Almost heaven, John Denver’s Take Me Home sung on the radio as I headed down to High Point in Huntersland this evening. I’ve always wanted to find some place safe to stop along the road and take pictures, but that was not to be. But I captured it on my dash board camera.
I’ve always loved Appalachia, the hills, the mountains, the farms dug outside of the mountains. I love the remoteness and the freedom of people who live tucked into the mountains with no nearby neighbors. I’ve always loved the land and wildness of the area.
People flock to the Adirondacks and Catskills for remoteness. But I always crave the remoteness of the hills around Huntersland, and so many other places like it. It’s almost a world independent of the big city – probably the nearest big town in Schoharie, or actually more accurately, Cobelskill.
I’ve always told myself I’d some day like to live in a place in the mountains like this – off the beaten track – but not in New York. Like many, I could list the open burning ban and the SAFE Act as top reasons, but really living in Upstate NY, a Rural New Yorker, is one indignity after another. $5,000 a year property taxes are just offensive when many people in other states pay a tenth of that, pistol permits and the Sullivan Act, no un-permitted open carry even in the woods, no places to ride ATVs on most public lands, among other things that most people in other states gets to enjoy.
I can celebrate this beautiful, wild land, while condemning our state’s government. But I realize our state’s Appalachian beauty, is not an exception but a rule. Pennsylvania has many remarkable lands and much better laws and lower taxes. I’ve spent much time in the Pennsylvania Wilds, but I’ve also heard that Ohiopyle area of state in Green County is quite beautiful. Not to mention many of the areas in the center part of state. And so many other states too.
While I feel such bitterness towards the state, I do love the land and it’s beauty. It’s government maybe draconian and take care of these people poorly, but they don’t live a life of natural poverty, even if they struggle to make ends meet. And while I don’t intent this essay to be a rant about state government – we all live in the system we chose to live under – I do have conflicted feelings about this beautiful area.
My office in Menands is down the street from the North Albany Sewage Treatment Plant, which processes about 83 Olympic swimming pools worth of water each day, reducing harmful pathogens and nutrient load before taking dumping much of Colonie, Menands and North Albany’s waste water in the Hudson River. It’s also home to one of state’s remaining sewage sludge incinerators, where they use natural gas to dry and burn off the solids separated out of waste water process, both generated on-site and trucked in 6-days a week from sewage treatment plants across the county and beyond. It wastes energy and produces carbon emissions, but greatly reduces the amount of sewage sludge ash that is currently disposed of in City of Albany Landfill in the Albany Pine Bush.
Lately there has been a push towards more composting of sewage sludge, but that has not been without problems. We live in a chemical-rich society, and wastewater not only often contains treated industrial effluent but also landfill effluent, the remains of pots and pans washed off, soaps and chemicals used in cleaning, and so forth. And it all get mixed in with the poop and pee, that is itself can contain the byproducts of pharmaceuticals. Most notable is the problem with PFOAs which have caused all kinds of issues for farms in Maine when they’ve been detected in farm field soils. Probably PCBs would be an equal problem, had they not been phased out what is going on 50 years ago now.
The thing about it is landfilling and incinerating might reduce immediate human exposure to the toxic compounds in sewage sludge, it hardly makes the problem going forward. And its a terrible waste of nutrient value and only increases climate emissions. I know whenever I can I will pee outdoors, and don’t think twice about digging a cat hole and using my bucket shitter up in the woods. I tihnk that’s a vastly more sustainable option. I really don’t love the idea of septic tanks either and capturing all those solids and having to have them pumped every few years. Yes, there is some biological degradation both in a septic system and a waste water digestion, but you’re still disposing rather utilizing nature’s fertilizer.
