Tag: New York state

A Letter to the County Executive of Dutchess County, New York

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The event I described happened in mid-July, and on that day I told the people I was with that I would write the sheriff and the county executive. They laughed. On a different day on that same stretch of road, my young horse spooked at a speeding garbage truck, dumped one of the barn’s professionals on the ground, and took off galloping back to the barn. He stopped and we were able to catch him.
Recent events all across the United States involving police remind me to encourage you, dear readers, to write letters to your local law enforcement and their bosses if you have an opinion about what you see them do. 

Out Hacking
Marcus J. Molinaro
County Executive
County of Dutchess
22 Market Street
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
Dear Mr. Molinaro:
Thank you for your kind letter welcoming me as a newly registered voter in Dutchess County. I look forward to participating in elections in my new rural community.
Recently, on a July weekday in the mid-afternoon on State Route XX in XXXXXX, I was out riding my horse on the road’s shoulder along with two other younger staff members of the barn where I ride. We were each wearing a helmet and riding a calm, older horse belonging to a private owner. An unmarked police vehicle approached and turned on its brightly colored lights and passed us, at an alarming speed. Because we are all experienced riders, we were able to calm our horses and continue; however, almost immediately the unmarked black police vehicle was joined by a marked Dutchess County Deputy Sheriff’s car, and passed us from the other direction at even greater speed.  Once again, we had to calm our horses and continue, which we did without further incident.
I have mulled over the encounter during the last couple of months and taken the time to confirm for myself that under Article 26 of the New York Vehicle and Traffic Law, Section 1146 a., “Every driver of a vehicle shall approach a horse being ridden or led along a public highway at a reasonable and prudent speed so as to avoid frightening such horse and shall pass the horse at a reasonable distance.”
I believe that the drivers of both police vehicles, though they may have been responding to an emergency, failed to obey this law, endangering the lives of three people and three horses.
Should any staff members of the Dutchess County Sheriff’s office be interested in learning about basic horse safety, the barn where I ride is a British Horse Society Certified facility, with highly educated and experienced instructors who would be able to provide basic lessons in horsemanship. I would think these skills would be useful throughout much of Dutchess County.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Shortcut

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On the way home, we were retracing our route down the Taconic, in that No-Man’s-Land of Dutchess County almost all the way up into Columbia County, where the roads are little gray squiggles on a map and the lakes are real. Further south, it’s all reservoirs, enslaved to the water demands of The City. My car’s navigation system had assigned us the route where we’d be doubling back at the end, with a sharp, pointed “v.” I was thinking there had to be a shortcut. I’ve never trusted the navigation system in the BMW anyway.
I had had only one beer at the bar right around 8 o’clock. I’d had a Coke around 10. When we left it was probably 11:15, although that’s a guess.
Traffic was sparse. It was a Saturday night. I came to what I thought was just the road we needed and cut across the other lane. My husband was on a bit of a nod himself, having had plenty of beer and cultivated a regular disinterest in issues of navigation. It was a narrow, snowy, one-lane road, with a small, green, rectangular sign: Seasonal Access, Road Maintained Apr.1 – Oct. 1. Something like that. It looked like it has been plowed at some point and had about six inches of fresher snow on top of that. There were tire tracks through it, and, down the middle of the road, a set of dog footprints, made by a huge, trotting woodland beast.
It was perfectly beautiful. Snow lit the floor of the woods. Trees surrounded us. The path was narrow and straight.
Woods in Winter, Dutchess County, NY
I cracked wise about how this might turn out to be a terrible idea.
He said, “You’re fine.”
I have snow tires. It’s an all-wheel drive car. He was probably right. There had been confusion over our bar tab. He had had three beers, maybe four. When we paid the check they charged us for four, but they missed the Coke, so we over-paid, assuming they missed a beer, too.
I said, “I just got that full adrenaline rush, the one when you’re like, scared shitless.”
“You’re fine.”
The road descended into a valley, so I slowed the car even more. We hadn’t yet lost traction, though the way was very noisy with the snow under our tires. My car is no SUV so it doesn’t have high clearance.
“I’m starting to worry about the way out of this,” I said. “What if they’ve plowed over and left a lot of snow?”
“You’re fine.”
“What if we have to back all the way out?” I asked. “I don’t want to have to back all the way back through this.”
“You’re fine.”
When we saw that the road rises to meet Route 199, and the depth of the snow at the top, deposited by plows just as I had feared, but made much worse by the dip in terrain, he said, calmly, “Punch it.”
I punched it, hard.
We made it most of the way up before we began to slip sideways and to the left, and sort of backwards. With some encouragement I backed up as far as I could without getting even more stuck. I tried again: more slipping, spinning, and sliding.
“I can’t do this.”
He hopped out and walked around the car. The road was black in both directions, but I knew it was199. A single car went by. If they saw our headlights shining from below the grade of the road, they didn’t care and they didn’t slow.  He examined all four tires, the snow, and the whole situation. I took off my seatbelt and climbed over to the passenger’s side.
He got behind the wheel. “I think we’re fucked,” he said simply, gunning the engine.
The car lurched forward, the tires spinning, and we slid sideways some more. He got out and looked at the situation again. He got back in, backed it up, and made another go of it, this time wedging us on the other side of the road, setting off all the automatic seat-belt warning tones. He got out and reassessed.
“We’re fucked,” he said, kicking the snow off his shoes and getting back in.
“Should I call AAA?” I asked, digging out my mobile phone.
“Yes,” he said, putting the car in gear.
“Put on your seatbelt this time,” I said.
I couldn’t find AAA in the contacts on my phone, so I pulled out my wallet to get the number off my membership card. I didn’t have that, either.
Ok, I thought. I can just look it up.
But of course I couldn’t look it up because I had no service. I looked at the clock. It was11:45 p.m., on a Saturday night. We were on an unmaintained service road, who-knows-where, stuck in the snow. Only one other car had gone by since we got stuck, and they didn’t see us or slow. We were going to have to get out and walk or wait and flag someone down.
I was now intensely upset with myself. We were not getting out of this easily. Before this moment, I might have shrugged off the error. Oh, whoops! Right? No. I am supposed to be a responsible adult. Really, I’m just a jackass, thinking I can just drive anywhere I want in my fancy car with my fancy snow tires.
He put the car into low gear, and was gunning the engine. There was acrid tire smoke and dark exhaust swirling up from us. The car was moving, a bit, here and there. Another car went by, in the opposite direction. Again, they did not slow. Suddenly with a lurch we were almost at the crest of the rise. He braked and got out.
Sometimes when I’m upset or angry or frustrated I just cry. I was always a cry-baby as a kid and was teased mercilessly for it. I always thought I had deserved it, the teasing. But now, here in the woods, I don’t cry. Mostly, I just felt really stupid. Why did I think it was a good idea to take an unmaintained service road as a shortcut in the middle of the night in winter when there’s a foot of snow on the ground?
He was out there stomping around, kicking snow and sizing up the situation, stomping and kicking. I opened the door and offered to help, “I have boots on.”
“No, I got it.”
He jumped back in. I insisted on the seatbelt again. Shifting to low, he really gunned it. The engine roared, the tires spun, the snow groaning and crunching and fighting us as hard as it could.
And then we were up on the pavement, tires squealing and spinning, snow and ice flying, and we were absolutely free.
“I gotta pull over. I might be over the limit.”
“Ok, but not here in the middle of the road.”
He gestured to a bit of shoulder.
“No shoulders,” I said. “We need to find like a road. Or a driveway.”
Up around the next bend we found a dead end road and traded places.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I said.
“I though we were fucked,” he said.
We went another quarter mile and I realized we were going the wrong way. We turned around again and made it home in about ten or fifteen more minutes.
It was, actually, a shortcut.

A Letter to the Governor of New York

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On a recent Saturday night, I wrote a bunch of letters to politicians in New York, starting with this one to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.  I received a form letter reply from the governor’s office about two weeks later.

16 March 2013
The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of New York State
NYS State Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224
Dear Governor Cuomo:
Though we moved to New York in July of 2011, I still consider myself to be a brand new New Yorker. I am proud of the leadership you showed getting marriage equality for New Yorkers, and admire your ability to get the budget passed with bi-partisan cooperation.  
I recently read the story of William Blake, a prisoner in administrative segregation at Elmira Correctional Facility who has been in solitary confinement for nearly 26 years.
I am terribly sad to learn that William Blake is but one of many prisoners in extreme isolation in New York State; a cruel and de-humanizing practice, extended periods of solitary confinement exacts physical and psychological harm on prisoners, prison staff and their families (according to investigations by the New York Civil Liberties Union).  I have also learned that prisoners are locked up for 23 hours a day and separated from meaningful human contact or mental stimulation for breaking minor prison rules.
I sincerely hope you join me in supporting reforms to end the common use of this inhumane practice. New York needs to establish strict criteria to ensure that inmates are separate only in limited and legitimate circumstances for the briefest period and under humane conditions and perform an audit of the current population in isolation.
Effective and fair criminal justice maintains public safety and honors our state’s commitment to basic human dignity. Please, help restore New York’s reputation as a progressive leader for the nation. Please, make me proud to be the brand new New Yorker. 
Form letter from Gov. Cuomo

Oh, Deer

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The house we are renting has large windows, and the windows want washing, inside and out.  First I wasted a whole bottle of Windex and a whole roll of paper towels, having poked around in the closets looking for a proper squeegee, and finding none.  The dogs watched me going at the windows the whole time. I thought I was being interesting. It was the deer in the yard, though, that was the interesting part, and as I came in, out went Captain for a long, deer-chasing romp.
Later, I made for the closest hardware store I know of, in the near-ish town of Cross River. The hardware store makes keys, sells paint, and has the parts of your running toilet that will make it stop running. Like so many of the small hardware stores you find in strip-malls, it’s packed to the rafters with merchandise. I always find that you walk in and ask the guy behind the counter. Don’t bother looking for yourself. I was shown a few options, and picked a squeegee for which one must provide a handle. The clerk found a couple of possibilities for the pole, none of them perfect, but he did secure the pole to the squeegee with a screw, charging me for neither the pole nor the screw. Along the way, I got a bit of history (the upstairs of the store used to be the screening room of the old movie theater), and some predictions for snow this winter.
In Westchester County, deer (and black bear) can be hunted only by bow, and the season is from October 15thto December 31st. I have already met one man who has permission to hunt on this land.  The deer here are certainly plentiful, and a danger to motorists. I see them every morning when I walk the dogs to get the paper, all day when I look out the windows, every afternoon when I walk the dogs on the road, and every day when I am out driving.  There was a large doe killed recently on Cat Ridge Road, where I walk.  One of its hind legs was broken in the accident, and stuck out from its body at a disturbing angle. It happened on Friday night, and the carcass had been removed by Monday midday. Scavengers had only just started to make progress on it.
The deer here in Westchester seem well adapted to seeing people and cars and trucks, and give everything a good, long, dumb stare before walking or running away.  There is a group that I have seen grazing dully at the margins of the Taconic Thruway near Lagrangeville. The speed limit is 50 mph, but many people seem to take that as a polite suggestion, like flossing daily or changing your smoke-detector batteries twice a year. The one thing that seems to make deer try to leap high and run fast is my knuckleheaded dogs; they charge at deer, barking furiously in frustration, running as fast as they can with no plan for maneuvering over the stone walls that the deer hop over without much visible effort.  Maybe if deer made more noise I would respect them more.
My landlord informs me that he likes seeing the crows and ravens and vultures and eagles that come if the bow hunters leave the entrails after gutting a deer.  As a dog owner, the possibility of my dogs getting into rotting deer entrails is pretty scary, but it is not nearly as scary as the prospect of preventing any and all Vizsla escapes from October 15thto December 31st, from dawn to dusk.  I am pretty sure that Vizslas look as much like white-tail deer as any dog can.  

Safety Patrol

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I try to get out for a walk every day.  There is an almost-three-mile loop from my front door on a country road with neither stripes nor shoulder.  The town speed limit is posted as 30 mph. This is loosely interpreted as whatever speed you will go.  Most cars seem to be aware of me and my leashed dogs, slow a bit (though never a lot), and give us room.  I have only had two scary encounters so far, the first happening during the first week of school.  It was a woman with a blond ponytail who drives a black BMW SUV and since she was on the phone she never did see me or my dogs. The second was this week, when the FedEx ground truck went by so fast Captain dove into the drainage ditch at the side of the road and cowered there, crouching.   
I do see other walkers, mostly women, sometimes with dogs and sometimes chatting and walking vigorously in pairs. There is one young woman who walks down the middle of the road, and who was not wearing shoes the first two times I saw her.  She has long, straight brown hair and bangs and large eyes that don’t look at you.  She wears clothes I can only describe as completely ordinary. But then she doesn’t have shoes on. With her is a dog that I would call a tan and white pit-bull mix. It wears no collar, and she carries no leash.  We saw them the very first time we went for a walk. The dog is out of control but friendly. The woman doesn’t really talk, not even about the dogs.  I gave her a nickname: Gandhi, pronounced “Candy.”
Two days ago, the dogs and I headed off to check the road-kill (which is another story completely), but found the road was blocked for repairs.  Yesterday, I passed the repair crew, and we exchanged smiles and nods. Cherry sneezed at the smell of the hot asphalt, and I got a chuckle out of that. But that day, we headed down the road past the stable with the intention of turning back at the half-way point.  I was thinking about the Haves and the Have-Nots on this road (which is also another story completely), when the vet pulled out onto the road next to me after a call to the stable.  He pulled up alongside of me and warned me, with concern in his voice, to look out for a pit-bull which is being walked loose and has been allowed to chase horses. “Don’t want it to be a problem for you.”

Friendly

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If you take the Harlem Line on MetroNorth and get off at Purdy’s, there is a town up in Westchester County called North Salem. This is no real town in the typical sense of the word, but a town in the sense of a corner of a county. A map shows spots like Grant Corners and Peach Lake and Salem Center. When you drive around (and if you have anything to do at all you will be driving around), you see signs that say Waccabuc (which is fun to say silently to yourself) and Golden’s Bridge and Cross River. The signs are the official green road signs, so I presume they are intended to inform, but I find them very confusing.  The only way they make sense to me is to view them as labels, as if the section of the road requires a branding strategy, so drivers will never mistake it for another stretch of competing road.  Old Salem is not to be confused with South Salem, Katonah is not to be confused with Bedford Hills, and so on.
I think that places which can be reached by a commuter train are probably suburbs, even if there are dirt roads and tractors, which I consider to be two of the tell-tale signs of a rural area. I see more SUVs here than I do pick-up trucks, and the cyclists wear shiny spandex.
Having been here less than a week, I know no one here but the realtor who arranged for the rental, and the three administrators I spoke to in an effort to enroll my son in school. I have a P.O. Box, which I check every day and it is almost always empty. One day  I did have one piece of mail: it was from the U.S.P.S. informing me of the failure of the change-of-address I attempted from our prior address. It seems the temporary apartment in the city is a business, and only they can forward my mail. I also noticed the other day that the post office hours have changed to now include an hour’s closure for lunch, from 1:15 to 2:15. This lunch closure is perfectly timed to coincide with the end of school at 2:10, so that it is impossible to check your mail on the way to school: it must be checked after. 
The timing of the afternoon school pick-up always sends me into a panic, since it is a full fifty minutes before it ever occurs to me that I might need to go pick him up and eighty minutes before what I consider to be a reasonable time to end the school day. I usually emerge from my mid-afternoon stupor at 2:15, realizing I am already late. Soon, I should look into the yellow school bus thing, since it seems to be an option. Sometimes I follow them all the way in to school in my efforts to deliver the boy by 7:28 am. 
I am not the only mother that drives her child to school here, nor am I the only one who picks up after. A line forms at pick-up time, starting by 1:45. Few parents interact with each other at all in this line, and while I have been tempted to introduce myself to the driver of the next car in line, I have not done it yet.
Monday mid-day I took the dogs for a walk. We got a good long look at a huge turkey vulture pecking at a carcass in the road and spied quite a lot of chipmunks. It was a beautiful late summer day. We were passed by a few cars. For the first time since we’ve been here, I felt like it might be tolerable to be here for a few months. 
Within a quarter mile of our rental house, we passed a woman with a small dog on a leash. Her dog grew noisy and excited about my two, and I offered to come over and introduce them, since mine are “friendly.” “Friendly” is a password among dog-owners which I have come to understand to mean “my dog probably will not try to rip your dog’s head off, probably,” or “my dog will jump on you and leave muddy foot-prints on your jeans.” One of my “friendly” dogs has a history of being quite nasty to other dogs, and it has only been since she spent three days a week at doggie-day-care in New York City that I have re-assessed her ability to greet other dogs reliably. 
The dog we met was feisty and full of himself, which no one finds surprising in a small fluffy dog. My dogs were polite. His owner and I chatted briefly about dog temperaments. I introduced myself.
As it turned out, I was introducing myself to my landlord.