After all these years, I finally laid eyes on Yawgoo Valley.
End prose. Begin pretentious analysis of the writing.
I like that opening sentence. It’s full of promise, mildly intriguing, and inspires a host of useful questions in the mind of the reader. Where is Yawgoo Valley, and what is it like? What special meaning does it hold for the narrator? Why did the narrator take so long to visit? And now what happens?
You can’t ask much more from a sentence than that.
Unfortunately, the answers to all of these questions are fairly slight, even trivial. I’ve enscripted a promise that I cannot fulfill, at least for readers with lofty expectations. And if you don’t have lofty expectations, my goodness why are you reading these scribblings of mine? I’ll wager you have better things to do and more interesting things to read, like mowing the lawn and “The Great Gatsby,” or playing catch with the kids and then the sports section of the New York Times. Instead, you’re stuck in an interminable paragraph written by Me, Your Author, and wondering why I don’t just get on with the obvious exposition that needs to follow. Okay, wish granted in the upcoming paragraph. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
End pretentious analysis, and resume the regular font.
Yawgoo Valley is a small, neighborhood ski area, located just north of Kingston, Rhode Island, and the only ski area in the state. It features two chairlifts that rise a modest 250 feet, serving six top-to-bottom runs. I drove along a local road that climbs alongside the hill, and I imagined the skiers sliding by me. That’s “imagined”, because my visit is at the end of March and the skiing is done for the season. All but a few patches of snow remain. Fortunately the area has a water park and summer activities. The place wouldn’t survive without them.
If I were a fatalist or other depressing sort of person, I would call skiing a sport that is waiting to die. Global warming is eating into its season at both ends, reducing the total snowfall and increasing mid-season snow melt, and in general, shifting the range of viable skiing closer to the poles. Rhode Island should be north enough to support snow, but its low elevation and nearness to the ocean make the matter a little dicey. So, three cheers to Yawgoo Valley for hanging on.
Maybe next season I’ll ski there.
You may ask what I was doing in Kingston, Rhode Island, and the answer is catching an Amtrak train to Philadelphia. Why Kingston instead of stations closer to my home? The answer is a), Kingston fares were slightly cheaper, and bigger reason b), the Kingston station has free parking.
Of course, when I arrived, the free parking lot was full. The overflow lot was not full, but marked with signs that said cars would be towed if they were found after midnight. So I parked on a grassy strip just beyond the overflow lot, and in line with other cars whose drivers (I’m guessing) were in the same predicament. I am now en route on the northbound Amtrak train back to Kingston, two days and two nights after my departure, and I am hoping (praying, hoping, wishing, et cetera) that my car is waiting for me as I had left it. The station is small and out of the way and hardly awash in activity, so I think, after only two days, that my chances of an undisturbed vehicle are pretty good. But who knows? If the car has been ticketed or towed, the whole point of choosing Kingston goes thoroughly out the window. Which is perhaps why I am mentally harping on Yawgoo Valley. That was an unplanned visit, I should mention, and I stayed only long enough to sniff the air and snap a few photographs. But I’m really pleased with my claim on Yawgoo Valley.
For what purpose was my trip to Philadelphia, you ask? Why, I was attending and shmoozing and enjoying myself at the biannual conference of the National Science Teachers Association, or NSTA as well call it. I am not a science teacher (nor do I play one on television) but my job is to provide textbooks and related products for their use, so I am pleased to take part. It’s an absolute pleasure to be around a good-sized crowd of people who recognize that Earth’s climate is changing, and who also believe that the planet is round and that we’ve been to the Moon and that the substance of plants comes mostly from carbon dioxide in the air, with the hydrogen atoms from water thrown in to support the chemistry.
I joined some sessions, I cruised the exhibit hall, and I spoke with a few old friends and clients. I talked at length to the people at Great Minds, who publish the math program that my son-the-younger is using. I told them that I admire the program (true!) and that my son is benefiting from it (possibly true, not totally convinced.)
I enjoyed a fine dinner with my colleagues at a restaurant that serves Israeli cuisine. The name of the restaurant is Laser Wolf, and I offered the intelligence that Laser Wolf is the name of a minor character in Fiddler on the Roof. He’s a wealthy butcher (or wealthy in comparison to the other villagers) whose wife has died and wants to remarry with Tevye’s oldest daughter, who is in love with a younger and much poorer man, and she marries Mr. True Love just before intermission. I picture Laser Wolf having to engage with the same emotions—first elation, then great disappointment—over and over again, night after night, for every performance. It’s the disappointment that lasts and lingers.
I asked the waitress why they chose to name the restaurant after Laser Wolf. She had no idea.
I’ve been reading that the Current President of the Nation–and what’s his name again? I’m sure it’ll come to me. Rhymes with “Dump” and “Chump,” I think. The Current President wants to instill in the government a counter-scientific idea about climate change, which is that all that warming is good for us. The warming will help the plants grow, it’ll help us stay warm in winter, and it’ll help animals like sea urchins in the ocean.
My goodness! Heavens to my Aunt Betsy!
Silly me, I had thought climate change was going to raise ocean levels and power hurricanes and spur on wildfires and eat into the ski season—you know, all these observations that scientists and ordinary people have been making for the past few decades at minimum. Maybe I need to be re-educated by a sea urchin. I’ll go find one at the next opportunity.
Amtrak trains, as you may recall, were a personal favorite of our previous President, who was Joe Biden. I hope history survives so that Joe Biden can be honored properly. I hope Amtrak survives, too, because the trains are a great way to travel in the northeast. We’ll be pulling into Manhattan shortly, and there’s no better way to arrive in Manhattan than on Amtrak. I like waving to the motorists stuck on various roadways as we pass by them.
Cue the meta-commentary once again!
Is there a point to all this? Will the writer (aka, me) choose one or more of the story threads and weave them into a cohesive narrative? Or is the essay merely a stream-of-consciousness info dump (there’s that word again) of little interest or consequence? Ah, I guess we’ll all find out. I’m still in there pitching. A baseball analogy, of all things.
My father, back in the day, played clarinet in the pit orchestra for not one, but two productions of Fiddler on the Roof, both at our local Jewish Community Center. It’s a wonderful musical. The characters remind us not of ourselves but who we imagine our ancestors to be, people who died before we were born, Jews from both another place and another era. The play ends with most of the characters, including Laser Wolf, emigrating to America. So, yeah.
The story is about the importance of religion and tradition and the Order of Things. Everyone has a role–father, mother, son, and daughter–and you may as well tattoo the rules on their foreheads. Except Tevye’s daughters have their own ideas. The oldest wants to marry the poor tailor instead of the rich butcher, which bothers Tevye but he gives his blessing. The middle daughter falls for the Marxist and leaves home for good. Sad, but ultimately, okay. The youngest daughter marries a local boy from the Russian Orthodox. Can Tevye accept this? The answer is……..nooooooooooo.
We, meaning the Jews in the audience, are modern sophisticates who work as doctors or lawyers (or, um, science editors) instead of tailors or dairymen. We have a few more sheckels to rub together than Tevye ever saw in his life, and we may sidestep or shrug at the Talmudic wisdom and firm faith in God that Tevye practiced and cherished. But speaking for myself, that big no from Tevye, I heard it loud and clear, and it resonated across the generations into my own life. That stated, I am not passing the dictum to my kids. They are free to marry whom they choose. Christian, Jewish, opposite gender or same gender, they’ll get no flack from me. Or my wife, I trust.
Here’s a joke I told in high school, during an English class devoted to science fiction.
Teacher: How would you feel if your sister married an android?
Me: A nice Jewish android?
Is that enough? Yeah, that’s about enough. Three more paragraphs to go.
The train is now pulling into the Penn Station of Newark, New Jersey. There are many Penn Stations in this neck of the world, not just the famous one in New York, and that’s because the Pennsylvania Railroad was a big deal back in the day. Things change, you know, and you have to keep up with the times. The market for nostalgia is limited and offers little financial reward, especially if, like me, you didn’t keep your baseball cards in pristine condition.
Soon we’ll be arriving at the real Penn Station in midtown Manhattan, and I’ll disembark to mail my postcards before catching the second train en route to Kingston. If any of you really want to know, I’ll report on whether or not my car is waiting safely for me. But really, I expect to be fine either way. The worst that will happen is some inconvenience and a stupid waste of money.
I’ll also tell you, if you ask, just where and when I waved, even figuratively, along the rail corridor. If you felt the tiniest of breezes after the dinner hour on Friday, March 28th, 2025–well, that was me saying hello and good-bye, both at the same time.
https://www.providence-hotel.com/blog/2024/12/skiing-in-rhode-island.html
