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.