Hudson Valley Ruined: Breaking and Entering in a Lost America

At the end of 1999, the hobbits of the Hudson Valley beamed messages at my brain.    It's amazing how one minute you're nowhere, or as good as nowhere, riding your bicycle in Brooklyn on the path underneath the Verrazano Bridge, as the year dribbles away and the December afternoon falls off into darkness?and then with the click of a synapse, bingo, a chain of associations fires upstairs as you pedal, and you're in another mental space altogether.

And thank God, because I'll tell you this: it's ridiculous pedaling northward along the edge of the Verrazano Narrows in December, with a huge wind screaming down over the water and shearing your cheeks off. Not only because of the pain, but because if the wind's hard enough and direct enough you're pedaling in place: like a circus bear whiplashed up rigid by the blast, a rictus frozen onto your face. You're weeping with pain, pumping a thousand rotations per minute to move a mere dozen yards. Trucks scream past you on the Belt Pkwy. Guys stick their faces up to the glass in wonderment, and every time a police car blows by amidst the rest of the shabby outer-borough traffic you're sure he's going to pull over and arrest you. You've got to be doing something wrong: pedaling in place in the deep freeze, 24 degrees, and then you've got to factor in the wind. You're stupid.

I guess it was the scudding water that triggered the association. I'm a teenager again and on a cold boat up in Haverstraw Bay, off Ossining, and the boat's heeling crazily and?

Or else we're walking by the river in February after school, so that?

Etc.

Anyway, great nostalgia?a great sad feeling of watery resonance and deja vu?seized me. Screamed home on my bike through Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst and the rest of those Brooklyn places, and slept it off. Maybe if I'd have pressed that weird deja vu feeling I'd have gone telepathic?could have apprehended over great space the presence of another consciousness, maybe even the residual consciousness of a younger me. But I didn't. I lack the mental discipline to be a psychonaut.

And it turned out well enough. I hit the Web in the next few days, and did indeed encounter through it another consciousness, a collective one. And a distant one, upstate in the wastes of a New York state winter. Those creatures up there were beaming me. It was as if I were alone in a mountaintop observatory and aliens had contacted me over light-years' worth of space. Another deep loneliness ensued from this contact, deeper than if they'd just let me alone in my isolation in the first place. Communication between beings separated by infernal tundra?which in fact New York state in winter by and large is. I wanted to go to my rooftop with a mirror and flash a signal toward the north.

So this metaphor presented itself to me, and so did another, which happens to be the one we'll stick with: Puzzled Middle Earth hobbits had burrowed up through the ceilings of their hobbit holes, popped their heads up through the soil and realized...well, gee, there's another world out there, beyond our little hobbit world...

These communications?in the form of a website message board I found that night?came from the village of Hudson, NY. That's a windy municipality located on the eastern shore of the Hudson River in Columbia County, just south of Albany. Hudson's a typical red-brick Hudson River village, both in its stolid 19th-century virtues (its good red-brick architecture, for example) and in its salient misfortunes. Inland strip development has gutted the village's economy, so Hudson has made an effort to transform into antique shops the storefronts of its once-thriving downtown. In this way, the village solons calculated, they'd attract the custom of daytripping urbanite shoppers.

In this they were relatively successful, in fact. But even this success is kind of sad, because antiquing is the traditional last economic refuge of the Hudson River village degenerating toward slum. Start selling antiques, and you basically admitted your obsolescence. The stench of death gathers around you.

So we're talking about upstate Columbia County, but it might as well have been Middle Earth.

Or a Pygmy settlement.

Or Bulgaria.

Or some other isolated community that makes contact with the greater human community and acquires for the first time the equivocal blessing of self-consciousness. I was struck by the yearning that the posted messages encoded. It was as if the village's inhabitants had, under the regenerative influence of the new millennium, just awaked from a collective slumber of a half century's duration and were stumbling around in the first moments of their disorientation, blinking and asking the sorts of questions no one should have to ask. How? Why? Whither? What the?? They were horrified by the mysterious faces they saw as they looked in their mirrors.

I encountered, for instance, postings like the following, which suggested something weird about the life of the village of Hudson, NY:

"If anyone has any information about the sculpture of the child holding a snake sitting on a big skull that is located on Columbia Street in Hudson I would be interested in hearing about it."

Anyone? Anyone where? I wondered why this small-town American didn't just walk out her front door and buttonhole the first old man she met and find out from him what she wanted to know. Simple as that. Or, if she'd tried that and that hadn't worked, why hadn't she called the old fellow at the local Chamber of Commerce, or the village historical society's resident spinster? Or whatever.

Why are you asking me, woman?

But then I smacked myself in the head. Who else was there to ask? Everyone in her village else was dazed, too. The village had?I'd forgotten?apparently just awoken from a sleepy enchantment.

And if you wake up in Hudson in 1999 what are you going to want to reconcile yourself to? Downtown's screwed. People are selling all the old, rotten crap out of their attics. Wiggers thump around in Jeeps with big tires, selling powder to each other down by the riverside. In all ways your river town, like a lot of other river towns, is dying. Development's destroying the landscape east of the river, and it's possible that soon not even the ridiculous antique shops will be able to survive. Probably if you go wading in the river of your youth, its foul water will rip your skin off.

And, as if that weren't all bad enough, when you open the paper you learn that two despicable human beings?that brutal New York City mayor and that woman who's married to the President?are competing to represent you in the Senate. You've awakened into a joke. Your wonderful region's been abandoned to the imperatives of junk capitalism and the sleaziest of politics. You might want to go back to sleep.

Here's a posting placed on the message board by a hobbit who identifies himself as Paul:

"i am a hudsonian, being born and raised there, i got to see alot of things change for both the better and the worse. hudson's name is sometimes slanderized. but, the majestics it offers are the best in the region."

He continues:

"since the 40's when hudson probably lost most of the population, we lost alot of attention too. antique shops line warrren st, and the building is occuring slowly (e.g opera house)?"

Then he evokes the town that was, the village that existed before he, Paul, drifted off with his fellow citizens in a collective reverie:

"...no builings above 4 floors, trollies as busses and all the people know each other?"

"...since the days of suddy's, knowing each other there reflects a good society?"

So all these yearning night flashings beamed into my apartment, where I sat late in the evening, smug in my contemporaneity. And then I read Paul's coup de grace:

"some people dread going into some neighborhoods and traveling through some streets (eg lower columbia, across 3rd)."

Afraid to cross 3rd St.? In a village 60-some miles north of New York City? In the country?

Translated out of hobbitspeak's gentilities, the question these creatures are asking themselves is: Who are we, and what happened here?

I'd become apprised of a pocket of questioning intelligence in a landscape?the Hudson Valley?that's certainly haunted and probably doomed.

Haunted we'll get to.    Probably doomed, because it just is.    I started to get interested in the idea of geographical self-consciousness, particularly as it's manifested in the Hudson Valley, where I'm from. The whole region's screwed. For example, a huge mall recently opened up along the New York Thruway, a short drive east from the Tappan Zee Bridge, which bridge they're actually thinking of rebuilding, because 45 years after its construction the span is inadequate to the volume of traffic it's come to bear. America's first Arcadia?the landscape the Hudson River School painters saw fit to idealize?has been destroyed, obliterated by sprawl.

So what do you do about it? "Progress"?the habitual invocation of which word has traditionally motivated the self-lacerating snufflings of so-called "liberals," the people who unfortunately are the first to want "to do something about it," whatever "it" happens to be?won't help you fight the problem. Progress is what created the problem in the first place.

But then I started thinking that if you conceive of politics geographically, suddenly there's something immediately at stake almost every day. Conceive of geography as a motivating principle for politics, and life becomes a series of stark choices, of the sort that are good for a body politic, and that are almost never offered to us citizens as matters stand now.

Choices like this: Either they build the nation's largest mall in the Hudson Valley, and screw up another so many acres or whatever it is, and thus hammer another nail into the grave of the region's identity, or else I stop them, and they don't.

Or again: Either the village of Tarrytown, on the eastern shore of the river up in Westchester County, does something humane with the riverside site of the General Motors factory that was just closed and reduced to rubble, or else the town fathers sell it off to a tar concern. In which case I will have to stop them, so that they won't.

Or yet again: Either the overpopulation stops or else?

Or else the muzzle of a shotgun?a metaphorical shotgun if you want, but a real one's fine, too?materializes against the back of the responsible party's mouth as the compromises of "politics" and the inane vocabulary of "progress" sublimate into thin air. What good is debate, anyway, given the reality of the land's finitude?

You're acquainted early with the pathos of finitude if you grow up a certain way in the Hudson Valley. A child in a sailboat on the water, tacking at weekday summer dusk along the huge Tappan Zee, in the shadow of the scarred hills, heading toward Haverstraw Bay, watching Croton Point approach from the north, with a baited line chucked into the water off a cleat in vague hopes of fish, and there's something eternal about it, despite the presence of the Tappan Zee Bridge to the south and of the Manhattan skyline visible also at the river's south end. It's possible at that point not only to understand, but also to experience, how the Hudson Valley was the place that 19th-century artists depicted, in its great natural glory, as an integral component of the republican political utopia that at that point poets and painters still had the guts to dream of.

But every Arcadia eventually becomes a ruined Arcadia, and so it was in the experience of that same child, driving on the same day with a parent through the inland commercialized corruption of New York's metropolitan sprawl...

Doom. It's from such juxtapositions that are created either realists, ironists, suicides or political romantics.

Doom. It was in the midst of all this philosophizing that, on the cold, clear day of Sunday, Jan. 30, I stumbled into my living room with my New York Times "Week In Review," which I opened to find bearing a story called "A Bridge Too Long: The Cost of Urban Sprawl: Unplanned Obsolescence," which happened to be about the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans the beautiful Tappan Zee portion of the Hudson River, all three gorgeous miles of it, to connect Tarrytown with Nyack. If there were ever any greater indication than this article of the thickness of the country into which I was born, I haven't yet come across it. The Tappan Zee Bridge, the article informs us, opened with the attendant hoopla in 1955, when a man like Robert Moses could still walk the streets of this country without being summarily lynched. Thus: "The bridge would pay dividends far beyond its $81 million cost, 'in new satellite communities, in increased land values and in countless other less tangible ways,' said Walter J. Mahoney, a Republican who was majority leader of the State Senate."

This Mahoney must have been awful?one of the small villains of American history, a man who apparently encapsulated a way of thinking that's utterly opposed to the more enlightened one that prevails now. Nowadays everybody's a lot wiser, so the plans currently afoot to replace the bridge proceed with rather more sensitivity to landscapes, to humane geographies. This, from the Times, about Gov. Pataki's recent bridge-replacement plan: "There was no brave talk of new subdivisions or shopping centers. Instead, the task force cast the bridge replacement almost as a mass transit project?a way to contain the suburban sprawl that the bridge had been built to generate in the first place... [T]he project may never get off the ground. But whether it does or not, it has already signaled a fundamental shift in the way major public works projects are conceived, promoted and packaged..."

I can't see this story as cause for optimism, as the Times probably thinks I should. Rather, it's with a perverse sense of patriotism that I laud the fact that, in America, it took 45 years to realize that wantonly destroying stuff isn't necessarily a good thing. Forty-five years? At least. I'm supposed to be happy about that?

God bless.

That's why you want that shotgun, clean and well-oiled and handy above the kitchen door.

You know a better way?

Hop the fence and you're in the Cold Spring Foundry, where you shouldn't be?    Or else skirt the wooded boundary between the Pennybridge section of Tarrytown and the Moon Estate and you're in forbidden territory.

We're in the realm of the Moonies, that is, where kidnapped children sit strapped into chairs under cone lamps with wired headsets strapped to their heads, like those headsets that guys wear in the electric chair, as the Moonies brainwash the heck out of them. Growing up around the estate of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, head of the cultic Unification Church?his huge estate straddles the river towns of Irvington-on-Hudson and Tarrytown?meant growing up hearing vague, horrifying stories about Moonie abductions, stories that troubled your sleep. They kidnap kids and brainwash them and they never never want to go home to their mommies.

?But Rob and I are trespassing. This part of the Moon estate encompasses the old Gracemere estate, late 19th- and early 20th-century home of a man named Henry King Browning, who made a fortune in the clothing business, and particularly by manufacturing the American armed forces' uniforms during WWI. The manor house is about 100 yards away from us, on the other side of some shrubbery. Cars are parked outside of it; the Moonies seem to use it as an office building, maybe partially as a residence. It's snowing hard, a beautiful dry snow, and piling up fast.

"Okay. There's somebody out there, walking to a car."

We cleave to the ostrich theory of trespassing on the grounds of a notorious cult: pretend you're invisible. We shuffle along?casual, casual.

Rob, who's 22 and specializes in these sorts of infiltrations, walks calmly up the snow-covered path, his ponytail bobbing over his wool jacket and his camera tripod over his shoulder. In the distance and down the hill we can hear the white noise of the highway washing up through the woods.

Then we're in view of the mansion.

"Jesus," I say.

"Yeah," Rob says, looking out through his spectacles. "It does have a sort of Amityville Horror aura to it."

It's an abandoned pile of a mansion, about 500 yards from the manor house itself. This, Rob believes, was one of the houses old Browning built for each of his four daughters. One of them lived in it with her husband Homer Stuart Green, a real estate man who served as Tarrytown's mayor from 1933 until 1937.

The building's blank white-plaster facade's even more malevolent than those of most abandoned mansions. Junk trees grow up against it, which makes it seem even more disconcerting, like it's become part of nature, like it's no longer human. How many rooms? The facade's endless from one side of the house to another, a good, what, 80 yards? In back, the hillside drops off steeply into a ravine, and ramshackle chunks of architecture hang loonily off into space. Everything's off-kilter, discomfiting.

We walk around back. There's a kitchen door divided horizontally into two halves, the sort of half-door a rosy farmer's wife might have leaned from, offering you a cup of buttermilk, but it's all rotted and flimsy now, so it undulates when you put your weight on it. Still?

"You hold it while I jump, and then I'll hold it for you?" Rob says.

Then we're both on the other side.

Your neck crawls in this ghastly ruin. Whole floors are rotted out, and huge pieces of infrastructure lie around, as if picked out and deposited by a huge hand?beams, doorframes, old pieces of plumbing in heaps so that sometimes we've got to climb with three limbs. Junk litters the floors of the dozens of rooms. A bureau. The shell of a huge industrial fan.

Or what would have been dozens of rooms. Since the walls are gone, as well as many of the floors, it's hard to see demarcations, hard to get oriented spatially. Rob sets up his tripod and snaps pictures as I go off alone. Boards bear you over deep space so that you keep your arms out for balance, and the dried-out old wiring hangs in tangles from ceilings and snow filters in shafts through windows.

In a green bedroom upstairs there's a chalk body outline on the wall, riddled with deep bullet holes.

"That's spooky," says Rob, coming up in the door behind me as I touch the holes with my fingers. "Must have been some Moonie kid, came up here with a gun."

I did a whole bunch of this sort of trespassing with Rob Yasinsac, a Tarrytown resident and amateur historian whose hobby is exploring the Hudson Valley's architectural ruins, of which there are many: 19th-century red-brick mills, abandoned riverside mansions built by Manhattan families as summer seats during the Polk administration. Rob graduated from college last spring and is currently back home in Tarrytown. He does some of his exploring with his friend Tom Rinaldi, whom I also spent some time with. But just as often he's alone, because Tom, 20, is still an undergraduate down at Georgetown. Besides, solitude is probably appropriate for these excursions into obscurity. In the dusty silence of an abandoned mansion's subbasement you can better commune with the weight of things, which is part of what this activity's all about.

Both Tom and Rob maintain websites that document their historical researches and trespasses. I surfed into them, and was fascinated, and contacted the guys. Both are far too likable and unpretentious to put it like this themselves, but I sensed that they were onto something serious and beautiful about the Hudson Valley. They were cultivating a fascination with empty and abandoned and haunted spaces in the face of a culture that despises emptiness and seeks obsessively to fill it, to desecrate it, to screw it up. They were interested in the skull beneath the increasingly disgusting skin of their home region.

So one freezing clear Saturday I stormed on an early train northward out of Grand Central Station; fell asleep as that warm womb flew out into the blue dawn of Harlem; awoke when Rob, boarding at Tarrytown station a half hour later, startled me awake. Rob even looks like someone who should be interested in the past, in ghostliness. He's got a high-cheekboned face and dresses his lanky self in wool, and sort of carries a sepia-tone aura about him. For example, he's a great walker, walking 40 minutes to work every day (he works, appropriately enough, as a period-dress guide at Philipse Manor, the historical recreation in Sleepy Hollow), because he still doesn't have his driver's license.

"Yeah," he explained to me with the quiet humor he most often talks with. "It's just that learning how to drive would involve a lot of time in the car with my parents."

We debarked in Cold Spring. That's one of the few economically viable river towns, a pretty place a bit north of West Point, and it's one of the few such towns where the Main Street economy is still robust, because the antiquing gambit actually worked in Cold Spring. It certainly didn't work in, say, Tarrytown, the potentially lovely Main St. of which is eternally shabby (but you can find a nice, musty old dresser there or a spring-busted pocket watch, so give it a try if you're in the area). But Cold Spring's blessed by an unusually spectacular location, right there on picturesque Martyr's Reach, which is the narrowest part of the Hudson, and over which loom the great shaggy rounded mountains Storm King and Dunderberg?so it worked out. Cafes and inns now exist to service daytrippers.

I followed Rob up freezing Main St.; at the top we made a right and walked south a bit along 9D, which is lined with clapboard houses. On a hill high above loomed the Lente House, which Rob and Tom had recently discovered, surrounded by brambles and snow. It's a huge fortress of an Italianate mansion that glowers from its hill. It was built in 1858 for a certain Dr. Lente:

"Dr. Lente was born in Newbern, N.C., in 1823. He graduated from the University of North Carolina...from the Medical Department of New York University...1849... In 1851...appointed surgeon to the West Point Foundry, the doctor removed to Cold Spring...married Mary, the accomplished daughter of William Kemble, Esq.

"...able to return to his family at Cold Spring...in the sixtieth year of his age, he peacefully breathed his...

"...a noble man. He dignified his manhood...his consistent Christian life..."

Rob pointed to the footsteps that marked the two-day-old snow, which was also matted with tire treads.

"All right, here's where we want to watch out," he said.

At the drive-in bank down the hill from us, guys glowered in their cars, out too early in the bitter cold to fetch money.

"The treads kind of surprise me," said Rob, pointing downward. "I guess they must do patrols through here. I thought maybe it was local thugs."

Now we were where we shouldn't have been. The backyard was a wasteland of brambles. A makeshift wooden ramp led to the mansion's back door. Rob crouched and rooted around with a ground-level windowboard, but right then the back door actually...actually just creaked open.

"Uh, Rob?"

"Oh. Wow."

"That was easy."

The darkness was tinged with green. A marijuana leaf was graffitoed on the wall. To the right was what looked like a servants' bathroom. Green water still puddled, frozen now, in the ancient bowl. Industrial sinks lazed in a kitchen space and there was that buzzing sound of emptiness as room led into cavernous room. I lost my sense of proportion; wandered from room to room, alone and in anxiety. The basement was the worst. The darkness was total and the cold was stale and tomb-like. I kept bumping my head. The beams of my flashlight illuminated a shaggy fruit cellar, a yawning old refrigerator.

Rob set up his tripod to take long exposures. A staircase with its balustrades ripped off led to vast heights bathed in morning light.

We'd stepped out of time.

Do enough of this stuff, and your sense of desolation grows to immense proportions. We jumped the fence at the Cold Spring Foundry, for instance, a hollowed-out monolith nestled in the snowy woods, a long walk along the marsh from the village. There's nothing left of the building but the fireplaces and the walls and sporadic floors and 2-by-8s sometimes where floors should be. You can climb the scaffolding up into the heights of the place and bug out. Rob lay on his back. The two of us lay there in the silence, bugging out. I felt very lost, very alone.

Another cold, clear day Tom Rinaldi was with us, and the day became a race against the dusk. Tom's a natty little fellow with black hair and an extremely pleasant, open face and an appealing habit of chuckling a bit when he talks. I sat in the backseat of Tom's Honda station wagon dozing and listening to Tom and Rob converse as we drove through, say, the shabby village of Kingston:

Rob [quietly incensed]: "Called the Village of Hastings and told them I'd love to get into the site and take some pictures. And they said, 'We're sure you're a good person, but we don't know you.' Then they sent me to the woman at the historical society, who gave me the runaround. Jeez. You'd think that nobody in that town cared about historical preservation."

Tom [chuckling]: "Yes, yesssss... But there's the Kingston Village Hall, looking good..."

Rob [craning to look]: "Did they put in new windows? Oh, I hate that. Nothing ruins the integrity of an old building like new windows."

Tom: "They wanted to put two-over-twos there. I'm like, am I the only one with a brain?"

Rob: "Andrey, you know there's this building up in Oswego..."

Or else one of them would comment, as we're driving along a stretch littered with abandoned mills, a breaker-and-enterer's fantasyland: "It's kind of frustrating to see so many abandoned buildings in one place. I mean, I like it, but it kind of loses its charm."

Or else Tom would say: "This is Rhinebeck, jewel of Dutchess County. Home to some of the oldest churches in the Hudson Valley, like the one on the right. The date of which I do not know."

It was quite heartening and wonderful. Here were probably the only two kids in their early 20s on the planet whose lingua franca involves offhand references to the abandoned glories of Buffalo's Central Terminal or Detroit's Michigan Central Station. (Detroit?and this would occur to you if you've ever thought about it?is, to an explorer of abandoned buildings, what Florence is to an art student. "Got to get out to Detroit again," Tom mused at least once, a sufficiently unlikely utterance that its commission several times that day bears documentation.)

Then, later, I was tumbling out of the car in Rhinecliff and we were making time across a hillside rimmed with trees and lousy with waddling wild turkeys. We were approaching Wyndcliffe, the 1853 home of the 19th-century spinster Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, a huge gothic horror that looms over the river.

Tom filled me in on Jones' story and the house's history. The mansion has by now been abandoned for a half century. Miss Jones was related by marriage to the Astor family. When her brother Edward died in 1869 she, a severe and dismal woman, remained in the house alone. (Tom told me that the intimidating splendor of the house, which was dominated inside by a dramatic three-story atrium, had inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses.") William and Henry James had been visitors to the 23-room house, as had Jones' niece, the young Edith Wharton, who late in her life would write of her aunt and the house she inhabited. Tom furnished me the passage:

"The effect of terror produced by the house at Rhinecliff was no doubt due to what seemed to me its intolerable ugliness... I was always vaguely frightened by Rhinecliff, which, as I saw, on rediscovering it some years later, was an expensive but dour specimen of Hudson River Gothic; and from the first I was obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granite exterior of my Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home, between her battlemented caps and the turrets of Rhinecliff..."

"I love this house," chuckled Tom, striding along under his camera equipment.

"I love the view with the tree in front," said Rob, striding along under his own burden.

We climbed in through the rubble-clogged basement and stood on the floor-level, looking up. The cellars were crammed with stuff: boxes of documents, ancient cameras, kitchen equipment. The back of the house had been ripped off, and light streamed though. Most of the floors are gone, so you stand in the bottom of what used to be the atrium, back when there was still enough surrounding structure to define it, and look up, and it's like looking at a cross-section of a house, or at a stage set.

But what do you really get, looking for the soul of a region in its dead ruins?

Tom and Rob, at least, will get a really good book out of it.

Dusk that day found us out at the point, a couple miles up the river, trying to bust in to another house. It had become a compulsion.

"Uh..."

"Maybe we should...pry it..."

So Tom and Rob were six feet underground in the ditch over which the house's porch would be if the porch still existed, making their bodies into crowbars with which to pry the boards off the subterranean windows of this abandoned house.

"Here, um, stick your..."

"Okay, now?"

Prohibitive signage?STATE PROPERTY STAY OUT?peppered the house's blackened facade.

"Stick your arm in and?"

"Here, you pry it back and I'll?"

"...these two nails..."

"...fuckers..."

"You see anything in there...?"

"Huge room..."

Smack smack smack of frozen fists on pinewood.

"Big-ass bolt screwed in there..."

From where I'm standing I can see between the loosened board and the facade into deep basement depths. Something old and somnolent and godawful exists down there. The shape of a...coal furnace is evident, some other hulking structure lurking in that stale atmosphere of morphic extinction.

We hiked back to the car along the dirt river path.

"Should come back with a bolt-cutter," one of us joked.

"Bolt-cutters?"

"Hmmmmm..."

"Yeah. Park the car off the premises and walk in late at night. It's not like it's gonna be any lighter in there during the day."

Then we were in Tom's warm Honda again. Tom dropped me off at the train station in Poughkeepsie, that poignant rotting encrustation of a town. I boarded the train and woke up in Grand Central, at the end of the line and in the heart of things.

STATE PROPERTY STAY OUT.

Maybe we'll go back with bolt-cutters after all.

I hadn't seen Rob or Tom for a number of weeks before I received an e-mail from Rob informing me that he'd located what was possibly the Hudson Valley ruin of all Hudson Valley ruins: the abandoned campus of King's College, a small Christian institution nestled in the hills of Briarcliff Manor. The college had closed in 1994.

I'd caught wind?through some people I know who are interested in the paranormal?that a notorious haunted house stands uninhabited in downtown Hudson, of all places, and I was trying to track it down in the hopes that Tom and Rob's expertise could get us in there, over the fence and through a window, so that we could check the place out. The house, I'd learned, was called the Dietz House, after the family that once owned it and perhaps still did. Its second floor was infested by the ghost of a former resident named Mabel Parker, who'd peskily hank the bedclothes off of slumbering inmates.

But that King's College was a ruin was the real surprise. As recently as 12 years ago, when as a teenager I'd spent a lot of time in Briarcliff Manor, the college had been a bustling concern, a pretty place amidst the winding roads of a wealthy municipality. You sort of took it for granted.

Now, though, it was a complete wreck. Rob had explored it thoroughly the last few weeks, and we met up so that he could show me his photographs. The institution had been closed for what? Half a decade? And already it was possible to be shocked, as you looked at the pictures, by the violence time had wrought. Tudor piles with their windows blown out; interiors razed by wind; plaster raining from ceilings. It was as if hundreds of little bombs had gone off. Bathrooms were sprayed with chips of paint, dorm blocks had been ground down by nothing more than the intersection of cold air and a little time. Structures that must have been new in the 50s or 60s were thoroughly trashed. If nothing else, you learn from hopping abandoned buildings that as little as an unbroken pane of glass can protect a dwelling from swift destruction.

And Rob hadn't just found abandoned buildings. He'd found an abandoned city, a necropolis.

"Jesus," I said.

"Yeah," he said, and sat up straight and committed a story to the record: "It was last week, Feb. 10, 2000, at the King's College main building, Briarcliff Lodge, and I'd been there an hour and a half already, and was just about to wind up the day. I'm in what's known as the Oak Room, a one-floor extension off the main building. And I hear this loud thud. Like some large object falling down to the floor, or maybe a door slamming. It made me jump back a few feet. I was kind of freaked out. I tried to think about what kind of plausible explanation there could be. It was a warm day. Maybe there were icicles falling and hitting the roof above me. Who knows? But then I'm on my way out, and going through the main lobby?and the door heading out is through the ballroom, and you have to go through two glass doors to get there. I go through the two doors, close them behind me. Then, I'm just about to the door outside and I hear this noise behind me. It sounded like the glass doors rattled. Like they opened and closed real quick, pretty loud... I just kept on going."

So, ghost stories.

Meanwhile I kept chasing down material on the Dietz House, making phone calls. The Columbia County historian, a kind older woman named Mrs. Howell, called me back in humorous exasperation, wanting to know where I'd heard of such a house?and more to the point, why she herself hadn't. Then she dove back into her researches and disappeared from my life for a while; and several weeks after that I received a packet full of photographs of the house. It seemed to be a well-kept, if uninhabited, structure closely neighbored by other, inhabited, houses.

"If you come up here, call me," she said with about half as much conviction as I'd liked to have heard from someone who was inviting me to go far, far upstate?for a bit of adventure amidst the hobbits! But since, try as she might, she couldn't determine the uninhabited house's current owner, my going wouldn't have done any good anyway. We couldn't get in legally, and breaking into old, and especially haunted, houses isn't something you do in the presence of an old woman.

I talked to a famous paranormal researcher and asked her if she knew anything about the Dietz House. She didn't. But we got to talking.

"There is such a mysticism about that area," she told me from her home in western Connecticut, her cadences musical and assured and, appropriately perhaps, fading into the static of a bad connection. "And you know that whole area of Rte. 9 and Rte. 9W. Oh! Honestly, every now and then when we're out at a school up in that area and we'll come back by that route, there's just such an intense mysticism about that whole area...

"And you feel the energy. You feel the energy before you actually see the landmark," she'd insisted.

"I mean, we were certainly involved in enough cases in that area," she said, her voice fading. "But I don't recollect. Oh yeah, along the Hudson and all up there...up in that area, yes..."

"So sometimes spontaneous things?" she said.

"They just pop up?" I'd offered.

"They just pop up. They just really pop up."

But that's nonsense. The fact is that really nothing ever happens at all. You bust into a house, even the notoriously haunted Dietz House, and what do you think's really going to happen? A spook materializes from the wainscoting! You're covered in ectoplasm!

Yeah, right. Those are actually phenomena I dream of, because they're indications that there exist, reassuringly, energies and presences in this world beyond those that rationalists can quantify and governments can tax, but they're nothing to count on, to build on.

And yet that's exactly what happens?people count on mysticism, the dead-end embrace of which becomes one of the last stages of the thoroughly debased political movement. You see that up in Woodstock, where Tom and Rob and I stopped for lunch. That whole mingy town's a metaphor for a generation's abdication from meaningful politics?a bunch of poxy hippies still smoking weed long after its utilities have worn off. You want to see some human wretchedness, drop by Woodstock, above which?even on a blue day?there seems to hang a miasma of bad health, a sickly effluvium. What must be lepers slouch along the small-town streets; guys with lice; old biker-looking cats with braided beards. One ancient and raddled stoner, in fact?an amazing specimen, this one?wears old sneakers, a peasant skirt, swinging beaded beard and a hooded cloak, like a Little Red Riding Hood, except that it's blue. He carries a joker's stick with a rattle at one end trailing motley ribbons, and a rubber-bulbed air horn at the other; in all this he resembles one of those bearded and female-monikered professional buffoons out of a Russian novel. And behind the counters of sandwich shops the middle-aged hippie women are ornery, as hippie women always are once the moonbeams wash from their hair around the time they turn 30 and the realities of the scarcity economies they've imposed upon themselves make themselves clear. They'll spend their lives behind Woodstock sandwich counters, maybe selling pumpkins to tourists each autumn. They're pinched and emotionally stingy, and they'd swindle you in a minute.

And they define Woodstock, a town for aging hippie suckers who cut and ran 20 and 25 and 30 years ago when the culture turned against them and the going suddenly got rough and there was nothing left to do but escape north and disappear into fogs of hemp smoke and yoga and Indian mysticism practiced in summer yurts in the ever-more-obliterated countryside in Woodstock and in New Paltz and in Saugerties and the other storied locales of the Movement's once-rural diaspora. Having become hobbits, too, of a sort, they've sequestered themselves here against the encroachments of the Fallen World, which is moving ever and ever closer to the Garden that, at any rate, they've already fouled. Way to go. Beaten old people maintain bookshops on dying Main Streets, then drift off into the hills to live in trailers and grow greens and smoke peace pipes and throw themselves on the mercy of the earth goddesses. They've botched it. You see them all over the place up there. They screwed it up. Old, old Woodstock indeed.

But why blame anybody? As if anybody specific could have done something to oppose an entire culture's logic. They're going to build, and they're going to trash everything. There's no way out.

It's telling that the Hudson Valley's most illustrious environmentalist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been working stealthily to foster candidate Hillary Clinton's York Senate candidacy, on the theory, presumably, that Rudy Giuliani's senatorship would represent environmental disaster upstate. If Giuliani's conduct concerning the protection of New York City's upstate watershed?Kennedy's pet issue?is any indication, that's probably true. And yet what does Kennedy think he's going to get out of the repellent Clinton? A revolution? A land ethic? It goes to show that even the angrier responses to what's going on in the Hudson Valley are equivocal and prophylactic, not militant as they should be. In the face of finitude?that viciously anti-American concept?what can "responsible development" mean? I'm still half-seriously waiting to vote for the presidential candidate who promises to shrink the economy. A growing economy, I've found, just means that the villages die. You get a bunch of Hudsons, emasculated places hanging on. And that's at best. At worst you get a Newburgh, a Poughkeepsie, an upstate slum.

In the meantime you just try to...what? Maintain, I guess. And so Rob and I found ourselves waiting, alone, on the southbound Cold Spring train platform, mid-morning after we'd busted into the Lente House. An Amtrak screamed by without stopping whooooosh and ripped our faces off.

"How fast was that going?"

"Fast."

"Whoa."

"Like 80 miles per hour?"

"Faster. Like, a hundred."

We had some time, so I talked Rob into hopping off the platform and walking down to the riverside. Through the snow and out to the point that juts up into the river north of Constitution Island. Near the shoreline froze rusting tanks and a baroque hillbilly shack and, before us, thick layers of ice crusted up against the shore like scales, pushed up against each other by the currents here at this hard, deep, narrow portion of the Hudson. In the intense sunshine and the cold light, the sight of the ice was exhilarating. So we stood looking at it for a while.

"Wow," said Rob.

"Yeah, no kidding," I said.

"Yeah, wow. Thanks. Thanks for taking me down here."

"Well, thanks for taking me upstate. Thanks for everything."

"But thanks for talking me into checking out the river."

We were on a roll. Any minute we were going to start bowing and bobbing at each other obsequiously, like Chinese maitre d's.

"No, thank you."

Then we got on the southbound train.