Dwell
By: Zachary Thacher
Tags: Housing, Nomad, Memoir, Covid 19, Brooklyn

Winter, 2020 — Brooklyn, NY

In March I fled New York and left behind a West Village apartment that was as alluring and compact and expensive as a jewel. Instead of a one bedroom with a deep bathtub, updated kitchen, living room with tall ceilings and a working fireplace on a tree-lined Manhattan street, I rented a series of short term furnished rentals in rural Massachusetts. The first was in a barn with a lumpy mattress and furnishings scavenged from the local dump; the second was in an apartment attached to an older woman’s home with streets without sidewalks and six easy chairs but no place to sit and work or eat. But I was safe and unscathed compared to many people in Covid.

I hovered near my best friend’s farm for a life of chores and work from home. In an awful time, being by a farm with my friend and his teenage kids felt like wrapping myself in a heavy comforter in the deadly cold. I labored outdoors as days slowly grew warm. The handful of adults and teenagers who keep my friend’s 30-acre farm going embraced me — from afar. It was idyllic and safe and I learned just how hard farming is, and how obviously central housing is to life. After three and a half months I exhausted the few short term rentals near the organic CSA — a farm without pesticides that’s subscribed to by locals. The owner of the barn studio with the tectonic bed needed me out in April, and the in-law apartment in the suburbs was only available for so long. By July 4th I had exhausted my options.

Now what?

Return to NYC in the height of the pandemic? I loved living in rural America and didn’t want to stop or felt safe to change that. I considered all along New York’s Hudson River Valley, from Westchester to the town of Hudson, I explored Western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley by Northampton, I even considered Nova Scotia which I’ve always wanted to visit, but either the borders were closed or I didn’t know anyone, anywhere. I was a mouse in a maze, banging his nose into a dead end.

Then a friend called.

“Come live with us in Vermont, in our new place. We’re moving to a giant farmhouse with four back buildings. We’ll have plenty of space,” a friend said.

He’s someone I’ve known since elementary school. We had been close as small children, stayed in loose touch over adolescence and reunited after graduating college. We moved with a few other people into a rambling, falling apart house in Brookline MA. From there I moved to my first Manhattan apartment in the East Village. A few years later, he followed to go to grad school at NYU.

If Boston and Washington DC and Philadelphia are planets, it is New York City that exerts the greatest gravity in the North American solar system, pulling in privileged young people as they seek love and purpose and money. New York is the sun, and for my friend, also his Juliet. It’s where he grew his career and found his wife, a beautiful Brooklynite who sings arias to herself and creates theater that is as entertaining and moving and inventive as their two little girls.

Summer in Vermont with creative friends who have fun kids? The mouse maze lifted. In its place: sunlit pastures stretching out to Lake Champlain and beyond that pool of silver, grey-faced mountains distilling sunsets each night.

I settled into their new-for-them 1840s farmhouse and enjoyed long drives through the northern New England countryside. When I was feeling virtuous, I ran along rural roads lined with fields that dipped and rose towards the lake shores.

And the thing is, all that beauty: the covered bridges spanning freshwater streams, the thick forests and Green Mountain summits and the undulation of the land that ripples from ridges to river valleys like waves of earth, the Pantone red barns and pastures and sparkling lakes, you never get used to it. With time and exposure, Vermont’s calm majesty fills you. With walks among birch trees and white pines and hemlocks and the endless maples, with views of deer and birds and grazing cows, with each breath of forest air, with walks through the Mona Lisa background, with friends from childhood and their children and food from a farm just down the road, with time and saturation in Vermont, you become beautiful too.