My family has been here for four generations

My wife and I bought property here six years ago

My family and I, we’ve had a house here for 18 years

My family has been coming here since 1900

    I grew up in the Catskills

    I swam in the streams, the lakes

    I went fishing, I climbed the mountains

    I ate the corn.

I was born in Callicoon

Raised in Eldred

I live in Cochecton

I have two businesses on Main Street

I am not an outsider though I live in Glen Spey

Don’t you know me? Then get over to the library

I live and work in this wonderful town

I’m 16 and I ought to be working on my homework right now

    But I’m not, because I’m here

    because it’s important to me.

My love of this land and water is vast

I didn’t know that you could live in an area for 28 years

    and be an outsider

I didn’t know you could generate income

    and collect sales tax

    and not be a stakeholder

We’re not an island

We are all stakeholders

Stakeholders in each others’ towns

Regardless of boundaries

All of us who breathe air, and drink water,

And cherish our peace and quiet

The river does not speak

But is a stakeholder

I am speaking for the river

The millions of non-human species around us

No one speaks for them. They also are stakeholders.

I am here to speak for my five-year-old son Alec

    and the next generation after that

    and the next generation after that.

When we moved here, we chose it

    because he would have a childhood

    he would have an innocent childhood.

There’s something very special here

The clean water and air, the quiet roads

Now there’s some ready cash to be made

Drilling creates side effects

that do not respect property boundaries

Trucks and noise

Drill pads and foul water

69,000 trucks coming over that bridge

right over there, down on the corner

People whose water supplies are tainted

Whose home values have dropped by 90%

Fields turned into open pits of chemicals

People literally walked away from their farms

The water was polluted and the air was polluted,

The noise from the pump stations and the truck traffic

And the livestock were dying

What I saw brought tears to my eyes

Could the land I love so much

    come to this end?

I do not want to live in an industrial-corporate colony.

I’m asking the zoning rewrite committee

to keep Article 14 in place

I thank you for it

I beg you to keep it in

Tusten has the chance to lead the way for all of us.

If you drive north on Route 97

Right before you get to Callicoon

There’s this little cemetery

Right before the river takes a bend

And in it there are buried 12 veterans

    of the Revolutionary War.

Those are our ancestors.

If they had feared what the outcome would be

    we wouldn’t be here.

Who knows what the outcome of all this may be?

We are not going to be happy saying,

“We could have done something, but we were afraid.”

Who knows what the outcome of all this may be?

It may even be victory.

*Found poems are poems created out of fragments of verbiage uttered or written by parties other than the author. This one is composed from comments submitted at the Town of Tusten’s public hearing for its zoning rewrite on Monday, October 10. It was the only way we could think of that we could come close to sharing the remarkable spirit of this meeting with our readers.

Our thanks go to all who commented at or attended the meeting, to the zoning rewrite committee and to consultant Dr. William Pammer, with special thanks to those whose voices are heard above: April Bidwell, Andrew Boyar, Darryl Brasseale, Peter Comstock, Kathy Grady, Olivia Grady, Stanley Harper, J. Morgan Puett, Penelope Lohr, Arnold Melman, Jane Morris, Carol Roig, Allison Rourk, Matt Solomon, Tony Staffieri, Ani Stanley, Teressa Steaktey and Vera B. Williams. (Please forgive us for any omissions or misspellings; we checked the names against several sources including the sign-in sheets, but the writing in some cases was not clear.) It was a privilege to share the evening with you.