America takes Hallowe'en very seriously and even though I travel up the Hudson
Valley prior to October 31 the shops, markets and houses are heaving with
pumpkins of all sizes and shades. They echo the spectacular colours of the
trees - one week short of their prime - but nevertheless of an intensity
unseen in Britain.
Kinderhook and the surrounding area of Columbia County were the setting for
Washington Irving's legends about Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of
Sleepy Hollow. Irving was tutor to children at Lindenwald, the house
where Martin van Buren, President of the United States, lived between
1841-62. Ichabod Crane, the mythical schoolmaster who got involved with the
Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, was based on Jesse Merwin a real-life
schoolmaster who is buried in Kinderhook.
He lived up a long dirt road and tradition has it that should his original
gravestone (taken to the house from the cemetery) be turned over, the
Headless Horseman would ride again. Several years ago the old lady who lives
in the house decided to defy superstition and got a strong young man to turn
over the stone; that night disaster struck - no Headless Horseman but almost
as dramatic - with lightning striking the 40ft tree in front of her house.
A visit to Blackwood and Brouwer, the local bookshop at 7 Hudson Street (00 1
518 758 1232) in Kinderhook was a great way of finding out about literature
set in an area. Cecile Lamalle writes culinary mysteries - Prepared for
Murder (2001) and Appetite for Murder (1999) - and Hollis
Seamon wrote a collection of short stories Body Work (2000) about
women living in and around the Hudson Valley.
Middleton, halfway between New York and Albany, is near Salt Point "a
place where, history shows, herds of cattle being driven down from the farm
regions upstate to market in the city were stopped and allowed to lick
freely at salt blocks, something which cattle apparently love to do, their
mobile, almost prehensile, tongues wrapping luxuriously around the roughly
textured squares, so that when the herd was stopped again, shortly before
New York, for water, they would drink and drink (the same strategy is
employed by bars, of course, who serve free salty snacks), thereby
increasing their saleable weight by maybe ten fluid pounds and the farmer's
profits by some few dollars..".
Gore Vidal's Burr (1973) the portrait of Aaron Burr (a Founding
Father who fought and killed his political nemesis Alexander Hamilton in
1804) also takes place in the Hudson Valley. There is a suggestion that Burr
was Van Buren's father but whether he was or was not, he was certainly his
mentor.
Edna St.Vincent Millay lived at Steepletop in Austerlitz, also in the
neighbourhood, and wrote much of her poetry about the vicinity, but the
region is probably chiefly known for its painters - Thomas Cole, Asher
Durand and Frederic Church whose house Olana looks down on the Hudson River.
Much of their painting was done on the other side of the river from Columbia
County in the Catskills, where the Catskill Mountain House hotel was burnt
down by the authorities in the 1960s for being too large. The view from
where the hotel once stood is famous - you are perched 3,000 ft above the
river and can see an area stretching over 12,000 square miles; it was
described by James Fennimore Cooper in Leatherstocking Tales:
"What see you when you get there?"
"Creation!" said Natty, dropping the end of his rod into the water,
and sweeping one hand around him in a circle, "all creation, lad … The
river was in sight for 70 miles under my feet, looking like a curled
shaving, though it was eight miles long to its banks".
In the early nineteenth century bottles of wine used to be sent down by pulley
and basket to a platform overlooking the Kaaterskill Falls. Nowadays you get
a good view of the Hudson River, albeit from river level, from the Riverview
Café at 48 Riverview Street, Stuyvesant's Landing (518 758 8950) with its
red-tiled floor and comfortable sofas.
The restaurant which has the railway line between it and the river, was opened
by Terry Chabot in 2002 and is run by her and her family. It only provides
dinner on a Friday night, but the day-time menu has breakfasts and excellent
sandwiches and one of the locals is the real Serpico, the New York cop who
blew the whistle on corruption and who was played by Al Pacino in the movie.
Hudson, an old whaling town, has started booming again after years of
depression and consequently has many new restaurants and antique shops; I
lunched at Swoon one day and the Charleston the next (518 828 4990) both in
Warren Street, Hudson's main drag. During the 19th century the Hudson River
Valley attracted many British travellers who often arrived by steamboat, but
now, at surely one of the most glorious times of year, I didn't see another
tourist.
Reading: New York State (Lonely Planet, 2004)
Buy books by the authors mentioned, as well as a wide range of travel
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