Fred Wilber

Everybody in or from central New York has thought about moving (generally south). Everybody past 70 with children gets letters from one or two generations of descendants with nary a New York postmark, and everybody knows all the reasons for local abandonment.

I won’t list all 37 of them because of poor memory. I’m stuck right after “Lake Pall.”

The main reason I haven’t left is fear—the same musical neurosis politicians and insurance companies play to keep us dancing. I’m tone deaf to their baloney, so my fear is real, like moving to someplace where I have to carry a gun on the golf course, live in a root cellar, wear a lighting arrester hat, spend a day in a sub-arctic air-conditioned chain store, or seldom understand the language due to the region’s diction or my dictionary doesn’t look like the local language.

Every strong assertion requires an explanation, so here is my “gardeners” excuse for staying north. Around here, if weeds are growing around your rhubarb, you can reach under those big animal-shading leaves with your little hand tool and rake away. You can rake and reach under there bare-handed or take a nap in the rhubarb from Pennsylvania north, or from southern Argentina south. In between you can’t do that.

About fourteen species of serpents and insects own all the land and airspace. Just one bare handed weed dig where I see something like a longitudinal bicycle tire and my weeding is done for the day. Make that all day, every day and night.

How anybody can go barefoot anywhere in the southeast or sit on their lawns in the evening—southwest, west and midwest, where reptiles are hunting—demands a nature-course update. One rollover on what feels like a Polish sausage can mean a long vacation from work

Knowing health insurers, as we all do by now, they have dropped coverage on snakebite. You’re supposed to know where they live and wear hip boots up to your cranial hair line.

That’s my gardener’s reason for staying north. You can throw in “recreational,” too. Who hasn’t heard the old “never had a shark attack in these waters” while some surfer is flopping to the shoreline carrying his foot? I’m saying you just don’t have that beastly threat here in the north. None of those eighteen-foot armored swamp logs under the snow drifts, either.

The only time I ever saw somebody sailing through the trees in a bathtub was a frat party in 1947—the tub fired off a porch roof. You can see that at least once a week in Kansas, when those black pyramids turn upside down over your trailer.

I used to go to Florida where it’s a hundred degrees by ten thirty everyday and the natives are thunder deaf and jump in the air to de-ground themselves every time someone turns on a porch light.

The south is too dangerous for me. Nearly went bankrupt on one trip; I spent so much time getting cool air in Dillards I bought sixteen pairs of pants in one day. You get crazy with the heat and northerner’s brains swell down there. The only place I’ve ever been where your brain never swells is right here—never heard of a local case of it.