“And do either of you belong?” asks E. We are sitting around the firepit in S’s back yard.
S and G have both just confessed to occasionally playing golf.
He is not addressing us, since he knows—as do all our readers—we confine all our sport to the page.
“Of course not,” says S. “I hear initial membership is well over a hundred thousand, and dues above ten grand a year.”
“Update your numbers, Chief,” says E, using his Bushmills-free hand to wave at us a prospectus he has printed off the Internet. “I have been looking online and the up-front was over a hundred-fifty more than twenty years ago.”
He is correct. A 1997 New York Times piece entitled “Bias Still a Concern At Private Golf Clubs” had the rates at these levels. Who knows where it is now, but by 2012 the initiation feed appears to have climbed to $210,000.
“Can you get a mortgage on that?” asks G. G is a school-circuit troubadour and children’s book author and he has been having a tough year, professionally.
“I’ve played there as a guest,” S confesses. “It’s a beautiful course.”
“Beautiful!?”
“Great views of the Hudson, nice trees—”
“Well, I hoped you enjoyed them while you could.”
We ask E what is going on.
“Oh, just the ultimate example of Lib Elites getting back-doored by Big Money Institutional Racists.”
“Is back-doored a legal term?” asks G.
“Please to explain,” says S.
“Solar farm,” says E. “The new village code that is supposed to encourage solar power has given those environmental rapists a beauty pageant of legal loopholes to penetrate and one of them—especially if you are still smarting about how the environmental losers on the Village board denied you complete victory with your plan to clear-cut the entire hill and made you hold 15 acres of unmanicured woodland aside, never to be developed—offers you the chance for sweet revenge.”
“Revenge?”
“Yes, the chance to take that unruly little thorn in the side of your landscaping plan, that unholy ghetto of trees and bushes and vines and chop it all down so you can put up eleven football-fields of solar electricity panels!”
“Seriously?”
“You should have heard one of their lackey engineers at the meeting. They are going to chop down 518 trees on a 15-acre lot. First he tells us, like we’re on a third grade field trip, that those stone walls in the woods are evidence that the entire area has been clearcut before. As if to say his plan to have another terrible haircut is justified because he’s had worse ones before.”
“Did he have bad hair?”
“It’s hard to tell on Zoom, what with only seeing people from the front, but it looked like a combover to me. But the point was, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter if you chop down some trees, it happens all the time! And, look, the world’s just fine.’”
“Can forests do combovers?” asks G.
“And then,” S continues, “He is telling us that the carbon off-set is such that it would justify cutting down more than two thousand trees! I mean, like we are a bunch of morons to not already be chopping down every tree in the Village!”
We observe that might be an elegant way around the leaf-blower crisis.
“Why not take down all the trees in the Catskills! The Adirondacks! Yosemite! Why not the Amazon itself! We will not rest till the Earth looks like the Death Star! That evil Carbon will rue the day it ever set foot on our planet!”
G observes that maybe they are using some funny math.
“Damn right they’re using funny math—it’s goddamn Trumpian!” shouts E, again waving his PDF printouts. “Wasn’t it just last week we all resolved to get back to science?!”
We ask him if he is so upset because of the birds. E is not sentimental about many people or creatures but has a documented soft spot for our avian cousins.
“Well, let’s think on that: do you know any species of bird that nests within a silicon-wafer solar panel?” he asks.
“At least they don’t kill them like those horrible wind turbines,” observes S.
“They sure as hell do kill birds. Know how many edible nuts, seeds, sap, and insects are created or fostered by your typical solar panel?”
“Not many?” suggest G.
“It’s like saying that the salting of Carthage didn’t kill any Carthaginians. No, the act of ruining the soil for generations kill anybody right then and there. Salt doesn’t poison humans just as solar panels don’t whack birds out of the sky and decapitate them. But did it cause the death of Carthaginians because they were unable to grow crops for hundreds of years? You bet your ass it did, and you can bet your ass that if you destroy 15 acres of bird-sustaining habitat so you can power the ceiling fans and wifi and whirlpool baths in your Temple-to-Mammon clubhouse, you are killing plenty of birds. And you’re killing insects and amphibians and plants—”
“Spiders?” suggests S.
“And soil bacteria and fungi and—"
“I told you about that woman with the t-shirt I saw on the voting line in Peekskill?” asks G. “The one with the line about mycologists—”
“Yes,” we all say.
“You need to see this,” says S, turning around his laptop so we can all see from our six-foot-distant chairs. He has queued up a Hudson National Golf Club promotional video.
It opens with aerial footage of a train rocketing along the Hudson, swelling orchestral music.
Now an interior shot—an attractive white man in a business suit in one of the newer electric trains, looking up from his iPad and out the window at the majestic Palisades north of Nyack.
A shiny black Cadillac Escalade is pulling past a guard booth and through a still-opening black gate. Then there’s drone footage of the course and massive stone clubhouse looking down at Haverstraw Bay and Croton Point.
And now we are standing on a green with the same view in the backdrop. A slightly pudgy white man in khakis and turquoise polo shirt is with us, taking it all in. He turns and talks about how words cannot capture the beautiful things one can see in this life. And then segues into how the train ride from Manhattan is just 43 minutes.
“Is this a joke?” says G.
The man introduces himself as Jimmy Roberts and—after warning us that he can get a little enthusiastic about this magical place—proceeds to give us a tour of the patio dining facilities, the dark-wood clubhouse, the conference rooms, the guest cabins and full-on houses, the new practice area on the Mount Airy side of the property.
“Holy shit,” says E. “Did you notice how many of those shots featured gas fires? The fireplaces? The fire pits?”
We ask him why this is significant.
“Because, as they’re moving to chop down all these trees for side-of-the-angels solar power, they’re pumping tons of pure CO2 into the atmosphere every year! Look at these stats.”
“Covid!” admonishes G as E extends the pages into our six-foot bubble.
E apologizes and instructs S to go to the Village site and pull down the document for us to see.
“Wait,” says S. “Look at this—the club’s home page claims it’s the second highest place in Westchester!”
We all laugh darkly. E, S and G have been surveying topographic maps of the county for weeks—they are planning to scale the county’s ten highest peaks this winter.
It is a nakedly fraudulent statement. The topo maps reveal there is not a spot 600 feet above sea level in or near the golf club, and the tenth highest peak in Westchester is Turkey Mountain at over 800 feet.
“Well,” G says to E, “What’s your plan?”
“To come up with one!”
“Maybe,” S suggests, “We could hike the highest point on the golf course and when they press charges for trespassing, we could reveal our mission, explain that we thought it was the second highest peak in the county! They’d let us go out of pure shame!”
“I don’t care about them lying about their elevation,” says E. “It’s the solar panels we have to stop!”
“Now hold on there, Chief,” says S, topping off his Bushmills as he continues to peruse the golf club website. “You can’t call yourself anti-solar. That’s accepting their framing. Politics 101. You said yourself solar is on the side of the angels. You have to say you are anti-clearcutting.”
“Good point,” says E.
“And you have to follow the money!” says G.
“That’s another good notion,” E agrees. “You know they are bribing the surrounding residents with electricity from the solar farm. The homes immediate around that side of the golf course are going to get a break on their bills so they don’t go NIMBY on them.”
“Well, that’s very white of them,” says S. “What’s the average home-price over there on Prickly Pear and Finney Farm? Two-point five million? How about they do some low-income housing susbsidies?”
“Yeah, that will happen,” says G.
We observe that we are, all four of us around this backyard pile of burning logs, white people of privilege.
“As was John Reed,” points out E. “Whose house is about a thousand feet from Hudson National. The point isn’t where and how we were born, but what we’re now doing with our days.”
We have previously ruled out E being a libertarian, and it now occurs he may actually have communist tendencies.
“I bet Reed would have been against private clubs,” says G.
“Look at that,” says S as he lights a fresh cigarette, “they have designated areas for members to smoke!”
“I have an idea,” says E. “Can I count on you for your support?”
“Stopping Hudson National from cutting down trees?” says S. “Sounds like fun.”
We agree and watch as E lopes off into the shadows.
“Think he’s serious?” asks G.
We reply that we sure hope so. This seems like the sort of story that could write itself.