It would be great if every town had a “Bog,” a place you can trust to have a first-rate hamburger or hot turkey sandwich or soup or tacos. We have our “Bog” back.

It is a place with a bar that fills early with people who know each other and cherish a safe place to go and have a drink and talk to other people. It is a gathering place full of families and neighbors and grandparents meeting each other for dinner, laughing and shouting at one another, sometimes across the room.

The “Bog” is a place where the community lives. If you pay much attention to the news, you may already know how important that is.

The Bog is a restaurant that local people have loved for 40 years. Then it fell on some hard and lonely times, like so many institutions in so many small towns. For a while, the Bog had to close.

Thanks to a stubborn and congenial local contractor, this very local restaurant found a savior and has come home again, I think for good. It is sure good for Maria and me.

When I  moved upstate nearly two decades ago, people warned me against going to the Bog, which had been in operation for 40 years. It was a biker place; they said the customers didn’t much care for strangers or city people.

I was wary of the big bikes so often lined up outside the restaurant, not being a local.

The Bog was warmed by a giant wood stove that could melt porcelain in the winter and next to a pool table. You might remember my photos of “Kelly,” a strong and beautiful woman. She was the spirit of the place.

(She is working down the road now as a receptionist for a popular auto repair shop, she wants to spend more time with her daughter and husband.)

Pat Guidon, the former owner of the Bog, presided over his restaurant, and nothing much ever changed. Pat did not believe in improvements; he wanted everything to stay the same. People loved him for that.

But the Bog – “Foggy Notions” was the restaurant’s official name – had a deserved reputation as having the best burgers anywhere.  There were some heavy drinkers there also.

Five or six years ago, I decided not to listen to other people and walked in for dinner. I was glowered at for a few minutes, but the bikers and regulars were just curious, not menacing. The bikers I have come to know are friendly and welcoming. Stereotyping people never works.

Even then, the bikers were vastly outnumbered by families and farmers, and married couples who needed an evening out. It was a family place, not a biker place.

Pat died in 2017. Everyone in town gave up on the idea of the Bog re-opening; it just needed so much work. In 2018 a local contractor named Mark Harwood decided to buy it and restore it. Good luck, we all thought.

Since Guidon had the liquor license in his name only, the state shut the restaurant down the day he died.

Harwood took on the daunting task of getting a new license, repairing the delipidated building, and getting it up to code.

Mark had been a customer for years. Years ago, he had flown into the town’s small airport and asked somebody where he could get a decent sandwich or hamburger. Everyone he asked recommended the Bog.

They didn’t know it, but they had saved the place.

It was a grinding, costly, and tough battle than Harwood, but by July of 2019, the Bog reopened and was ready to return to life. At first, it was not the same. It looked different and felt different; the state even made Mark take out the big wood stove.

I wasn’t at all sure they would make it. How could anyone retain the sense of character and special feeling of so idiosyncratic a place?

But Mark worked hard at it. He kept Davin Saari as bar manager and started hiring good people. He even hired an extra chef to spruce up the menus, which hadn’t changed in years.

Then Covid-19 struck. Mark hung in there. While it was closed, there was no other place like it to go to. I’d pretty much give up on it; it just seemed the Gods were not on the side of the Bog.

Mark decided to ride it out and keep up the restoration, and the Bog better, cleaner and stronger. It is its old self – busy, loaded with locals and families, loved by bikers.

There is always something good to eat.

Last night, we had a nice juicy hamburger with gravy and mashed potatoes. We loved it. A week ago, there were enough tacos on my plate to feed the donkeys and the sheep as well as us.

Maria is a tough critic when it comes to eating out; she already loves the new Blog. It just feels like home to us, and that is not something we often feel.

Mark Harwood says he did it because he knew how important it was for people in our small town and the farmers in the county. He was a busy and successful contractor; he really didn’t need to do it, to take all that risk.

It’s good to have it back. I always try to thank Mark when I see him, and he is usually there, keeping an eye on things. He loves the place, just as Pat did. He seems like an especially nice man to me, easy-going, easy to talk to.

That makes all the difference in a restaurant, at least in my mind.

Maria and I go there a couple of times a week for dinner or a hamburger, especially on nights where I don’t feel like cooking. Pat never hired more than one waiter or waitress at any time; the wait for food was legendary.

Kelly was both bartender and waitress for years. We could never figure out how she survived it. Now, four or five people do the work she did.

The Bog has its glory back.

The town rejoiced; there was really no good alternative for a family place that served liquor and good food and offered a Tuesday Trivia Night.

As the country splinters and divides, places like the Bog become a more critical thread in community life, much as the Pubs in England.

The Bog is not just a restaurant with good burgers; it is the heart of the town, reborn again in many ways.

We all know how many cherished local institutions can be and how few ever return once they shutter. In that sense, the Bog is a small miracle. I have to give Mark credit.

He kept the old feeling and made it better.

We go there for a burger, which lives up to its reputation, and for a sense of family and place.

A dental technician comes up to remind me of my appointment; a bank teller comes over to say hi, a neighbor asks if he can borrow an old mower, and a friend stops by to tell us of her mother’s passing, who we knew.

A dog lover comes over to show me a photo of their new dog. Someone shouts that they love the new color of our farmhouse.

A waitress might ask for a college reference. A woman stops to tell Maria how much she loves the quilts she sees on her blog, a man comes by to talk about the Amish.

When the food comes, people are left in peace to eat and talk. There is etiquette in the Bog,  an understanding of boundaries, and people honor them.

I brought my Leica last night to test its night vision. Everyone there knows me by now as the eccentric man who loves to take photos there, everybody co-operates and kids me about the camera and the people being photographed.

I asked Mark if it was okay to take a photo (I always ask), and he said sure, please get in the new “Bog” sign if I could.  He is quite proud of it.

I liked the photo, though. The Bog teaches me a lot about community and how easy it can be to transcend all those differences and arguments we read and hear about. The Bog reminds me that people are people, politics, and cable news aside.

The politicians haven’t quite managed to take that away from us.

Outside, the world can be draining and discouraging. A Bog is a place of light.

I am happy to live in a town that would fight so hard for a local restaurant. And I appreciate a town that has not forgotten the meaning of community or given up on it.