I had dropped by the home of my neighbor (the one with the hand-painted Trump sign on his farm) to pick up a pint of maple syrup. I’d noticed mud clumped around my beets, so I asked if it had been raining when I was away. “Three inches in a single storm!” The Chenango River licks at the foundations of houses by the bridge in Greene when that happens. “I have no sympathy for them!” he bellowed. “If you build on a floodplain, you’re going to get flooded. And then they expect taxpayers to bail them out.” I felt he was itching for a big-government fight. “Floodplains,” I said, invoking the Nile and Egypt, “are for farming, not building on. And then these idiots build dams that stop the floods so the soil never gets fertilized.” I was itching for the big-development fight.
But apparently we’d hit a point of accord, so he took me to lunch.
In his F-150, I bragged about my recent success – thanks to many hours on YouTube – in repairing my backup generator, a class of machinery that had not been in my life a year ago. This brought up his sawmill, powered by an engine no longer allowed by his nemesis, the EPA. “Just imagine! Every day, dozens of trucks take trash out of New York City, to Seneca Meadows, in the pristine Finger Lakes, and they worry about my little engine?” NYC takes care to dump its trash far from the Catskills that supplies its drinking water. “Yep, they should be composting their organics,” I suggested hesitantly, hoping not to trigger him. “They oughtta stop buying all that goddamn stuff and throwing them away after six months. And every truck oughtta be made of the same parts so you can repair them anywhere.”
So my Trump-voting neighbor is a right-to-repair fanatic who hates landfills and is open to questioning mega dams.