Spruceton Valley & My buddy, Max

I live 4.6 miles up County Route 6 at the far end of Spruceton Valley in the hamlet of Spruceton, village of West Kill, town of Lexington, County of Greene, the northern edge of the Catskill range, upstate NY. I-phones do not work here. There is no cable. The local market is half an hour away. Sometimes an hour passes without a vehicle coming by the house. There is no rush hour. It is very quiet, and, in Winter when the creek is completely frozen and covered with two feet of snow, there is no sound at all. At some point, a single crow might caw once, brittle in the frigid air. Once swallowed by silence.

The first recorded deed on the property was in 1820. It was a farm and then, when we bought it, a hunting lodge with thirteen bedrooms, each with a sink equipped with spring-loaded faucets that snapped back the instant you let them go. You could lose a finger on one of those things. Changes were made, rooms knocked out. The house gradually became ours. It’s comfortable, and we love it, but don’t think Martha Stewart. High end it’s not. Some might say it needs work. It does. We bought the place complete with every plate, pot, pan, and piece of flatware, and, decades later, we’re still using them. The irony is that these same plates and bowls sell for a fortune now in antique shops and flea markets, and we’ve got service for about forty. Suddenly our stuff is chic instead of curious. . Everything recycles, even our dishes. Nothing short of a sledgehammer can shatter them, and buster, you’d better hit it just right. They will live forever. Certainly, they will outlive me.

My buddy, Max, came by today. I knew he would because we had a big snowfall, and he’d be out plowing people’s driveways. He stops in regularly, snow or not, and drinks two cups of coffee before moving on. We have a deal, Max and I. He can walk into the house any time without knocking then go ahead and make a cup of coffee for himself. Makes one for me, too, but the deal is that if I’m seriously working I’ll stay at my desk and not socialize. Fine with Max. He sits at my dining room table reading catalogues and magazines until the coffee’s gone and it’s time for another lawn or another driveway or a favor to do for somebody. Then he yells, “Burn ‘er, bub” and goes about his business. When he doesn’t show (which happens only when he’s away on vacation or with in-laws for holidays) I’ll often go days without seeing anyone at all. My closest full-time neighbor lives a quarter mile west. My children are in Boston, and my wife works in LA. My job is to write novels and keep the home fires burning. Good thing I like silence because I’ve got it.

Max plows our driveway and mows our fields, and he stops in at random times during the week, basically, to see if I’m still alive. Recently he actually admitted it – “Well, y’know, Steve, you’re getting’ up there. You might not look it but still you’re getting’ up there. I gotta look in on you time to time to make sure, you know…” Yeah, I know, and actually I’ve suspected so for years. His visits have kept me aware of my mortality in a way that nothing else does. We joke that he’ll find me one sub-arctic day stiff and frozen solid standing in the bathroom with my shotgun poked out the open window eternally waiting to ambush the red squirrels chewing the timbers of my house (Unless you have experienced a plague of red squirrels run amuck through your house in biblical proportions, don’t criticize.). More likely he’ll find me at my computer with the usual look of literary anguish frozen on my face, but I don’t tell him that. I’m not going to do anything to diminish my legend. Like a Frederick Remington scout or a Charlie Russell.free trapper I want to be remembered standing tall not hunched over a keyboard.like Scrooge’s clerk who didn’t have a keyboard, I know, but you get the picture.