I tell you this. My budget is not such that I’ve sprung for a subscription to your paper so far in my 48 long years living in town. The only things USPS delivers to my doorstep with any reliability are bills and junk mail. So it goes. 

I found you at the gas station, where I empty my wallet and I fill up my tank. There are stacks of rags, tabloids and periodicals on a little newsstand beside the clerk, who gazes downward—forever downward—while they murmur what I owe for the fossil fuel. You’d think by now they’d expect my response of, “A pack of Camel Turks too, if ya please,” and save me the breath. Alas, the verbal repartee continues.

One such morning I spied the bold, red logo of “River Reporter.” It struck me as odd. What was this? An environmental publication? Some government mandated reportage of fish and other aquatic wildlife populations? 

“A pack of Turks, and one of them river papers too, if ya please.” This threw the clerk for a loop so bad we nearly made eye contact.

That night I came home and read your paper. It was curious. No census of fish populations this. Simply the local paper. I am mystified, though, by the fact that it covers news across state lines. In one moment we are in the economically depressed streets of Liberty, NY—getting furiously beeped at by the driver of an electric vehicle festooned with Woodstock-era bumper stickers advertising “peace and love.” Another moment, we are in the chicken-fried sidewalks of Pennsyltucky, USA, peering through the jet-black exhaust smoke left by a Honesdale High School student’s diesel-fueled pickup truck. 

What do these communities have in common, aside from proximity, a river and apparently this paper? 

I’d like to hear from the paper’s founder: why bring these disparate, estranged siblings together under one roof? I’m sure I won’t. I’d also like to tell them, if they cared to listen, my ideas to make the paper stronger. I’m sure they won’t.

Herbert Holmes
Starrucca, PA