Phoenicia, Tis of Thee

I wrote this to read at the Phoenicia Playhouse debut of my recurring event The Real Life Revival: An Evening of Storytelling & Music, Saturday May 14th, 2022.

I’ve lived in the hamlet of Phoenicia the longest I’ve lived anywhere. My wife and I moved to this town with our four-year-old son in autumn of 2002. Going on 20 years now, almost 1/3 of my life, I’ve received mail in a burg of approximately 300 people. The closest traffic light is 16 miles away. Prior to this chapter, the longest I resided at one address was 14 years in a St Mark’s Place tenement.

My Phoenicia chapter did not begin auspiciously. On Day 1, I stood in our gravel driveway and tearfully apologized to a century-old maple for severing its lowest bough with the moving van. I thought, “This does not bode well.” I told no one what I’d done. I hid the massive branch in the nearby woods to rot.

That maple thrives to this day, however. Scarred but stronger, it towers ever higher over the house that once knew it as a sapling. Plainly visible on Google Earth. Completely recovered from a traumatic 2005 denuding by ravenous tent caterpillars. Its roots have spread deeper and further, communicating via an underground mycelial network to the massive spruce in the backyard, the cedar out front, the pear and apple trees and lilac now flowering, the knotweed, the silver birches, and the living root system of a rare American chestnut.

I was so clueless in 2002. I did not realize the maple would be fine, or that it talked to its neighbors. I didn’t feel akin to it or, in fact, to anything here. In my woe I considered myself an interloper, a man out of place. A fool. We’d come here against our will, after all. We’d lost a legal battle with our New York City landlord. I was no country guy. I was still eying the horizon. I thought of Phoenicia as more roost than home.

But I would learn a lot in these parts. Aside from my first decade on Earth, I’d wager I’ve gained the most knowledge here – in the shadow of Romer Mountain, the moody Esopus flowing constant just beyond my doorstep, the scent of Brio’s wood-fired pizza oven commingling with campfires, the riot of birdsong laughing at the inelegant rhythms of nearby gunfire. Surrounded thus have I transitioned from a new dad to a graying elder. Both literally and metaphorically, this is the soil in which I’ve tilled and harvested the most, some of it sweet, some bitter.

I’ve learned this terrain was once covered with thick, dark hemlock forests, and had been hunting grounds for the Esopus people. After the legal rape of the land by the tanning industry of the early 20th century, the hills are now covered with what we commonly refer to as “invasive species” like Norway maples, barberry, and white people.

In 2011, Irene temporarily devastated my town. The hurricane changed both the landscape of Phoenicia, and me. On that apocalyptic late August night, as modern conveniences went offline one after another, boulders smashed thunderously in the raging waters, taking out the Bridge St bridge. Six feet of water rose in our basement. For the first time ever, the Esopus crested its banks in front of our home. Main Street became a river itself. After the rains stopped and lo, the sun rose, a determined band of camo-clad strangers, Phoenicians I rarely see, got the jump on FEMA. They showed up to shovel silt from basements, to deliver food and clean water, to hand out dry ice, or just to share information. The information was not always accurate – we were told, for instance, that nearby Oliverea had been obliterated (it was not) – but the sharing of it, the oral storytelling, would bind the community tighter than any email. I learned that when the town is transported by a weather event to the 19th century for 10 days, these mysterious intrepid citizens will enthusiastically jump into action to help residents and businesses, no matter your yard signs, or how long you’ve resided here.

Irene was pivotal for me. At the age of 46, I began to settle in, and accept where I’d landed, and where, clearly, my son’s childhood would continue to play out in an idyll I could, for a time, influence.

In the wake of Irene, I wrote a novel, Perfectly Broken. It became my first published work and set me on the circuitous path that led me here tonight. Something about the Esopus, whipped up by Irene, directly outside my window, its vapor in my nostrils and its roar in my ears, transformed from humble trout stream to raging elemental force, altering the landscape, chastening the laughable will of the people. Just as it carved up layers of asphalt and concrete pavement to reveal ancient, hardy cobblestones beneath my street, the Esopus unearthed a subliminal force in me. I tapped into this stratum for my work, and for my life. I surrendered to a power greater than myself, and, in some ways, I became stronger.  

After years on my own clock, but a blip in the deep time of the natural world, I finally took my cue from the maple I’d injured in the driveway two decades ago. I accepted my scars, sank my roots deep and wide into the rocky soil of Phoenicia, extended my mycelial network in the loamy darkness, and became both part of a place, and more myself.