| The following column appeared in The River Reporter on April 9, 1998. |
By Bert S. Feldman
The Recusant Reporter
Thursday, April 9, 1998
Sullivan County, along with their neighbors over the Delaware in Pennsylvania, possess, at this time, only one industry. Mostly, the butter on our bread and the steak on the barbeque are products of tourism. This is not intended to disparage those people who work our farms and tend their herds of milk cattle, but the mainstay of our economy is being nice to people and providing them with what they need or may want.
The great thing that sets our area apart from other tourist areas is our natural beauty. Our hills and our mountains, our clear streams and rivers, our villages and open areas, our scenic golf courses all combine to make this countryside of ours a prime attraction.
To this end, the keeping of our area's natural beauty and of its man-made attractions is, and rightly should be, our principal concern. Every town, county, village government seems to be conducting a clean-up, spruce-up, tear-down-the-eyesores campaign. Discussions on creating a scenic highway along Route 97 are in progress.
Have you taken a good look around lately? There are places that need immediate attention. With the coming of warm weather I have had people from the metropolitan area come to visit my wife and me over the past few weekends. We like to take our visitors to see some beautiful aspects of our area. One of our favorite show-off' places is that portion of Route 97 known as the Hawk's Nest, overlooking the Delaware River in all its sinuous beauty. We turned the car into one of the pull-offs along the highway for a closer look. Behind the stone wall that edges the road, we could see a lovely sight. Piles of bottles, cans, garbage, condoms, newspapers and auto parts!
At the moment, gazing down on the mighty Delaware, all that I could think of, or wish for, was a fulfillment of that part of the book of Matthew:
"the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep, place into the sea, and perished in the waters."
So I turned my back to the river and gazed at the majestic and rugged cliffs standing erect over the twisting roadway. And all I could see were words written by imbeciles – words such as "Joe from Queens was here, 1979," and R.S. loves T.U.," all written large in fluorescent idiocy.
The next weekend we went out again, this time heading toward the mountains and forests of the New York Forest Preserve. Here, among the "whispering pines and the hemlocks," we found more graffiti on every protruding rock. Then, to top my day off, we entered the Halls Mills covered bridge, one of our best known tourist attractions, and found that some presapient creatures had built a bonfire inside the bridge and had burned a hole through the wooden floor.
These are not just childish pranks. Perhaps the laws covering defacement, littering and destruction should be amended. As Sir William Gilbert wrote, we should "Make the punishment fit the crime." Any person caught spraying paint on any surface in a public park or monument, should be obliged to remove that smear of imbecility at his/her expense and personal labor.
I am sure if anyone caught a simian-human spraying paint on his house, the result on the part of the homeowner would be a call to the police and, very likely, a punch in the face.
This area is our home; we live here. Our response should be the same.
