My grandparents bought our home in Columbia County in 1948. But I didn’t start visiting regularly until I was a teenager in the late Sixties. I’d walk deep into the woods to write bad poetry. Which I’ve come to understand is age appropriate behavior.
After my grandparents passed away, I was lucky that my parents showed little interest in the place. They were born and bred city people. My mother was once stung by a wasp in her upstate bedroom -- in February.
I believe she took that as an omen.
My father kept all the doors locked all the time. And when he left the house, he left lights on, as well as an elaborate place setting in the dining room, along with a note that said, “Be right back!”
Just to spook any burglars.
By the late Seventies, and post-college, the property was basically mine. There’s a photo album of Polaroids that documents the fun my friends and I had back in that charmed era. The intoxicated dinner parties. The skinny dipping in the pond.
My wife has relegated the album to the top shelf of our library so our children won’t be tempted to examine it. Even though they’re both in their twenties.
They couldn’t care less. They just wish we didn’t come up every weekend. They want the run of the place -- the way we had it at their age.
There was rumor of only one celebrity who had a home in the area back then. Harry Belafonte.
I like to think the rumor confirmed when I ordered a roast beef sandwich topped with cole slaw at the Claverack Food Mart a few years back. Guess who was the first person ever to order that combination years earlier? Owner Ted Filli told me it was Harry Belafonte.
When my grandparents bought own house, the story went that the traffic consisted of one car. It traveled down their sleepy country road in the morning and returned in the evening.
There are more cars, and more notable residents, than there were back then. But the fundamental experience of the area feels unchanged.
Nature still holds the upper hand. You can still go to the supermarket in pajama pants if you feel like it.
I’ve heard the fear expressed for years that the Hudson Valley is destined to become the next Hamptons.
That will never happen. And not just because we don’t have ocean views.
Ours is not the area for you if you like to see and be seen. Even if the buzz on Warren Street in Hudson, New York on weekends bears more than a passing resemblance to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Privacy is one of the area’s selling points. And you don’t needs twelve-foot hedges or forbidding security gates to accomplish it. Fields and woods do the job just fine.
And then there’s our ace in the hole. The Taconic State Parkway. One of the nation’s most lovely yet fearsome roadways. It boasts what I like to call “The Wall of Death.” You know what I’m talking about. It’s that Depression-era, shoulderless, high stone retaining wall around Carmel, New York.
I know otherwise happy, successful adults who will do anything to avoid that harrowing experience, preferring the monotony of the New York State Thruway, even if it takes them well out of their way.
However, the beauty of the Taconic is that it also serves as a metaphor. As soon as you join it, you may as well be on a magic carpet ride to a different time and place. It taps the Rip Van Winkle in each of us.
That fantasy holds sway unless the cops pull you over for speeding. They typically don’t buy the excuse that you’re just excited to reach your house and start your weekend.
Ralph Gardner Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgarnder.com.
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