I took the big road north. It was late afternoon and the truck was loaded with honey and garlic and tables and tablecloths and my new pop-up tent. There was no hurry, the festival not until tomorrow. It was comfortable, for a change, the truck cleaned of dust and the windshield polished, and the random dropped tools of summer repairs removed from the floorboards, stored in the shed where they belonged. It was like a fresh start. A new beginning. And I had time on my hands.

Traffic was average and the swing through Albany was smooth and as I glanced at the city, the town seemed to have matured since those raw days when Rockefeller tore down the old center in his flamboyant imperial rage and put up some monstrous modernities. Now, new buildings, with tempered, honorable aspirations, helped blend the city back together, and I was reminded how I can no longer recognize the world’s cities simply by viewing their silhouettes. My travel days receding in memory like melting glaciers.

Man’s relentless energy has transformed what once seemed permanent, solid, a recognizable “place,” into just another corner of the blueprint, erased and rewritten on the architect’s slanted draft table. For better or worse, the constructed world is renewed in front of our eyes -- if we have a pictorial sense of shapes and a way of holding onto them -- like images held in your eyes after you close your eyelids, the contrasts illuminate. Its like being in the woods and suddenly you can see that, since the last time you noticed them, all the trees are bigger!

With that, and with the stress of Albany quelched by the knowledge there was a new governor (and hope for the name Tappan Zee!), I crossed the Hudson into a truly broken grey city with a name immersed in Mediterranean mythology and lore -- Troy. This brick and wood city, not rating a pass-though roadway like its gleaming big sister, Albany, Troy’s red-lights forced me to stop at the welcoming signage. I took a picture. The Home of Uncle Sam, RPI, and with an Armenian Festival on tap. My good high-school friend, Willie, was an RPI guy (Rensselaer Polytech Institute.) When I found the time, I used to crash his party and take in a hockey game (campus religion) and listen transfixed to the bright boys’ conversations, back then, 1969-70, of all the concentration and speculation on semi-conductors, chips, silicon, chip design, silver channeling, wafers, gates -- soon to become all the catchwords -- bits and bytes -- of the coming world, a world transformed by them! They showed me this stuff -- the blueprints for reducing everything to positive or negative, and in reducing it, creating infinity.

Troy stood its ground and I angled ever eastward, climbing away from the river. Trees returned to the landscape and the sunlight was bright yellow and the green of the leaves was as deep and full as it would ever achieve this season. The topography crested and I felt on the slope down to Vermont.

Shadows lengthened and I was looking for a bar. Not any bar, but a bar on Route 7, a fixture in trout fishermen’s lore, as it was a stopping off point, coming and going, to the great trout streams: the Hoosick River, the Walloomsac River, and Little White Creek. Here it was – “Man of Kent Tavern and Café,” the sign peeling and unlit, the exterior floodlights expired, or the wiring frayed, I felt immediately comfortable.

In the morning, after a light dew, I slipped down into Bennington, quietly passing the big white church with steeple, and into a city I could still recognize by its profile punctuated by the Green Mountain Boys Monument.

The crowd at the festival was like a wolf pack, a shiver of sharks. I could have sold all my garlic at one festival. After being pent up with the pandemic for a year and a half, people were soaking up the sun and spending their dough on garlic like it was medicine, and, absolutely, it is just that, medicine.