My life has been a constant vacillation between competing urges– wrestling with desire to be in the middle of the madding throng… (say, recently, on the dance floor
listening to a way-loud Funk Evolution at Dango’s in July, or soon at Bailey’s outdoor cafe in the middle of August, or anytime at Gaffney’s or City Tavern if you really want a mobscene…), versus chilling on the homefront in the hills nine miles out.,. where everything seems green and peaceful. It’s nice to have the choice. And on this blog, at various times, I’ve extolled the virtues of both possibilities.
Some urban dwellers prefer a life where staring at stars or a sunset from your front porch has no appeal, and life involves nonstop action, entertainment, partying…with little trace of nature in the picture. Plenty of rural folk, however, could not take the pace, density or intensity of even a city like Saratoga Springs in the summer mode, much less NYC or DC or Boston. To each his own, but I like both.
As I write, the small city is at maximum activity, and it takes three changes of a light to cross Broadway at Church Street. Tourists and track visitors alike take the peripatetic stroll up and down Broadway and its side streets, filling outdoor cafes and whatever restaurants are within walking distance to their parked cars. Locals know that strolling from home is simpler than driving many times. Certainly, if you are trying to get around for real estate appointments or other forms of travel, you have to try to work around or avoid the obvious times of high traffic… like around 6 pm six days a week, when the race track crowd hits the streets– clogging East Ave., Union Ave., Circular Street, Lake Ave… Nelson, Lincoln, Crescent, and of course Broadway especially (Route 9), as well as Route 50, which splits off from 9, going either north or south. Today however the Bolshoi Ballet had an afternoon performance at SPAC which let out at 5 pm and clogged both Ballston Ave. heading back into downtown Saratoga (a mile of gridlock) before the track even let out. I was trying to get to Ballston Spa and going south was no treat either, with a two-mile backup of the sort one usully sees after late rock concerts of 20,000 or more fans tries to exit all at once. I never made it to the appointment, unforeseen logjam gridlock.
But I U-turned out of it and headed west, where the touristos and SPAC-crowd don’t know to go….. it becomes rural in a hurry, and the roadrage and frustration melt away… as the scenery turns greenery.
I have some great client friends now named Benji and Robin, recently married, who just this month moved up here in a life-changing mode… leaving behind an 800 sq ft apartment near Dupont Circle in D.C. for a 23-acre organic farmstead (with 2200 sq ft house) they bought in the rustic zone I’m describing, west of Ballston Spa. They went from walking to the subway in the steamy miasma of the Nation’s capital to their chosen field of dreams where they are now learning to hitch bush-hogs to tractors and disc the soil with tillers, and collecting currants and berries of all kinds, and planning by this time next year to be on the Farmer’s Market circuit themselves.
They, however, are music fans themselves, and not averse to testing how many decibels of indie music they can handle. They liked my blog when they found a reference to Valerie June, whom they’d just seen live. Robin and I had compared notes on music and many other topics in our first chat, and I’d had a good time trying to convince her that she and her new husband would NOT be moving to a cultural wasteland if indeed he– a brilliant Tibetan scholar– accepted a new position at Skidmore. When I mentioned my early affinity for the beat poets of the ’50’s, she mentioned than Benji was related to one of the peripheral writers of that crowd, a friend of Lew Welch and Gary Snyder and Ginsberg and Burroughs and even Jack Kerouac himself. It was a serendipitous match of personalities, and I gave them the pitch that, short of Boulder or Denver or the west coast itself (think Vancouver, Portland, or Seattle,and the Bay area), Saratoga might be one of the best places to illustrate the balance of downtown culture in immediate proximity to natural retreats.
A week or two after they had closed on their property, and had the requisite visits from relatives and close family well-wishers, I caught them on a relaxed evening where we could play three-way Petanque– a French spin-off of bocci— in the driveway near the barn, in hilarious fashion.
I took pics of them together as we soaked our dusty feet in the cool blue swimming pool which had been an un-sought bonus to their purchase, and asked if they had sent any slightly-gloating selfies back to their friends inside the Beltway. They looked glowingly at each other and admitted, No, not yet… and when I inquired why, they said, well, we don’t really want to brag about how HAPPY we are… they wouldn’t understand.
I am not saying this is a trend of any sort– it is just a choice that happened to make these two people content. The irony is that they had looked at multiple other homes in Saratoga proper, Ballston Spa and Round Lake villages, and the one they bought was significantly different than everything else they looked at. They could have gone the route of “being within walking distance of Broadway” which is so in vogue right now that it constitutes about half my real estate business. Instead, they opted for the 60’s or 70’s idyll– back to the land. They speak fondly of acquiring chickens and honey bees and maybe a goat or two, and clearing more and more overgrown acreage each year from here on. They will be cutting firewood for the woodstove in the fall once Benji is back from Vienna, where he will be lecturing on his specialty, the lives of certain esoteric Buddhist masters of Tibet and Nepal.
So this to me is akin to the best of The Dharma Bums, my favorite book in my late teens– wherein Japhy Ryder (who was really Gary Snyder) tries to convince the narrator (Kerouac himself) of the virtues of early rising, survival skills and agility in the wilds of the High Sierras and Rockies, when Jack would have rather been in the jazz dives of Denver or San Francisco, drinking red wine into the wee hours of morning, and partying with the rebels and hedonists of the beat generation, whose grandchildren now populate the downtown post-midnight revelry of Saratoga Springs to varying degrees of frivolity, seven nights a week. The scene is there if you want it to be, but if not, it doesn’t take long to get out to the QUIET, to re-charge.
I’m not saying this as a shill for the Chamber of Congress, nor as a Realtor giving you the hype on why you should live here, I’m just alluding to the reasons I do.
Peace, and thanks for reading…
Wayne, on the outskirts of Saratoga, 7/31/14