Hudson Weekend.

I'm not sure if there has ever been, since the very beginning of life on our pale blue dot, a weekend with more beautiful weather than there was this past weekend, which happened to be not only my wife's birthday, but Memorial Day as well.

We had taken a room up in the Hudson Valley--far from both the madding crowds of Manhattan and the Gingham crowds up in Connecticut. Our bed and breakfast was in an 1880s house with a slight view of the Hudson River about half a mile away and through half a million trees.

The river and the low mountains that line it, still bring to mind the beauty the Hudson River School painters captured a century and a half to two centuries ago. The river is wide, its current slow. It seems to give off a slight mist that tints the landscape with different colors depending on the height of the sun and the clearness of the day. 

At times the scene is a gauzy blue. At other times a first-buds of spring green. At other times, the yellow you see after a late-afternoon summer rain. Often, a lonely sailboat will be making its way up the broad river--placed perfectly almost as if by an all-powerful art director.

There was a railroad bridge built in the 1860s by big corrupt monied interests over the river at Poughkeepsie. It's a US Steel affair, all girders and struts and tinkertoy delicate. Like most of Amerika, it had fallen apart by the 1970s and probably by now would have crashed into the river 200 feet below and been corroded by the carcinogens General Electric dumped into the water for hundreds of years.

Instead, money was raised--even the state contributed funds-- and the old bridge was turned into a living-room-wide 1.3 mile walk or bike across the waters. The old rail-line was converted to a recreation path, miles long and serene in parts, an escape from the malling and the falling of the rest of the area that seems equal parts crappy Dollar Stores and Applebee's and fallen apart abandoned factories and warehouses.

Below, everyone is driving around in 6,000 pound pick-ups with loud exhausts as they flit from chain store to chain store looking for more moreness.

My wife and I--older than everyone--looking back at what was and sadly at what is and spending a weekend high above the murk of a mighty river.