To Leave, I Couldn't

 

If you asked me yesterday, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you where New Hope was.  I drove down there today, on an icy morning as I’d committed to see an old friend down at his new place.  The weather sounded ominous last night though there was only a bit of drizzle in the morning.  The car was iced over and took some time to thaw out but I was traveling down the New York State Throughway and the conditions were fine, as I listened along with a client call. By the time I had the airwaves back driving along 202, I found WFMU had moved, and I could barely keep the new signal.  I settled on a local country station. 

 

His place is marvelous and it’s great to see he and his wife.  Out in the back you can see the Delaware River and hear the remarkable rapids that seem to stretch across the broad path of the river.  “Was it near to hear?”  “Where Washington crossed the Delaware?  Yeah.  Right down that way.”  He says, pointing out the large window.  “They have a reenactment every year.”  Later we walk down by the river and the roar is considerably louder. 

To cross-the-Delaware we drove through New Hope, which felt warm and prosperous like certain townships in Westchester.  New Hope’s ninety minutes from Manhattan, just like New Paltz but it’s also only fifty minutes to Philadelphia, which accounts for the sense of dense, Mid-Atlantic suburbia.  That positioning was hard to get my mind around and I tried to imagine where this was on a map.  Remarkably to my thinking, the town across the way was every bit as prosperous.  Crossing the old singing green bridge we landed in Lambertville, which immediately lodged itself mnemonically with Kit Lambert, the manager of The Who.  I was expecting to see the rough side of town over in New Jersey but this down seemed a mirror image of New Hope.

 

We parked at the end of town and walked out to where the locks and canal channel began their run out of town.  The rapids must have stood there impeding any down river traffic for centuries and then in the early nineteenth century the drive to create other pathways for the river’s flow.  What marvels they must have been for a time.  We plodded along the snowy canal path, above the roaring river for a quarter mile or so and considered his place now from the other side of the river. 

 

When it was time to leave, I couldn’t.  A gent had come and successfully navigated his snowy driveway with is enormous fuel track but when he tried to back out he became stuck.  Struggling valiantly a few times, running down and backing up he eventually got the truck up at which point he beeped the horn triumphantly and we pumped our arms in affirmation and then, a moment later noticed that he was still stuck, further on up ahead on the hill.  This time he couldn’t rock forward and back.  He was stuck and now, walking down the hill. 

Tuesday, 2/16/21