Local Deep Down
by Dorothy Dow Crane

My neighbor stopped by our local deli for a cup of coffee. While trying to get the lid securely seated on the cup as she searched deep in her purse for change, some coffee sloshed over onto the counter. An older gentleman at a nearby table leaned over and commented, "You New York people move too fast." My neighbor has lived here for 11 years but, she says, there's no way she qualifies as local. To her, local means being born and bred here. Deep roots. Knowing all the back roads and shortcuts. Although she and her husband have always had breakfast in the village at the Copper Kettle (it later became Blondie's and then morphed into Pete's), 11 years is not nearly long enough to qualify as local.

At a recent public hearing for the Rhinebeck Comprehensive Plan one resident after another came to the microphone, gave his or her name, and then, almost defiantly, stated the number of years lived in Rhinebeck, exactly where they had lived, and the number of children they had nurtured here, as though this information was ammunition for the fight against a powerful, unnamed force. Those coming to the microphone without local credentials effusively praised the town's unique resources and beauty, like uneasy interlopers in slightly hostile territory who need to placate the ancestors properly before getting down to work. Without exception, every single speaker took pains to answer the unspoken question floating in the room: But are you local? Yes. Almost. Practically. No, but with enough reverence to make up for it.

I have lived in our Rhinebeck village home long enough to experience the collapse of three old cisterns in our back yard. One almost swallowed a car. Another almost swallowed my husband as he raked leaves and then suddenly found himself stuck in the ground up to his thigh. I have lived here long enough to remember how, from our second story window, we watched the fiery glow of the high school gym going up in flames. Long enough to recall the December we skated the Hudson from Rhinecliff to the bridge on black ice. Long enough to reminisce about "the old days" when Le Petit Bistro was just an informal seafood restaurant with fishnet and cork floats on the wall and the proprietor asked a young buxom female customer to leave because she wasn't wearing a bra. That was the era when both draft cards and bras were up for tinder. But after almost 40 years shoveling my sidewalk, sending our two children to the public school (and attending all their concerts), eating local tomatoes every summer and local apples every fall, my status is questionable. I wasn't born here. I didn't go to school here. I'm pretty sure that means I'm not really a local.

My husband, on the other hand, did go to school here. He learned to read at a small wooden desk in the Methodist church parish hall (the Rhinebeck elementary school had run short of space) and graduated from high school in Red Hook. He'll take anyone who's willing on a tour of the homes he's lived in—the old Kipp house by the river where he used to build forts in the woods, Smith Herman's farmhouse on 308 just outside the village where he used to make secret paths through the winter wheat, the house on Broadway in Red Hook that later became a dress shop where his mother sometimes bought clothes (imagine walking into what used to be your living room and seeing racks of skirts!) Yes, for people on the tour who also want to see notable local architecture he'll include the Gehry-designed Performing Arts Center at Bard, but his heart is clearly in the houses where he grew up. But what about those first four years my husband spent elsewhere? What about the fact that his parents were born in New Jersey? Is my husband a local? Perhaps not. While standing on line at Bread Alone, a local contractor informed me his family had been here for over 100 years. That, he said, was local.

So how many generations make a true local? Should one's family have arrived before the bridge was completed? Before the Taconic Parkway made its way north? Been here by the time the tiny village of Tivoli began to produce hats, barrels, and boxes in the 1800s? Or even before Chancellor Livingston was breeding his merinos at Clermont in 1790?

It definitely helps. People pay attention to how much time you (and your family before you) have spent here. A Livingston descendant I know can see Round Top Mountain from her Columbia County home. So could her grandparents and great-grandparents and even her distant ancestor Robert Livingston after he made his way here in the late 1600s from Scotland by way of Holland and New York. Her family has lived on the same land for over 300 years. Yes, she says, she is local, and when pressed she laughs gently and uses the phrase I've heard so often: deep roots. She feels the tendrils that reach back in time and literally into the soil. It is as though this land—the river, the Catskills, the sky—has shaped her genetic material, has joined with her flesh. The soil and the sky have seeped into her bloodstream and her bones, and she knows it.

Yet there is a sense in which this term local—except maybe for produce grown in the area—doesn't fit the Hudson Valley. The river has always been a way to transport grain, iron, and apples to New York City's growing population. People landed here from elsewhere to farm and manufacture whatever the great metropolis needed to keep growing. They sent produce and wool down the river. Now the urban dwellers come up river seeking open space and respite from noisy city canyons. When Henry Hudson sailed the Half Moon up the Hudson in 1609, native peoples had been here for 11,000 years. Even the painters who memorialized our view of the river and the Catskills weren't native born: Thomas Cole came from England and grew up in Ohio. Asher Durand was born and died in Maplewood, New Jersey. Fredric Church was from Connecticut.

I am tempted to dismiss the word local (aren't we all from someplace else?) as simply a shorthand device to indicate a complicated relationship between power and class, or a common putdown by newcomers of those who have lived here for so long that they seem "behind the times" and "out of touch." (And might we not ask as well, "Who exactly qualifies as a newcomer?") But being local has a gravity, a power that I can't ignore. I feel the pull when I talk to my Barrytown friend who grew up on Chanler Chapman's estate where her father worked. Her grandfather was the local Red Hook tinsmith who kept a roof over most everyone's head. When she talks about local, she describes having conversations on the front porch rather than by email or cell phone—as wanting and being willing to put the time into staying connected to your neighbors. She dreams about starting a Barrytown radio station as an electronic equivalent of that front porch chat. And she tells stories about scapping for herring in April—how the men waded into the water with their huge dip nets, how the children scrambled to gather the slippery silvery fish cast up on shore, how whole families burst outside on a early spring day to picnic and catch up on the news—fishermen, farmers, those with money, those without—but herring lovers all, hanging out, helping each other, and trading pickling recipes. I hear it when the Livingston great-great-almost-infinitely-great-granddaughter describes how generations of stories about the gentry and the ordinary folks, chronicling good times and bad, fly back and forth, stories that seem to stitch the whole community together, person by person. She tells me about the young local carpenter now working on her kitchen who grew up playing on his family's land—land that used to be her family's land—with the ruins of an old tenant house in his front yard, a house where his great-great-almost-infinitely-great-grandfather once lived while he sharecropped for her ancestors.

To newcomers, these stories about families picnicking on the Hudson while fishing for herring and stories about manor lords and tenant farmers have a warm, Currier and Ives quality. We are entertained by the images of a simpler, purer past. But when I listen, really listen, I hear much more. I hear about real people—not dreamy characters in the movies of our imagination—and their everyday encounters with one another as they struggled to raise their children, do their jobs, and keep the roof on the church. I hear about individuals who called each other by name, needed each other, and (most of the time) helped each other. I hear how locals let themselves belong to each other.

I yearn for that genuine, real thing that comes with endless ancestors who lived on the same soil where you now walk your dog and put in your daffodil bulbs. After 40 years, even without the ancestors, can't I qualify? My body shifts imperceptibly to anticipate the turns on River Road, sees the stone walls before they appear, knows where the deer are most likely to graze late in the day, where the eagles nest, how to find the swans, and at exactly what time the setting sun will turn the windows of the Rhinebeck Department Store into liquid gold. Is this knowledge—am I, in fact—less authentic simply because I was born in Tennessee? We long-term transplants, middlecomers, seem forever shut out of the inner group due to our "insufficient years in residence." We stand before the hovering Invisible Certifier of Localness and present our houses (built over a hundred years ago!) as substitute pedigrees. We guide visitors to the oldest sections of our homes, point to marks on the floor where the desks stood in what was once a schoolhouse, and proudly offer the stories we have collected but not lived. Deep down, our evidence is insufficient. We long to belong. We want more than being from here. We want to be of here.