The perceived cheapness of upstate was, naturally, its defining feature and the ruler by which its opportunities seemed to be measured. Like everybody else in the city I’d had a million conversational daydreams about opening a bed-and-breakfast on a hobby farm (“like the Kaaterskill but closer and without sheep and less expensive but still with fireplaces”) or a yoga studio in Beacon (“people are so chill up there, you know? And you can walk to stuff. It’s like a real town”), restoring a Victorian in Hudson to its Depression-era glory (“I feel this…instinctual need for a clawfoot bathtub”), or even buying a warehouse in Albany with my friends and making a Little Detroit of our very own (“we could have a skate park in the building”). However, when the rubber met the road, as a childless, unmarried woman in her thirties, moving upstate on my own had previously appeared only to be a one-way trip to Crazytown: population, me. I’d long worried that artists who moved out of the city were ultimately destined to abandon their work in order to sell mosaic-topped garden tables to other alcoholic kooks, and I was terrified of real loneliness, of a life without the noise of the city, its bars, its parties, the comfort of its density and rancor.

But it turned out that when I really thought about it, I wouldn’t miss the endless parade of dead-on-arrival relationships, or the hard edges that grew on me like a rash as other people got married and had babies and I stayed single, or how nobody in the city could ever commit to anything, or how easy it was to stay immature forever, or how I hadn’t made a new friend in what felt like years, or any other of the same old boring piles of garbage I’d been circling like a vulture for the last decade. The facts on the ground were that the loft had been the only thing keeping me in the city. Without it, I would’ve been driven out long ago.

I’d missed the boat on New York real estate by at least two decades, if not more, which made this drive inevitable. Today, tomorrow, next year, five years, it didn’t matter: Eventually, in every possible version of my life (except for the one where I died alone wrapped in rags on a subway platform), I was destined to get behind the wheel of a truck like this and head up the Taconic.

So—why fight it?

I felt myself detach, for the first time in twelve years, from the city I was leaving behind. Maybe that drunk old tortoise from the party was right, after all.

It was time to be a new person.

*  *  *