11 posts tagged “east coast 08”
The last thing I did before returning the rental at Newark was swing through Nyack. As mentioned earlier, my grandparents lived there; in fact they kept a Nyack residence for most of their married life, raising my mother and four other children in a large house that was later bulldozed to make way for the Tappan Zee Bridge. They moved into a smaller house on an adjacent property, right next to the Thruway just as it becomes the Bridge, and many of my childhood away-from-home memories are of that house. I hadn’t been back there since my grandfather died in 1980; my grandmother left to come live with my mother three years later and I wasn’t even sure the house was still standing. So of course I had to go and look.
It was there exactly where I left it and looked just like I remember. It seems vacant now, but only recently and whoever’s had it in the intervening years has done some fine upkeep on the place. It’s good to know that not everything gets pushed aside by time.
The day was beautiful, simply stunning weather the likes of which had eluded me for most of the trip, and I wished I had a few more days to spend puttering around and snapping photos and eating cheap delicious pizza and generally soaking up the things I miss so much living in Texas but everyone sooner or later has a plane to catch. As always, I hope to get back soon. In the meantime, I’m going to be looking at these pictures a lot.
While in the Boston area I went out to Cape Ann to visit Lauri, a college classmate I haven’t seen since we graduated. When we were at Bard we were pretty good friends and even dated awhile – she was in fact my first real girlfriend – and there’s no accounting for us never getting together in the intervening 26 years except that I’m a jerk sometimes. It’s a long story.
Anyway, however long it’s been since I’ve seen Lauri it’s even longer since I’ve been on Cape Ann and boy howdy is it spectacular there. We were blessed with the first truly excellent weather of my whole trip which made it even more so.
My friend is looking pretty good herself, maybe even better than she did back in The Day, which is saying a lot. She always was a beauty. And while it’s always muy good to reconnect with a much-missed friend and find that you slip right back into the best parts of the relationship with total ease, it’s even better when said friend has the same soft, knowing smile you remember so well and uses it just as much as she ever did. Maybe even more now. It’s good to know that someone from The Day is so well taken-care-of in her present life.
Lauri’s living on the same patch of land she grew up on, the performing-arts camp her parents established and her mother still runs (and, not incidentally, still lives on too). Once a dairy farm, the buildings have been refitted as dorms and studios and see a lot of use from groups renting them out during the summer. Lauri herself is an RN in a cardiac ward so you bet I got in a question or two that’ve been on my mind since my last cardiologist visit.
We toured the around the Cape, which of course didn’t take long, and had lunch by the Gloucester harbor, and later took a walk out to a nearby park that used to be a granite quarry, and of all the locales I saw on this trip this was the one with the most sense of place. Maybe because it’s the one I saw clearest through the eyes of someone who’s known it for a lifetime and loves the hell out of it.
I was technically in Boston a total of 72 hours this visit and if I learned anything it’s that 72 hours is nowhere near sufficient. I only got one full day to be out and poking around in the city, the other one being allocated to a day trip to Cape Ann (see next entry), and that poking-around day saw somewhat dismal weather. Even so, Boston in the gray is better than most cities in their best spring plumery, and there was a lot to see downtown that’s sprung up in the 24 years since I was last out on foot there.
South Station is quite impressive these days, or at least the food court is. Impressive but not pretentious, and I felt every bit of affection for the place I remember from taking the Red Line there daily when I worked for Greenpeace on Congress St. renewed.
The building that housed the Greenpeace office hasn’t fared so well. In fact it’s been completely gutted to make way for a 32-story behemoth. I’m just glad I got to see it when it still looked at least a little like it once did.
Speaking of urban density, the house right next to W.’s is getting some ugly new infill in the back yard. W.’s is pretty much the same as it was last year but that new house is seriously going to block the sun from his shop and driveway. The original house in front is getting a rehab to the tune of the high six figures. At least the property will look nice from the street.
Loved the fountain and stream on the fringe of Chinatown. No telling how long it’s been there but it fits perfectly if you overlook the six-lane semi-expressway 10 feet away.
The Commons was its same engagingly grungy self and even the sporadic rain couldn’t take its charm away. Swan boats still in full operation too, filled with hooting schoolkids and not an iPod in sight anywhere.
All the time I spent in the Back Bay when I lived here I don’t recall looking up that much then. If I did I’d have surely remembered there are some large, ornate and wickedly classy buildings around here. As always I'm reminded that they just don't know how to build things the way they did on the east coast.
It was pretty much a dash-and-go visit with E. and his wife at their house outside Keene – time to drive around and check on their sheep (now being pastured at two separate locations around town) and hike briefly up to the pond above their house and not much else. Except for blackflies. Nice weather, though, and good company.
You might notice that this year’s photos are generally long on landscape and short on people. That’s intentional, as the people I saw mostly don’t look too different than a year ago. The landscape, on the other hand, changes all the time. Or you see places you didn’t before. Or whatever. Maybe it’s just because I have to worry less about privacy concerns when it comes to inanimate objects.
Going to Bard the second day I took 9W from Stony Point to Newburgh, a stretch of road you think I’d know better given my grandparents lived in Nyack until 1980. I remember a day trip or two from there to Bear Mountain in my single-digit years (and the souvenir carved wooden bear kept for long after) but not much else. The slow drive that day didn’t awaken any memories either except for the time I was a junior at Bard out to write an alarmist piece on the Indian Point nuclear plant and drove down with my friends Suzanne the activist (not the Suzanne now living in Warwick) and Gabrielle the photographer and Joe the nutcase driver for an interview with the PR flack there and we showed up so stoned we forgot any interesting questions for him we might have developed on the way. Yes, those were the days weren’t they? And you wonder why the No Nukes movement in the 80s never got anyone more credible than Jackson Browne as a spokesperson.
Memories or not, it’s a lovely stretch of road, and Bear Mountain and Storm King are just as dramatic as ever. I’m reminded once again, as if I ever need it, why my mother loved the Hudson Valley of her youth so deeply, and am once again glad she was able to pass that love on to me.
The Bard campus has changed a lot in the intervening 26 years, meaning that if it were a commercial property, developers would be creaming in their jeans at all the infill that's gone up. Yeah, I know the college wants to accommodate a larger student body (during my time there it barely topped 1000) and its staggering tuition fees but even so, damned if they don't know how to ruin a beautiful campus by building promiscuously on it. Fully half the present structures weren't there when I graduated. Some of the new ones are kind of impressive, I admit, but fuck 'em.
And yet for all the fuck 'ems there's the like of magnificent, unchanging Blithewood, the old mansion at the south end of campus formerly a girl's dorm but now housing the Jerome Levy Economics Institute. Many a great romp was had on the lawn and gardens behind, including my first acid trip. I somehow managed to overlook Blithewood during my day's puttering around campus so the next day I stopped by on the way up to New Hampshire to snap a few of the big ol' white palace. Crews were busy setting up tents and whatnot for graduation but no one stopped to bother one guy with a camera. Benefits of an open campus and all.
I mean really. Can you imagine once using this place as a dorm? No wonder the bequest to Bard included the stipulation that boys never be allowed to live here.
Of course, for a Bard grad there's little reason to visit the mid-Hudson area but to poke around the ol' campus. Didn't do much of that last year because I was ducking the dreaded 25th reunion, but this year was safe and the campus was fairly quiet, making its final preparations for graduation a few days later.
Sunday we went into Manhattan for a tattoo show at Roseland. It was my first time in The City since 1999, and I forgot how vast it is in spite of taking up so little land. I’d say not much has changed there either but it’s really hard to say when you’re only there for a few hours with so long between visits.
We parked in a garage right next to the building where the Colbert Report is shot, which somehow tickled me tremendously. I never think of such vaunted institutions as having street entrances, or at least marked ones.
Suzanne got an extensive ankle tattoo at the show and a number of shots of Jack Daniels to go with it. When we got back to the garage she hadn’t unwrapped it yet but was feeling the pain even through the bourbon.
Not a lot’s changed since I was here a year ago. Orange County in the spring is still beautiful, Michael and Suzanne’s house is still classy, and their bulldog Tallulah is still an idiot even for a bulldog. In spite of the loveliness of the surroundings it seems I spent a disproportionate time in front of the TV, getting Michael hooked on The Wire. What better gift can a friend bring than his favorite box set, though?
Darla, now 9, has made a Soccer Mom of Suzanne. It’d be funny if it weren’t so totally ludicrous to hear my Manhattan-tough homegirl talking with the other SMs about trading team snack-days on the roster. On my first full day there I came along for a game in which Darla’s team fought their rivals to a 3-3 standstill. Darla was goalie and let the others score at least once unnecessarily which was disheartening for all involved. But when the hour was up and their opponents hadn’t been allowed to continue a recent winning streak, the star player on the other team cried and had to be made to give the customary high-five. Which somehow made it all worthwhile.
Hello again. This year’s whirlwind East Coast tour is over and I’m back in Austin with a day to recover under my belt and feeling nominally rested and relaxed and I had to go and spoil it all by going into work today. Not that I had much PTO left after last week anyway, but let’s just ignore that for the moment.
The stops on this year’s itinerary were the same as before, only in turned inside out. This time I started in Newark instead of Boston: picked up the rental there, drove to Warwick, hung out a few days with Michael and Suzanne, drove to New Hampshire and visited with E., went from there to Boston and stayed with W. and Dee a few days before driving back to Warwick and finally catching a plane home the next day. I wonder if it was the inside-out that made it seem much too short. (Same as last year, when I wrote halfway through: “The only thing I feel I conclusively know I know at this point is I don't have enough time on this trip. But you never really do when you travel, not to someplace you want to go.”)
Anyway, I had 10 days crammed as full as I could cram them. This time at least my energy didn’t crash until I got home, with a lot of ground covered in the meantime and something over 1100 miles on the rental’s odometer. I saw any number of locales I found colorful, pretty and exciting, which I’m going to share with you over the next few entries. All I can say is that I wish I was still there; on the east coast it hasn’t yet gotten too hot to sleep with the window open.
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