CITY DESK: The Upper Upper West Side

One of the goals of hopeful New Yorkers is to have a place outside New York, to escape periodically the crush and fret. But can they ever escape other New Yorkers?

Our place is two hours from the city, in a valley on the flank of the Catskills. This August the town of Rochester (not the city), where our house is located, celebrated its tricentennial. The party began with a perfect parade, only 25 minutes long. The line of march included a town official in colonial costume, riding a golf cart; the trucks of three local fire departments; a snowplow from the highway department; the Pop Warner football team and its cheerleaders; the VFW; an active-duty soldier in this FW, recently home from Iraq (big cheers for him); assorted old cars; somebody's Belgian draft horses; somebody else's llamas; trucks from three big local farms. One of these bore a sign with a proud boast: "Saunderskill Farm, Est. 1680 / Salutes Rochester, Est. 1703." Even a weekender deals with many of these people regularly. Those born and raised in the valley, of course, have been dealing with them, in some cases, since the 17th century.

The valley sleeps like Rip Van Winkle, yet it is only two hours from Metropolis. How is it still different? There is no place to go for coffee. There are two diners where coffee can be gotten, but people go there (early) to eat. You have more luck finding maple syrup or heirloom tomatoes. The whole concept of coffee as an off-hours jolt is out of place, since all hours are given to work or rest. The many weapons in the valley are perfectly legal, and fired at targets or creatures. Soon enough the bow hunters and their camouflage will appear, followed by the rifle hunters and their anti-camouflage of orange vests. No one walks. A few kids ride bicycles or ATVs; everyone else drives cars, or trucks filled with lumber, tree limbs, or bulky unfamiliar machinery. Peg Leg Bates, a one-legged tap dancer, had a resort up in the hills that drew a black clientele, yet almost no black people live here. There are plenty of Mexicans, though, harvesting all those tomatoes. NR would tell the farmers to invest in new machinery, though I can't see how it would pick the bosomy, misshapen heirlooms. There is more fauna in the city than we usually think, though except for birds, vermin, and pets, it is confined to the city's parks. The fauna in the valley is freer and stranger. Once we saw in the trees out our kitchen door a fisher, a low-slung bounding beast like a large weasel, evidently furtive and somewhat dangerous. My wife named him Fisher Ames, after a Federalist congressman of the oldest school. We imagine him in the hemlocks, berating democrats and Jacobins. In the middle of the night we have heard barred owls, in their exigent baritones, asking "Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?" Between owls, there is stillness. When the bugs die, there will be another layer of it; when the rustling leaves fall, there will be a second; when the stream freezes, there will be the final third.

For all those differences how is the valley changing? For it does change. A few large farms anchor the valley floor, where the soil is best. As the hills rise and the ground turns rockier, the farms have molted away. One became a dude ranch where urban cowboys herd patient cattle. A few have converted to stables, or Christmas tree farms. In the local paper I read about an old Eastern European man around the corner from me who still keeps dairy cows the way he and his late brother did for most of their 80 years. When he dies, his place will convert to mullein, then to brush. Here and there are signs of farms that have gone the whole way: backyard chicken coops, grey with weather and time; family graveyards, thick with trees. People become truckers; or they work for the town, or the prison. They can't wait tables at coffee houses.

Many of the old properties are divided into house lots, as in the suburbs, only minus the services. The pressure comes partly from local people who want better houses, mainly from New Yorkers seeking second homes. A friend told me he has been seeing a lot of lesbians at the dump. It was not a criticism, only an observation. I too am part of the process. My house started as a hunter's cabin. Someone made it a weekend cottage. I added oil heat. Up the road my wife told me to stop at an unusually promising yard sale. Most show, as they flash by the side-view mirror, old toys and lugubrious clothes. This one displayed Turkish rugs. The seller turned out to be an old student at my wife's psychoanalytic institute. The Catskills: the Upper Upper West Side.

The country place is an old urban dream. As New York City has grown, the country has fled before it. Gouverneur Morris's estate was in what is now the South Bronx. He told Mme de Stael that "by the middle of September" she could "repose after your fatigues . . . gather peaches, take walks, make verses, romances; in a word . . . do whatever you please." Alexander Hamilton's country place was in what is now Harlem, Clement Moore's in what is now Chelsea. As New Yorkers follow the countryside, they worry about other people like themselves. For twenty years New York magazine has been proclaiming the death of the Hamptons. Once they said northwestern Connecticut would replace it; now they are saying the Catskills.