August 6, 2017
I haven’t written much this summer. At this point, I would have usually written
out something on one or another impression; cold swims, rain, the animals that
visit, the hummingbirds that buzz-bomb me as I pinch spent flowers from a plant
they enjoy feeding upon. Nor have the tumult and drama of our political circus moved
me to write anything out. Much of it
just sits in my brain stewing or has settled in my knees and shoulders.
I lost my friend Florence Silverman this summer and I wrote
about her. And I recently learned of another death, Sam Yasgur, a man I knew only
briefly a few summers ago but who left a powerful impression. He had been
fighting cancer for some time and died last June. Maybe this summer isn’t about birds and swims and sunsets, or Washington; rather,
I will remember it as a summer when people I cared about were no more.
Sam Yasgur loved to ride motorcycles over the hills of
Bethel, NY. I got to know him during the making of a documentary and we spoke
over the course of a week or two about Woodstock and his father Max, who made
the three days of music and art in August 1969 possible by renting his cow
pastures to Michael Lang.
Sam showed up on a clean, black Harley Davidson motorcycle
and he told me of the rides he was making and planning to make. He talked about
his bike and showed me a memento he always carried with him in his saddlebag when
he rode that reminded him of someone he loved.
He talked about growing up here in Bethel, about working on his father’s
dairy farm and about delivering milk to the Hamlet of Smallwood where I live.
He told me that as a young man, he would volunteer to make
the milk deliveries to Smallwood because none of the other drivers would come
here. They were afraid of getting lost. This Hamlet was cut from the woods and fields
of Ballard Farm in 1928 and there is little of logic to do with the streets and
trails that wander then peter out into dead ends, face first into a stream, or
deep into a wood that has not seen an axe for decades and is alive with fox and
bear and eagle. But Sam was comfortable
here and understood the plan at some level that precluded the need for a map –
if one existed.
I was saddened to hear of Sam Yasgur’s passing; I would have
liked to talk with him again.
