 he's mellowed - well, a tiny bit. It's kind of lovely to watch the two of them. They drive each other crazy, but they have what is actually a very loving, caring relationship. 

I was relieved to find that the house is indeed in much better shape than three years ago. The upstairs is now once again livable, the barn has been cleared of most of the clutter, they've cleared some land around the house, cleaned up the pond and even have a large and productive vegetable garden. The apple trees they've planted are still too small to yield apples, but visitors craving fruit can pick from the seemingly endless raspberry/blackberry bushes growing wild on the property.

Upstairs bedroom, 2022

Same bedroom, 2025

Upstairs landing 2022

Upstairs landing 2025

They've got a handyman who they let live in one of the trailers on the property in exchange for labor. The guy is perhaps even more hyper than Charles and Bernie, and he seems to constantly be puttering by in his pickup truck, an ATV, or whatever, but he is a hard worker and seems to have good skills. His big project while I was there was shoring up the roof on the chicken coop part of the barn and putting on some new asphalt roofing, though Bernie was constantly distracting him with other projects: put up a mirror at the driveway entrance, switch the flag on the flagpole, install a new roof rack on the Jeep, replace a light fixture, etc.

The house and barn

Vegetable garden

Apple tree saplings

Wild berries!

Charles and his dad are both pretty handy with construction stuff. Years ago Charles and I owned a small cabin near Fleischmanns, NY together, and he was always willing to dig into home repair/improvement projects which I wouldn't have known how to do, and I'm reasonably handy. However, occasionally Bernie (who seems more in control of the whole place than he should be) makes some strange rednecky choices. For example, check out the photo below. He wanted to close off an area of a room to make sort of an extra bedroom, but instead of framing it out normally he created a wall and door out of corrugated plastic roof panels - probably because he got a deal on them. Very, um, industrial chic.  

Honestly, Bernie, WTF?

Anyway, Charles and I spent a nice couple of days together doing not very much. We explored a local stream in Charles' giant plastic sit-on-top tandem kayak (Charles, ever the klutz, slipped and banged his elbow getting down to the stream and so I did most of the paddling). We ingested locally grown produce, walked around the property, and just hung out. We visited the cool local Amish market. I enjoyed some slow time to catch up with an old friend.

Kayaking

There were heavy rains forecast for the day I was driving home, so I got on the road just after breakfast and made as quick a trip of it as I could. I did get caught in a couple of deluges - the kind of rain where everyone slows down to about 30 MPH on the Interstate because that's the best you can do. I stopped at a small town somewhere where I got a pre-fab salad from the local supermarket for lunch. While there I also gassed up the car, and at the gas station there was a dude walking around who, for reasons unknown to me, was dressed and made up in red and white stripes like a candy cane or a barber pole (you can't see his face in the photo; it was painted too). He didn't seem to be an employee of the gas station, but he was chatting with one of the other drivers filling up. Maybe he's a local eccentric. Maybe it's a promotion of some kind. Maybe he had lost a bet.

Honestly, Pennsylvania, WTF?

My initial plan included detouring on the way home so I could look at a kayak which was for sale at a good price in Yonkers, but with the nasty weather and knowing I had a busy weekend coming up, I opted to skip the detour and just make a bee-line for home. Anyway, a nice meander around upstate New York, and a nice time catching up with Charles and Detective Bernie.

Two old friends