Ahead, Behind Those Trees

I’m falling in love, fast.  This rail trail behind our New York house is fun.  The other day I went on to Gardiner.  I timed it.  A straight flat shot it was only thirty-five minutes, passed the creek and the farm house and the McMansions, to a new bridge I hadn’t crossed over before and on past new groves and new fields and back into cognizance in the town of Gardiner and the library they have down by the old tracks. 

Today I went the other way.  The ride into New Paltz is only five minutes.  The way out from town was rail-trail-incognita.  The ride out of town passes a playground, there is a lot for sale and the back sides of businesses I’d never considered before all abut the trail.  The Gunks up to the left, and the Wallkill underneath me I decide to take a photo or two.  Now the land becomes rural. There’s a clapboard sign placed up off the trail side.  Someone serves their own wine and beer at a farm house obscured, off somewhere ahead, behind those trees.   

Around the thirty-minute mark I pause and consider Google Maps.  It’s only twenty-five more minutes to the next town of Rosendale.  Why not?   The trail is flat.  They dynamited out all the inclines one-hundred and seventy years ago and so you pass through dark, obsidian slate gashes in the woods.  Someone has a convincing tree house set above the top of one of them.  And with each home you pass you imagine the people that live there and what it would be like to live where they live, and sit on their porch.

I keep thinking of “Cross Roads”, the old Robert Johnson song  Is it?  It isn’t ‘Rosedale’.  I check   It’s Rosendale.  It isn’t far at all.  That’s it up there.  Down of this road to the hill, is the town and it unfolds, fragile and wonderful with a dozen stores that seem so brave in their determination in the age of the Amazon-after-mall.  How do these little places survive?

Even biking, you can blink and miss it.  Continue out to where the river crosses under and a big blue bridge brings you over to Route 32.  I turn around here and begin the inevitable ride home.  The map app says I’ve got fifty minutes to go and the toughest part is right up ahead of me getting out of Rosendale.  First though I’ve got to cross this Remarkable Trestle Bridge that looms over the town and was apparently built by Robeling, the same gent who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Wednesday, 09/04/19