Editor's Note
Summer is upon us and there are real reasons for optimism. Although there will always be subset of folks who are irrationally exuberant—their toxic positivity causing a range of disasters from boom-and-bust cycles in the stock market to a belief that the Mets will ever win another National League title, let alone a World Series (don’t be fooled by a strong start!)—there is a case to be made for cautious optimism.
Not just because the groundhogs who live underneath the shed in my backyard have yet to eat my broccoli plants. (Clearly, those ingenious critters are biding their time until the florets start to form, prompting maximal hope but likely delivering nibbled-to-the-ground devastation. It makes one not want to want things. As Annie Lennox sang, in a different context: “Desire, despair, desire / so many monsters.”)
Well, for one thing: if you are reading this, you are alive.1 I won’t bore you with all the details of the spectacular miracle of your existence, but I’ll note this: the odds of you ever being born were one in 400 trillion. And you’ve made it thus far through a pandemic that’s killed 600,000 people in the US and four million worldwide and is not through with us yet, Delta variant and all. It’s still dire in some spots across the globe, but US fatalities peaked in mid-January at 3,300 a day. We’re down to 343 a day as of mid-June. Plus: Almost half the US population is fully vaccinated. (Some may decry that only half of our country’s somewhat-prone-to-knuckleheaded-ideas citizens are vaxxed, but I prefer to see the glass as half poked.)
Seventy percent of New Yorkers have received at least one dose of vaccine, and Governor Cuomo declared that “we can now return to life as we know it,”2 easing many of the remaining social distancing rules in place to protect us from the coronavirus/each other. Even Lissa Harris, my colleague who exhaustively covered COVID for The River Newsroom—and is reliably the skunk at any picnic when talk turns positive regarding the pandemic—told me “the worst of the pandemic is over in the US.”3 Just the fact that we’ve scaled back our COVID coverage and Lissa has taken on a new disaster beat, climate change in the Hudson Valley, shows how far we’ve come.
Those are some of the numbers—the stats—on how this is the beginning (middle?) of the end of the pandemic. The emotional texture of our lives is not in the numbers, however, but in our day-to-day experience. Here are some impressions from the past month as we reawaken from the long slumber of COVID.
Where Do the Children Play?
The back side of our office here in Kingston looks out on land owned by the YMCA. Long an urban wild space, the fields were underutilized as a community resource and overutilized by some who were a nuisance to the community until 2014, when some visionary folks—my wife Lee Anne among them—decided to put in a small farm and community garden known as the Kingston YMCA Farm Project.4 Soon afterward, some rudimentary metal children’s play equipment was installed next to the farm. At some point during COVID, the Y embarked on a playground upgrade, installing a series of interconnected wooden play environments connected by whimsical winding paths. And then supply chains shut down, lumber was unavailable, and work on the playground stalled just short of completion. All through the fall and winter of COVID, I watched the rain and snow fall on a half-built playground. Is there anything sadder than cold rain on an abandoned jungle gym?5
And then a few weeks ago, I looked out the window to see children cavorting—climbing up the rope tower, balancing on the stacks of long logs, tearing ass around, and shrieking in the upper registers of playground delight. It’s a sound that parents stop hearing at a certain point but it can be dental-drill-unsettling to the childless. Except this time. I listened to the high-pitched squeals as if I, too, were ready to join in the game I dubbed Run Shriek Tag Shriek Climb Shriek. Rules to follow, once I can get close enough to the kids to ask without losing my hearing.
People on the Streets
I traveled to Hudson for the city’s inaugural 2econd Saturday Gallery Crawl in June. It also happened to be Flag Day, and Warren Street was chock full of folks headed to the carnival rides and fireworks at one end of town and the galleries mostly clustered at the other end. There was music on the sidewalks and people filling cafes that spilled into the street. It all felt so very, well, normal—like old normal, like hug-an-acquaintance normal. And it’s the same all over the region, as David McIntyre’s photographic portrait of Warwick will attest.
To-Do List
And the press releases keep pouring in. There are more and more events to cover, from must-see concerts (Neko Case at Levon Helm Studios on August 18) to unclassifiable performance (Joseph Keckler at Ancram Opera House on July 24; read Peter Aaron’s interview with the earnestly odd Keckler) to the standard embarrassment of riches that is the summer arts calendar here in the Hudson Valley. To make sense of it all, we’ve revived our long-dormant cultural crib sheet, the Short List. My pick this month is “Mystery in the Mine,” a whodunit staged in Rosendale’s Widow Jane Mine by local theater troupe Murder Cafe. Set inside a cave, it’ll be cool, no matter what.
The other show I won’t miss this summer is “The Tempest” at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. It’s HVSF’s last year at Boscobel before they move into their permanent home just down the road, and I want to take in that sui generis setting one more time before it goes disappearo. If you don’t know: HVSF’s performances take place in a large tent high on a bluff on the Hudson River in Garrison. The opening of the tent faces west, toward the river, and it’s a tradition at the festival for plays to begin with a procession up and over the hill and across the lawn while the sun is gently dipping down behind the Catskills across the river. There’s real magic in it.
And how fitting that HVSF should stage “The Tempest” as its Boscobel swan song. One of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, and his final masterwork, the drama climaxes [spoiler alert] with a poignant leave-taking of a spell weaver. The conclusion also brings freedom to the sprite Ariel, who caused the titular storm that is the show’s inciting incident. In revisiting the text, I was struck by how much Ariel’s monologue after being released by Prospero resonates with this delicious post-COVID feeling—a summer of freedom, or something close to it.
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie:
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
1. Apologies to any Chronogram fans on the other side of this mortal coil. As an atheist, I don’t believe you’re out there, but in this media landscape of infinitely splintered attention, I’ll take any readers I can get, corporeal or not.
2. Life as we know it will not be possible for the over 13,000 nursing home residents in the state who died after the enactment of a controversial policy in late March of 2020 that sought to create more space in hospitals by releasing recovering COVID-19 patients into nursing homes. Watching the governor celebrate New York’s reopening, complete with fireworks—already a seasonal nuisance for dog owners and their shell-shocked companions—like a victorious general left a bit to be desired.
3. Lissa, never one to let good news go unspoiled, did note that cases are gently rising again in the US—though a lot less deadly because the vulnerable are mostly vaccinated. Further, she told me: “We are not going to eliminate this bad boy, and I think we might well get a smaller fall wave.”
4. Congrats to the Kingston YMCA Farm Project on their second-place Chronogrammies award in the Food Justice Organization category. A full list of winners begins on page 54.
5. Well of course there is. One day during the pandemic, I watched Parks and Rec workers remove the rims from the basketball court near my house, leaving nothing but bare backboard. A week or so later, in early April, a pudgy kid in a puffy coat was out on the court, just bouncing his ball against the backboard like he was intentionally stubbing his toe over and over. He could just barely heave the ball high enough to reach the backboard. I half expected some Parks and Rec employee to show up and take his ball away.
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Jul 1, 2021
Tags: Editor's Note The Tempest Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival Joseph Keckler
Chronogrammies
In a lot of places in this world, when trouble strikes, you’re more or less on your own. In Ulster County, a friendly, trained voice on the other end of the line will offer comfort and connect you with food, clothing, a place to stay, and networks of helpers to keep your problem from becoming a catastrophe. Demonstrating their superb comprehension of the multifaceted nature of health, our readers chose Family of Woodstock as their favorite Public Health Organization.
Family will strive to help you solve “any problem under the sun” by applying their core principles—help needs to be creative, tireless, confidential, caring, and generally free. From its humble beginnings as a hotline in 1970, the organization has become a multifaceted, problem-solving powerhouse taking on homelessness, domestic violence, child care, mental and physical health, hunger, and disasters of all sorts.
Director Michael Berg takes pride in that evolution, which he says has been organic. “Our approach, to start with a rudimentary service and ask the person served what additional services or needs they have, has proven to be a very effective way to provide relevant services based upon the input of the people served,” he says. “Our staff and volunteers will not tell people what to do or burden them with judgement. We provide a safe space where people can describe their innermost secrets and those problems which are significantly impacting them without fear of judgement or violation of privacy.”
Berg, who’s been leading the organization since its founding, says another part of the key to success is being on the ground, where the people are—in Family’s case, that means headquarters in four towns. And you’re invited to join the dance, as a donor, volunteer, or employee—you bring your heart and skills, they’ll teach you to apply them in the Family way.
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Jul 1, 2021
Tags: Chronogrammies family of woodstock public health organization 2021
General Arts & Culture
Juneteenth marks the official end of slavery in America on June 19, 1865. Today, the holiday focuses on Black achievements and culture, recognition of inequality and systemic racism in the United States, and the ongoing fight for equal rights. 2021 brings an expanded list of ways to celebrate Black freedom and to reckon with the racial past and present of the United States.
By Naomi Shammash
Jun 14, 2021
Tags: General Arts & Culture juneteenth BLM
Outdoors
The Winnakee Land Trust opened Vlei Marsh to the public on June 1, a 165-acre nature preserve that is Rhinebeck’s second largest wetland area. Multi-looped, newly upgraded trails at Vlei Marsh take visitors through both wetland and forest, home to scores of mammals, amphibians, and birds. A 30-year-old accredited land trust and nonprofit, the WLT focuses on protecting and stewarding forests, farmland, natural habitats, and water resources from development, for both ecological health and community enjoyment. They have expanded into acquiring and maintaining land in the Hudson Valley in the past few years.
By Naomi Shammash
Jun 3, 2021
Tags: Outdoors Environment Rhinebeck
Editor's Note
Editorial director Brian K. Mahoney remembers local craft beer pioneer and stalwart community member the late Tommy Keegan of Keegan Ales.
By Brian K. Mahoney
Jun 1, 2021
Tags: Editor's Note
Environment
The annual day of service offers volunteers from Brooklyn to the Adirondacks the opportunity to help rejuvenate sites along the Hudson River and its tributaries
After nine years, 804 projects, and 275 tons of debris removed from the Hudson River and its tributaries, the annual Riverkeeper Sweep has become one of the region’s most enduring environmental traditions. With over 120 project sites and 17 new projects that will offer anyone who wants to volunteer the chance to get involved, this year's 10th anniversary event on May 1 is shaping up in peak form.
Presented with Riverkeeper
Apr 2, 2021
Tags: Environment Riverkeeper Riverkeeper Sweep Hudson River al stewardship natural resources nature volunteer Web Only Sponsored Content
Social Justice
This spring, the housing nonprofit is offering a special edition of The Low Road and launching a food business called Heroes Making Heroes
In support of the services for veterans provided by Poughkeepsie-based Hudson River Housing (HRH), the organization will receive one hundred percent of the profits of the “VetZero Heroes” edition of Tommy Zurhellen's forthcoming book The Low Road. Later this spring, the nonprofit is also launching a new social enterprise food business called Heroes Making Heroes, which will also support veterans experiencing homelessness.
Presented with Hudson River Housing
Apr 1, 2021
Tags: Social Justice Hudson River Housing VetZero Heroes Making Heroes homelessness suicide veterans Tommy Zurhellen The Low Road Web Only Sponsored Content
Social Justice
The Deportation Of Paul Pierrilus
The contentious topic of immigration and deportation has garnered more attention recently as President Biden tries to reverse the still lingering effects of former President Trump's zero tolerance immigration policy.
By Michael Frank
Apr 1, 2021
Tags: Social Justice immigration deportation paul pierrilus
Art of Business
ChoShields Studio Founders In Cho and Tim Shields Are Committed to Making Passive House Mainstream
Through their work designing Passive House buildings and empowering an ever-widening audience from elementary school students to building professionals with the knowledge of Passive House, In Cho and Tim Shields, founders of Kingston and Brooklyn-based architecture firm ChoShields Studio are advocating for a climate positive and socially equitable future. “Passive House is something that we would love to become public knowledge so it’s not just within our specific field,” says In. “It really has to be expanded to everyone. Our goal is to spread this knowledge so that everyone knows exactly what Passive House means the same way you do something as easy as recycling.”
Presented with ChoShields Studio
Mar 23, 2021
Tags: Art of Business Passive House ChoShields Studio In Cho Tim Shields energy efficiency sustainability retrofit renovation education professional training climate change renewable energy Brooklyn Kingston Web Only Sponsored Content
Land Use / Development
According to John C. Cappello, Esq., a partner at the Walden-based law firm Jacobowitz & Gubits who has worked with both developers and planning boards and zoning boards of appeals in the Hudson Valley, while the region has seen significant commercial development recently, the issues of housing have been mostly ignored. To help solve this problem, Cappello says that community members must acknowledge the issue, advocate for change, and educate themselves on resources and policy changes happening in their own backyards.
Presented with Jacobowitz & Gubits
Mar 13, 2021
Tags: Land Use / Development Web Only Sponsored Content
Editor's Note
Editorial director Brian Mahoney ruminates on near death experiences, the present shifts in our political landscape, and poetic musings while strolling with his pups through the snowy landscape of his local park.
Mar 1, 2021
Tags: Editor's Note Trump Biden Poetry
General News & Politics
Farm and Food Workers Await the Vaccine
Vulnerable farm workers and rural communities are being overlooked by New York State's Covid vaccine rollout.
By Lissa Harris
Mar 1, 2021
Tags: General News & Politics COVID-19 Pandemic Vaccine
Community Notebook
New Hampton Resident Lori Iribarren Has Fostered and Placed Thousands of Dogs on Her Own Dime
Lori Iribarren is crying as she hands rat-terrier mix Minnie’s leash to her new owner. “It never gets any easier,” says Iribarren, an animal-rescue director who fostered Minnie for several weeks before finding the adopter. “I wish I could keep them all.”
In the animal rescue world, which seems to attract people who love animals but relate poorly to humans, Iribarren is a rare breed – a rescue director who gets along with people as well as she does with dogs.
As people spend more time at home because of the pandemic and animal shelters have banned walk-ins, Iribarren has been building her following and placing scores of dogs, most of whom have adoptive homes lined up before they arrive at her house in New Hampton. She often fosters the dogs herself so she can get a sense of their personality and match them with the right family. Her skill at matching dogs with families has resulted in only a few of the nearly 1,000 she has placed being returned and then only because of a change in the family’s living situation.
Fur-Get Me Not Animal Rescue, which Iribarren launched in 2017, has amassed over 4,000 Facebook followers. Iribarren, who also promotes the rescue’s dogs (and occasional cats) through her personal Facebook page, has more than 2,000 friends, many of whom help the animals find homes by sharing her posts.
Thanks to her people skills, Iribarren has tapped into a network of volunteers who ferry dogs in shifts from southern states like Texas and Arkansas to New Hampton, where she or a volunteer fosters them until they are adopted. Many of her adopters become repeat customers (including the author of this piece), and some volunteer for her as fosters or transporters when she gets word that a local dog needs to be re-homed. She and her volunteers also scan Craigslist for local dogs offered for sale or for free and scoop them up before they end up in an abusive situation.
Stalking the Applicants
“I always stalk the applicants’ Facebook page,” says Iribarren, 53, a graduate of Minisink Valley High School who works as a housecleaner. “If they don’t accept my friend request, I deny their application because they are most likely hiding something, and also I want to get updates on how the dog is doing and see pics.”
About 4 million shelter dogs and cats are adopted each year, according to the Humane Society of the United States. Shelters and rescue groups across the country reported heightened demand and longer waiting lists for animals in 2020. Nearly 90 percent of shelter animals left alive in 2020, compared to 84 percent in 2019, according to the nonprofit database Shelter Animals Count. But well before Covid, the mantra “adopt, don’t shop” had been popularized by national ad campaigns like the Humane Society’s Shelter Pet Project and celebrities like Miley Cyrus, who recently adopted a dog left homeless because of the coronavirus. President Joe Biden’s two-year-old German shepherd, Major, adopted from the Delaware Humane Association, has just become the first shelter dog to live in the White House.
In the South, a combination of factors ranging from cultural differences in how dogs are treated to weaker animal-protection laws has caused the population of stray and abandoned dogs to balloon. In one case where Iribarren intervened, five dogs were left to fend for themselves in an Arkansas trailer home after their family was evicted.
Many of Iribarren’s dogs come from Texas through Rhonda Wilson, director of the Van Zandt County Humane Society in Van, where, Wilson says, strays run rampant in part because the county lacks an animal-control agency. Wilson runs the humane society out of her home and houses the dogs in kennels scattered around her property. A volunteer transport coordinator arranges the trips north, which take three days, include two overnight stays, and require a volunteer driver for each of 23 legs. Iribarren helps pay for gas because many of the volunteers are elderly retirees on fixed incomes. When the transport coordinator is too busy to arrange a trip or can’t get enough volunteers, Iribarren’s only other option is a transport service that charges $250 per dog.
“I trust that Lori’s going to do the right thing for the dogs,” says Wilson, who has been working with Iribarren for about two years. “She’s really good at matching the dogs with personalities, and she isn’t trying to just move dogs. She’ll go through applications and say, ‘I had so-and-so application, and I rejected them.’ Most of her adopters stay in touch with her, so I can ask, ‘How’s Izzy doing?’ and she can get me a picture of Izzy.”
During the pandemic, Iribarren has been placing around 15 dogs a month; previously, she placed about 30 a month because more volunteer drivers were available, but now the dogs are finding homes more quickly. Volunteers also help process applications and maintain the website, which automatically links to Petfinder.com and AdoptaPet.com. But Iribarren’s most valuable marketing tool is her network of adopters on Facebook, who help spread the word when a dog or cat is available.
Grandmother, Cleaner, Rescuer
On a typical workday, Iribarren is up by 8 a.m. to let her two dogs and any fosters staying with her into her fenced yard, feed them, and clean their crates. Her son, Mark, 23, and granddaughter, Skyleigh, 11, live with her. Mark, who works nights, watches Skyleigh while Iribarren is cleaning clients’ houses from 10 a.m. till anywhere between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.
When Iribarren gets home, she makes dinner for herself and Skyleigh, feeds the dogs, and, while Skyleigh does homework on her laptop, begins to scroll through and respond to the 500-odd messages and Facebook alerts about animals in need that she receives each day. The process takes well into the wee hours, and she rarely gets to sleep before 3 a.m. Still, despite her packed schedule, she takes Skyleigh to dance class at a local studio every Thursday evening. Every year for Skyleigh’s birthday, they head to a Pennsylvania water park, and they spend a week every summer at the Jersey Shore.“Lori doesn’t ever sit still,” says Tiffany Glavan-Humbert of Otisville, who helps Iribarren with Fur-Get Me Not’s website and adopted dachshund-terrier mix Kyle from the rescue after fostering him in 2019. “This is one woman, and she’s got these dogs in her house. They’re on her couch, they’re in her bed. It’s not an organization, it’s not a sanctuary. She’s doing this all on her own.”
The one dog that Iribarren hasn’t been able to place is a pit bull-pointer mix named Ava who suffers from fear aggression and has been living in her house for two years. Rather than deem Ava unadoptable and euthanize her, says Glavan-Humbert, “she’s so dedicated that she will keep this dog.”
Iribarren began volunteering in animal rescue more than 20 years ago, helping pull dogs from New York City kill shelters, finding foster homes for them, and fostering them herself. Many were pit bulls, including the now 15-year-old Mystic, whom Iribarren kept after watching Mystic interact with Skyleigh.
“I started with pit bulls because I was seeing so many of them on death row,” Iribarren says. “I got Mystic when Skyleigh was just a toddler, and the way she interacted with her was just amazing. She was the mother hen type, yet she was a throwaway mom herself. She just fit so well in our home, and I couldn’t let her go.”
She still considers pit bulls her specialty but will take any dog that needs a home. One skill she had to learn to master is how to break up a dog fight: “You pick up their back legs – it makes them release their jaw.” Another is how to tell prospective adopters firmly but diplomatically that they don’t qualify, as in a recent case after a call to the applicant’s veterinarian revealed that when her previous dog had a seizure, she refused to have tests performed and opted for euthanasia.
An 11-Year-Old Partner
Skyleigh helps care for the foster dogs and even gives pregnant dogs a hand when they go into labor. She cleans puppy crates, changes the newspaper lining, lets the dogs in and out of the house, trains them to walk on a leash, and plays and snuggles with them.
“She’s so involved in the rescue she’s kind of like my partner,” Iribarren says. “She’s been doing it since she was born. She knew the breeds of dogs before she knew the alphabet. She could look at a picture at four or five and tell me what breed it is.”
Iribarren charges $400 for puppies (because they require more vaccinations), $350 for dogs age two and up, and veterinarian costs for seniors. The fees are deliberately on the low side so they won’t be a barrier to placing dogs. (By contrast, the only one of the author’s three rescue dogs that didn’t come from Iribarren cost $600, including a transport fee from Alabama.) Many of Iribarren’s adopters as well as her housecleaning clients and local businesses donate dog food. Before the pandemic, Iribarren hosted an adoption event every month at a local business like PetSmart and Middletown Honda, which helped bring in donations.
“I might make $100 or $200 on one dog, and the next dog I’m in the hole for $100 if I have to pay for transport,” she says. “If I have $50 extra, it goes for food, other supplies, and treats. Dogs love cow hooves, and it’s something to occupy them in their crate.”
The hardest part of running the rescue is making sure she has enough funds on hand so she doesn’t have to dip into her personal piggy bank too often, especially when she has a litter of hungry puppies that can’t be adopted until they’re eight weeks old. Sacrificing time she could otherwise spend with her tight-knit extended family is also hard.
"I Cry Every Time"
Iribarren requires that prospective adopters take her on a video tour of their home and come to her house for a meet-and-greet. “The whole family and their dogs need to come so I can see how they interact together and, if there are kids, to see how the kids treat and act with the dog,” she says.
Even though the dogs usually stay with Iribarren just a short time, she becomes attached. “I cry every time they leave in the car when they’re looking at me through the back window and pulling out the driveway,” she says. “But I keep doing it because I know if it wasn’t for me, they would be dead or who knows where.
“I get so many updates from most of my adopters,” she adds. “That makes it so much easier.”
Cindy Sotland has eight senior rescue dogs with medical issues, including three adopted through Iribarren, for whom she has fostered dogs and done local transports. Iribarren, she says, “doesn’t pick the prettiest dog in the group and will help the misfits,” like dogs missing an eye or a leg.
“I’d walk through fire for that woman,” says Sotland, who lives in Kingston. “I respect the hell out of her. She just does this because she loves animals, and she’ll work with people. You don’t have to be the perfect adopter or have the perfect house. If you can provide a wonderful, loving home, that’s all she cares about.”
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By Karen Angel
Feb 10, 2021
Tags: Community Notebook animal rescue lori iribarren dog rescue furgetmenot Web Only
It’s high time Chronogram made a newsletter about marijuana. Stay in the know with the latest on dispensary openings, industry news, cultivation tips, and more as we cover the emerging cannabis scene in New York and the Northeast. Welcome to High Society.
