“I find myself back in the Mohawk Valley, New York’s second most famous waterway, the gateway to the West when the West was in the East. I grew up here, Princetown and Rotterdam, Schenectady County. Wanted to leave. Felt like I was passing through, almost everyone here seems like they are just passing, or so I thought. Either that or they’ve become so fixed, so part of the landscape that they’ll talk about farming not seeming to notice that the barn collapsed 20 years ago and the bailer has saplings growing through it. Thousands of people zoom through here every day. It’s always been a corridor, ever since a glacier beat a retreat on its way to oblivion. Now I like to come back. For the cheese and the hay fever, and for the boredom and slowness. For the sound of a train approaching from 5 miles away.”
“One morning outside my motel I meet a woman who tells me about her childhood trips to her grandmother’s home near Nelliston. She and her younger brother would disembark (it’s what she said) the train at Canajoharie and then they would dine in elegance at the Hotel Wagner. ’The painted mural in the dining room’ she exclaims, ‘the ladies in their beautiful dresses…’ As she reminisces on the Edwardian splendor that was 1950 Canajoharie, I watch the trucks roll on the Thruway and think of travelers in their finest sweatpants enjoying TCBY at the rest stop. ’On Sunday afternoons,’ she says ‘we would take a ride to the Inn at Stone Arabia for a big country dinner. ‘ I picture her and her dear beknickered brother gliding along in a four-in-hand through the countryside, freed at last from all time and space with a chicken dinner between them. ’Probably gone now’, she muses.”
