The Landscape Detective

[mallorys_camera]

There are two 26 Egbert Streets (address changed to confuse the innocent) in Kingston.

Two!

So, I spent an hour of what, all in all, was a frustrating day yesterday trying to figure out which one the National Counting Project wanted me to count.

There were also numerous addresses that turned out to be abandoned junkyards, deserted marinas, ruined shacks up unapproachably steep dirt roads, etc. etc. about which the enumerators who’d come before me had cheerfully written in their notes, Nobody home! Left Notice of Visit!

Snort.

I’ll bet.

The National Counting Project is just the most inefficient gub’mint operation ev-ah!

But like I say, it gives me an excuse to do what I like to do anyway—which is basically to knock around weird little places that are so mired in a sense of the past that walking around in them is like wading through muck. A landscape detective!

And I get paid for it.

###

I started the morning back in Rosendale, knocking on doors up and down the lengths of the scrappy little roads that sprout off Creek Locks Road. None of these roads have signage, so it’s a matter of driving the same stretch of Creek Locks three or four times until you sight the turn-off that’s not the driveway to some white supremacist’s home.

On Constable Lane (I kid you not), I met a drop-dead gorgeous blonde in full police uniform and her dead-eyed male consort.

“Hi, my name is Patrizia! I work with the National Counting Project! Is this 6666666 Constable Lane?” I chirped in my best ingratiating puppy-dog voice.

“Who wants to know?” said the man. But it was more of a statement than a question.

Wait! I thought. She’s police. Shouldn’t she know what the National Counting Project is?

But maybe she wasn’t really police! Maybe this was some kind of cosplay the couple did to spice up their sex life! Maybe inside this rather forbidding looking house—constructed entirely of logs, by the way—they had a dungeon where he’d strip her except for that hat with the visor, string her up on pulleys, and fuck her from behind.

In fact, the dungeon was probably filled with sex slaves, hapless National Counting Project enumerators all, that the couple had plucked from the road during survey attempts.

Or maybe what the blonde was wearing wasn’t a police uniform but the uniform of the local militia!

Whatev-ah, girlfriend! I braced myself and quickly rifled through my mental gallery of Explanations to Give Whenever a Respondent Casts Aspersions on the Sanctity of the National Counting Project.

“It’s in the Constitution!” I said. “Article 1, Section 2!” I wished I had prepared a little statement about how the work the National Counting Project does is vitally important to the support of the Second Amendment.

Eventually, I did manage to wheedle them into giving me occupancy information. Nothing else, though.

“We don’t give out personal information to the government,” sneered the blonde.

###

Throughout the day, I was on the lookout for glimpses of the old D&H Canal bed and its locks. May have sighted them several times while I was driving. But there was no place to pull over and snap pix.

I did take pix where there was room to pull over:



This is Roundout Creek near what was once the village of Rosendale (which voted itself out of existence some 50 years ago.) To my eyes, the waterway looks too straight not to have been engineered.



This pic was taken from one of the mobile home parks. Again, the waterway looks too straight and unobstructed to be a natural creek. But, of course, what do I know?

###

I saw lots of old pre-colonial houses, too. Some of them had historical markers:




But most of them were just Places Where People Live:



By the way, the whitewash is probably truer to the way these places actually looked during the time of Dutch and early English colonial rule than the plain stone of the Hurley houses.

###

I worked my way down Creek Locks Road and its subsidiaries, gloomy under dense clouds, and found myself on Rte 213, which styles itself “Abeel Road” as it passes into Kingston. This was the cause of some hilarity as the National Counting Project addresses all say “Rte 213” while my GPS concierge kept insisting “Abeel Road.”

I think “Abeel Road” may be some kind of holdover from the mid-19th century when this part of the Kingston marina was still an independent village called Roundout. Johannes Abeel was apparently some early 17th century mayor of Albany who was deposed by (of course!) a member of the eeee-vil Livingston dynasty.

I had a much better time counting in the Kingston inner city than I did in the hostile White-People-Lands surrounding it, I must say. Respondents were more respectful and much, much friendlier.

I have no control over where they send me, of course.

But I definitely do not want to go back to Ulster County’s white supremacist strongholds. It was a challenge to remain polite.

So that may be it for me and the National Counting Project.

I’ll see how I feel in a couple of days.