NEW YORK'S CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY

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My white-hot coat hook is done. Fitzgibbon quenches it and it turns blue-black, looking to me like an elegant, ornate, giant fishhook. "If anybody is thinking about moving to Chautauqua County," he says thoughtfully, "I would tell them you have to be versatile. But if you are, and if you're willing to lead a pretty local life, it's one of the few places around you can attain real independence.

" It's noon. Fitzgibbon takes off his leather apron and we walk to the garden to see if any of the rhubarb is still worth eating. "Chautauqua County isn't a place a lot of people will be drawn to," he concludes, "because there's no way you can come here expecting to find an existing job. But what you should do is come and look around—see what needs doing. Then simply do it, create your own job. Just like your psychic said." Fitzgibbon's modest notions for the future of Chautauqua County collide with every aggressive economic-growth model known to man. Nevertheless, it is clearly the county's near-steady population and the lack of developmental pressures on its land that make it a good and green place to live for him or you or me. And unlike most rural places to which you might relocate, the county has the civilizing influence of the venerable Chautauqua Institution.

Once a training ground for Methodist Episcopal Sunday school teachers, it is now a nonsectarian, multicultural community on 1,200 acres alongside Lake Chautauqua. Here, for modest fees, you can take lessons in voice or French or dance, hear a symphony orchestra, attend conferences on U.S.-Soviet relations and rub elbows with such celebrities as John Denver, Ravi Shankar and Ed Meese. And then there's the curious link with the Institution's religious roots called Palestine Park. Built along the shore of Chautauqua Lake in 1874, the park is a 100-yardlong, built-to-scale, topographical replica of the entire Holy Land, containing rock-sculpted representations of Bethlehem, the Mount of Beatitudes, Hebron, Mount Hermon, Jacob's Well and, when the tap is turned on, an actual, waterfilled, 20-foot-long Dead Sea with an occasional soda can floating in it. As the guide sign says, though: "The directions [of the park] are reversed.The northern mountains are in the south near the sports club and Lake Chautauqua represents the Mediterranean Sea."

Chautauqua County's primary assets of lifestyle remain, as mystics and others tell us, its isolation, its informality and unhurried pace and its low prices of everything from haircuts to chimney sweeping. When I get my spiritual/economic calling, I know I could buy 10 acres of wooded land for probably $5,000 and build the small house I would need for another $35,000, without much worry, that in five years a builder would turn the farm across the road into a housing development. Even though the soil is poor, I know I could get enough horse manure from my Amish neighbors to fertilize and aerate my garden, in return for which I would let them use my telephone and give them rides to town. And I know I could save a lot of money on meat each year by getting a landowner's permit to shoot the three or four whitetail deer that I would claim were munching my pole beans.

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