[at-l] Bear Mountain Tango Part VI

[cballs@mindspring.com (cballs@mindspring.com)]

Part VI - Bear Mountain Tango


After lunch I walked over to the Trailplace Museum right off the highway just before the west side of the Bear Mountain Bridge.  There was no admission charge. Actually it’s a combination Museum and Zoo.  The pavilions, all built as part of the WPA program, are made of local stone and wood and house the museum portion of the exhibits.  They are attractive and well made as all things under the WPA were and look as if they will survive until the end of time.  The pavilions house the geology, flora and fauna exhibits, as well as the human history of the area practically back to the Big Bang.  They were windowless and hot and I didn’t spend much time in them.  Neither did anyone else.  The Zoo portion contained many animals indigenous to the Appalachians that can be, if you’re lucky, seen on the Trail.  Including a bald eagle.  Most of the animals became part of this Zoo because they had been wounded in some way and the Museum people have nursed them back to health.  There were ma!
ny birds, turkey, quail, and owls of all kinds, as well as several other types, a snake exhibit, which I particularly attracted to, and a deer, a beaver, and a river otter, which everyone wants to take home.  I didn’t see the bear exhibit.  There was a fishpond and a number of areas set up for you to learn the plant life of the area.  

The tree and bird exhibits were set up as a kind of test.  Accompanying pictures of tree leaves, underneath each of which was a button you could press, was the list of corresponding answers describing its correct name running down the right side of the board, also with buttons.  You press the button under a leaf and then press its corresponding button from the list.  If the two are a correct match, a buzzer sounds.  There are about thirty matches for each exhibit.  The birds I tried, all but five of them, I got correct.  Every single one of them on the first try.  I got every single one of the tree leaves I tried wrong.  I couldn’t get one leaf to buzz correctly.  I grew up around maple and oak and poplar and beech and all kinds of nut and fruit trees and I just couldn’t believe that I got that many of them wrong.  I asked one of the museum workers who was cleaning out the snake pit if the board was working.  “Yes,” she said, “It’s working.”  Since she was foolin’ with the sna!
kes I didn’t challenge her.  But I think she smirked.  I walked off feeling whipped and stupid.  I mean there ought to be at least one of those buttons that buzz no matter which one you press so you don’t feel like such a tree dunce.  Imagine how the children must feel.  It could scar them for life and turn them against nature entirely.  And most of these are city kids up here.  Maybe they could print the correct answers at the bottom, upside down or scrambled or something.  I think it’s a trick board and I think the snake lady knows it.

The cages are all too small for the animals, but there’s a sign saying how there are plans to revamp the whole thing and make the pens larger and more in keeping with each animals natural environment.  It’s probably a woefully underfunded museum and mostly a labor of love for the people who work there.  All in all it’s worth a visit.  It’s certainly worth more than the price of admission.

I took off across the Bridge again and loved every step of it.  If it weren’t for the traffic, it would have been heaven.  I was going to hike up Anthony’s Nose because it was only 2:30 and I still had plenty of time before I needed to call the cabby and get back to the train station in Peekskill.  When I reached the east side of the bridge, I had to do hand to hand combat with the traffic.  It comes barreling and careening down the highway and around the mountain, on and off the bridge, oblivious of foot traffic.  From where they sit, there isn’t supposed to be any foot traffic.  Most of them are completely unaware that the Appalachian Trail crosses here.  They’re in a car, by god, and they have the upper hand, all tensed up as they are trying to get through the intersection themselves.  It reminded me of a Herman Hesse novel in which the end of the 20th century comes down to a war between those who have cars and those who don’t.  It would have been better if I’d crossed to t!
he other side of the bridge on the other side of the river, then I would have been on the easier side of the traffic once I got to the east side.  You don’t think about these things sometimes until it’s too late.  I made it across finally without hurting myself or causing a twenty car pile-up.  I walked around the intersection to the north side of Anthony’s Nose and finally found a white blaze about an eighth of a mile up the highway.  Into the woods.  Ahhh, safe again.  There was work ahead, but at least I was safe from traffic.  

This mountain has no mercy.  It doesn’t start up in a gentle sloping way.  This mountain goes straight up from the minute you leave the highway.  It’s nine hundred feet to the top.  Well, there is a place or two where you can sit down and not be completely vertical, but that’s it.  This mountain is not for wimps.  I huffed and puffed my way to the top, sucking in air like a vacuum cleaner and blowing out exhaust like a freight train.  The “Nose” part of the mountain is on the south side so you’re coming up kind of the back of the head from the north and across the forehead out on to the face and then the nose.  The AT doesn’t go to the nose.  The nose, which is an overlook of the Hudson, is on a side trail.  Actually, near the summit, it begins to calm down a little and gets more sloping.  There’s an old road up there which a man I passed on the way up told me was used for getting artillery up there during the Revolutionary War.  The forest is lovely up there with large stands!
 of birch trees, or was it oak? or maybe apple?  It’s some distance once you’re on the summit to the nose but eventually you pass a stone with an arrow painted on it pointing toward the nose with the world “Nose” next to it.  

The view is stunning and worth the effort to climb up.  You look directly down on the river and down on the Bridge.  It seems like you’re about 300 feet above the top of the bridge.  You can see Bear Mountain perfectly, as well as the Inn and Hessian Lake and the Trailplace Museum.  It’s the Bridge and the river that’s so excellent from up there though.  You can’t resist lingering and enjoying the vista.  It makes you feel so grand and so small. There were several people up there, day hikers.  Young people, girlfriends and boyfriends.  It’s a good place to be in love. I must have sauntered around up there for an hour or so before beginning my descent.  The trip down was almost as difficult as the trip up, but I had my walking stick and it came in handy.

Half way across the Bridge on my way to call the cabby to come and pick me up, I meet a big, burly, young fellow pushing a bicycle across the Bridge.  We stopped to talk and fell into conversation about my hike and his new bike.  He had a beard and he had on wool gloves with the fingers cut out and he had on too many clothes for August.  He said he’d been riding his bike for about a week from Plattsburgh in upstate New York.  At first, he said he was on his way to New York City, out just enjoying nature.  He just thought he’d ride his new bike from Plattsburgh down to New York.  Then he said he’d been moving around a lot and that he was originally from Texas and that he was going to New York City to look for Jesus.  He said life had been hard on him and that he was out looking for the Lord.  And that he knew there was a lot of bad stuff in New York but he thought he’d try there just the same.  He wanted to know if I had a couple dollars so that he could get the train from Peek!
skill to the City.  I told him that I didn’t think it would be at all easy to find Jesus in New York City, unless he had an address, and that it would cost a bit more than a couple dollars to get there on the train.  Knowing that some Latinos favor the name Jesus for one of their male children, I told him he might in fact come across some guys named Jesus in the City but he’d come closer to finding the Jesus he was looking for out here on this Bridge or up one of these mountains.  Not that it was impossible in the City, only less likely. He said to just forget the couple dollars then since he didn’t have enough money and he wasn’t going to ask me for the whole amount.  He had his bike, he said, and he’d just keep riding until he got there.  He seemed determined.  After we parted, I wondered if I wouldn’t find him someday, lying curled up over a grating, trying to stay warm on a New York City street.

Once back on the other side of the Bridge, I found a public phone next to the entrance to the Trailplace museum.  Three thru-hikers were there trying to call over to the hotel in Ft. Montgomery to see if there were any rooms.  They weren’t having any luck as the Bell Atlantic operators were on strike and the phones weren’t working.  They’d put in their quarter, punch in the number, and then nothing would happen but a high pitched tone, like a fax machine makes.  They were two men and a woman, one of the men and the woman was known as M&M. The man said he was from Texas.  This was turning out to be a Texas afternoon. The other man was from Maine and I don’t remember what he said his trailname was.  He said that this had been hard, harder than he thought it would be and that he’d wanted to quit about a dozen times.  The man from Texas gave me several pointers about my planned thru-hike.  He said that I didn’t need any Nalgolen bottles, that any old plastic drink bottle would do.!
  Just use it until it got worn out and then throw it away and get another one.  He said all the bottles get dirty and dangerous around the top.  The guy from Maine said I didn’t need to carry my wallet.  That I should just use a ziplock bag.  The woman didn’t say anything because she was busy trying to get through to the hotel. Right before they took off for the hotel, I told them that I admired them for what they were doing and their determination to see it through.  The man from Texas told me that I should do it, “But remember,” he said, “it will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do.”  I walked with them to the road crossing, and wished them well.  They went off toward Ft. Montgomery in the late afternoon light, walking into the sun it made them appear as a silhouette against the dark green woods on the other side of the road from where I stood, their packs and poles and gaiters and boots making them seem a romantic ideal.

I tried the phone and didn’t have any more luck than they had had, so I resigned myself to hiking back over to the Inn and using the phone there.  The cabby had told me it would take him about an hour after I’d paged him to get to the Bridge so I figured I’d have time to call him and then walk back across the Bridge and wait for him on the non-toll side where he said he’d come.  Walking back across the Bridge for the fourth time since I’d been at Bear Mountain I felt exhausted and relieved that I was going home, not so much relieved to be away from the Trail or the mountains, but to be away from all these people,  to be back in my apartment where I couldn’t see them or hear them.  I enjoyed my last walk across the Bridge and wondered if anyone had noticed me going back and forth on the bridge and doubted my sanity. Once I got over to the other side, I took off my shoes and socks and let my feet get some air.  They’d been cooped up all day and had had quite a work out.  The cab!
by came just as he said he would and took me back to the station.  He told me to give him a call the next time I wanted to come up and hike the Trail.

I will.
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Finis