Hudson Highlands: a personal note

-


The Highlands region of New Jersey and New York becomes sharply defined along its northwestern boundary, where slopes descend to the the sedimentary basin that supports the cities of Newburgh and Beacon, apple orchards, and sprawl.

Glacially scoured, bare bedrocks hilltops along the Highlands' northwestern edge have great views of the Hudson Valley, the Shawangunk Mountains and the Catskills beyond. Public hiking access to such spots includes the Appalachian Trail through Dutchess County, Hudson Highlands State Park, Storm King State Park and Black Rock Forest.

This view as I've seen it at different points in my life has had many meanings for me. Starting to explore the Highlands region as a kid with my dad, from our home well to the south in the Piedmont of NJ, it was a look beyond the limits of the world we could reach -- the radius of an hour or two of driving.

For many years in my 20s as I've tried to set out on my own, these mountains were the objects of my desire for a greater unknown -- for beauty, grandeur, mystery and accomplishment.

The Shawangunks are a place of unique beauty, but crowded. The Catskills are on a big scale - New York not New Jersey sized mountains with old growth forest, cool rushing streams, hippie vibes and Upstate New York sadness. During my adult life so far, I have been filling them both up with memories. I hope to continue to do so, but they are no longer so monumental in my yearning, confused mind.

Sitting for the second time this summer at such a viewpoint, I've come to see how nature reflects our state of mind. I suppose art can be like this too. How cool to see a beautiful sight -- in this case a major river, cities, towns, fertile fields, hills, ridges and mountains -- and to invest it with such personal meaning, and then to come back again and again as your attitude towards it changes but the sight stays more or less the same. It's a little like looking up at the moon, only if we could go to the moon and consider making our lives there.

This summer I looked at the view first from Mount Egbert along the Appalachian Trail with Max, whose parents now live under the Catskills, who drives up the NY Thruway all the time. Then with Sarah, who has lived in and enjoyed the Hudson Valley, but who is not a native, and to whom the bumps on the horizon have much less precise meaning than they do to me. She is about to leave the New York area, perhaps for good. We talked about meditation and prayer, Buddhism and Christianity. These matters of the heart and spirit made the view look small.

Sarah has an intensity about her. Not a neurotic energy like other intense people I know. She and I can meet on a great conversational plain that seems both elevated and intimate. The electrifying possibility of abstract spiritual richness and growth seems, I hope, like a beacon to follow in my future life, as the sight of the white stripe of Silurian conglomerate exposed as southeast facing ledges on the Shawangunk Mountains, and the outline of the Catskills against the horizon, once served for me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Grandpa: an Economic History

-
Image
I don't have facts here, I just have family stories. My great grandparents, Masha and David Shoshkes, emigrated to Newark, NJ from a small town in Poland as adults. David went into the produce business, starting off with a pushcart. Through hard work and sacrifice, the story goes, he saved enough money to establish a store on South Orange Avenue. Later, he became a distributor, driving his truck to delis in the suburbs with their produce orders. One of his clients was the Town Hall Deli in South Orange, which still exists. As he accumulated some capital, David invested in real estate. These ventures were risky, and due to one financial setback, the family had to pack up and move into an investment property of his, for a number of years. This house was in an Italian neighborhood of nearby East Orange with few Jewish residents. It seems that my grandpa was bullied in school while they lived there. My grandpa Milton was a smart kid. He liked sports but violin made a more lasting i
Read more

Impressions of Colorado

-
Image
  The Rocky Mountains are similar to the Presidential Range of New Hampshire in that they are in many places old rounded mountains that have been spiced up by Pleistocene glaciation. I can’t speak for everywhere but many important ranges from the Front Range and Sawatch Range in Colorado to the Beartooth Mountains of Montana share a common appearance: some sides are rugged cliffs scooped out by glacers, but the preglacial erosional surfaces are never far away, in the form of rounded boulder-covered slopes. The glaciers didn’t get everywhere in these mountains, and while the most dramatic terrain lies above U-shaped glacial valleys, there are large areas - whether a side of a mountain or an entire mountain range - that retain their smoothed-over appearance from millions of years of erosion. The strongest impression that the Colorado Rockies left on me was of extensiveness and geologic diversity, more than of steepness and ruggedness. The state has countless mountain ranges exhibiting a
Read more

Little Falls, Potomac River, Washington DC

-
Image
Washington DC is one of the many cities in the US Mid-Atlantic region located on the “fall line” where the hard crystalline bedrock of the Piedmont meets the relatively soft sediments of the Coastal Plain. The region contains several major rivers that are as a rule wide, navigable and tidal up to the fall line. At that point they usually contain a steep fast stretch as they transition to their generally narrower, shallower, fresher Piedmont forms. Some of these “falls” are more impressive than others. Now that I’m listing them out, they appear to get more dramatic as you go south. A casual tuber could go over the falls on the Delaware at Trenton without spilling his or her drink (though to be fair I’ve only seen them briefly out a train window). The dam on the Schuylkill by the Philadelphia water works is a nice urban park, but it is overshadowed by the city's Museum of Art nearby (from Rocky ). Jones Falls in Baltimore features some dramatic scenes of post-industrial nature but th
Read more