One of my professional interests in addition to city government is emergency management. While in Michigan, I participated in a series of training events, both classroom and online, with the Michigan State Police and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This training culminated with a day-long examination, one of the most difficult tests that I had ever taken. I passed the examination and earned the designation of professional emergency manager.I then sought to use my training to assist others. I had enjoyed the emergency management training and believed that if I left municipal management, I would seek a FEMA-style position. As I looked for various opportunities, I discovered the Presbyterian Disaster Relief National Response Team (PDA NRT).I was raised as a Presbyterian and remained active in my local church. I submitted an application to join the NRT. The NRT is a group of approximately 65 to 70 volunteers who, when requested by affected churches, deploy in two- or three-person teams to areas that have been struck by a disaster. The efforts of the NRT focus on recovery efforts (dealing with the long-term after-effects of a disaster), not response efforts (search and rescue, filling sandbags, etc.).After a lengthy weekend “interview” in Arkansas, I was formally invited to join the NRT. My commitment entails four weeks of annual service: one week for our national training conference, one week of training and two weeks availability for deployment to disaster locations (the two weeks need not be consecutive, but may be a series of shorter deployments). For all of my work, I use my accrued vacation leave.My first real interaction with the PDA NRT was last year’s national training conference in San Francisco. Wow — a week in San Fran! But this was not a junket. We stayed at an area convent with very Spartan accommodations: Each room had a single twin bed, a small sink and a closet. The doors had no locks and each floor had a community bathroom. No cell phones were allowed. Despite the intensive 13-hour training days, it was incredibly tranquil and peaceful.During the conference, I was assigned a deployment to Nashville in response to the widespread flooding. I was in Nashville for a week, visiting area churches and assisting those churches and other relief organizations. It is critical to understand that spreading Presbyterianism is not an objective of the NRT. It is part of the faith to help others in need, no matter what their faith or beliefs. Most of our efforts were spent in helping area churches make preparations to host out-of-town volunteers coming to Nashville to do the “grunt work” of rebuilding the community.Less than a month later, I was deployed to a small town in Illinois. A tornado hit Streator, Ill., at dusk on a Saturday evening. The twister came down on the community theater (the annual spring production had completed its shows the previous week), battered a few homes, jumped over the area hospital, came back down and destroyed several homes and a recently renovated park complex before continuing across farmland. This “little” tornado generated nearly 2,000 truck loads of tree debris. The destruction was limited to property: No one died as a result of the tornado. I stayed in Streator for four days, helping a new pastor prepare for group counseling sessions as part of the community recovery effort. I also met with town officials to determine other possible opportunities for assistance by local groups or national relief agencies.I have found the relief efforts to be rewarding and fulfilling. The destruction and suffering that I have witnessed serves as a means to reset my “perspective meter.” After my seemingly inconsequential effort to contribute to Nashville’s recovery, I returned to a community that was embroiled in a dispute as to how many pets each resident would be allowed to keep. Somehow, the whole debate seemed trivial. Government, especially local government, can do so much more than debate little things that exhaust our time and resources.Next week I will be at the PDA NRT national training conference in North Carolina. Many of my fellow team members have deployed recently to Alabama, North Dakota, Georgia, Texas and Arkansas. When you hear of tornadoes or floods, please remember that a community has just been torn apart (and you rarely hear of smaller disasters such as shootings or fires that affected individual churches that request assistance). I used to unfeelingly turn the page or channel after hearing such news. I had never heard of Streator, Ill.; now I have hundreds of photos and even more vivid memories.Our community’s issues are strikingly small and humbling compared to Tuscaloosa, Ala. Please keep that in perspective. Let’s work together and make things better here.Dale Martin is the town manager of Winchester.
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his former partner, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
This article has been changed to reflect that Hermans and Nelson were partners. A prior version states that they were married.
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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