First, you must be able to drive. After an hour’s wait eavesdropping on the most improbable accounts of misfortune and attempts to represent oneself other than one is/was and to magically change the size and seating arrangements of vehicles, we were granted a nearly new Rav4 Hybrid. Could one have wanted anything better? No. Toyotas are so intuitive and easy to drive. Could I drive it on the wrong side of the road? Yes I could. Only two bits of weirdness on consecutive days with a divided road in Galveston.
We were driving to look rather than get somewhere. At this point it was emphatically the journey rather than the destination. So we wanted to stay off freeways. To leave an airport that’s harder than it sounds. Besides Albany doesn’t so much finish as merge into a dozen or more towns: Schenectady, Watervleit, Colonie, Waterford, waves of lighter and heavier development, a shopping mall here, a nature preserve there. We were shooting for Guilderland because I liked the sound of the name.
And because we could visit French’s Hollow Falls which were unremarkable except for the very strange girder structure underpinning the rail line.
And we could visit Altamont (main street at right) and I could think about the Rolling Stones and their disastrous concert, except of course it wasn’t here at all. It was at the Altamont Speedway on the other side of the country not so far from San Francisco to which they fled in a deeply unseemly fashion. I could be allowed this mistake to some extent because we were just a few hills away from Woodstock. But then Woodstock didn’t happen at Woodstock either. It happened at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm near Bethel another 60 miles south.
The identifier for this photo says ‘Slingerlands’, but it is more likely to have been New Scotland at Emma Cleary’s Cafe where this is what happens if you ask for a salad.
Nearby was the first sign that we saw saying “Nobody Voted For This. Stand Up. Speak Out.” The first of quite a number, along with others saying: “Stop Marxism from destroying the country.”
John Boyd Thacher State Park, East Berne, Renssalaerville, Medusa, Greenville, Freehold, Earlville, Climax, Coxsackie, Athens. Quiet little towns where better days have been seen. Not so long ago Upstate New York was a powerhouse of industry and enterprise. General Electric, IBM, Kodak, and Xerox were established here, and don’t those names sound just a little bit last century now. Empty shops, quiet streets … a civil and verdant version of the Rust Belt.
Then a choice between Catskill and Hudson to spend the night. Not much between them really except that Hudson had an Opera House. They both had views of the Hudson. What looks like it might be a boat is a lighthouse. The other photo is a bit Hudson The Town-esque although he is standing near feast and floret, an Italian restaurant, which was humming.
The next day we went looking for the house of Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the US and the first to be born after the Revolution and of non-British ancestry. We found what we found throughout our version of the US, not so much gardens as vast expanses of lawn, tended, mown and cherished with love and pride.
That’s Martin Van Buren’s front yard. This is his house.
You had to have a guided tour. The last guided tour had just left. It would be some time and some expense till one could join the next. What could be in there that would justify the wait? We didn’t. Applauded warmly and left.
But we did find an avenue of interesting houses on their own fenceless expanses of lawn. We are at Kinderhook 20 minutes drive north of Hudson.
They each have plaques. The one related to the house at top right explains that the British General Burgoyne ‘was entertained’ in this house after being removed from the Battle of Saratoga as a prisoner of war. The two Battles of Saratoga fought on September 19 and October 7, 1777 just north of Albany — the target and the prize for both armies — were a major turning point in the Revolutionary Wars. The British were emphatically defeated, the ‘Americans’ gained new resolve and vigour and, most importantly, the French chose to become full partners in the Americans’ struggle.
Immediately on the other side of Rothermel Lane is the Benedict Arnold House.
The American Generals at Saratoga were Horatio Gates and Arnold. Yes Benedict Arnold, an American synonym for the worst kind of traitor. He didn’t get on with Gates and, in a very short version of the story, felt that his achievements at Saratoga and elsewhere were insufficiently recognised. He married into a Loyalist family (ie Americans fighting for the British) and negotiated via his brother-in-law to become an officer in their army and to be paid a substantial sum of money in return for surrendering West Point of which, at the time, he was in command. It’s a long and fascinating story which includes being incriminated from evidence found in his brother-in-law’s boot. He escaped and did fight for the British; his brother-in-law was hanged. But no one argues that he wasn’t a brilliant general.
It is generally agreed that his strategy at Saratoga was decisive, along with the brilliant defensive engineering of Tadeusz Kosciuszko whose memorial statue can be seen both here and very prominently on the corner of Lafayette Square adjoining the White House lawns in Washington. And that is OUR Kosciuszko (‘ko SHOOS koe’ if you want to pronounce it like a Pole.)
He fought for the Americans for seven years without payment, was a war hero in Belarus, Poland and Lithuania, embarrassed Napoleon, led an uprising for Polish independence, was a good friend of Thomas Jefferson and left whatever money he had when he died to ‘the betterment of the American Negro’.
What a guy.
His fortifications are still evident at West Point where another memorial statue stands in another prominent position overlooking the Hudson.
He never came to Australia of course. It was Pavel Strzelecki (‘shtriz LIT ski’ if you care) who named the mountain, some people think incorrectly. The nearest mountain, Townsend — where just as it happens we spent the night of the turn of the millennium — has a mound on top of it which apparently looks very like a memorial to Kosciuszko in Kraków. The top of Mt Kosciuszko itself is a featureless hill. Townsend can look higher. Strzelecki may have been in error. [For the non-Australian reader, Mt Kosciuszko at 2228m above sea level (7319 feet for Michael) is the highest point on the Australian continent. Townsend is 19m lower.]
Our hero was born in Mereczowszczyzna. (I put that in only to encourage efforts at pronunciation and to see how many words you know that have four ‘z’s in them that aren’t sleep-related.) But we’re off track, except that Ann and Richard’s house in Garrison (garrison, get it?) is almost directly across the Hudson from the West Point statue.
We were on our way to another grand house, Olana, home of Frederic Church, doyen of the Hudson River School artists and referred to in another one of these blogs.
We could explore what was available to explore on our own, but in a fairly heavily supervised way. The American docent (‘a person who leads guided tours as a volunteer in a museum, art gallery, zoo, or park’, from the Latin ‘I teach’) is not to be denied.
This remarkable house, ‘an Orientalist fantasia’ located on a 250-acre estate, also meticulously planned and curated, was built with the proceeds of an immensely successful career in art. It was commenced in 1870 and finished in 1872 with an extension a few years later. It is full of treasures both fixed, like the Moorish tiles, and loose, like an extraordinary collection of 19th century American and other art. Church treated the interior decoration as an artwork itself being very particular about colours and where they should be applied. He designed the wallpaper in the bedroom above as he did all the wallpaper in the house, and there’s a lot.
You see what I mean. And I just like this photo.
Off to Garrison to see our friends and their little slice of heaven. I used to work with Ann who went to work in America for the National Center on Education and the Economy 34 years ago. She met Richard at a school she was working with.
They live on a four-acre property with a barn and an eye-popping garden. They share the property with two very large sheep named Pluto and Jupiter, a rooster named Edgar and hens named Lavender, Peony and Lilac. Their ducks are Van Gogh, Toft and Thompson. The donkey is Venus.
The actual owners of the property are three poodles named Juno, Hemingway and Jackson.
We had come via the Taconic Parkway: ‘Its winding, hilly route was designed by landscape architect Gilmore Clarke [at the behest of FDR when he was President] to offer scenic vistas of the Hudson Highlands, Catskills and Taconic regions. The bridges and now-closed service areas were designed to be aesthetically pleasing. It has been praised for the beauty of not only the surrounding landscape and views it offers, but the way the road itself integrates with and presents them.’ America.
It was certainly a cruisy drive, very easy, but there wasn’t much in the way of views of any length. Dense vegetation — it might be what they call here ‘piney forest’ — lined both sides. That can happen. This is country where it seemed anything would grow.
Ann had cooked up a vegetarian storm, a feast, and we talked about America and money and philanthropy and the naming fetish. We had passed the Private Melvin V. Byrok Bridge and the Hudson American Catholic Children’s Brigade Bridge. Later we were to encounter a section of a highway being looked after by the Baby Jesus Knights of the Templar, and this splendidly isolated drinking fountain in Houston which may have deserved a name, or not, is the ‘Droste and Darby Sarofim Fountain’.
I proposed that this might be part of the extraordinary web of motivational tools and processes in America, so very sophisticated and so very ubiquitous. The Americans told us about graduation ceremonies for kids from Grade Two where the kids wear academic gowns, and from Elementary School where the kids are driven around in loops so that the whole community can applaud them, the very widespread practice of clapping yourself and the naked pleasure of telling others how successful you’ve been. IT IS HOW YOU GET ON. Of course. Sometimes the obvious really works.
The next day we visited the Farmer’s Market that Ann frequents and saw (and later ate) produce, including a salmon, of the very highest quality.
Never let anyone say you can’t eat well in America. It is possible, especially on the eastern bank of the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York.
Later we crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge (currently available for additional naming rights) to visit the Storm King Art Centre, outdoors and only the second day it had rained in the four weeks we’d been away.
I don’t know about big lumps of things in mown paddocks. They have their moments I suppose. Well actually they don’t. That’s how they are all the time except when they get wet. Good but not overwhelming I think was the final judgment. The drive there and back north across the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge (straightforward, more naming possibilities) had been just as interesting. You couldn’t call where we were the Mexican side of the Hudson but there was clearly another cultural presence and a fair bit less money. We stopped at Gus’s Diner for a drink and, lo and behold, they had banana splits on the menu, and I do love a banana split. They may have been on the menu but I don’t think Gus’s very Mexican diner had had much call to create a banana split before, ever. Ordering one was a jolt for the orderee, a jolt that was transformed into a challenge, a challenge that was met. I’m sure the counter staff moved with new confidence after that. I moved the already startling tip up one digital notch.
That night we watched Bill Maher interview J.D. Vance on TV. It was billed as a big moment. Vance was there to plug his new book. Maher was there to ask him the tough questions: the Iran war, the cost of living, petrol prices blah blah blah. Except he didn’t. It was a study in ingratiation, and Vance handled him with an easy and superior charm. There is a lot of strength in incumbency.
Next day we found our way back onto the Taconic Parkway (no tolls) to Albany airport and flew, without incident, to the nation’s capital.
And just as a footnote, we didn’t see Baby. I can only think she must have stayed in her corner.
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