My husband and I moved to the village of Catskill, in New York, more than a year ago. Although we have lived in the Hudson Valley off and on since 1998, we arrived in Catskill as strangers. And, because the pandemic hit right after we moved, we are still strangers, restricted in our ability to get to know our new place. Mainly, we know it by walking, for blocks in all directions, and by saying hi to our neighbors, who, perhaps because for a long stretch they couldn't go to the gym, were also walking; we know it from snatches of conversation and by looking.
We lived previously on the other side of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, in Dutchess County; over time, we had become familiar with Kingston and other parts of Ulster County, but Greene County, where Catskill is, remained mysteriously unknown to us. We chose to buy here because it was still affordable and because it is beautiful. The places where we'd lived on the other side of the Hudson River are also beautiful or, at least, charming, but Catskill's beauty immediately seemed more varied, more complex, somehow deeper. The village is certainly more diverse, socially and topographically. It slopes down to the Hudson on one side and up to the mountains on the other, giving some streets stark angles, which are complicated by trees and rooftops that are flat, peaked, corniced, or, in some cases, domed. You can stand at the corner of, say, Bridge and Spring and see the road rising and falling as it travels into the greater world, then turn down a side street and enter into a lush fold of small-town life (planned greenery, flowers, decorations, toys). There are gorgeous houses, blocks of them, even on streets where the sidewalks are broken and overrun with grass; rigorously kept homes are sometimes close to those that are almost calamitously run-down, and the two elements—rigor and calamity—each accent the other's beauty. A very lovely home may sit across the street from a once-grand house, now weather-beaten and sagging on its foundation. There is a sense of small-town hierarchy, of house pride and house modesty, of the effort it takes to create beauty and also just to survive. These homes are a constant reminder that some boats rise while some sink, and you never know for sure which yours will be.
Usually, I have little natural curiosity about the factual histories of villages and towns; I am content to absorb places in their present tense, to subliminally sense their pasts in the details of their architecture, the textures of their plants and broken places, or the names on display in their tumble-down cemeteries. But Catskill made me wonder—wonder with a flavor of anxiety, especially last fall, when the pandemic was rising and the election was impending. What kind of place was this? There was basic information in the profusion of political yard signs—mostly Biden-Harris in our immediate vicinity, lots of Black Lives Matter—but, beyond that, who were these people?
It was in this state of nervous receptivity that I came upon what I call the Trump House. This house is on a main thoroughfare in Catskill, in an area that my next-door neighbors call "the gut," which borders on and, in some cases, seems to roll gently down into a steep, verdant ravine that spans at least a block and, when the foliage is out, gives the area an aura of wildness. I had driven by the house and glimpsed its display of flags and costumed mannequins and a handmade sign, but the full effect could be appreciated only by slowly walking past. Initially, I was too averse to the concept of the house to do that. But eventually my curiosity got the best of me and I took a better look. The house was small and built close to the street, with a concrete area bordered by an iron railing where there would usually be a front yard with grass; the homeowner had made remarkable use of this area, arraying it with large mannequins, including a white male figure wearing a maga hat and a shirt with a picture of Smokey the Bear warning that "only you can prevent socialism"; just behind him lurked a skeleton that sported a bow-tie and a faded Trump cap. (Later I'd see the skeleton wearing a "Don't Tread on Me" shirt, but more often it went nude.)