July, 1977, I moved from the chic upper East Side of Manhattan, after 8 years in New York City, to a farm in southern Rhode Island, or "South County" as it was called.
It wasn't like I had actually lived in New York City: I had gone to medical school there for the first 4 years and then did internship, residency at The New York Hospital (as it was called then, as if it were the only hospital in New York that mattered, which the faculty, medical students and housestaff actually believed it was) , on the East River. I lived first in the medical school dormitory four years, and then in the hospital staff housing, across the street from the hospital, and while I had some weekends or weekend nights to explore New York, it wasn't like having a day job and a night life with other people my age and living in the city, like "Friends" or "Sex in the City."
But it was still New York City and I was transformed by it, as most people are.
I moved from what I believed, at some level in the dark recesses of my soul, from the center of the universe, to a place as far from the center as I could find.
The reasons for all this are unimportant, but I became a doctor at the college infirmary, which was in Kingston, Rhode Island and I Iived down the road from the college, in the farmhouse of a potato farm, which the owner rented to me with the agreement that I mow the lawn around the farm house and keep on eye on things and not allow mischief to occur, as he lived a few miles away in Wakefield, having got too old to watch after the place, but he still hired men to plant potatoes in the fields.
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| The House on Barber's Pond Farm Rd, R.I. |
I moved there with my girlfriend, who was an Army brat, who had moved every 3 years of her life and who knew how to pack up and move. She actually found the listing for the farm house in the college housing office.
The farmhouse overlooked a pond, about half an acre of water and our nearest neighbors were only just barely visible down the road. One of the first things which occurred to me is that we were isolated and defenseless. I had read, "In Cold Blood" and I said, "We need a gun. I don't want to wind up like the Cutter family."
My girlfriend's father was a lifetime member of the NRA, who had got his first gun at age 12. She herself was a very good skeet shooter, and comfortable with guns and she said, "There's no way we are getting a gun. Especially you are not getting a gun."
Her father had always kept his guns locked in impenetrable metal gun cabinets and he maintained a gun is no kind of thing for self defense. "The only person you are likely to shoot with a gun in the house is your wife or one of your own kids," he said. "If anyone breaks into your house it's not the gun that gives them any advantage; it's the element of surprise. You'd be better off with a baseball bat."
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| Vincent Van Gogh |
I did have several baseball bats, but that did not seem like enough so my girlfriend agreed to allowing me a bow and arrow and I made a great show of practicing in front of the house, just so anyone driving by in his pick up truck would understand that the guy in the farm house on Barber Pond was a lethal bow and arrow guy.
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| Obadiah Youngblood |
The people I met that year either worked for the college or lived in the farms around it. The wives of some of the faculty had a poetry club and they put together a little book of their poems which was the best book of poems I've ever read, now tragically lost to posterity, but it was filled with sly and understated yearnings of women who had clearly had affairs, resolved to move on, some with resignation, some with satisfaction.
One thing about living where there are no street lights: the sky is full of stars, more stars than I had ever seen, like a Van Gogh canvas. We'd sit on folding chairs in the front and listen to the crickets and the frogs. The night sounds were not like city sounds, but in the city we lived high enough above street level the sounds were muffled. Here on the farm, it sounded like all the creatures were right next to us.
"That bullfrog must weigh 15 pounds," my girlfriend said. We could not see it, but we could hear it penetrating the wall of sound made by the little frogs and the insects and owls. I knew exactly who she was talking about.
It made a big sound, deep and resonant.
But most of the folks I met that year in this rural place were not poets, had never gone to college. The men could re wire their houses, fix their cars, raise turkeys in the most foul coops imaginable, do their own plumbing and they killed things daily, mostly birds, but sometimes bigger things.
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| Obadiah Youngblood |
We woke up one day to discover a dozen plastic empty milk bottles bobbing up and down on the surface of the pond. I had no idea what those bottles were doing there but they seemed anchored and were not going any place so I called the owner and the next day they were gone.
"It's the Campbells, down the road," the owner told me. "They were trapping turtles."
"Turtles?"
"Yeah, the pond's full of them."
"I noticed. Turtles and a 15 pound bull frog. But what do they want with turtles?"
"Turtle soup."
"Oh."
Most of the people I met in South County seemed to me a little desperate, a little defeated. My girlfriend said I was projecting, reading into them. But they did seem to believe they could not make it anywhere else, in Providence, just 45 minutes up Route 95, never mind, New York City.
I'd talk to someone at the hardware store for a few minutes and the most common comment was, "You're not from here, are you?"
One day, I was up in my study and my girlfriend appeared at my door and said, "There's a guy on the porch with hands that look like old leather and he's got a shotgun. He's just one shade this side of 'Deliverance.'"
"Oh?"
"He wants to know if he can hunt."
"Mr. Sullivan said no hunting."
"You go tell him. I'm going to look for the baseball bat."
So I went down and spoke to the guy with the leather hands and the shotgun, who was very pleasant and said he completely understood. I emphasized it was not my land, I only rented and if it were up to me he could shoot all the geese he wanted to with his howitzer, but, it really wasn't my call.
Actually, I was glad he couldn't hunt. I was sick of seeing animals murdered.
Nobody jogged much in those parts in those days. Really, only me. I'd jog down the road, past farms and there was always some carnage in the farm yards, chickens beheaded but still on their feet, deer strung up and gutted. Fish on lines gutted and drying.
There was a vegetarian restaurant down the road. The food was nearly inedible but at least nobody had killed it.
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| Obadiah Youngblood |
Seven months later, in February, 1978, a big snowstorm blew in and dumped at least two feet in one day, the blizzard of '78, still one of the biggest ever to hit New England.
My girlfriend, who had a job in a hospital up in Providence, got phone calls from all the nurses who were trapped in Women's and Infants Hospital and were running out of tampons, soda pop, popcorn and other essentials. She was also not happy about being trapped with me in a farm house, so she determined to get down to the railroad station, a half a mile from our farm as soon as Amtrak plowed the tracks.
That left me with nothing to do: They had closed the college and the infirmary. It was mostly a commuter school in those days, so the snow took care of that decision.
For a week I had nothing to do but remember New York Hospital and I had a typewriter so I tapped out a little memoir of that crazy time on the wards.
The snow made that seem like the best use of time. Sometime about the quiet, the tranquility, the fireplace and the enforced confinement.
Sometimes, when my friends wonder aloud about how anyone can see anything in Donald Trump, I remember what it was like out there in South County and while I cannot abide anything about Trump, it does not seem like that deep a mystery, his appeal in that quiet, isolated world.
