Every time I go back to my hometown, Greenville I bemoan the changes over the past twenty years. But how much has it really changed compared to myself? I’ve been working and studying in the city for twenty years now and my connection is most distant to the town I grew up in.
But more than that, I’ve also become more wilder and aware of places far beyond the borders of the town I few up in. Greenville is rural and it’s farm country but at 25 miles from Albany it’s still very exurban. Compared to the deep rural country of Madison County – to say nothing of the Allegheny Wilds of Pennsylvania or the back country of West Virginia.
And thanks to the internet I’ve been exposed to greater and more wild country in places like the Mid-West, and the true West like Idaho. I’ve been able to learn about off-griders and homesteaders who really are living on the frontier. I’ve learned about cattle ranchers and dairyman, goat farmers and trappers. Often residing on far greater acreages than is common in an commuter town on the far outskirts of Albany.
It’s not to say that I didn’t grow up in a town of country boys and gals, that there aren’t still cattle and hills and hollers on the back roads. But I’ve experienced far more wild places even in New York State to say nothing of those other states I’ve visited. There are many other towns that smell like cows, places where they homes are far more spread out, where the mountains are bigger and the people are more wild.
Greenville might be rural and the Catskill Mountains looming large, but it’s no Idaho or even West Virginia. In many ways I’ve outgrown my old town both in my dreams and hopes, and while it has changed so I have during my past twenty years away.
