Review: Walking through Varna
I like taking long walks, usually three miles along the side of the road near my house. There are two three-mile loops that are fairly pleasant, and only about 25% heavily trafficked. Alternately, I can walk three and a half to work, then take the bus home. Though I do that less and less, because I don’t enjoy listening to the bus driver talk about his lawn tractor that he has modified for racing.
Lately I’ve been trying to improve my health and have decided to increase my walking distance. So I’ve been walking through Varna. Varna is a hamlet. It actually says that on the sign, “Hamlet of Varna.” A hamlet, in New York State, is a small populated area that couldn’t get its shit together to become a village. Varna lies along route 366 in the Town of Dryden. No, not a town like a town. In New York State, a “town” is…never mind.
This walk starts out mildly annoying, gets super nice for a while, gets annoying again, then gets nice again. From the end of my driveway, walk against traffic down Ellis Hollow Road, keeping an eye on all the pickup trucks and Priuses speeding past you on the way to Brooktondale and Slaterville. Turn right onto Dodge, then follow it, with its two peculiar ninety-degree turns, to the intersection with Stevenson. This is my favorite intersection. It’s the ruralest section of our neighborhood and features horses. (Panorama above.) Turn left on Stevenson, walk past the game farm to Game Farm, and turn right.
Now the walk is getting annoying again. The guys driving farm machinery and dump trucks on Game Farm don’t give a rat’s ass that you are a helpless soft pink animal and will not move over to give you space. And those ag school professors are eager to get home to their woodstoves and presidential biographies and may not notice you there in the gloom of the posted experimental forest. Turn right, with relief, onto Route 366, and pass through Varna. Note the following:
- 2-liter Fanta bottle in ditch
- single abandoned counterfeit Hermes mitten
- single abandoned gray child’s snow boot
- neoconservative farm stand
- sign at town hall advertising pancake breakfast, chicken dinner, or polling place, depending on time of day/year
- porch railing made of hockey sticks
- sewage odor
If you don’t like seeing drivers aggressively tailgate other drivers, you will not like this stretch of road. If you like your roads to be well-drained and free of glaciation, you will not like this road. You may enjoy the next right, Observatory, which is neatly graveled as it passes the suburban housing development, and the right after that, Turkey Hill, which will bring you back to my house. Turkey Hill gives you an awfully nice view. Down into the valley you go, and then back up past the Entomology lab and the new age religious center and the asshole neighbor with his asshole dogs and the preschool that changes its name every year.
One of these days, some kid in an old Camaro is going to take the Ellis Hollow / Turkey Hill corner a little too close, and I’m going to be walking there, sweating slightly as I complete the last leg of my walk, and he’s going to run me down and kill me. Until then, I’ll be feeling fit.
Three and a half stars.
★ ★ ★ ½
