Crossing the Border

In early May of 2001, my wife and I packed up our 10th-floor apartment in Manhattan, loaded the kids in the car with our closest belongings, and headed north for a new life in the Adirondacks. We’d bought the house just two months before, the first one we looked at, in a town we’d never been to, North Creek, New York. It was a small ranch on a pine-filled acre. Covered in snow, it looked like a postcard from Bavaria. The house sat atop a hill and beneath its windows bubbled the clear and new Hudson, the same river we’d watched freighters cross below our apartment. Our future home was as foreign a place as I could imagine, like moving to Thailand, or the Himalayas, and just a four-hour drive upriver.

I was born in New York City, and until that May I’d spent most of my life there, much of it as a paramedic in midtown Manhattan. I wrote a book about my experiences, called , detailing those endless night shifts on the ambulance. I wanted to save in words the lives I couldn’t save in life, the souls I