My wife and I live in Putnam County, New York.
Were you to drive through it you would be struck by its natural beauty – rough, rocky highlands dotted by lake after lake that serve as New York City resevoirs.
Most of the county is rural and sparsely populated. Million-dollar homes dot the woods around us and BMWs and Hummers prowl the single-lane roads that wind through the hills.
In short, it’s a Shangri-La for the wealthy about sixty miles north of New York City.
It’s also a mountain steadfast of the proudly undereducated who wear their ignorance and active rejection of science as badges of honor.
The first day we were in our new house there was a knock on the door. We answered and there was a woman on our front deck.
She introduced herself as our next-door neighbor, and her introduction included such impressive facts such as:
She was a leader in local Republican politics.
She and her family had been in the area for many years.
She and her husband had wanted to buy our house, but the asking price was too high.
All of this took her about fifteen seconds to communicate.
I told her we were from the city, staunchly against Republicans, and that we had actually wanted to buy a house in Westchester County but that we had lost the bidding war and had to buy something quickly as we had already sold our apartment in Greenwich Village. We settled on Putnam County but wanted to be in Westchester.
She looked like she hadn’t heard a word I said. She turned from us and looked around the woods that surrounded the house and that I now owned.
“Don’t you just love the bubonic splendor of nature?” she asked.
My wife and I looked at each other.
“The bubonic splendor?” I asked, chuckling.
“Yes,” our new neighbor said, beaming at her word power. “The bubonic splendor of nature.”
Luckily, it was at that point that our dogs noticed she was on the front deck and started to go ballistic. We took the opportunity to excuse ourselves, go back inside, and proceed to simultaneously laugh ourselves silly and regret our choice of places to live.
We hadn’t even been in Putnam County for more than a couple hours and it was already on the downward slope.
None of this is to say that all the locals are inbred Peacocks, the ones who are nice, smart, and well-spoken generally don’t mention they’re local.
Now that it’s been almost eleven years since we’ve moved to Putnam County I feel that I’ve gotten to the point to begin to comment on what I’ve observed.
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