Here's how you know you're not one:
The house you've lived in for 20 years is still referred to
(by the real locals) as the Paley House. (That's the name of the people you bought
it from.)
The nurse from the local high school doesn’t come up to you
at the county fair and ask, "How's your brother Jakey?”
And the girl who has been so relentlessly unfriendly to you
... You finally learned that she's unfriendly to everybody. Always has been.
All that inside information (when you finally learn it)
makes you feel disconnected, even boneheaded. And for one brief melancholy
moment, you indulge in some provincial self-pity. You call yourself an
outsider. But then you get over it.
You tell yourself:
"What about the stuff they don't know about me? Like. I
was one hell of a hitter in Little League, with more ground-rule doubles than
anyone on my team." If the subject comes up, they'll just have to take
your word for it.
•
The subjects for this issue are our local heroes of
Catskill. Some of them (with their families) have been here doing stuff for generations:
some of them, it seems, have just turned up. What they have in common is that
they are changing things. That's what's most important to us.
You could say our interest in things local runs wide and
deep. It runs from a family circus held on the banks of the Hudson, with words
lifted from our favorite river-seeker, Mark Twain ... And turns to local
celebrity filmmaker Mary Stuart Masterson, who has used old Catskill as the
backdrop for a soulful story of family life in small-town America. It could be
any town, but she chose ours ... And to John Cronin, director of The Beacon
Institute, who, in his first appearance as a regular contributor, reminds us of
the Hudson as a river of the mind — a body of water we get to call ours (sort
of) that has captured the imaginations and passions of people for centuries,
and by definition, travels the world ... Then there's not-so-local Paul
Epstein, associate director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and
the Global Environment, who tells us it's a distinct possibility that Greenland
may slip into the Atlantic, closing the Cull Stream, causing a world of pain
for everyone, including all of us here in the Hudson Valley ... And finally, to
Brigit Binns, California girl turned famous Hudson Valley epicurean, who tells
us where we can get local pork so good, an entire dinner party just might
experience something incredible ... simultaneously. Now that's local flavor.
These folks from Catskill are not only cool cats: they make
their homes about a mile from our office. So that makes them about as local as
you can get.
