The trees, the sun-spangled leaves, the mist rising from the creeks and ponds in early morning, fuzzing the view with the kind of soft blurriness that might make someone mistake one person for another.  Say, identifying a person accusing him of assault as one of his former wives and not even the former wife who accused him of assault, either.  

All make riding the stomach-roiling rollercoaster roads to the grocery store, splendid journeys indeed.    

Fall is almost why we are here. 

When we lived in [“the crime and gang-ridden hellhole of”] NYC, as enchanting and dreamlike and artificial as NYC’s Prospect and Central Parks can be in the autumn, I still wanted to come to the Catskills for leaf peeping. But it was always hard to predict when the best time to visit would be, and everyone and their cousins filled up all the motel rooms for the Indigenous Day weekend. 

We stayed at a B&B in Parksville, NY one year and discovered that, while still close enough to see the offspring still in the lower 48 often, the Delaware River area was more our retirement style than the Hudson River valley, the pricey renovated houses of which reminded me of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, a neighborhood that always inspired me to mumble, “Die yuppy scum!” back when people understood what that meant.    

A corner brownstone we trudged past on our way to the bus stop had an Emmy statuette perched in a parlor floor window. We, ourselves, had two-and-a-half kids in requisite sports activities, but we turned up our noses at crass displays of their trophies. 

Here in NEPA, when I turn my national park’s calendar to October, the brazenly garish monthly centerfold cannot compare to the views from my living room. Fall colors abound all around us, rather than only after a long bus or subway ride with small fidgety kids. 

The view of lower New York Bay on the express bus to Manhattan from Staten Island over the Verrazano Bridge was awesome.  But the curl of the Delaware River, silvery swirling below the high road running alongside it, brings snippets of psalms to my mind.  Driving to the periodontist here is more soul restoreth-ing than heading into the office there. 

When the car reaches a crest and tumbling vistas come into view, the clouds trace zebra stripes on the faraway hills, the [“so pathetic and so bad”] wind turbines on mountaintops 10 miles to the southeast spinning like pinwheels [“destroying our beautiful countryside! Driving whales crazy!”]. 

The wide white tail of a bald eagle gliding above a field, a hawk perched high on the power lines. 

Thank goodness they haven’t been murdered by those turbines, yet, nor fried on the proposed solar farms [“They fry because they’re hot!”].  Though on the bright side, we do like to eat local.  Bald Eagle Fricassee, anyone?

The water riffling in the streams, like the sounds of multiple flushings [“10 times, 15 times...”]  of toilets struggling to clear away papers stuffed into them.

Alas, even great beauty cannot protect us from the real world.