A Die-Hard New Yorker Leaves Manhattan and Embraces the Country Life - Vogue

At the risk of sounding appallingly pretentious, it was Cate Blanchett who made me realize it was time to leave New York City. It was a year ago, last October, and we had just finished a leisurely interview over a late dinner in a London restaurant when we found ourselves standing on a rainy street corner, not quite ready to say good night. She asked what I was doing the next day, and I said I had no plans because I have no friends who live in central London anymore. Like my friends in Manhattan, most of them have moved somewhere less ruinous. Blanchett, who’d left London herself a few years earlier, looked a little wistful and said, “It’s a different place.” Having recently turned 50, I muttered something about being older—maybe that’s what had changed. “No,” she said firmly. “The world’s changed. It’s very difficult to know where to be.” Then she compared giving up one’s chosen city to a drunk going dry. “Because sometimes life is so fast and so absolute that the only way you can change things is by actually shifting your life utterly and totally to a different hemisphere. You can’t partially change. There’s no semi-revolution.”

That was the moment, right there, the speech delivered toward the end of the story by the passing character in the protagonist’s life that turns on the light and shifts everything. As I said goodbye and walked away, my heart pounding, I was filled with a rush of certainty about something I had been puzzling over for years: Where should I be? I hopped in a cab and called my boyfriend, Andy, back in New York: Quit your job, and let’s move upstate.

Leaving the life I knew was a terrifying thought, but then again, I’d done it before. When I was 24 and living in Atlantic City, my parents helped me pack up what little stuff I owned into the back of their pickup truck and dropped me off on the corner of One-hundred-second Street and Broadway, where I had found a sublet for $575 a month in the classifieds of The New York Times. I wanted to be a writer, and New York was calling. Never mind that I knew exactly one person in the city, a waitress/actress named Cristine, and she was barely speaking to me.

Twenty-six years, eight apartments, one book, and dozens of magazine cover stories later, Manhattan had become not just the place I’d lived my whole adult life but my identity. My career, my social life, my love life had all taken place within four square miles. And for the better part of two decades, that was good enough for me. But sometime in the last few years I began to hear a faint hissing—the sound of air leaking out of the dream.

What had changed? New York, for one. Far too much has been written about this already, but suffice it to say that the street I lived on for many years—once a sublime combination of urban lumberyard, artists’ studios, and a fifties diner—is now a high-end shopping mecca with four-star pizzerias and a Kobe-beef emporium selling Wagyu for $130 a pound. It’s the story of so much of Manhattan, but when it happens to your street, it’s heartbreaking. My friend Ellen is still the co-op–board president of the loft building Andy and I called home. She emailed me the other day to say that the ground-floor commercial space, once home to a kooky antiques shop run by an eccentric pain in the ass, has been rented out to Phillip Lim, who is opening a new store during Fashion Week with a big party at which Banks will perform. Nothing against Lim or Banks, but who other than a groupie wants to live above that? We sold our loft in that building a few years ago and, in a final attempt to find a place to be in the city, bought another loft in Alphabet City, where I had lived in the late eighties. But I could not shake the feeling that I had become a ghost, wandering around the streets of my salad days, stalking my younger self.

When I told a friend, a grande dame in her 80s, that Andy and I were thinking of leaving Manhattan, she implored me not to tell anyone. They will think you are out of the game, she said. But that’s the other thing that’s changed: There is no game. The New York media complex has atomized and scattered to the winds. If Glenn Greenwald, the guy who broke the Edward Snowden story, can shake the U.S. security apparatus to its very foundation from the top of a mountain in Rio, it’s clear that you can change the conversation from pretty much anywhere. It was time to shove on, and, luckily, we already had a place to go.

About five years earlier, during a rare but keenly felt rough patch in Andy’s and my relationship, we made the fairly rash decision to buy a house in Woodstock, one of the most well-known small towns in the world, where the 1969 music festival famously didn’t take place. It was rash not just because we had visited Woodstock only once before, in the middle of February, but because we also already owned a country house, a twelve-acre farm in a small town in New Jersey called Wood_bine,_ not far from the horse farm where I grew up. Long story how it came to be ours, but bottom line, it was both a wreck and cheaper than a Porsche Carrera, the monthly mortgage payment not much more than our parking space in Manhattan.

I have a lot of family in South Jersey, and our little farm very quickly became the Van Meter compound. It wasn’t until that rough patch that Andy finally told me he wasn’t thrilled to be spending his weekends witness to, but never truly a part of, all the highs and lows of a family dynamic that had been playing out for decades before he arrived on the scene. I finally addressed what had, until that moment, been swept under the rug: We needed a place of our own, away from my history and out of the city, with its co-op and condo boards, where ownership still feels like sharing, where nothing is ever truly yours. We needed a place where we could be alone, together, where every decision (and all of its ramifications) would be ours and ours alone.

Manhattan had become my identity. My career, my social life, my love life had all taken place within four square miles.

Jonathan Van Meter

It was right around this time that our friend Abbe, who lived in our building in Manhattan with her husband and eight-year-old son, and who spent her summers in Woodstock, decided that there would be no semi-revolution for her, either. She left her husband for a woman and then pulled up stakes and left New York entirely: Just like that, she was gone. It was jarring, to say the least. I had always thought of Abbe as being more like me than not: hopelessly urban. We were both given to quoting lines from Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing: “New York, New York . . . if you can make it here, you will fail. every. where. else!” I needed to investigate what was going on in this little town that had so ensorcelled my friend, so that February, with three feet of snow on the ground, Andy and I drove up to Woodstock to spend the weekend with Abbe, a weekend during which she threw a fortieth-birthday party for herself and nearly 100 people showed up, many of them expats from the city, including a couple dozen happy gay men, and we all danced in her living room until 4:00 a.m. It was the best party I had been to in years. Andy and I both felt something click that weekend, and so we went back and looked at real estate and promptly fell in love with the second house we walked into: a 100-year-old shingle-style cottage on five acres, a half mile up the mountain, just outside town.

The house had only two previous owners. The first was an army nurse who built the original structure herself out of wood from decommissioned barracks in New Jersey that she had shipped up the Hudson River. The second was a woman named Johanna Vos, who bought the place in 1963 with her husband, Aart, and over the years expanded it into a rambling, sneaky-big warren of wonderfully odd proportions; there are four bedrooms, four bathrooms, five porches, an oversize Federal-style fireplace, and three sets of French doors that open out onto a huge, private oasis of a backyard. The writer John Bowe declared the house to be “nook-tastic” when he came to visit one day that first summer.

Johanna Vos had worked as a journalist in Paris in the thirties. Living in Holland during World War II, she and Aart rescued 36 Jews, hiding them in their home and in a tunnel that Aart built under their backyard. After the war they moved to Woodstock and started a summer camp for the children of U.N. employees. Aart died in 1990, but Johanna lived until 2007. There was a strange office cubicle in one corner of the living room—presumably where she wrote her book, The End of the Tunnel. We learned some of this history at the closing from Johanna’s daughter and her husband—and some from her lengthy obituary in The New York Times. When Johanna’s son-in-law handed over the keys in the parking lot of the bank, he said, “Make sure you walk far enough into the woods and find the waterfalls.”

The minute Andy and I got settled into the house, I set about building a trail that begins at the back of our yard and goes deep into the woods, all the way to the big stream that runs down Mead Mountain. The trail ends at three preposterously beautiful waterfalls that have, through centuries of constant splashdown, carved out lovely little swimming holes, just big enough for two people to float around in, which is exactly what Andy and I did every chance we got that first summer. When I built the trail, I did it with such a freaky intensity, such monomaniacal focus, that Andy had no choice but to mock me by naming the path Jonny’s Way. I did not stop to think much about why I became so obsessed, what sort of primeval urge was in play, as I raked and mowed and cleared rocks and fallen trees and lopped off branches and plowed through the woods until I made it to the stream. It wasn’t until a year later, feeling lonely and bored one day after a relentless 48-hour August rain, when I walked the trail back to the waterfalls and sat on a big rock and stared into the churn, that I stopped to think about it: I was re-creating—reclaiming—my most fundamental, and in some ways most complicated, boyhood memories, those middle years between seven and ten when I spent a lot of time by myself in the woods, building a fort, catching frogs and turtles—lonely and yet somehow exhilarated by a newfound sense of freedom. As I sat there, I realized I had finally found what I had hoped to find on the farm in Woodbine: a place to be.

One day the Woodstock building inspector said to us, “Mrs. Vos was very frugal.” Is that why the house wasn’t insulated? Was warmth seen as too indulgent? She lived in a cold house for more than 40 years! How could we have known that a year-round home within 30 miles of three ski resorts would have no insulation? For the next five years, we meticulously renovated every square inch: replaced every window (but in the exact six-over-six, mullioned style of the originals), took down and put back up every single wall (replastered just as they were before). For some reason, we felt it was important to hew as closely as possible to her vision—but warmer.

We quickly discovered that renovating to create the illusion that everything has always been there requires a thesis-like amount of research. One day, while interviewing someone at the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel in the city, I inquired about the beautiful wood covering the walls and discovered that it came from the Hudson Company, a reclaimed-lumber mill not far from our house upstate. If it’s good enough for Ian Schrager . . . , I thought. A small fortune later, we have new-old floors and new-old beams in the ceiling that look like they’ve been in place for 100 years. When we finally found a source for handmade encaustic cement tile for the kitchen and dining room and then fell in love with a pattern that was already in stock (cheaper), we hesitated a moment too long and Zac Posen bought out the entire lot. We eventually swallowed hard and custom-designed our own batch—and then had to wait three months for it to arrive on a ship all the way from Morocco. When the interior was finally finished, we painted the exterior, trim and all, a spooky gray-green color that looks almost black, called New York Café Noir (very Woodstock), which, ironically enough, we found at Walmart (not very Woodstock). Our contractor refuses to shop there, so he had it mixed somewhere less offensive to the local anti-corporate sensibility.

Oh, the hippies. It permeates everything here: the endless yoga options, the crystals and healers, the tie-dye shops, the Buddhist monastery on our road at the top of the mountain, the place to get your teeth cleaned called Transcend Dental. It’s ripe for mocking, but it’s also kind of great. Nobody’s trying too hard. It’s uncool here, and that’s not a complaint. People are nice. At four-way stop signs, no one wants to appear pushy by going first. (As opposed to New York, where everyone has to be first.) I once honked my horn at the proud gray-haired hippie lady in the Subaru station wagon ahead of me at the stop sign in front of the village green. She probably lives in a purple house. I felt guilty for weeks.

Visitors from the city often ask if we “have any friends” upstate, which makes us laugh out loud. We’ve never had more friends! We turn down dinner-party invitations every weekend because we’re always booked. Even though most of our friends in the city had moved to big town houses in the New Brooklyn Suburbia—where they no longer had the excuse of a too-small apartment—they still weren’t exactly fighting over us as guests to all the dinner parties they hoped to have because they’re too exhausted from demanding jobs and chasing after five-year-olds. I never thought I’d say this, but we were bored in Manhattan.

We’re continually amazed by the oddball menagerie we’ve accumulated, the unlikely social orbit we’ve been pulled into. There’s Karen, the tennis pro at the Woodstock Tennis Club whom we play with regularly. We call her Vegetable Princess of Ulster County—for 80 years her family owned Gill Farms, a 1,200-acre produce farm that they just sold to Warren Buffett’s son’s foundation for $13 million. There’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge Pierre Leval and his wife, Susana, who was nominated by President Obama to be on the National Museum and Library Services Board. They live nearby on an old bluestone quarry, where they have the best pool parties in town. At one of our earliest gatherings, new friends Stéphane and Alison, an NYU professor and a family mediator, brought along Alison’s mother, the photographer Gay Block, who published a book and had a show at MoMA called “Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust.” Sometime in the eighties, Gay had photographed Johanna and Aart’s portrait in what is now our living room, and she wanted us to see it. Minus all the macramé and spider plants, it looks pretty much the same now as it did then.

We moved into our not-quite-totally-renovated house on April 1, and the digging of the pool began on April 2. The noise and the dust and the carpenters and the painters and the landscapers are all gone now, the house finished, the pool a marvel. Andy does laps in his Speedo every morning. I walk into the woods and out to the waterfalls when I am feeling stuck or bored or anxious. It beats wandering around the East Village, feels easier to hit the reset button, refresh the page. I am not a fool, however. I know that our existential worries follow us wherever we go, though some of them take on a slightly different cast. What was once OMG, what if a bomb explodes on the subway when Andy is coming home from work in Times Square? is now Please let Andy not hit a deer on 375 when he’s driving home from getting the groceries.

And, sure, there are things I will always miss about living in Manhattan: barbershops on every other block; Asian delivery that arrives in seven minutes; walking home tipsy through the West Village at midnight after a particularly raucous dinner party; my shrink’s couch. But so far, I am mostly getting what I need up here in the Catskills, including, for lack of a better phrase, the occasional sense of well-being that, for whatever reason, seemed to escape me in the city. It’s that anxious, bored, alone, but happy thing I felt when I was a kid, on my own, in the woods. My friend Diane recently said to me during one of her weekend visits upstate, “You are your best self here.” Isn’t that what everyone wants?

I can’t explain exactly why I am paying $20 a month to Verizon to hang on to the 212 phone number I had in the city for more than 20 years. Every once in a while, I dial it, just to make sure it’s still mine. I find it perversely amusing that it rings forever, into nowhere. A Manhattan friend recently called to chat and as the conversation was winding down asked, “How’s life in the country?” Well . . . , I said. It’s summer. “You’ll be back,” she said, laughing, and then hung up.