Brings me back to my younger years. The Plymouth Sundance and later the little Ford Ranger exploring these back roads. Singing along with Jim Croce’s I’ve Got a Name and the Easy Rider sound track in my Plymouth Sundance played through a big black audio tape recorder and an FM modulator as that car lacked a tape deck much less a CD player. Crazy shit like taking my on that road covered with ice and snow, but my little 4×4 was pretty good in the snow except the few times I deep centered it. I don’t do shit like that anymore.
In my younger years I spent many an evening after work and college exploring the back roads. I told myself in search of freedom, whatever that I meant. I wanted a mental map of all the farms and backwoods homesteads with blackened burn barrels in hope of smelling a little bit of burnt plastic or better yet a rip roaring fire, maybe with a little pungent black smoke as those Styrofoam egg trays, plastic bags and paper plates burned on up. But also I wanted to see those deep rural homesteads with the deer hung out, dressed each October or November, a few goats and hogs penned up, or a working dairy – the small tie stall grazing kind in the hills – were people scrapped together a living from manure spread with an open cab tractor and milk. Those were the best to find a blackened and often smoldering burn barrel at too.
In later years it also was a search for roadside campsites at state forests in my pickup, some designated and otherwise. So many rough dirt roads to explore in that little Ford Ranger. And wildlife. Deer. Turkey. Grouse. Shit when you are walking in the rough country and accidentally flush one out, I almost shit my pants in shock. But more than anything for that deep rural freedom. The deep hollows and mountain vistas. The woods and hard scrabble farms. In many ways the freedom to burn – even stinky garbage – was all wrapped up in that. They never allowed any of that in the more civilized and urban areas. I would with my little Ford Ranger pickup drive those dirt trails, just to see where they lead and because it was easy to back up and turn around should the road be too rough for a stock 4×4. Many of those trails were destroyed if not deeply eroded for a stock Ford Ranger after Hurricane Irene – and lately the DEC has gated and posted more and more of them as No Motor Vehicles due to lack of maintenance and damage by ATVs.
In my younger years, when I was hanging out and exploring Kenyen Road, a land owner up that way approached me and asked if I was interested in buying land along the road. It’s not that I didn’t have an eye on this rural road, I walked it and explored it. In recent years, some of then abandoned farm land has sprouted houses. Indeed, more recently two roads over a somewhat run down hunting cabin on ten acres that I immediately fell in love with went up for sale for only $90k but I passed on looking at it at 37 miles and 45 minutes from work, including a very steep rough dirt road to get up to it.
It was so perfect except for being in New York State with the burn ban, SAFE Act 2.0 and so far from work with the mandatory five day in office crap except when it’s not. But the gas would add up and I might have to still maintain an apartment in the city for work in bad winter weather – and how to take care of livestock them. Remote enough though I probably still could have campfires and bonfires for the burnable debris and avoid sending it to the landfill during the summer months. Just roasting some sticks, junk mail, and maybe that occasional wrapper or bottle from the day or two – I don’t eat a lot of packaged food and with a homestead I’d certainly have even less that couldn’t feed the hogs or compost pile. Maybe I should have scheduled a tour – it sat on the market for some time as it’s mostly hunters and folks like me who seek out such a property. It also was grid tied too which I did not like at all as it’s not easy to disconnect an existing structure from the grid.
I do so love the country up this way but my time spent in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and even rural Maryland has shown me deep rural exists outside of New York State and while West Virginia has burn laws, Maryland and especially Pennsylvania are super relaxed out in the sticks. Gun laws outside of Maryland are good but Pennsylvania gets werid and restrictive with a lot of random shit like their liquor laws and no legal cannabis. Pretty country though up this way with the Blackhead Mountains and the deep hollars in hills in all other directions.
With my big jacked up truck with it’s heavy fuel consumption and not all that nimble on off-road trails it’s rare I’ve driven many in recent years. Trust me, a full size truck even with a lift kit is shit on the trails and a major pain to back any distance. Then the DEC designated all the campsites for a while at Rennselaerville State Forest camping by permit only. After Camp Cass closed, the moved the Park Rangers training area up here, so I figured it’s not worth it with so many other places to camp. So I stayed away until those restrictions were dropped except for hiking and skiing until after the pandemic when the permit requirement or at least the signs disappeared and were not replaced by the department.
“The deer get on the railroad tracks and eat the corn, and they think, ‘I can outrun the predator if I don’t go into the deep snow,” Porter explains in the video. “So they stay on the tracks, trying to outrun the train, and they just get pounded. There’s dead deer all over the place.”
