Our home was on a dirt road with vertiginous grades and no-code drainage; we liked to think of it as the worst road in Putnam County. One quickly learned the meaning of item 4 and the importance of snow tires and four-wheel drive. Initially we had an older Volvo station wagon that got left at the bottom of the hill once or twice in ice-storms. We put heavy bags of cat-litter in the back to give the thing more weight, but the front-wheel drive was still terrible on the slick and very steep uphill stretches. Within a couple years I became religious about studded Pirelli snow tires.

I liked the sense of isolation during these events (though we often lost power and water, drawn as it was from a well by an electric pump). We had neighbors all around us, but the trees and rocks gave us a lot of cover: the illusion of seclusion. After many years in the East Village it felt wonderful. It was a good place to raise the kid.

I’m not telling anyone what they haven’t heard or experienced: taking care of a baby is hard. Some babies require more care than others, but there is a minimum amount for any kid. There are a lot of diapers to change, and this is the task that separates those who talk about helping from those who actually help. I tried hard to be in the former but I often failed, becoming what I hated: the man who left it to the women. Carolyn was the one who heard her on the baby monitor and went downstairs in the middle of the night.

In one famous incident H was crying because of a movie she’d seen earlier that same evening: The Poseidon Adventure. We had cable then and I was just flipping through the channels; I saw Leslie Nielsen in a captain’s outfit and I stopped. This is a good one, I probably said, and we watched the rest of it. If you haven’t seen it the ship flips over, capsized by a rogue wave, just after a performance of that Oscar-winning piece of schmaltz “There’s Got To Be A Morning After,” a song I love—I have the single. This set-piece occurs in the ship’s huge dining-room and many extras fall from the former floor to the former ceiling. There’s a piano involved.

I was telling her how all the pieces were put together, the practical effects one sees in a 70s disaster flick. I was stressing that no one died, that it was all stunt work, and I thought she understood. Maybe she did at the time but not later, not in the middle of the night. So Carolyn went downstairs to clean up my mess. No one in my family has any intention of letting me forget this.

Poseidon came up again when she saw footage of 9/11: But nobody really died, right?

Carolyn often prepared H’s food and when we bought stuff we kept it appropriate to what her body could handle. We made mistakes, of course—I’m thinking of an incident in Avignon when we were traveling: three boxes of apple juice emerged from baby guts in a literal explosion, with spatter patterns like a crime scene.

Sometimes the smell would make me gag. Once when I was a kid I was cleaning up the dog poop in the back yard and my cousin Rick (on the left) was surprisingly curious about it; he stood beside me and watched me work. I looked for the piles of poop dotting the lawn, which were pretty obvious. I had a hand trowel and I’d squat and start shoveling the turds into this plastic kid’s bucket. Sometimes the pieces would break in half on the way to the bucket. This happened while Rick watched and the broken piece happened to be aswarm with maggots. Rick began to gag and this is how, years later, I would gag when there was some particularly stinky blur of diarrhetic pooh smeared across a just-opened diaper.

One night on the way back from a Poughkeepsie drive-in we were looking for a place to pull over and change a diaper. We’d seen Nick Park’s Chicken Run on a double-bill with Verhoeven’s Hollow Man. Previously she’d slept through all second-features so we didn’t think we had to worry about our toddler confronting a Verhoeven film. It was a good plan but it didn't work out.

(Hollow Man had also disappointed us and not been nearly as good as favorites Spetters, RoboCop, and especially Starship Troopers. Fortunately Verhoeven continued to make really good movies when he got back to the Netherlands, Elle and Black Book in particular. I remain disappointed in myself for missing Benedetta when it played in NYC theaters.)

After the drive-in I was driving south on Route 9 and passed through some deceptive speed zones—from forty-five to thirty, for instance, going by a shopping center. A cop had appeared behind me a couple zones back and finally pulled me over. He asked me, Didn’t you see me behind you? and I said I hadn’t. He couldn’t believe I wasn’t paying attention to him and moderating my speed. I agreed that it was surprising but explained we had this baby and we needed to change her diaper so I was looking for a place to pull over. The cop became apologetic but still felt he had to give me a ticket; eventually I had to show up in traffic court—on my birthday—and wait for the cop not to appear. This is how a policeman does you a favor.

A tornado skipped across the local lake that June. I was grilling on our deck, about four-hundred feet above the water on a neighboring hill. I went inside for something and when I came back out, the tornado had come and gone. We heard nothing. I only slowly became aware that many of the tall pines surrounding the lake houses had been snapped in half. It was all over in a few seconds.

The hamlet where we lived was called Garrison. It was located in a township called Philipstown; Philipstown constitutes the western third of Putnam County, the only part that votes for Democrats. The specific neighborhood was Continental Village, a housing development built along a stream that fed an artificial lake. Somewhere in the Village, probably along Canopus Creek, was the site of a supply depot (thus Garrison) for Washington’s army. This was burnt to the ground by British forces during Washington’s initial retreat. The place reeks of history.

During the middle of the last century a place called Cimarron Ranch occupied most of what would become Continental Village. It was a dude ranch for folks from the city that also rented and stabled horses. Older locals remembered riding there. At some point a large part of the ranch was sold to developers who turned it into half-acre housing lots. I believe it was these developers who built the dam across Canopus Creek that created Cortland Lake. Many lots became sites for lakeside homes.

Our house was halfway up a hill looming over the lake, about four-hundred feet above sea level. It felt higher, especially when you walked up the dirt road from the nearest paved street. It was set back about a quarter-mile from the water; no one was going to be diving off our deck. Through the trees we could see a few homes on the opposite shore.

Everyone in the Village paid a moderate fee for a summer pass to a beach on our side of the lake. Lifeguards were on duty, the water was regularly tested for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and the lake floor was regularly scoured of weeds. You could walk down to the beach in fifteen minutes.

When we left the East Village in 1997 we went north until we could afford to buy. We found a house on the very first day we looked, a modified A-frame called a “Banff Chalet” on the plans, obviously plucked from a design book. The eastern end of the house had a wall of large windows looking out over a wraparound deck looking out over the valley. We lived among tree-tops.

We had no plans for a child, we just wanted to get away from what the East Village had become. We were tired, tired of the junkies and drunks, the noise, the routine incivilities of the New York demimonde. Our rent-stabilized apartment was only $600 a month, but we would have had to quadruple that to find a space with another dozen square feet. We wanted to spread out a bit.

A no point did we think we’d have a view of a forested hillside and a lake; we were just hoping for a realistic commute to the city on the Hudson Line Metro-North Railroad. We got lucky.

Two hours to the north of Garrison along the mighty Hudson lies Olana, the home of Hudson River School painter Frederick Church. He designed the house and modified the grounds to make the most of its hilltop above the river, and the original Orientalist furnishings inside are more-or-less intact. It's an extraordinary structure and we were desperate for day-trips. This particular image of Olana’s tower looks like one of the matte shots in Vertigo during the sequences at the Spanish mission.

Inside is like walking through a Sax Rohmer novel. Looking out of the windows are spectacular views of the Hudson; it’s easy to see how Church sculpted the landscape. Calbert Vaux was also involved.

I signed up for a lot of art history classes in college; there was a great professor or two and I enjoyed every class I took. I remember very little time devoted to hyper-realistic artists like Church; the contemporary canon included much more abstraction and conceptual art. Tastes change all the time and I’m glad artists like Church are again widely celebrated. Certainly he has always been a favorite of the public, and died a very wealthy man.