Leaving Philly: Starting a New Life in the Adirondacks
Shortly before I left Philadelphia for good, I found myself in a crowded noisy courtroom in City Hall. On one side, the Painted Bride, a venerable art center, and its community of supporters (including me), seeking approval to sell its building, a performance space festooned with an exuberant mosaic by the artist Isaiah Zagar. On the other side of the courtroom — opponents of the sale and friends of Zagar seeking to preserve the building and mosaic. The case had ignited intense feelings about art, community, the built environment and historic preservation.
As I entered the courtroom, Kitty, an acquaintance of mine and friend of Zagar approached me and said, “You’re on the wrong side of this case. And, by the way, why the hell are you moving to the Adirondacks? You won’t have any of this” as she gestured with her hand, taking in a sweep of the courtroom, bristling with the passion and tension.
“This”. I knew what she meant.
I have traded a city for a home in a forest with a view of pine trees and mountains. If I step outside my house, I hear only wind. On this day in January, the dark green pines are dusted with gleaming white snow. A rare plane may pass overhead. The only cars to drive by are headed to the Siamese Ponds Wilderness Area to hike or hunt or snowshoe or ski the backcountry.
For the first few months, my friends in Philadelphia would ask “Do you still feel like you are on vacation?” Few could imagine that I would actually choose to live in a place where city people go on vacation, to “unplug” — but only for a while — so they can then return to “this”.
Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely certain that I would be able to give up “this” for what lies before me. You spend your first month or two focused on the paperwork of a move, the drivers licenses and voting, and the finding of doctors and dry cleaners and hair cutters and electricians.
Then, one day, you’ve filled out all the forms, unpacked the boxes and suitcases and rearranged the closets. You’ve left the world of daily work behind and your new life stretches out in front of you, past the trees and the lakes toward the mountains and wilderness.
How do I compare living in a metropolis to living in a hamlet of 500 where the closest real town is 10 miles away and boasts a supermarket, a bank, a liquor store, one excellent restaurant and a couple of middling ones. I can’t wake up each morning and bemoan the lack of art galleries and coffee shops and gyms and the bustle of crowded sidewalks.
Recently someone in Philadelphia asked me, “what do you do all day?”. A well-meaning question, comical in one sense, as if I had sentenced myself to a life that promised mostly boredom, albeit with a pretty view. But it was a fair question, a gentle inquiry. Moving from a bustling dense city to a tranquil mountain is somewhat like having your phone taken away. You get that initial nervous tic when you can no longer reach for the same distractions.
Instead of people watching a sidewalk cafe, I watch the sun rise and set over Thirteenth Lake Mountain and track the birds at my feeder. I run into my neighbors at the post office and the cross-country ski trails and the Friday happy hour at the rustic lodge up the hill. I see my husband reading by the fireplace. I can volunteer and socialize, just as I did in the city.
I am more alone with my thoughts than I have been in a long time. Perhaps for the first time, I am confronting the need to let each day unfold and to let go of the need to accomplish and to judge and to compare.
In 2019, the Atlantic Magazine published an article about the geography political tolerance. In this world of hyper-polarization a study sought to find places where “people still seem to give their fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt even when they disagree.”. Turned out, one of most tolerant regions of the country is the Adirondacks. When I tried describing this to some of my Philadelphia friends, I was met with skepticism. “That’s Trump country, isn’t it?”, as if no more need be said. It also turns out, according to the Atlantic, that the “most judgmental partisans tend to be white, urban, older, highly educated politically engaged and politically segregated.”
The magazine tried to figure out why comity seems to survive in the Adirondacks, perhaps more than other conservative rural places. “I believe this place is different,” says a pastor, “We’re not defined by the anonymous critic. We are more civil because we hear each other, because we know each other, because we listen, and this listening gives us power to live better lives.”
Someday, I may understand this place better and will have my own answer. I know that my existence here is separate from those who have lived here for generations, who have to scratch out a living with, as is common, a job for every season. The ones who live in a sometimes uneasy truce with the second-home and retired people, like me.
Four months into this new life I’ve probably only learned one thing. That I really don’t know what the next day will bring. A cliché, an obvious truth. But it took uprooting myself from a city where I had lived a full life, to not only feel it, but to embrace it. A few days ago, a snow squall careened across the Adirondacks and I drove cautiously through a haze of swirling white. The squall left another few inches of powdery snow like confectioners sugar covering the landscape.
This is what I have chosen. With each passing day, the drive through the trees, so weighed down with snow, becomes familiar. It is no longer vacation and yet, when I climb up Hooper Mine trail and see the High Peaks in the distance from the outcroppings of chipped Ruby Mountain garnet, well, it never fails to take my breath away.
