One weekend night in let’s say 1979, in let’s say autumn, at let’s say 11 p.m., I left my friends’ family house on North Oakwood Terrace in New Paltz with intent to head home. It was a short walk from the quaintest street on the village grid up to my parents’ house, one grooved by repetition in my high-school years. As the bird flies, the way back to point A would take me past Ed’s College Diner, which closed after lunchtime, and the Jack in the Box, which was still open and serving fish filets, by and for stoned SUNY students, until midnight.
I would have slanted across the Convenient (nee EZ) Deli parking lot and entered the grounds of the New Paltz Middle School, passing swing sets, bleachers, and goalposts, picking up a footpath at the south bend of the school’s gravel track that would deliver me to the bottom — Joalyn Road — of the wooded Cherry Hill neighborhood where my now 93-year-old mother still lives. But of course we’re talking about selling now because, you know …..
Odds are I was probably a little buzzed, and that can endow any blindingly familiar ten-minute walk with Odyssean dimensions of journey and return. I was no party animal, or rather a purely domesticated one — five friends in a bedroom with some herb and music and a lot of silliness. If I was even into beer yet, it was a bottle or two of some import darkened by the musky secrets of European cultural superiority, perhaps elk’s blood! I did not fake IDs and sneak into the bars or deface things. When we went out, it was to the willow-canopied benches around the college pond. My idea of chasing women involved looking bummed and hoping they’d notice.
But for some reason, the binary of fate, that night I deviated and turned right on Main Street rather than the homeward left, and you are thereby spared a lengthier nostalgic meditation on the Huguenot village that has perhaps not really changed very much in these last 40 years going on 300. I walked, for some reason, toward downtown.
Passing the bend at the ancient Elting Library, mine eyes did there behold a scene hallucinatory and warped, like everything about downtown New Paltz after dark, but acutely inflamed on this evening. Hundreds — maybe thousands — of young people who seemed old to me at the time careened in the streets, chanting, sweaty faced, incited and aroused. It was a druggy, drunken carnival at which the rides seemed to be all internal but pretty intense. There was, indeed, police presence.
It was, as some of you veterans of SUNY and the village will verify, a spontaneous No-Nukes rally, done in New Paltz style, with an -ism more hedon- than activ-. It may have been unplanned, but it wasn’t original. While the famous institutional New York City No-Nukes rally was still two or three years away, these grassroots demonstrations had been sweeping not the country but the world for several months. This one was blissfully anarchic and headless, disorganization being kind of the whole idea. After all it takes massive foresight, bureaucracy and infrastructure to build and operate a nuke plant, a mere raging party to dissolve one and hold out until the sun can power everything.
There were no leaders or talking points or pamphlets on the street that night, and if the argument went beyond those two tunefully alliterative words, I didn’t hear it. Did it work? Well, to date, there are still no nuclear power plants in New Paltz, so I guess so.
Meantime, the very same calendar year, a group of area citizens and leaders mobilized to defend the Shawangunk Ridge from the Marriott Corporation’s plan to purchase the Minnewaska property from the Phillips family and build an enormous lakeside resort complex. A sober, multi-mode act of community resistance, the movement had strong legs, spending six intensive years in conflict with the corporation and with the many pro-development local authorities and interests (to whose arguments I am not entirely unsympathetic), stringing out Marriott via acts populist (there was chanting) and fine-print litigatory (much dispute of tax abatements). Marriott withdrew in 1984, and the state purchased the land a few years, a victory of community resistance with resonance and implications that extended far beyond the couple thousand acres in question.
In Marriott’s own version of the story, the hotel giant’s withdrawal after six years of committed pursuit and millions spent is credited not to the work of the gadfly local-advocacy groups, and not even to the sober assessments of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation or New York State’s longstanding reputation as a thorny place to do business. Instead, Marriott blamed a single, unappealable decision made in a federal court regarding space for the expansion of a golf course. Goliath never credits David with the win. The corporation refuses to allow that grassroots efforts prevailed, lest the roots of resistance grow deeper.
This week, The New York Times published a lavish, long, multidimensional story about how wonderful the stupid little town of my life was. A thematic centerpiece of the story was all the wonderful natural preserves in a community of longstanding progressive values. Yikes.
As I read the story, in which several friends are quoted, eloquent and balanced, I felt a familiar impulse. Resist.
But resist what? Them is us. My father came here on the first big wave of SUNY hirings and construction in the early Sixties. Not only am I sure a sizeable sector of the local population resented the development and the change in the town’s character, villainizing the PhDs and their presumption of authority. Man, I tell you I still feel it! The wounds and the divide! I am the imperial invader of half a century ago.
What does resistance even look like against the yellowing trees, drying grasses, and falling fruits of the autumn? The BMWs come as usual, but this time they just stay. I know to honor that vague reflex to resist and to party it out in the streets and to be the New Paltz I want to see.
What I want is a New Paltz of diversity, a New Paltz with room for the down-on-their-luck, where people can still discover themselves in shambolic, affordable and undistinguished ways, a SUNY where a kid can act the dilettante without accruing a prison of debt, a New Paltz where doing nothing — big nothing, like what Marriott and Con Ed got done here — really means something.
Join the family! 
