Volume 4 Issue 11

Just two years ago, lacrosse was just a club sport at Millbrook High School. Last year, after several seniors petitioned to give credibility to the team, they improbably made it to the sectional finals in their first year as a varsity team. This year, the team faces the challenge of learning the basics all over again after losing 17 seniors from the program.  Rob Gehlhoff, the head coach of Millbrook’s varsity lacrosse team, is reluctant to call this year a rebuilding year, but he admits he knew it was going to be tough losing all of the seniors. Gehlhoff’s strategy this year is to “keep it simple.” He spends a lot of time talking about the basics and teaching the new players the terminology. He stresses that it’s important to keep the players talking on the field during practice to promote learning. 

  The reclusive and elusive Pope of Science Fiction was suddenly teleported to Bard College last Monday. Students bored with spoon-fed realism, heart-baring romanticism, and numerous unmentionable isms appeared eager to drink the ersatz intellectual cocktail offered by James Morrow. The ingredients of his heady brew remain a trade secret locked in a bank vault at State College, Pennsylvania, but some of the well-known toxic elements include massive dosages of Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Conrad, Emmanuel Kant, Mark Twain, and the Bible, which has been known to be fatal to its day-dreaming addicts, especially those who have trouble understanding what a literary metaphor is and how it operates on the ganglia.  

  We learned last week that our colleague Chris Wood is closing the Pawling Press after a run of over two years. The issue that comes out on Friday will be its last. We are indeed sorry to see another weekly perish on the wheels of business realities.  It takes more money to run a paper than ad revenue and sales generate, especially in a faltering economy where local businesses are struggling. 

The vision of the Harlem Valley Rail Trail when first conceived in 1986 was that it run up the Harlem Valley all the way to Chatham.  The master plans for the towns of Hillsdale and Copake show the rail trail running from the Taconic State Park in Copake Falls up to Hillsdale, along the old rail bed, across farm fields and through the woods bordering the gorgeous Audubon land.  The views of the Berkshires along this segment of the trail will be breathtaking.  Now it looks like that vision is finally coming to fruition.