R and J in the USA

New York, as far as we can tell, is a state that is one of the most and one of the least known states. It has a handful of world famous features that many people the world over have on their bucket list of must-see and hope-to-someday-see places. Whether you are witnessing the raw power and rush of Niagara Falls, the concrete jungle where dreams are made of in New York City or one of, if not the most iconic emblems of freedom and liberty world wide, the Statue of Liberty, you are bound to have your ears flooded by a din of language soup, hearing voices from every corner of the globe that have done the work to make it to any one of these renowned sites. And every one of those spots deserves their iconic reputation and will elicit involuntarily gasps of awe and a rush of emotion of one kind or another. 

We count ourselves lucky to have gotten to partake in the iconic places of our home state with relative ease over the course of our lives. We made sure to include each of them on this trip, but only because an exploration of the state of New York without them would seem incomplete, not because we had not been before. As a matter of fact, we have both been to each of these world famous parts of New York many times over. This is not something to take for granted, even as a resident of the state of New York. As with any and every state we’ve traveled to, there are plenty of people throughout the state that have not seen them, even when they are within a day’s drive or train ride.

And, it is not uncommon for these famous pockets of the state to be all that someone knows of New York if you get far enough outside of its borders. And, if you are from the state of New York and traveled anywhere outside of it, you have come to learn, very quickly that, most places you go and most people you meet will only know these parts of New York and will assume that to be from New York is to be from New York City. Like having a name that is always misspelled, you begin to expect and anticipate the clarifications you will need to make in every casual interaction about where you are from. There is no resentment of it per se. It’s nice to be from a place that people know about. Though not all New York Staters feel fondly about New York City, we do, so we don’t resent the association. But it is not accurate and it always takes a little extra time and energy to make that clear. We don’t mind doing it and have enjoyed getting to be an ambassador for our state in that way, spreading the word wherever we go about the places beyond the Big Apple that most people don’t realize are there. We have also found that New York is one of a handful of states that we have found people have opinions about, whether or not they have been there. There are New York stereotypes that have preceded us, some of which we are hopeful and happy to dispel. We’ve heard comments about people from New York being rude, unfriendly or not having their priorities straight. All of these things are said with a smile and a lightheartedness with no ill will, but still, we have enjoyed seeing some minds open and expand after encountering our smiles and welcoming conversation. Such it is being human. It can be hard to see beyond what you have seen with your own eyes.

When we tell others we are from upstate New York, it is news to most we have encountered that we are over a 5 hour drive away from the state’s most famous city. We educated more than a few people about what makes up the places in between those iconic spots – endless green rolling hills, lakes of every shape and size, rivers that turn into waterfalls and rapids, mountain ranges, islands, bucolic small towns and all the things that are as opposite to what people think of when they think of New York City’s sidewalks and tall buildings as can be. 

Of those iconic spots, the one that makes the state of New York least and most known is its most famous city at its southeastern tip. Carrying an outsized reputation the world over compared to the rest of the state and a decent portion of what makes New Yorks State the fourth most populous state in the United States, it seems that a deep dive into describing the city that never sleeps in an overview of the state is only fair.

Many who visit New York City for the first time fall in love with the pulsation of creativity that is palpable in every jam-packed square inch of it. There are endless sights to behold and endless opportunities for engagement. You need engage in no more complex activity than just walking down the street to be steeped in a fully sensory entertainment experience, though there are plenty of more purposeful forms of entertainment available at every turn if you seek them. If you are a fan of sculpture art or architecture, your appetite could be satiated on almost any block for days. If entertainment for you is about performance, you can find it in every form and at remarkable caliber in every nook and cranny, whether music, theater or comedy or anything else that could possibly be performed. And if it is your taste buds that seek entertainment, well, you could spend your life tasting the culinary offerings of New York City and not even make a dent. For every new visitor that is entranced by the delights and wonders of the city, just as many are counting the minutes to get the heck out of the constant onslaught to the senses that is a walk down nearly any block of Manhattan. There are the endless chorus of horns and sirens and a never ending din of people talking, singing, shouting, breathing all in one cacophony of sound. For some, the sounds are like a symphony of activity, the soundtrack to what feels like an endless slumber party where the streets are just one big dance floor and the dance is simply the motion of people going about their lives next to, all around, in between, below and piled on top of one another. For others, the endless noise is an irksome buzzing in your ear, disturbing sleep and one that you might seek to drown out in search of quieter moments. One could shift from one feeling about it to the other in the space of seconds depending on what kind of day you are having. Then, of course, there is the chaotic swirl of smells that can swing from the delicious aromas of roasted nuts and hot dogs on the griddle to the fumes of garbage and lord knows what mixed into the aerated stew as you move a few feet in any direction. There are the claustrophobic streets crowded from the sides with people and from the air with high rises and skyscrapers that fill your vision with movement and shapes and colors everywhere you look. There is no respite from the sensory input if that is what you seek. There are some that love it so much that they never want to leave, there are some that consider the experience an exercise in anxiety ridden masochism and there are just as many that battle between the two polarities, loving and hating it at the same time. There are many that love it for a day or two and then reach a satiation and saturation point and are ready to go, having enjoyed their time, but feeling no need for any more of it, and there are some that leave already dreaming of their return. New York City can elicit it all.   

No matter which of these camps you end up finding yourself in, New York City is an experience and one we would hope everyone to get a chance to partake in at least for a day just to have the experience for themselves.

New York City is one of Julie’s favorite places on earth. It is definitely not for everyone. Ryan sits in the camp of people that can enjoy it for a couple of days, but, once he reaches that saturation point, is eager to return to the wide open spaces of life in the rolling hills and greenery of upstate New York.

It is likely no surprise to claim that we could go on writing pages just about the experience of New York City alone. To spend too much time talking about and describing New York City could potentially feed into that conception that New York State is one 54,265 square foot suburb of New York City, which it definitely is not.

Julie was at a conference once for New York small business owners to talk with their local congressperson. The person in charge got up to pump up the crowd and asked, “Who here is from Queens?” A response of cheers followed. “Who here is from Manhattan?” A response of cheers followed. He proceeded to go through all 5 Burroughs of our state’s one behemoth city and also included Long Island. Then he called out, “Who here is from upstate?” In this particular gentleman’s eyes, New York State was basically New York City and Long Island. The other 52,000 square miles of the state was one big place called upstate, with no regional distinctions. This moment still sticks in Julie’s craw. Even though Julie loves New York City and will be the first to want to sing its praises as a place within the state of New York, and we are now both fans of Long Island too, there is still a little chip on our upstate New York shoulders for such an attitude. Maybe not so much a chip as a strong desire to bring a little more noise to the incredible expanse and diversity of the world in the other 52,000 square miles where the other 44% of the state’s 20 million people reside (8.4 million in the five Burroughs, 2.8 million in Long Island and the rest of the state’s 8 million residents spread out, though not evenly, between the Eastern, Western, Northern and Central New York regions).

Despite these upstate New Yorker hangups, at the same time as all of that, any meditation on the state of New York, in our opinion, is incomplete without inclusion of a description of a city that packs a larger population into 300 square miles than the total population of 38 other individual states. As a matter of fact, you could combine the population of the states of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana and Maine and still not equal the amount of people living in New York City. The fact that two fifths of the state’s population is in the city that never sleeps certainly makes it worthy of its own paragraph in an overview of the state of New York and makes it more than understandable that it so often dominates the words “New York” when anyone hears them. And, actually, a description of New York City is worth inclusion not just because of its size and density and massive role on the global stage in so many areas of society, but also because of its uniqueness in the state of New York. Though the words New York often cause the characteristics of the city to be ascribed to the rest of the state, the city is deeply unique and though we were able to see some ways that the culture and aesthetic of it steeps outward into its surrounding areas and even, in some small and subtle ways, further afield in the expanse of the state, for the most part, knowing New York City does not make you know much of the rest of the state at all. New York State is one of a handful of states that has more than one city of substantial size. All of New York’s medium-sized cities are nothing compared to NYC’s population or density, but what makes for a medium or small sized city in the rest of New York, a Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester or even an Albany, there are a handful of states for which any one of these medium sized cities would be the biggest city around. And none of these smaller cities are anything like New York City. And then there are the miles and miles of open road and green expanse peppered with villages and small towns and farms and forests and lakes and mountains that make New York what it is to so many that live there. For the world that is New York for a great many New Yorkers, the bright lights of the big city are only distant rumors that someone may never have even been to, let alone have connected to at all with their sense of what it is to live in New York. 

The fact that New York City leaves three fifths of the 20 million people that live in New York State unaccounted for and makes up only 300 square miles of the over 50,000 square miles that make up New York State is also why the state as a whole is so very much in need of description to get a real understanding of what it is and what it means to many people. 

So, for all those people the world over that hear that someone is from upstate New York and ask if we go to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty all of the time, for the large majority of people that live in the state of New York, the answer is a resounding no. There is no offense at being asked, but it is a clarification worth making. As a matter of fact, for those people that live right in New York City, the answer is typically a no, just as it would be for any inhabitant in any town or city as to how often they go to the most famous tourist attractions that their towns have to offer. And for those with some small familiarity of New York State, enough to think that saying “we are from upstate New York” means Westchester (the county just north of New York City), if geographical awareness holds value to you, or if you just would like to know about the beautiful places that exist that you didn’t already know about, it is worth expanding your awareness of how big and beautiful and varied the state of New York actually is. 

Whether it is the sight of the mighty Niagara Falls or the ocean-like shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, two of the nation’s Great Lakes, or the miles long Finger Lakes in Western New York or the 120 miles long, 13 miles wide at its widest point, Lake Champlain, or the Thousand Islands found between the flow of the St. Lawrence River on its way to the Atlantic, the Hudson River or the millions of acres of the Adirondack State Park and its undulating mountains, 46 of which rise to over 4,000 feet (baby mountains compared to the towering 10,000+ footers out west, but gorgeous in their stature and foliage nonetheless) or the beauty of the Catskill mountains further south, or the very Long Island that stretches out miles into the Atlantic, there is so much of New York to get lost in with no desire to be anywhere else.

New York is also a state that dives fully into all four seasons – a characteristic that anyone could use google to find out, but we happen to know because we have lived through decades worth of them – a vantage point we don’t get to have when writing perspective on each of the other states that we haven’t spent season upon season of living. But, to drive through New York in springtime, it is easy to tell as much if you look closely enough at the details. There are bursts and blankets of young green and color telling you that, though much lushness has already arrived, there is plenty more coming down the shoot in the seasons to come. In springtime, there are some leafless trees telling you the story of long winters only just being recovered from – trees who’s empty branches tell a story of a previous fall in which whatever leaves once covered those branches made their colors and fell to the ground to leave the uncloaked branches to face a winter whose signs can be found all over the springtime landscape by those who are looking. There are rivers rushing with rapids that show signs that they don’t always flow so high or so hard, but for the melt off of winter’s snow and ice that have now warmed to a free flowing state. And, in the spots throughout, especially those more northern ones, your suspicion that snow once blanketed the state are confirmed by pockets of snow that are refusing to melt before they get a chance to see some of the springtime blossoms for themselves. Then there is the temperature of the waters on a sunny spring day, if you dare to dip your toe into them. Those temperatures make it clear that, though they are glimmering in the sun and flowing freely in liquid form, they are, in fact, as close to ice as can be before actually becoming it, a state that an ever warming springtime and summer sun will transform into the warmish and welcoming waters that can bring joy and relief from what will eventually be a hot summer sun. 

We don’t know it from this trip, but we do know it from the longer trip of life that seeing New York from the angle of all four seasons is one of the best things about it – though that also is the thing that sends more than a few snowbirds south for the somewhat unforgiving winters. For those that don’t find joy in the cold, or at least in so much of it that lasts so long, or don’t find enticement in the playscapes a winter wonderland has to offer, especially for those who’ve seen a lifetime’s share of them and have no desire to continue to navigate the challenges that a cold New York winter can bring, there are more than a few that see New York’s winters as, understandably, a yearly fate to escape from. 

It is hard to know if we’ve done justice to describing New York or if we’ve gone too far and given too many words to the attempt, which is more likely. We thought it worth expanding our writing about this state, largely because, as our home state, we feel equipped to do so from the perspective of someone from one of its less known regions, but also because, to visit New York, to know New York and to understand New York must include the expanse of the bright lights of the big city and the striking beauty of the rolling hills, mountains and lakes that fill up the bulk of its miles.

We love New York. We love all of it. We love New York and we love New York. We love being New Yorkers even though we are not New Yorkers. We love traveling in New York to New York. And we hope we have added a little bit of insight into how wonderful New York is and also that New York is not the only part of New York to love.

That should clear things right up now, shouldn’t it.