The Move

I was born on Long Island near the city, was a kid of mischievous ways, and was always up to no good. If I stayed on L.I. I would have taken a different course in life. Near the city, I had all the temptations one could ever need. Cars and summer homes were easy illegal targets to gain possession of and enjoy the weekends with friends. We would party without adult supervision and sneak off into the village with fake I.D.s to drink in a bar where movies were filmed back in the 1970s.

That changed in 1990. Then suddenly, the announcement to us was that we were moving upstate. I was crushed! “What in hell was in upstate New York? Surely not any fun” that I can think of. I was to leave my beach behind and move to Podunk, nowhere full of cow shit. I thought hell no to myself at the time.

I still remember riding up there with my stepdad and mom to look at some shitty house just outside Deposit, NY. It was an old farmhouse, and it had been a while since anyone lived in it. Beams were busted and handed down. The smell of old wood and dust filled my sinuses with a heavy burn. I remember walking around the house and the floor slightly giving with each step, springing about step by step. There was no way we could live here, five of us in an old three-bedroom farmhouse.

We left Deposit and headed to Walton, NY, to spend the night. My stepfather had a friend he knew who lived there from Long Island. He had bought an old magnificent dairy farm and had it up and running. How he went from building inspector on Long Island to a dairy farmer upstate was beyond me. That profession at the time didn’t seem very rewarding to me. Though the farmhouse was beautiful and from the 1800s, the barn was that of a large red wooden building with an attached milk house.

That evening, I had a chance to wander about the barn and milk house. I still remember to this day the smells that had attacked my senses. The earthy grass-cut smell of hay lay about in each stall for the cows to lay on — followed by the pungent smell of ammonia and poop that the cows themselves made into the gutter behind each stall. The most surprising smell there was the corn silage. It would hit me in sweet corn and grass, but only in pockets throughout the lower portion of the barn.

The barn’s first floor was long, with a cement path wide enough for a tractor with a bucket to go down. On each side of that was the gutter behind the cows. That allowed them to poop and pee in for easy scraping and cleaning. Then, of course, each stall with about 20 stalls on each side of the barn. It was messy and dirty, and I did not like it. The sights, smells, and even the sounds were all foreign to this city boy.

 Only one room in the barn was clean, so clean you could almost operate in it, the milk house. One tiny section of the barn housed the milk tank, milking equipment, pumps, and a wash basin. Here, the milk was stored until the milk truck came for it. The smells were of creaminess and cleaner, an unfamiliar combination to me. I have never seen raw milk, unpasteurized, fresh from the cow. Fatty and thicker looking, it was weird to see so much in one holding tank, whereas a gallon at a time was all I had ever seen until that point.

That evening, I wandered around the farm, wondering if I could survive up there, away from my friends and family on Long Island. I was scared because I had moved so many times on Long Island that I began calling Long Beach my home. I had friends that I had finally made that were longer than a year, and I didn’t want to pack up all my stuff again and make new friends, but that wasn’t my choice. I was only 16 at the time, and my parents were on a mission to get off that Island.

The next day, we all looked at a double-wide trailer, or modular home some folks call it, out about 11 miles from the village in the middle of nowhere. It was straight up the side of a hill surrounded by pine trees. The air was so clean and crisp. We looked at the house, where we met the owner and his wife. They seemed very friendly and wanted to sell to move into the village as they had small kids, and it would be nicer to have access to the stores and hospital quicker.

Well, that was it, they found their home, and I found dread. My sister, brother, and I did not want to go there. Then, I started talking with a girl I liked, and I didn’t want to start over. It was painfully excruciating to get to that point! How would I ever get the nerve to talk to another girl again? Plus, how will I be able to fade into the seemingly endless crowd of students up there? I was going from about a class of 900 students to 135!!! What was that about!?

I adapted just fine. It was the perfect opportunity to be myself and not pretend as I did so much in school on Long Island. That was the best route, as everybody I met was just down to Earth. This was pleasant to me. I truly liked how everybody was easy to talk to, and most of the other kids didn’t have anything to prove, as they grew up there and still had childhood friends with them.

I met several best friends that, to this day, I talk with when I can, even if it’s a quick comment here and there. I learned more about becoming a man up there as well. How do I take responsibility for my actions and respect other people’s property? I became pretty popular up there, nothing like how I was on Long Island. Because I changed who I was and what I was about. People were more wholesome and friendlier because of it. I became a firefighter for many years, helping put back into the community that gave to me. I even joined the sheriff’s office for a while, but that’s another story. There are two things I am pretty sure I would never have done down in the city.

I worked on that dairy farm and several others throughout high school and continued to do so in my young adult years. I was still helping out at other friends’ farms until I moved to Arizona. Smells and all.