Window display at the Phoenicia Pharmacy. Photo by Flickr user Lori_NY; published under Creative Commons license.
When I think of historic places, I think of roadside markers. I think of heroic conflicts and memorable people long deceased. I think of villages restored to resemble the way they looked a long time ago, with actors reenacting the way folks lived in the distant past. I think of old machines on display that few of us have ever seen actually used, all from a bygone era. These are places set aside intentionally. They have velvet ropes to keep us from sitting on the chairs, and signs warning us not to touch the machines. The reenactment scenes stay confined within clearly defined borders, separate from the modern world.
Shandaken isn’t historic like that, though there is plenty of history within our town’s borders. Shandaken is part of the living world, subject to the changing present. No one gets paid to preserve Shandaken the way it was, or even how it is today. For those of us who live here, it is simply our home. Shandaken holds our future, not the past.
But some who visit Shandaken find something else here: a piece of vanishing America, like a stand of old-growth forest.
There is often a point of magic that straddles the present and the past; A place where things once common stand out in vivid colors, lit by the glow of a familiarity nearly lost. All of us know that feeling. Some get it spotting an early Mustang parked by the side of the road. Others might respond to a box of Good & Plenty candy, or a dress long thought out of fashion. Call it nostalgia.
Marketers know it well. There’s a whole genre of goods simply known as 'retro.' Today, on eBay, first-edition pop comics frequently sell for many times the price of very rare, century-old classic books. Nostalgia is fueled by deep emotions and personal connections.
There’s a funny thing about nostalgia, though: Not everyone gets it. For some, an early Mustang is just an old beat-up car, a box of Good & Plenty candy is only empty calories, and a dress out of fashion is overdue for the thrift store. As Joni Mitchell once so brilliantly put it, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got 'til its gone.” We in Shandaken should take careful note of that. Some times you can’t see the old-growth forest for the trees.
Once when I was in Philadelphia, I took a tour of Independence Hall. It’s an amazing place to stand inside of. Our Declaration of Independence was signed there; the Constitution of the United States was drafted there. Independence Hall is an elegant wooden building with simple, understated grace, and quite small by contemporary standards. It was already thought small by the standards of the mid-1820s when the Marquis de Lafayette made his farewell tour of America. Replaced by a larger structure as Pennsylvania’s State House, and in need of serious repairs, Independence Hall was then being used for little more than storing surplus furniture, with talk already begun in Philadelphia about tearing it down altogether.
Lafayette, however, had a different viewpoint. Long absent from America, upon his return he asked to be taken to America’s great “Hall of Independence,” which was mostly referred to back then as “the Old State House.” It was only after viewing it through Lafayette’s deep affection that Americans of the day came to see Independence Hall as a treasure in their midst; and the rest, as they say, is history.
Having grown up on Long Island, decades ago I moved west, in large part to escape what I was even then coming to think of as suburban blight. It wasn’t always like that in my original home town of Syosset. I remember in first grade taking a class field trip across the street from our elementary school to visit a potato farm. Rest assured, there are no potato farms in Syosset any more.
When I returned to New York State in 2002, we settled on Phoenicia as our new hometown. We were moving from a place of great beauty along the northern California coast, and I’ll admit it, we were spoiled. It would take a special place to replace that loss, and in Shandaken we felt we found it. We sensed it immediately driving west from Boiceville on Route 28. It was more than just the magnificent scenery, though that was certainly part of it.
We found a place where the highways were two-lane roads that seldom got congested, with nary a stop light to be seen. Main thoroughfares weren’t lined by multi-colored neon signs competing in the daily hustle. Instead, we found owner-operated businesses clustered within easy walking distance of each other, in distinctly individual hamlets. The blur of repetitive franchises and the buzz of big box stores were strangely absent, but still easily within reach if wanted, just beyond the near horizon.
Unless you travel around the country a lot, it’s hard to fully appreciate how rare it is now to find places where all of that remains true. Throw in our art and culture, combine that with wilderness trails and outdoor recreational options, and a place like Shandaken is seldom encountered outside of the Catskills. There used to be more places like Shandaken in America, and Syosset once had potato farms, but not anymore. The country is changing; it’s already changed, and many Americans sense how much we’ve lost.
I didn’t know how much I missed Shandaken until I got lucky and found it. It’s part of a vanishing America that refused to vanish, and that’s what makes Shandaken special. That is what sets Shandaken apart from most other American towns and destinations, and that could become the foundation Shandaken's future is built on. It isn’t our only option forward. It is just the one most likely to disappear if we don’t decide to consciously embrace it.
Tom Rinaldo writes the Dispatches from Shandaken column for the Watershed Post's Shandaken page. Email Tom at tomrinaldo@watershedpost.com.
