I walk around in fear

Exit 30 is the portal to the Adirondacks' 'snow country'

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When Bella and I and Ringo drive around this area, we frequently see a contradiction — Trump signs and “Back the Blue” signs on the same lawn.

Backing the Blue means respecting police officers for the difficult and necessary job they do. Trump has promised to pardon the people who beat Capitol Police and D.C. officers with batons and bars and flagpoles and bike racks and shields and helmets, causing lasting injuries.

You cannot support both the police and the man who praises cop-beaters as “patriots.”

Monday was the fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. As in other defining events, those who shamed themselves on that day have been working hard to obscure the truth of what happened.

Trump, as he does, has been pushing a story opposite to the evidence, calling the savage beatings anyone can watch on video a “day of love.”

Trump also claims he supports the police, but too much attention is paid to Donald Trump’s false words. What I do get stuck on is local people, including people I like and respect, saying they support foundational concepts like law and order while supporting the man wrecking that foundation.

“At some point during the fighting, I was dragged from the line of officers and into the crowd. I heard someone scream — ‘I got one!’. As I was swarmed by a violent mob, they ripped off my badge. They grabbed and stripped me of my radio. They seized ammunition that was secured to my body. They began to beat me with their fists, and what felt like hard metal objects. At one point, I came face-to-face with an attacker, who repeatedly lunged for me and attempted to remove my firearm. I heard chanting from some in the crowd — ‘Get his gun!’ and ‘Kill him with his own gun!'"^[7]

Those are the words of Officer Michael Fanone, who joined the Capitol Police after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, then joined the D.C. Metropolitan police and worked for about 20 years as a narcotics officer, including undercover. He was off duty when the Jan. 6, 2021 assault began but responded to radio calls for assistance. He was dragged down the Capitol steps, beaten with pipes, stunned and sprayed. He suffered a heart attack, concussion and traumatic brain injury.

Men who beat Officer Fanone are in prison now. Will Trump pardon them?

“All of you are culpable in Brian's death. All of you bear responsibility for the injuries sustained by Brian's fellow officers — the broken bones, head trauma, and the continuing mental anguish they suffer — and will endure — for the rest of their lives.”

That is what Gladys Sicknick, mother of Officer Brian Sicknick, wrote in a victim impact statement prepared for the trial of a man who attacked her son.

Brian Sicknick collapsed later on the day of the attack, was taken to the hospital, suffered two strokes and died on Jan. 7. Will Trump pardon the men who beat him?

I’ve been helped by local officers several times when Bella, in the grip of Alzheimer’s-induced anxiety and delusion, has marched away from me on busy streets or slipped out of the house when I wasn’t watching.

The officers have invariably been kind, and I am grateful. But I can’t help wondering: Do any of them support Donald Trump? How do they square that?

Trump has made claims he won the 2020 election the center of his political identity. His celebration of the convicted criminals of Jan. 6 is an integral part of those claims. The beatings that took place that day were not spontaneous or incidental but central to the event’s purpose: to overthrow the national order established by laws and enforced by police and replace it with a new order that followed Trump’s wishes.

The emotional dissonance I feel these days extends beyond my respect for police officers to my affection for friendly neighbors, people I chat with in coffee shops, cashiers at the grocery store and old friends I’ve reconnected with online.

I like people. But I dread seeing signs, on their lawns or in their remarks, that they are fans of Donald Trump. It makes me wary. It makes me afraid of what things could happen soon worse than Jan. 6.

I wish I could find this hay monument, which stands along a road in Washington County, just amusing or interesting as folk art. But I also find it foreboding.

Snow countries

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky.”

— Those are the first lines of Yasunari Kawabata’s great novel, “Snow Country,” published in its final form (Kawabata kept rewriting parts of it) in 1948. I read the novel about 40 years ago, in translation from Japanese, around the time I spent a year in Tokyo. But the feeling of the novel is still vivid — the loneliness of the main character, Shimamura, and the hopelessness of the love that a geisha, Komako, feels for him; the way the human emotions dissipate in the piercing beauty of the snow country of Yuzawa, a hot spring resort where the affair takes place.

Ever since reading it, I’ve thought of the book when I drive off Exit 30 into the Adirondacks, through the High Peaks region and then up and up to the wintry plateau of the villages of Lake Placid and Saranac Lake. The feeling of the landscape changes as you leave the openness of the Northway for the narrow roads that wind upward through icy cliffs.

Many times, I’ve driven on a snow-free highway under a clear sky, only to plunge off the exit into a gray cloud obscuring the mountaintops, with snow falling and the roads white and treacherous.

On Wednesday, we drove up to see my mom and sister Erin in Keene Valley. It wasn’t snowing, but the drive offered the feeling of entrance into another world, as always.

Route 73 heads west from Northway Exit 30 into the High Peaks region and Keene Valley.

The Ausable River runs next to Route 73 as they both enter the village of Keene Valley.

Jessup’s Landing

We took a drive Thursday out Corinth Road to Corinth, then down Route 9N to Saratoga Springs and back up the Northway to our home in Glens Falls.

We got out for a few minutes after crossing the bridge over the Hudson River into Corinth to walk around the historic Jessup’s Landing area, near the beach.

This was the view Wednesday from the Jessup’s Landing area in Corinth out over the Hudson River. That gray blob in the middle of the photo is a pigeon in flight.