Dunkin’

Dunkin’ Brands wants to put a Baskin Robbins/Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Chestnut (the main street into town coming from the south) and Walnut (the street where Aviva lives and where we’ve just bought our village house). One of the charms of Cooperstown is that, except for CVS and ACE Hardware, there are no national chains here. There’s Stagecoach Coffee and Schneider Bakery, and a few (not great) little ice cream outlets. It’s a town where people mostly walk rather than driving thru, even at CVS and the bank, where you can drive thru. But a Dunkin’ drive thru will probably see a lot of action from both residents and tourists.

The big deal about this is the location on Walnut – a block from the elementary and high school, a narrow street that groans under school traffic. It’s a bad location for so many reasons. It sits at the main tourist entrance to Cooperstown, and is counter to the village atmosphere we like to present. Worse, kids can easily walk there on their own for some of the least healthy food on the planet. And very worst, the traffic during morning school drop off, already snarled with school buses and parents, will collide with prime coffee and donut buying time. This will only get worse when the new parking lot for hospital employees open a couple of blocks away at the other end of Walnut.

So we’ve gotten involved. We don’t hate Dunkin’, and in fact we drink their coffee often when we’re traveling (okay, we’ve been known to eat a donut too). But we hate them in that location. There are other excellent options for them south of town where the other chains are clustered and where the tourists can find plenty of parking and space for a long drive thru line.

We attended a meeting of the village Historic Preservation Architectural Review Board where the design of the proposed store was met with significant criticism. About a hundred villagers turned up with verbal pitchforks. In most such meetings there are two sides, but here no one had a kind word to say about the proposal. The meeting was open for public comment, intended to be related to the design. A few people were passionate about the design, but most people just wanted to talk about what a horrible location it was and a few wanted to talk about how bad junk food is for kids.

After the meeting, Jay, the old labor organizer, started talking about mobilizing folks to write letters to Dunkin’ to convince them that there are better places for them to be. And before you knew it, Aviva put us in touch with a local activist who has a great email list, and she connected us to the woman who runs Templeton Hall, a perfect venue for a meeting, and voila, we have a letter writing meeting set for this week. Aviva also got us in to the local newspaper for an interview and they immediately posted an article about the meeting online and on the front page of the weekly paper.

Small town life. I can’t imagine we would ever have gotten similarly involved in Palo Alto. Here, it’s pretty clear that if you want something to happen, you need to step up and make it happen. In the same vein, Aviva and I joined the local League of Women Voters. At the first meeting, a guy came from the Census Bureau and mentioned that Hartwick had the worst response rate in the area in 2010 and he was looking for help. So a group of us Hartwickians and Aviva put together a little team to do what we can to promote the census, starting with a meeting at the courtroom in the Hartwick Town Hall in January.

It’s fun to be involved, and a nice way to get to know neighbors. It’s all on such a human scale, and it all affects our lives pretty directly. But what affects my life here more is the beautiful part of the planet we live on. We have had our first snow. Autumn shifted through its gears, from the first turning leaves, to full color, to the final few trees holding their brilliant leaves. When most of the leaves are gone, the trees that still have leaves glow in the light. Even they have lost many of their leaves, so the light penetrates in a way that it can’t when the leaves are dense, and the trees look like they’re lit from inside when the sun shines thru them. At last, they were gone too. The hillsides were covered in bare trees, in dark evergreens, and in orange tamaracks – the only conifers whose needles turn color and drop each year. And now, after the first snow, even the orange tamarack needles are mostly gone and the landscape we’ll live with until spring is settled. It was a perfect first snow, about a half inch; deep enough to cover the remains of green grass, but not deep enough to be a challenge. I laid out the heated door mats that give us a little melted walkway across the slippery patio. Jay got the tractor positioned in the barn for easy access when he needs it for clearing the driveway. We are snug for the winter. All we need is coffee and donuts.