June 8 to 13— Schodack Island (NY) State Park, in the Hudson River below Albany
The campground here has only been open two months. On the plus side it means the bath house up-to-date and clean, the picnic tables unscarred, the fire ring unrusted. On the other hand the park managers have some work to do cleaning up their trail map. The basic qualities one values in a map—distance, direction, course—have not yet found their way into the park’s current offering. It’s not like you can get dangerously lost but you can start off on what you think is a nice little stroll and have it turn into a major slog.
Still, it is a decent place. It is one of the only habitats of the cerulean warbler, a tiny blue bird which I definitely heard and will claim to have seen—they are arboreal birds like Orioles and it is hard to distinguish color way up there against a blue sky. Let’s just say I saw one.
We took a trip into Albany, walked the downtown area for a couple of hours. I was disappointed that I could not get into the State House—it is supposed to be something of an architectural masterpiece, plus, who could pass up the opportunity to walk the hall of one of the country’s most corrupt legislatures—but the guards said that I could either dispose of my tiny pocket knife or take it back to my car which they didn’t know was a mile away but could not enter with it. I understand, I guess, tho my pen is just as lethal, but frankly, I thought their manner was rude, kind of the way people imagine New York City residents act but don’t, really; after the one guard gave me my options regarding my lethal weapon the other guard piped up, as if he were auditioning for The Sopranos, “You’re choice.” Like that added anything to my understanding of the situation. I left there with a bad attitude toward Albany that stayed with me until we had a nice lunch and a pint in a very nice English pub-sort-of-place.
Today it was raining so we took a tour of Martin Van Buren’s house in Kinderhook, NY. He was yclept as “Old Kinderhook” during his presidential campaign, which some people believe is the origin of the word/phrase “OK.” My friend Chris Brown has a more plausible explanation based on a Dutch phrase he encountered (“och doch”) evolving into “okey dokey” and then “okay.” I bought a book on the subject of, and entitled, “OK” at the Van Buren gift shop and hope to come to an informed opinion on the matter.
Fun fact: Van Buren was the first president born a U.S. citizen.
After Van Buren it stopped raining so we found a wildlife area along the Hudson (Papascanee) and walked the broken slate along the shore for a good ways. The Hudson, surprisingly, is tidal all the way up here, 150 miles from its mouth. If you throw a stick in the river at Troy, NY it will drift upstream and down, two steps forward and one back, and take four months to flow to the ocean, according to one authority. Because of the alternating influence of tide and flow the Mohican name for the Hudson was “river that flows in two directions.”
Albany has an impressive skyline, dominated by a set of of tall matching buildings that are simple and elegant, giving it a sort of future-city, Brasilia-like appearance. “Visit if you can, but leave your pen knife at home” is the city slogan.
I forgot to report that I toured the Remington Arms Museum in Ilion, NY while in Cooperstown. Brenda wasn’t interested because it was mostly, well, entirely, about GUNS. The museum is on the grounds of the original, still-operating Remington Factory. (The company is poised to relocate and using the same ploy that Beretta used in Charles County, Maryland, claiming that they will leave the state to protest the restrictive gun laws but really are moving to a place where the workers “work almost for nothin’.”) The Remington creation myth is interesting—Eliphalet Remington had a worn-out fowling piece and thought he could build one as good. His father was a blacksmith and they made a roll-welded or coil-welded barrel and a wood stock and Eliphalet walked fifteen miles to Utica to have the barrel rifled, came in second place in a local shooting match and took scores of orders for new rifles. That was 1816 and before long he had the largest gun manufactury in the US. He attracted innovators to his factory and Remington rifles have dominated the market since. Of course this whole region is really the industrial birthplace of the nation in the 19th century, thanks to the Erie Canal. In Cooperstown area the Singer sewing machine and the Clark thread companies were the economic engines, and still are.
Today we went to Saratoga National Park and took the walking tour over the sprawling battlefield where the British General Burgoyne ultimately surrendered and turned the tide of the Revolutionary War. The trail roams the significant sites of the battle over four+ miles through imposing forests and old fields with views of mountains receding into the distance. Interesting that the victory here led the French to lend support to the American cause, while a hundred years later Lincoln needed the win at Antietam to keep the French out of the Civil War.
The Americans captured something like 3,000 German mercenaries here and after the battle marched them toward Virginia to be held as prisoners of war. Tom Allen told me a while ago that along the way as the column passed through the German settlements all through lower New York and Pennsylvania the Hessians slipped away and hid among the population, becoming American farmers, and by the time the column got to Virginia there were hardly any prisoners left.
Looking forward to Vermont and New Hampshire in the coming weeks.