I packed my truck for Hudson. I was booked for the Octoberfest at the Upper Depot Brewery. Something new for me, a small street festival to fill in between the big garlic festivals -- Saugerties New York, (see last week’s column, The Festival from Hell) and Bethlehem Connecticut’s Garlic Fest coming up this weekend. Give yourself a treat and take Interstate 84 over to Connecticut Route 6 and drive up the “Antique Trail” to Bethlehem. Spectacular road with historic homes and barns and town squares and all will be dressed in their fall colors with yellow sugar maples and, yes, orange pumpkins, and red expressions near the swamps. And if I mix it all together, I get a sort of amber in the sky and on the sides of my mind, with the amber color flushed to my memories of travel, and the farm, and events gone by. Traveling certain roads at unencumbered speeds makes the mind flow like poetry.

 

The Hudson Street Octoberfest had a late start and that was also a draw as I could take my time. I was fully set up half an hour before the gate opened, most unusual, and this gave me time to get a free pint from the host brewery. Entering the city, I noticed a farmer’s market already in full swing and that did not bode well for the inventory I stressed, but what the heck. Is it getting so there might be just too many of these seasonal, “Hey I’m your friendly local community event” events? Where to turn?

 

I really would have rather been at Walden’s Harvest Fest, which was going on at the same time. Walden’s Fest was postponed last week because of the storm, and I was booked last week to sell at the garlic festival and could not attend, and, this week, I was already committed to the Hudson Fest. These things cost money, you know, and nobody returns money once you send it. But, yeah, I missed not selling in my hometown.

 

So, in Hudson, I was assigned to the north end of North Street with the north wind coming in, you guess it, briskly from the north. Good thing I had some wool to go with my khaki shorts. Hudson has become one of those “in” places, and the city feels its transition from country backwater to end-of-the-line commuter city escape destination. Swingers have two apartments where the well-off have an apartment in the city and their country apartment somewhere close to a Metro North station, or, in this case, Hudson Amtrak. The locals I met on the streets are of mixed emotion about the successes of their city. There are, at first glance, newly constructed, handsome five-story brick apartment buildings, like the one across North Street from the temporarily assembled polyester canopy sheltering my fold-up tables holding my jars of honey and bags of garlic. I took a closer look at this building. To get in, the resident must type in a code on a keypad attached to the wall outside the front door. Like the big city. The people coming out of the building were often, not always, dressed quite bohemian like the lady with the hat right out of Cat-in-the Hat. It is supposed to be low income. But low income for who? One woman buying a couple onions from my table, her hands showing a life of work, her teeth showing a country without a dental plan, said, “The apartments are nice, but they are supposed to be low income. Two thousand a month! That’s not low income. They got all the tax breaks too.” 

 

I noticed a few peculiar things about the construction. This style of building is being built all along that side of the river, everywhere the train stops, within blocks of the station. There is a certain urban planning logic to all that, for sure, and the pink brick was nice, similar to what I used on the Millspaugh Furniture annex on Main Street, Walden, but the windows had no arches and, if you look closely you will see the stone, or the concrete slab meant to look like stone, that runs across each window as a lintel stone to carry the weight above, as an arch would do, or a real lintel stone, the stone they used did not carry through to the bricks on the sides of the windows! That means the lintel stone was just hanging there above the window, supported by just the window frames, or, most likely, by angle iron, The entire lintel stone, which should be supported by the brick walls running up the sides of the windows, is doing no work, is simply ornamental. And that is just how our whole society has become, nothing much is real, and no one really cares.

 

I did OK. I got by. Other vendors were smoked and didn’t even make back their entry fees. But our products are so good, we always make something. Yet, I wished I’d been back at my hometown selling to the locals at the Harvest Fest.  

 

If I am selling in my hometown, people can come up to me and tell me how wrong I am about things, and that is always a charge, a boost to the soul. Like the local, retired farmer who dropped off a letter at my roadstand commenting on a recent column. An earnest man, sincere in his criticism, his letter written longhand in neat cursive, I read it carefully. On God, he wrote the old argument that if there is a watch, there has to be a watchmaker; but ignores the follow-up question, where did the watchmaker come from? Great minds argue these points all the time. I am lucky because I am alive to hear the arguments.

 

He is praying for me, regularly, he writes, and he hopes I find Jesus the Savior because he “would love to have you spend eternity in heaven rather in Hell!” I noticed he capitalized Hell but not heaven. I have to ask myself, what kind of god is it that would punish a person in Hell for all Eternity? Who would ever think of such a thing? Had to be a man, not a god. Certainly not any god I would want to believe in. Take Zeus torture of Prometheus for giving mankind the use of fire, chained to a rock, everyday an eagle flies over and rips out his liver. Being eternal, the liver grows back. 

 

Eternity has consequences! Encase mine in amber! I don’t believe in Zeus either.