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Campgrounds are Gross

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I got this book out of the library the other day titled, “The Best of Tent Camping: A guide for car campers who hate RVs, Concrete Slabs, and Loud Portable Stereos” and thought it was a perfect read until I actually opened the book and found out it was a book expounding the virtues of state campgrounds, rather then back country and roadside locations for camping.

I once stayed in a state campground. It had to be the most miserable day in my life. I really don’t need to be told by some jackbooted thug how to operate my campsite, when I must turn down the music or dim the camp lights, or otherwise restrict what I want to do. I want shoot guns at midnight, then that should be my right.

Camping at Cumberland Head State Park

Campgrounds are tightly packed locations, versus the typical 1/4 mile plus spacing between most roadside and backcountry campsites, where you are out of eyeshot and earshot of other campers, so you are pretty much free to do what you want without restriction of the government or annoyance of others.

If you need the kind of services that campgrounds you probably shouldn’t go up to woods. Especially if your tent camping, a developed campground just seems kind of silly and wasteful. You can always burn and pack out your garbage, and there are creeks to swim in to clean yourself out.

Bulldozing Sand Dunes in Albany Pine Bush is Vulgur

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Tearing Down a Sand Dune

Like Fuck.
Like Fuck You Guilderland.
Like Fuck You Wealthy Folk.

We’ve all probably uttered that word, sometimes more then we’d be proud of it. Yet, sometimes somethings are just truly vulgur like tearing down sand dunes to build McMansions.

New Mini-McMansions in Pine Bush

The first part of any housing development in the Albany Pine Bush appears to be the leveling of the land, and the carting off the sand to fill in other areas. To make the landscape flat and boring, so a suburban street grid, driveways, and foundations can be laid.

It involves tearing down tall beautiful pitch pines, removing habitat that might be restored if fire were to touch it once again, to sterlize the landscape for generations to come.

Welcome! To the Flattened Pine Bush.

People need places to live, places to farm, places to use. But do they really need to tear down magnificent sand dunes? If they had to build, couldn’t they have left more of the trees standing, and built on the dunes, and preserved the terrian?

Untitled

It might be easy and cheap to bulldoze sand. There is no rocks to blast away at. But making it all flat, just to stick tacky, plastic and plywood houses for the wealthy just seems so vulgur and awful.

The New York City Mapping Problem

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I have in the past made maps up of New York State’s population, divided by population density or actual population per municipality. I almost always have to distort that maps for Upstate to show any detail, because of the extreme population concentration downstate, specifically in New York City.

Juneteenth 2022 Weekend

Simply said, there is nothing in Upstate New York at all like downstate. There simply are not the concentrations of people or dense urban core. Our Upstate cities are dense compared to the surrounding countryside — often as much as 100 times more dense (e.g. 100 times more people per mile), but Manhattan is 9 times more dense then even our most dense upstate cities.

Camp

New York is truly a metropolitian area, unlike any other in New York State, and like few in America. I welds immense power not just over itself but the more rural parts upstate, and the surrounding countryside that seems — at least to the city folk — so unimportant compared to their extremely dense and complicated living arrangements.