During May of 2006 I wrote an essay about Eliot Spitzer and produced it on the radio at Public Radio Albany New York,
WAMC FM 90.3 on the FM DialI wanted to post the original version of the essay which was way too long to read on the air in the 3 minute time requirement.
Here is the text of the original version. I will post a link to
listen to the essay on the air too.
Upstate New York as “Appalachia”Earlier this spring, Attorney General Eliott Spitzer referred to Upstate New York as “Appalachian”. When I heard this comment reported on the radio, I shouted: “Yes, Yes, Finally!” Someone has said what I’ve been thinking for quite some time. You see, I went to college in Appalachia: - the “real” Appalachia, not Upstate New York.
I was born in Detroit, Michigan, the grandson of Italian immigrant auto workers. My grandmother wired dashboards by hand. My parents moved to the suburbs of Cleveland Ohio and as a youngster, I traveled back and forth between Detroit and Cleveland, sometimes by train and sometimes by bus.
I often stayed in Detroit with my grandparents during the formative years of the Motown sound, and it was great. Stevie Wonder was often on TV and radio, and he was just a little guy, like me. There were only 3 channels on TV and grandma translated the boring political conventions on TV every four years for me. She had to know all about that to become a citizen – I learned about government, politics and labor unions from her.
At 17 years old, I went away to college in the Appalachian Mountains. Appalachia was quite different from the cities that I was accustomed to and understood. In a city, I could figure out how people “got by, and how they earned a living, even though I always wondered what went on in those factories billowing smoke with their putrid sulphuric smells. But, I couldn’t understand how people “got by” in the Appalachians.
As a boy In Detroit, I had wondered how dandelions came up, survived and even thrived through the cracks of so much concrete. I wondered why the wonderful, cooling, magnificent, arching, elm trees, on our street in center city Detroit were afflicted with the dreaded malady, Dutch elm disease –dying right there in front of me as each summer passed.
During my training as a natural scientist in college, I often made forays into the Appalachian Mountains. With professors and fellow students, I started to learn about the land, what grew on the land and how that land was used – or abused.
In Appalachia, I saw a strip mine and a humongous steam shovel. That steam shovel could hold an entire college marching band inside its bucket. I saw what that machine did to the land to wrestle from that resting place a once living substance called coal. A few miles away, I had to study an experiment where pillaged land, scarred from mining, was being reclaimed, with hopes that someday, it could be healed and restored – although it would never again yield coal.
A few miles away from that, I studied a virgin forest with huge, magnificent, healthy trees older than our country. Somehow, by chance, and then by conscious effort, this small virgin forest was protected and I was grateful to learn what a forest looked like that had never been cut for lumber or cleared for farmland or stripped for coal.
After a while, I learned how to go out and explore the countryside on my own.
I learned how to hunt and gather the prized delicacy morel mushroom in the foothills of the Appalachians and how to use these wonderful mushrooms in cooking. I made sassafras tea from sassafras root I collected in the Appalachians.
For spending money I worked with a nursery business. We often had to take truckloads of trees and shrubs to our customers. A part time minister worked with me and drove the truck. Now, I started to learn about the people of Appalachia: - a proud people. The minister would often stop the truck way off the beaten path, and, I have to admit, the sound track from the movie “Deliverance” often came to my mind.
He would yodel call out of the window of the truck and bounce his voice off the hills in a hollowed out valley. I learned these protected coves of trees & earth were called “hollers”. His call let members of his congregation know that he was passing through praying for them and we always heard a call back yodel, letting the pastor know, translated, that, “everything was fine, see you on Sunday, God willin’. “
Asleep in my college dormitory one night, I woke in the morning to learn that the hospital (about a mile away) had cared for some people during the night that had been bitten by rattlesnakes. One bitten person died while I slept. In our college newspaper the college students were warned not to participate in local religious services where rattlesnakes were used to bite the faithful. Whoa! I thought! Appalachia is WAY different from the city!
After graduate school, I moved to Boston, and worked as a research scientist in the fledgling biotechnology industry. Now, I made frequent trips on Interstate 90 in Massachusetts & the New York Thruway to get back to Cleveland.
The Thruway drive was always boring and I found myself looking off to each side of the road, wondering about the real NY countryside, not the artificial thruway.
I decided to get off the thruway, and discover the real New York State. I took my time and traveled the back roads through New York State. I saw some beautiful country in New York, once I worked up the courage to get off the thruway.
I started to wonder about the people of upstate New York the same way I wondered about the people of Appalachia. In the Adirondacks, I met a young single mother who lived in a very small home, reminiscent of the shacks I photographed in the Appalachians as a college student. This home was nearby a gorgeous lake, and looked like it had been a camp house meant to be lived in by vacationing sportsmen. Now this mother lives in this camp home year round and has a beautiful 7 year old boy – with autism. I had worked with autistic boys in cities, where resources are available …but how does a young mother find help up in this beautiful countryside for her son?
I met another lady who is a widow in the Adirondacks. She had lived in a wonderful Victorian farm house on a farm of many acres and raised her kids there. Now, her life was shoehorned into a few small rooms of a rectangular trailer, her head reeling and spinning on how quickly her life had changed so dramatically when her husband passed.
It started to occur to me that economic deprivation could be found in Upstate New York, in a very similar way to the economic deprivation of Appalachia. There were many, many places in New York where I wondered how people “got by” and I found many remnants of past economic boom times, now rotting and rusting. As I traveled throughout the United States, I saw cities booming economically and the boom seems so uneven throughout the United States, missing our area here in the Northeast.
I left Cleveland last year on Labor Day, drove back roads into the Fingerlakes and passed picnic after picnic in back yards across New York State of New Yorkers celebrating their labor and their Labor Day holiday. I saw picnic tables, card tables, folding chairs and folding tables in many, many, garages and horse shoe playing and badminton in the yards as I crept along the NY countryside. These people obviously were at home in their New York countryside and they seemed to be proud of their homes, their friends and family and their labor – not too different from the Appalachian people I used to know.
Maybe we don’t like being referred to as Appalachian here because of stereotypes borne from the likes of Li’l Abner and the Beverly Hillbillies .
But, Poverty [in the real Appalachia] is a text book word. The poor don’t know they are poor and in Appalachia – pride and dignity fill a half empty stomach.
If “Appalachian” means having the courage to somehow contribute to our community when that economic boom has gone by us, and stay here and stand four square as we face that reality and enjoy our “poverty with a view”. . . . Then, I don’t mind, I take no offense from Mr. Spitzer’s comment.
Our home here is defiantly beautiful and all of us have pride and dignity for this place we call home, just like the people in Appalachia have pride and dignity for their home too.
