April 1, 1980 Journal Entry East Village

April 1

My brother Frank's Birthday

April Fool's Day 1979

Yesterday Michael Selbach and I felt the urge for a short trip up the Hudson on his Kawasaki 650cc motorcycle. The day was sunny and I dressed in white denims; jacket and jeans, then rode the subway up to Times Square. The David's Pot Belly's cook waited on the corner of 42nd and Eighth. He handed me a Bell helmet and I climbed on the back.

"I never thought you'd be my bike bitch."

"Hey, this is only platonic."

He headed over to the semi-destructed West Side Highway and we cruised north along the Hudson.

"Shall we go to the Cloisters?" he shouted with his head slightly turned away from the wind.

"I went there two weeks ago. Have you ever been to West Point?" The famed military academy was about fifty miles away.

"No, I haven't."

"It's worth the ride, plus there's the Storm King Highway overlooking the Hudson. A must see." I had been there once with my family. Like me my father loved the road.

"Sounds good to me."

We crossed the Fiord on the GW Bridge to New Jersey and sped along the Palisades Parkway.

Far back in the Ice Age this falaise had guarded an extinct continent against the rising ocean, as the melt-off from the mile-high glacier carved through the tectonic plate to form the Hudson hundreds of feet below us. A fierce wind along the parkway buffered us from lane to lane. Thankfully traffic was light after the 9W exit and we soon sheltered by the bare branched trees.

The towns along the western bank were situated out of sight from the roadway. THe surrounding towns had outlived their original purpose to become suburbs for men and women commuting into Manhattan for work. We passed by the exit signs dentoing their existence without seeing their centers. After Nyack the land ruralized with farms spreading over the hills, until we reached a massive quarry shipping gravel to reconstruct New York City recovering slowly from the dereliction of the 1970s.

Michael topspeeded on the highway. 86 mph. Helmets restricted any conversation and I spoke within my mind to my minds.

After Haversack we entered the suburban sprawl of malls and little league fields. The station wagons were filled with young boys in baseball uniforms driven by well-coiffed mothers. The young boys studied our passage with a a sense of yearning. Some of them had to want to be us.

Michael and I had grown up in similar surroundings on the West and East Coasts. A life as a bum was preferable to their parents' enslavement to the 9 to 5. I had left behind the suburbs in 1974 and I harbored no urge of returning to the sprawl of my birth.

Lately Michael had been talking about moving to Hoboken, as if he was abandoning the city. I was bound to the East Village. I wasn't leaving until it was time to leave and today that felt like never.

Haverstack gave way to West Haversack without a struggle. George Washington might have retreated through these lands after the military debacle in New York over two centuries ago. The towns were replaced by farmland and then tenth-growth woodlands. Michael hit 80W for a few miles before we exited for West Point.

US 6 spanned the Hudson River on the Bear Mountain Bridge. In 1948 Jack Kerouac started his trip across America here. That trip inspired ON THE ROAD. I wanted Michael to stop, so I could stand where the Beat writer had stood thirty-two years ago. The bridge dated back to the 1930s. America really began here. I had last hitchhiked across the continent in the winter of 1975. I stood wishing I was on my way to the Coast, instead I sat back on the bike.

We descended into marshes. Railroad tracks were strapped to the western bank. A sign WEST POINT 10 MILES stood at attention by the roadside. My father had driven here on our Ford Station Wagon in 1966. I had been almost fourteen. My mother had wanted me to be a priest or a cadet.

Michael and I entered the academy by Thayer Gate. The graduates of the the 1960s and 1970s had served in Vietnam. The power of the world's strongest army. Defeated by rice farmers. Now five years after the Fall of Saigon the cadets of the 1980s in their dress uniforms showed no defeat. Their stiff posture marked their dreams of America's future glory. Vietnam wasn't their defeat, but it was our victory. Michael and I were both anti-war leather punks.

A sign announced NO PARADE TODAY.

"It's a good show." Back in my youth I had wanted to be a cadet. Anything to get out of my hometown on the South Shore of Boston. I would have looked good in the uniform.

We stopped at the military graveyard. Home eternal for thousands of officers. We stood at George Custer's grave.

"He's no hero."

"And neither are we."

We saddled up and the Kawasaki climbed the steep two-laner to the top of the Storm King Highway, 420 feet over the Hudson. We stopped at the precipitous vista point. The Hudson ran north between the Berkshires and Catskills. Both mountain ranges had been shorn of their height by the glaciers.

"You know I might have fallen in love with Vickie." Michael had been seeing the redheaded fashion student for a few months. I was still recovering from Lisa's desertion. My blonde girlfriend had disappeared into Europe to be a fashion model. I had seen her in a German lingerie ad. Michael had been a good friend. His wife had left him last summer.

That's a good thing for you."

"But not you?"

"It's was bound to happen. I'm happy you're in love. I know how to drink alone."

"Really?"

No, but better you than neither of us."

"What about you and Elizabeth?"

I had been seeing the lanky Virginian for a few months too. We had even met each other's parents.

"We're going nowhere."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah I'm too haunted. I don't felt anything for anyone. Not even myself. It's better that I break up with her before I really hurt her."

"Or yourself." Michael straddled the Kawasaki. "Too bad, she's a great girl. By the way you should look at your jacket."

"Why?"

"Look."

I took off the Levi jacket. The back tire had thrown up a oily rooster tail to splatter the back of the white jacket.

"Damn. That ain't gonna come off."

"Your jeans match."

"Double damnit."

I got on the bike behind Michael. If I had a motorcycle, I wished we were bound for the West Coast and a sore ass, but we crossed the Hudson at Newburgh and drove south to New York and our lives.

Boom Boom - Super Bowl - 2014

Last night I heard a rumble from the river. The thunder sounded like a battle. I worried that the Canadians had attacked New York City. I called several friends living on the Hudson. The growling grew louder. Finally Rod Longprong answered his phone.

"I heard the same thing. It's fireworks."

"Fireworks for what?"

"For Super Bowl Weekend." I was thinking some rich banker's engagement party.

"Oh." I felt foolish about fearing an invasion, then again The Patriots weren't in the Game, so I could care less about the SuperBowl in the Meadowlands.

Broncos versus Seahawks.

I'm picking the Seahawks.

Anyone but Peyton Manning.

2017 February

A snow day. February 2017. Cold with a storm at large. Snow coming and it dropped a load on Fort Greene.

Eight inches and more of the heavy stuff.

Seeing Past the Hudson - Poetry 1978

Soft, the West Wind
Blowing visions
Of a continent
From beyond the Hudson River
Jersey to the Delaware Water Gap
The Midwest corn fields
360 flat horizens
The Mississippi
Corn giving way to cattle
The Missouri
High prarie rising from the Midwest
Sighting of the Rockies
Desert
Nevada
More desert
The Sierras
Oh California
Oh, the Pacific.
Stretching west to Asia.
I see it all
All America
From sea to shining sea
Standing on a Hudson River pier
The evening tide slipping to the sea
Holding you in my arms
Your boyish body
Your woman's mind
Tender
Our embrace
I crave us naked
I don't want California
All I want is you.

Bridges On The Hudson

Written Sep 2, 2018

The Kaaterskil Creek flows East out of the Catskill Mountains Into the Hudson River___

The creek has existed since the Ice Age.

For millenium the primordial Glacial Shield sheared off the tops of much high mountains forming the Catskills. Granite tops their ruined peaks.

A land of wonder.

In 1818 at the age of seventeen Thomas Cole emigrated from England to the newly-formed United States. Enamoured the wild beauty of the Hudson River Valley Thomas Cole moved to Cedar Farm on a high ridge with a westerly view of Kaaterskil Mountain immortalized the view of the mountain ridges from his veranda in Catskill.

The view was unchanged in 2018.

In June 2018 I stood atop the Hudson Milliner of Warren Street helping Shannon patch a hole in the roof. The steeple of the First Presbyterian Church cut off the view of Kaaterskil. My friend and his wife have been coming up river for years. In recent years I have joined them to help with construction, but mostly in the basement. It was good to be in the open air.

Wiping the sweat from my face, I said, "It would be good to good for a swim."

Neither of us had swam in the Hudson and he said, "The Kaaterskil Creek is best."

"What about the Hudson?"

"No one swims in the Hudson."

The GE Plant in Schenectady had been formed by Thomas Edison. The Electric Industry had dumped pollutants into the river for decades. Deadly pollutants. So bad the PCPs killed off the Shad fishing seasons forever.

Before the White Man came the river was home to the Lenape people. THe called it or Muhheakantuck, the Lenape name for the river that flow both ways. In the summer they traveled down river to Manhhattah to feast oysters on Manhattan by the billions. The middens of discard shells created large mounds and the Dutch named a path Pearl Street for the luminous nacres ps the name Manhatta means “place of inebriation.

Peter Stuyvesant stole this treasure for the Dutch.

White men were the devil, but the river surged in and out without prejudice.

Tides ruled its flow.

Not man.

At least until the Union Bridge connected Waterford and Lansingburgh in 1804.

I mentioned this crossing to Shannon.

According to Structure Magazine the Union Bridge, connecting Waterford and Lansingburgh, New York, was the first to cross the Hudson River in its 154 mile course from New York harbor northward. It was located near a long time ford and ferry crossing. The Internet answered so many questions, but once we had completed our task, the two of us grabbed our bathing suits and went for lunch, before Charlotta his partner pressganged us into another task. In old houses there are always many.

After a beer we crossed over the Hudson on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, which had opened in 1935 to fireworks. I had once walked across it in the winter squall. Rogers Island and Hallenbeck Creek beneath obscured by snow flurries. Coming from New England I have good winter gear.

On the other side I told Shannon, "I love that bridge. It's probably the prettiest of those across the river.

"What about Bear Mountain? Isn't that where Jack Kerouac start hitchhiking across America in ON THE ROAD?"

To get to 6 I had to go up to Bear Mountain. Filled with dreams of what I'd do in Chicago, in Denver, and then finally in San Fran, I took the Seventh Avenue Subway to the end of the line at 242nd Street, and there took a trolley into Yonkers; in downtown Yonkers I transferred to an outgoing trolley and went to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River. If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys as it goes to sea forever -- think of that wonderful Hudson Valley. I started hitching up the thing. Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6 arched in from New England. It began to rain in torrents when I was let off there. - OPENING to ON THE ROAD

"You're right." I stopped talking about the bridges across the Hudson.

Tomorrow I was traveling south.

Whatever I knew about the bridges was nothing without seeing them. We swam in the warm creek. The slabs of rock scarred by the glaciers. The scrapping immortalized in the stone.

The next day I caught Amtrak's 3:47 to Penn Station from the Hudson NY station.

The train arrived on time.

We left on time too.

I was alone with a seat on the right. A river view.

The bay below the Rip Van Winkle Bridge was calm.

I was returning to the city to work.

Construction at Chez Oskar, Charlotta's restaurant on Malcolm X Boulevard. Far from the Hudson. I wish I could have stayed , but I have five children in Thailand.

They hated me not working.

Beyond the opposite bank rose mountains.

They were eternal.

The Rip Van Winkle's supports had been set in the tidal marshes.

1934.

The train hurried south through woods.

In 1835 Alexis De Torqueville had written during his travel from Newe York to Philadelphia that America was a jungle in DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA.

He was more right now than then.

What had been farmland in the 19th Century was mostly now woods.

The valley healing from Man.

The Catskills seemed small from the eastern shore of the Hudson.

Before the Glaciers they had been highger. The rubble had been swept south to form Long Island.

The train ran close to sea level.

The river flowed 315 miles from its headwaters in the Adirondacks.

Straight into the Atlantic.

A cold northern ocean.

The train picked up speed.

Another bridge crossed the river.

Rhinebeck to Kingston.

It had been built in 1957.

And still worked today carrying cars and trucks east and west.

I nodded off and dreamt of the impending apocalyppse. The Bridge toppled into the river. I woke, as the train pulled into the suburbs of Poughkeepsie. Another bridge. A train bridge converted to a pedestrian tourist attraction.

145 feet over the river.

It had survived by dream world extinction. For now.

A few passengers boarded at Rhinebeck.

The sun dropped low.

Even for this last day in the solstice cycle.

The river was calm enough to please the early explorers Jean Cabot and Henry Hudson.

It is called a drowned river and the dead always speak with quiet in their hearts.

I looked out the window.

The river bore only birds.

None of them were quacking.

I nodded off to nowhere and woke under the construction for the new Tappan Zee Bridge. The replacement bridge will cost $4 billion dollars. It will have a new name.

Or two billions beers at the 169 Bar in Chinatown, my home away from home.

Once ferries carrying passengers and cargo up the river. All I see are barges, although the Newburgh–Beacon Ferry still services commuters.

Now there are more bridges on the Hudson from the wooden foot bridge just east of Henderson Lake outlet to the mightiest span of all is the GW Bridge. Forty Seven in total.

A monster.

The train tucked into the shore and delivered us to Penn Station.

Right on time.

New York wouldn't be New York without the Hudson.

Because all cities are defined by their surroundings and man can never defied Nature.

Never.