I'll answer those "describe me" posts as soon as my life stops sucking. In the mantime Book of Shenanigans is on temporary hiatus, so here's last Friday's Local Boy column.

The Great Indoors

It’s funny how geography affects your perception. If you say to someone outside the state that you live in upstate New York, they’ll say, “Oh, like Albany?” Then you’ll meet city people who, when you say you live upstate, say, “Oh, like the Bronx?” …No. Not like the Bronx.

City peoples’ perceptions of this area are off in a number of highly amusing ways. For instance, this is not “the boonies.” It can’t be the boonies when there’s an Outback Steakhouse within 10 miles. I think that’s what it says in the dictionary.

I think one of the reasons for this perception is our wild animal population. You won’t see a herd of deer foraging on Madison Avenue, so when city people come up here they tend to be shocked by the sheer amount of the animal kingdom we share our town with. Sometimes they can be beautiful, like deer. And sometimes they can be annoying and destructive, like deer. And sometimes they can turn your life into a living hell, like when animals kicked my wife and I out of our first apartment.

We were just married and living together in a basement apartment in downtown Goshen. Brooke had sworn she had heard noises in the bedroom at night and I, caring and brave husband that I was, had mumbled that she was dreaming and should go back to sleep.

But the next night as we sat in the room, we distinctly heard animal noises coming from a hole in the floor that, for some reason, had never seemed like a major problem before. It was our first apartment, and for all we knew apartments were supposed to have holes in the floor. We were reasonably sure, however, that apartments weren’t supposed to have holes with something deep inside them making scritching, scratching noises. So we headed to the hardware store to get some insulation, the thinking being that if we plugged the hole with insulation it would be too itchy to get through for whatever was down there. I kid you not.

When we came back in an hour later I walked into the bedroom and found myself staring at the source of the noise. Not a squirrel, as I had expected, or even a rat. It was a skunk. A big one. And it was fully inside our bedroom.

The next couple of days were a whirlwind of patching holes with the help of our landlord, only to have the skunk make another hole he could get through in a different room, often while we were standing a few feet away. It was like playing Whack-A-Mole, only if you tried to whack this thing it would probably emit a foul spray that would make you and everything you own smell terrible for the rest of your life. Eventually we realized that we had to move out, and within a day we were totally gone and living in my mom’s basement. Luckily, somehow none of our belongings ever got sprayed.

Now I ask you, does a town where you can get chased out of your home by skunks sound like the boonies to you? And before you answer…might I remind you that Middletown has not only an Outback but also a Chili’s and a Red Lobster?