Upstate Onslaught

More moving, if you can bear it

When we landed at JFK last Sunday evening, I wondered how I’d have the strength to drive the few hours upstate. It’s not that the flight from London was so long, or that there was anything wrong with me. I just felt drained and not ready for the task at hand which was emptying our lives into a shipping container that would head across the ocean.

Maybe the exhaustion was there because most of the hard work had already happened — a few weeks before Eric and I had packed, sold, then emptied our house of almost thirteen years. My tiredness was probably more mental than physical. There’d been the craziness of the news the week following the Trump assassination attempt; calls to Biden to drop out of the presidential race and a computer outage two days before that grounded many flights—we’d wondered if we’d even be able to to fly.

But I turned on my phone and saw that Biden had bowed out. I wanted to show Eric the news but he was sitting up in a different section of the plane, the two of us having booked separate tickets we’d changed when we found out when the shipping company could do the business. Things had been so frenzied the last time with Eric in the middle of playing gigs, it was hard to remember what state the contents of our lives were in when I’d left. We’d had to add an adjunct storage space to hold the overflow from the first one. “Just til the end of the month,” I’d insisted to Mike the nice storage facility guy. He’d nodded sagely and said “Sure thing,” like a defense attorney used to representing criminals. Mike has seen and heard it all. He opened this place two months ago on the outskirts of Hudson New York and it’s already full. Construction continues with another twenty units out front. I used to say storage spaces were a huge con but I’ve stopped thinking that way. They are outposts on life’s journey, that sometimes become bigger than the journey itself.

Our first, largest storage space this time was actually the second, with a third small one earmarked as permanent: gear, merchandise, PAs for house concerts in the US. I think I accepted this is just the small price of doing business when I read about Barbra Streisand’s massive clothing archive and storage facility, or saw them fling open the doors of Deborah Vance’s desert wardrobe warehouse in the latest season of Hacks—thinking a 4 x 8 stake on US soil is not so much.

I collected Eric from under his luxe quilted blanket and premier class amenities (“wait, where’s the toiletry bag?” I shrilled as we ambled towards immigration. “Don’t tell me you passed up free socks and an eye mask??! Can’t we go back and get it?” We collected our bags and waited for the shuttle to a way offsite parking lot.

I practically fell to my knees when the guy from Ghana pulled up my Subaru. Our old life has been sold, donated, dumped or packed in boxes and to see this dear faithful friend gleaming in the dank twilight on the outskirts of Brooklyn, a wave of emotion hit me: home.

But not for much longer.

My immediate feeling as I started driving north was “and we’ll be at the house and maybe cook a plate of pasta and watch a show” as we’ve done so many times coming home from gigs and trips and it really hit me then that someone else was in our kitchen now. I guess these realizations are so deep you can’t take them in all at once. I took a different route since we’d actually be staying at our friends’ house in Hudson and we’d better get used to no more Catskill.

Our pals Dan and Liz have a charming house right in the center of town and it’s so generous of them to turn it over to us to stay there. I woke up super-early Monday morning, too early even for the Indian grocery on the corner. I decided Stewart’s up the road would be a good spot to grab some milk and breakfast stuff so got in my car to drive there. Thankfully the heat of a few weeks earlier had dialed back but I thought I’d better save my strength for the packing business ahead. At a stoplight I saw our friend Bill and it was comforting to encounter a familiar face within hours of arriving. We said hi and that we’d meet up later, and I carried on up to Stewart’s.

This was a full on upstate onslaught. The Mustang parked next to me, heavily tattooed guy and lady with scraped-back ponytail who might’ve been twenty but also could’ve been sixty, car doors splayed to take up three parking places. In front of me in line she didn’t have her card to pay with, “I’m sorry everybody! I’m sorry, I’m sorry hon!’ Too early, in a way, yet I was also an eager audience. I even got in the spirit, buying a classic “buttered roll” a default NY deli breakfast from decades past. Out front the tattooed guy was engaged in banter with a State Trooper about what actually constituted a felony. I’d barely left the place, was actually still here but felt nostalgic already: the buttered roll, the Stewarts’ brand half and half; the hapless lovable lowlifes. I wanted to celebrate it all.

But there was work to do. Throwing open the storage unit door, half-expecting a Silence Of The Lambs moment where we’d find both Eric and I mummified in the front seat of his now-departed Mercury Cougar, things weren’t as chaotic as I’d remembered. Just some extra items that needed to be combined with the larger space across the hall: office chairs, some empty guitar cases (it occurs to me guitars have wardrobes too - soft cases for local gigs, hard shell for flying - some are interchangeable but others are very specific) Clothes I’d left behind. I dug out a pair of Teva sandals I’ve kind of hated since I bought them, they’re just a little too big and ungainly looking but are very wearable and practical - I can’t help but feel guilty wearing them as I dissed Tevas in my song Men In Sandals years ago. Some songs don’t wear well and that’s one I can’t really get behind anymore, with climate change and summers hotter and hotter, men can wear whatever the hell they want. (well maybe not on stage?) I encourage them to be comfortable, look at the damage men in suits do! Be free, and more humane please.

I grabbed my Tevas and other clothes items, and we took it pretty easy sorting through the last of the stuff. I grabbed some important paperwork - after all our moves how is it possible I have both Eric’s and my original birth certificates? Titles for the cars, and…the boat. Our lives in an accordian file.

We hit all our favorite spots: Rivertown, Supernatural coffee. Brought a load of Eric’s book reissue to the Spotty Dog, where I immediately started straightening art supplies in the back. It felt so nice to hang out with Kelley the owner and co-worker friends in the bar up front. That same feeling kept washing over me the whole week, that we’re part of this place. It isn’t easy to leave. I kind of wish we were mummified in the Cougar, frozen as part of a community, at the same time things are changing and marching forward always, whether we want them to or not. These friends are moving back to the city, another out west. Maybe we’re the dominoes that set things in motion. It’s comforting that when we do come back (heh heh, it’s been less than a month since we left) we just slot right back in again.

I spent Tuesday fretting about the shipping insurance, we needed to value everything in the container, place a number value and list the items too. I had pages of box labels I’d taken photos of as we’d packed, it was overwhelming trying to add it all up. Hard to put a price on certain things that are irreplaceable but essentially useless which covers a lot of stuff in there: my dad’s Kolene sign - the company he worked for, the heavy metal sign he kept propped on a shelf in his home office all the time I was growing up, that moved with him again and again til the end. Stuff like that, mixed in with the studio equipment and characterful furniture. Books and records we could surely live without but that say `this is us.’

Moving insanity

The shipping guys came early Wednesday, we thought we should be on hand to help but they had it all in hand. The crew boss was Hungarian, there were a couple of his countrymen, a Guatemalan pair, they were all so focused and thoughtful and knew exactly what they were doing, Eric and I were extraneous. I took the opportunity to take the Subaru to a hand car wash with a free vacuum. It was like meditation, running the nozzle over the seats, the carpet, cleaning out the cup holders, sorting the CDs. I admit I was still searching for my mother’s rings I lost two summers ago. But also, it felt good to put my house in order, I was passing it on to my daughter and wanted it to be nice for her. Cars are fetishistic objects for me, running the water over mine felt almost sacrificial, ritualistic. So many hours in this thing, I thought. So many miles, alone. Trips with me and Eric, or my daughter. That ride with my dad, from Pittsburgh to Queens. Touring miles, work miles. So many books and songs listened to. Thank you for your service, Subaru. You’ve been a good, true friend.

We tried a new wine bar in Catskill and met up with our old neighbors for dinner there, but I felt like I needed to steer clear of our old house, even though the new owners had been super-sweet and invited us to drop by. Too soon, I just couldn’t face it. Not yet. A few times I just had to collapse on our bed at Dan and Liz’s. The heat wasn’t terrible but it felt like too much. I wanted to get back to England where our new life had already begun. Just about to buy a house there, a dream of a place near the sea.

Found a home for the boat and Eric disposed of some more equipment. My daughter and her boyfriend were coming to drive the Subaru back to California. That made me happy — I always wanted to live in California and having my daughter, and now my old car there, made it feel like I kind of was, while starting life in yet another place I love, England. That might be a downside of traveling a lot, you never feel all the way loyal to anywhere. “I’d like to settle down, but they won’t let me” as Merle Haggard sang in his Fugitive song. But we do love to try.

I put my Tevas on to walk one more time at Olana, my favorite walking place. It was a perfect summer morning, the humidity had lifted. I saw our old pal Frank and his dog on the driveway there. Olana is in the middle of a big renovation project, a new visitor center. Over a hundred years old but it keeps changing too. I thanked Olana, its trees and beautiful views and winding paths and slopes, for all the hours of comfort and peace it has given me.

One last walk at Olana

Waiting on the bread line in Hudson

We ate some fancy pastries and high class Mexican food. I saw my brother Michael and jumped in the pool at his friend’s country getaway, so odd to see my city brother out in the woods. Hazel arrived by train from the airport in NYC, I felt like that flaky hippie mom you see in a movie or show, there at the Hudson train station in my wet clothes over my bathing suit, shuffling boxes and wine bottles and garbage bags around in the back of the car to make room for passengers. We had a nice dinner and got up early to pack up one last time. I put my Tevas in the garbage  and took them out again. Kissed my daughter and her Patrick goodbye, only this time it was them in the Subaru and me and Eric on the train, down to NYC and then JFK. The majority of our stuff was in a shipping container bound eventually for the port of Felixstowe and the countryside in Norfolk. The switch had flipped. We had our two little carry on bags, and Hazel drove off with the last of our trash in the back of the Subaru.