Caught between the future and the past... Thoughts on a rainy day.

Caught between the future and the past, Preble is in the midst of change. In her past she was a farming community with fantastic soil, good water, and a ready market for her produce. Population grows, kids move to the big city, and slowly the farms are sold off to city people to build nice upscale homes. To the north and the south of the center of town are lakes formed millennia ago by glaciers. They started out with summer camps and slowly turned into year round homes. This shift in population was not something many of the original families really wanted, although they partially created it by selling off parts of their farms to the city people. Some of the farm families are trying desperately to hold onto the past while others are planning for their future.

It is particularly hard on the elders who worked all their lives to pass on their farms to their children and are now too old, too frail to control the future of their life's work. In some cases their children are making long range plans to sell off their prime farm property to developers and move on. Some with no children to pass their farm on to will sell off and move out, making a bunch of money in the process. This is very painful for their elders who want to keep the farm like it was.

Before I was born my father along with 7 friends bought 100 acres in the Pocono Mountains and called it the White Birch Club. They built a 40-foot square cinder block hunting lodge and spent their winters there hunting deer and bear. My dad bagged a few over the years, but it was more of a retreat for him than for hunting. When asked, he would say that if a deer were running towards the camp with enough speed that his momentum would carry him onto the porch he would consider shooting it. As a teenager we went there summers to cut trees for firewood for the hunting season. On Thanksgiving we were required to be there for the annual feast. My father loved that place and he was deeply hurt when, after most of the other 7 members died off, their children, now scattered far and wide, and who did not use the camp, wanted to sell it to a developer. They out voted my dad and he was very saddened by it.

He was going on a business trip near the camp just before the new owners took over and was going to stop by to pick up a few last things, and say goodbye I guess. He asked me if I wanted an old vise that was in the tool shed and I said sure, could always use another vise. I got a call about a week later early on a Sunday morning from my nephew who lived in Scranton. Some friends of my dad found his body at the camp when they stopped by to get a load of firewood he gave them. At first they thought he was alive because he was standing up at the back of his car doubled over into the trunk. He had a weak heart. Later when my brother brought his car up to Syracuse to sell, I found that old vise inside a heavy paper bag in the trunk. I've never taken that vise out of the bag and it sits in my garage to this day. I think I know what those old timers feel when they see what is happening to their beloved farms. Difference is it is their own children doing it and not some strangers. I guess money truly is the root of all evil.

When I was in my twenties I worked as a carpenter for a very rich man. We would have coffee in the morning in his office and shoot the breeze. We got along well. One morning I was telling him about a used car I just bought for $600 and I was hoping I made a good decision. Later in our discussion he told me of a group of oil paintings he bought as an investment for $60,000 and he too hoped he made a good decision. I realized at the time that we had the same concerns and fears and the only difference was the decimal point. Even though he had much more money than I, he was no happier. It taught me a lesson that the pursuit of money is foolish and the events in Preble have taught me that the pursuit of money causes more pain and suffering than it is worth.

If you don't have a lot of money and spend most of your time struggling to pay the bills then... well... first of all, who doesn't fit that category? The lure of money seems to be a solution to all your problems. It isn't. Now you dream of things just beyond your reach and if you suddenly won the lottery you would be able to realize those dreams. However, it would not be long before you will create new dreams that are just beyond your new reach. We have to have something to dream about, something to take the worries of the day away, something that tells us that if we just had a little bit more money or time or whatever we would be perfectly happy. Happiness for me would be a phone call to my dad to shoot the breeze like we used to do. Money won't buy that and if a child does something that hurts his parents for money he will regret it for the rest of his life. He will go to his grave with the guilt of the world on his shoulders.

Money can't buy happiness but it sure can buy hell.

Frank Hogg
3/4/02

 

PS The developers that bought the camp did not do a perk test beforehand and when they did, it failed. Unfortunately they bulldozed all the old buildings down and without a good perk test they can't build anything worthwhile. It is now overgrown and will probably stay that way forever. Sometimes I wish I had the knowledge of that perk test before hand because it probably would have stopped the sale and my dad could have lived out his remaining years without that stress to deal with. He could have died a happy man. Be careful what you do because there will come a day when you can't make it right.