Across the Street from Heaven

Bob, just to add another touch of celestial glory to your story, I present these images of the very sights you and I would have beheld 1) on our way into St. James Church on a Sunday morning, our minds and hearts lifted up to God, and 2) the florist shop directly across the street from the church, whose magnolia blossoms beckoned us toward the bakery a few doors down, where we would celebrate our faith with largesse that never made it into the collection basket. In the background is the Delaware Station firehouse.

Holier Than Thou

So much of the aforegoing makes us look so rough-and-tumble, Mick, but as you remember, we could be holy as hell when necessary. However, as to our transcendant piety in the early days (sort of the acquired obverse of our instinctive natures) I believe I was holier than thou (wow, I actually got a chance to say that!), being at that time not only an altar boy of the utmost apparent sanctity - apart from minor commissions like leaving the altar rail doors unlocked for communion supplicants to lean upon (for an unstoppable intramass chuckle with Owen, my altarcrewmate) or trying during retreat to hit the altar bell with my slingshot - but also a choirboy with the purest of altos, aimed straight at heaven. With eyes turned fully Godward I conjured a mean reverence, let me tell you. Somewhere in some Albany basement, attic or garage there must be a picture of me and my fellow altar/choir crewmembers looking our externally holiest.

This general illusion of preadolescent saintliness was amplified by the black cassock and white linen surplice I wore with the big floppy black bow tie over the tall celluloid collar I used to get cleaned across the street from St. James at the steamy Chinese laundry that as far as I knew specialized in altar boy collars. It was next to the bakery where early in the morning we got the best crumb buns in the world so far, to have with cocoa after communion. (Actually there was a shotgun pharmacy in between, where I got my lime lollipops and jujubes.) What an international fragrance filled that little Chinese laundry when you stepped into the steamy, laundry-jammed room and the smiling Chinese grandpa, who never said much, would take your numbered ticket and hand you your perfectly laundered, freshly starched, tall white altarboy collar (little did we know we were wearing the sacerdotal duds of the middle ages, when people walled themselves in even more than they do now...)

And then stepping next door into the bakery, back when they still used their own genuine yeast in their breads and pastries, then kneaded the precious goodies by hand and watched them bake like babies growing, they cared so much because they were selling directly to those who bought their goods and shared in the delight, the bakers lived in the neighborhood and had a direct stake in its happiness, as did all the other store owners around there, except maybe the A&P, which seemed a little ritzy to me then... How I'd love to walk around in it just as it was back then right now, though...

To get back to the cocoa: appropriate to the hellish metaphor involved, the cocoa was brewed down in the basement of St. James by a volunteer horde of big sadistic Catholic grandmothers dressed in white, inventors of a new and cryptic form of suffering, who stood cackling around giant steaming cauldrons whence they served to us slavering communicant kids - who therefore hadn't eaten anything since dinner the day before and now had to eat breakfast in about 5 minutes before class (is there anything hungrier than a kid after communion who's had fresh crumb buns in his school bag for over an hour?) - big heavy white mugs of cocoa that had been boiled until hot enough to scald God. There were many blessed blistered palates those mornings, borne in saintly silence throughout the day, and it wasn’t from taking communion with a sinful soul...

At any rate, like all who grow on multiple levels, I was soon confronted with a moral dilemma. Being as I was a permanent fixture on the Sacred Bleeding Heart of Christ Total Shitlist (offshoot of the Legion of Decency) for my various altarian escapades, it was one day announced before all in class that I and one other similarly grievous altarian would have to serve evening mass every night from now until Christmas or be drummed out of the corps. As God had of course planned it, however, the announcement was given only a week or so before the pagan event of Halloween, so it was basically a choice between God and bags of free candy with all my friends out in the autumn dark of truly ancient realities. God lost, big time, as she knew she would. In another post-Halloween announcement before the class, I was officially removed from the list of Kids God Loves and put on the list of Kids Needing Miracles.

Needless to say, I survived the experience, and still have hopes for some kind of heaven following the mortal one I've variously known. I did like that surplice, though; I can't stand buttoned collars anymore, let alone any kind of tie. Also, I've preferred my cocoa lukewarm ever since... and those crumb buns, man, they were all the proof of God I ever needed, really. They don't make them like that any more.

Young Rascals

Bob, I felt it was important to include the only photo I could find of the scene of the crime; that is, the Carl's house in Schodack Landing. Oddly enough, it happens to be a double exposure, which to me feels even closer to the dreamlike quality of memory. Standing in the back row, from left to right, are: Jackie, me, Billy, you, Maryanne and Mikey. Don't know who the other two kids are. Look closely and you can see the railroad 'bridge in the distance', and in front of it, the River Road.

Through the Looking-Glass

Maybe the combined talents of Ansel Adams and Vincent vanGogh could have captured enough of the imagic of that full-moonlit night on the sleek frozen river to merit mounting on a wall in a room somewhere with flash lighting, but as for the night itself, all it was and meant, forget it.

That mythic experience took place 50 years ago now, when things were less crowded in general (we were then being taught in school that the world population was 2 billion people); but even so, skating was never as uncrowded as it was that night on the river. My memory of it is tinged with the feeling of going out into the icicle-air of no streetlights like we had in the city, the only-the-moonlight of the countryside, the long glass river a mirror blown clear of snow by winter winds, and the feeling involved in sitting on the banks and lacing up before we actually began skating on a diamond...

All our previous growing-up skating had been fanatically done on artificial city park ponds that were flooded each winter by the fire department, as in Lincoln Park, or earlier for us, the small playground rink up behind Public School 23 (near where I'd shot out the streetlight). But though we had grand and frantic times on those rinks, they were always crowded and the ice rough and well used, with edges in every direction.

Every deep skater's dream is to skate on ice as smooth as the top of a diamond for as far as they want to, without crowds around; we were in that dream come true, we were gliding through skaters' heaven on the river that night, could have skated a good part of the way to New York City if we'd wanted, being young and lithe and full of strength and energy in that moment's paradise as we were, on that gleaming highway between shore and island, gathering a lifetime's worth of memory in a single night...

One of the things I remember most intensely was the power of that moon way up there in the dark blue night air among the stars, and how it lit up the ice, silversleek as far as the eye could see downriver, our skates making that special gem-quality ice sound of fresh perfection that all skaters yearn for, that deep, crisp, unchecked boom to the bladed feet as we moved along smoothly as ever we had in our lives: we could go and go, skate along this silver mirror as far as our hearts desired, twirling and swooping, racing and gliding then scraping to a halt in splendid sprays of white and going on again, miles and miles -- it was the paradise of ice, until a few miles along I plunged through the mirror.

I'd skated over toward shore, probably in my usual way daring the ice, when the ice took up the challenge and one of my legs went through about up to my thigh. The water was only about as cold as liquid nitrogen, nothing for a teenager of those days. I managed to roll myself out and skate onto the thicker ice toward the center of the river with one pantsleg icicling fast. I kept warm by skating hard, not wanting the experience to end. For a while after I was the one who fell through the ice on the river that night, but I've always thought of it as the night I skated on a diamond river, stretching out unending beneath the high full moon like the magic road to this whole lifetime...

Railroad Man

Bob, one of the best ways I can think of to honor the man is to post a poem from your book, Further on This Floating Bridge of Dreams, which sure do him proud. Thanks for the green light.

Old Tracy
bent and toothless
black as coal
railroad roustabout
from the first highball sign:
"I been in all the 48
'fore you was born.
Worked American 4-4-0's
way back in the nineties,
went through on Prairies, Berkshires
ten-wheelers, Santa Fe's Mohawks
(counting the tips of his knobbly fingers)
the New York Central
Empire State Express 999
even that Union Pacific 'Big Boy"
twenty four wheels, 6000 horsepower
(out puff the buckled cheeks, each eye
a headlight)
by god, she was a engine!
Go straight uppa mount'n,
pull the mount'n up behind."

In his shack down by the New
York Central Hudson River tracks,
in the coal-stove heat,
curly-cornered photographs
held crackling streets alive with carriages and drays
and black-suited, stovepiped, substantial folks
on trains with puffing engines
gone on down the line.

We snuck some brandy
played some lantern-light poker
while he told us stories
of the country in his head
train sounds in the night
hand to his ear
in the doorway.

Years later
back from some travels
I heard he'd been found the winter before
fire gone out;
whole life on the railroad.

Back to the River of Dreams

Using what little willpower I have left, I am nailing some of those pandora's lids back on for a moment, so that we can return to the river of dreams (called Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk by the Mahicans, the mighty Hudson by others), lest an important piece of mythohistory be left behind. This one, a simple, staggeringly beautiful memory, begs revisiting; one which, thinking about it today, I find myself wondering if it really happened at all.

I can still see the four of us (me, you, Jackie and Teddy) in Aunt Madeleine's kitchen after dinner on a deep winter's night in January, somewhere in the early fifties. We are babbling excitedly as we prepare to head out into the bitter cold for an adventure we had been anticipating for days. We wrestle ourselves into just enough warm clothing to make it possible to stay warm and still be able to move, then put on our ice skates.

Jackie has decided that the river is frozen through; the ice is now safe and smooth enough for us to travel, by the light of a full moon, downriver several miles to visit a place that until now had been kept hidden from us, a place they had been hinting at for days, a place that only a few people on earth even knew about. We were going to visit old Tracy's cabin.

Gliding on the moonlit surface of one of America's great rivers was magic enough, but when the starry silence was ruptured by a New York Central express train thundering along the banks just a hundred yards away, it was a moment of surpassing awe. Passengers traveling upstate from Manhattan could be seen through the steamy windows of a dining car as it raced by in the night. We stood for a moment in the moonlight, hardly able to speak, then skated on in silence.

After some distance we came upon a marshy area along the riverbank, frozen into the ice and dusted with newfallen snow. A small, squat wooden building sat tucked into the shore, hard by the railroad tracks, a warm glow from the windows reflected on the icy river, tufts of smoke rising from a makeshift metal chimney in the roof. In spite of the frigid temperature, our race downriver had made us surprisingly warm. Someone must have heard us crunching up the riverbank, and when the door opened, we entered another world, another time.

Inside that shack was the magic of times gone by, and the old black man in the overalls who shared it all with us that night, for all I knew, could have been Uncle Remus, or Dan'l, the ex-slave who taught Mark Twain how to tell a good story. There was a glow in that room, and it wasn't just the pot-bellied stove or the kerosene lanterns. After taking off our coats and sweaters, we settled in around the fire for a night of story-telling, as if in a dream. Sipping hot tea and brandy, we sat and listened to tale upon tale of Tracy's long life on the railroad and the river. We passed around faded photos of Albany underwater in the Great Flood of 1913, of horse-drawn liveries arriving at Union Station; we witnessed train following train, carrying long-gone friends, rich and poor.

Then, suddenly, Tracy stood up and said, "Ok, time fo' the likrish stick!". While this sounded like a great idea to me at the time, I noticed that Jackie and Teddy were trying desperately to keep from laughing, so I became more than a little apprehensive. Tracy then went to a cupboard and brought out a long, black, shiny stick and handed it to me with an air of mock gravity and a twinkle in his eye. "Go 'head, take a lick," he said. With no way out, I closed my eyes and ran my tongue tenuously along the "likrish stick", and as I did, the room filled with laughter. Opening my eyes, I said, "What's so damned funny?" "That's a bull's dick!", came the reply, and then more laughter. I had been initiated into Tracy's river family, one of the most elite clubs in the world.

I don't remember skating back up the river that night, but I'm sure when we finally got to bed I sank into my pillow with a little bluebird on my shoulder, singing lullabies in my ear as I drifted off to yet another dreamland. Once again, it seemed, we had stepped out of the twentieth century and come back to tell the tale. By the way, it's stories like this that have caused my kids to think I grew up in the Little House on the Prairie. Sometimes I think they might just be right.

The Torch of Cool

During the Inquisition that was my high school days, now way back there in mythohistory along with Achilles, the Battle of Thermopylae and all that other stuff I've forgotten about ever since, I remember being puzzled as to why the grownups, in the microseconds I gave it any thought, were so revolted by my super-slick D.A. haircut with rat-tail, my cherry-red sweater-vest with the black-gray-and-white-striped border over my knockout black shirt with the gold front panel tucked into my supercool slim-belted 14-inch pegged white flannel slacks with rat-tail comb in the back pocket and cuffs breaking perfectly on my high-sided ox-blood cordovan ducks with a diamond shine. The attitude of the nearly dead was a closed book to me. But in the fundamental certainty that unites all teenagers I was sure that anyway the old was gone forever and the new was here to stay. This was it. The style was set in stone.

I'd be wearing pegged pants and cordovan ducks and a DA haircut when I was 80, and my kids and their kids would too, all the way to the end of time, because who would ever need more than life requires, which is this: to be the coolest of the cool for as long as you live? And when one light-years-distant day I had miraculously reached the ancient age of 65, I wouldn't have to go through all these weird reactions toward the familiarly cool duds of the new era.

But now that I've passed that half-century mark once so far away, the hair's a bit thin for a DA and rat-tail, even if I had the desire, not to mention the time, the grease or the warped sense of history to create one; and pegged pants, I'd have to let them out at the waist and thighs, probably even the ankles; and red sweater vest over black and gold-panel shirt, forget it, I haven't got the time, let alone the interest, to defend clothes like that. Besides, I haven't seen a pair of cordovan ducks for nearly 50 years now, and anyway what the hell would I want to look like a 50's teenager in my 60s for? And who would know but other 60-year olds from Elm Street, which is also gone?

Besides, now that I've passed my Achilles equivalency, and had hands-on experience with the Thermopylae factor, and having realized all too clearly that I myself am now one of the nearly dead-- in other words, now that I perceive (as only the nearly dead can) the fingerpoppin' transience of things, especially teenagers, and teenage fads, I stop and look at the teenagers grungeing along around me, the girls with hair like they've just been saved from drowning, and the guys with hair like somebody stomped through wet concrete, their bodies layered in sweats to here, hanging out of these pants you could catch a cow in one leg of that end cuffless just past the knees, and wearing shoes my great-grandfather for godsake would have thought the ultimate in style and I can't help it: I want to say something corrective to the daughters of today as they sag along like 14-year-old bag ladies, I want to say something dissuasive to the sons as they slag down the street like the ultimate rag men, but what for? Teenagers can't hear.

So instead, like King Lear I cry to the darkening sky, 'Whatever happened to coolness?' Of the rains and the winds I ask, 'Where is the cool of yesteryear?' But the weather does not answer, any more than it did for Lear or my father or his father before him, when they too stood stumped on the doorstep and watched their kids fade out of reach in some incomprehensible fashion, and it comes to me that each new group, in stepping out thus, flares then in its one bright brief moment of flaming youth before growing into age, which in its turn carries the torch of the one true cool to eternity; that maybe only great-grandfathers in the great beyond can look at what kids wear nowadays and smile, smile at how it has all come round again, just like they'd always known it would, to one the true style, the cool that is in heaven.

Ducklore Galore

Bob, thoroughly enjoyed reliving our last great bridge adventure, and I do believe you can rightly claim to be the only one to have done it wearing baby ducks; or at least the only one who lived to tell the tale. My guess is I was wearing Keds, but the details escape me this late in life. It seems you've opened a Pandora's shoebox in my head, though, for I've been obessively scouring the web for a glimpse of that legendary shoe and I, too, have come up empty. Could they have been a purely local phenom, and gotten lost in the closet of history? Say it ain't so, Joe.

For what it's worth, I've brought out a pair of shoes that might be more like what you're looking for; they're very comfortable, and they seem to resemble those cordovan beauties you mentioned. Try 'em on, walk around, see how you like 'em. For what it's worth more, I have a bit of cordovan trivia for you, then I'm moving on to more esoteric ducklore.

Genuine Shell Cordovan, the most non-porous leather known, is distinguished by its lustrous waxy finish, superior durability and suppleness, readily conforming to the shape of the wearer’s foot. It is a soft, fine-grained, colored leather produced mainly from the shell of a horse butt, and is known for taking on a rich lustre that improves with wear and polishing. The name derives from Córdoba, Spain, where the leather was first produced.

The shell of a horse butt? Who knew horse butts came in a shell? Be that as it may, it's a damn good thing the word wasn't out on Elm Street, or the shine would have been off those puppies right quick. We thought they were ducks.

Now let's delve deeper into duck history: let's examine the legendary D.A. haircut, the haircut that launched a thousand greaser movies and tv shows and set the terms for teenage manhood for years to come. The haircut that became a worldwide symbol of teenage resistance, that enabled us to break loose from those deadly men's haircuts of the fifties and, for all we know, led to the Beatles' moptops and on into hippie longhair legend. We do know that from the fifties on, the greaser was the hero and the jock became the nerd. It was a simple formula: the bad boys got the girls. We surfed on that wave, baby, and we rode it all the way to shore.

The initals, of course, stand for duck's ass, which is what this cut resembles more than anything else on earth. How someone could have invented it, I don't know, but I do know that there had to be a Catholic school somewhere in his past. During my own tenure as a Catholic schoolboy, I learned, among other things, that nothing drove the nuns nuts more than a D.A. haircut, including pegged pants. Your hair had to be long and well-oiled, and it took great effort and care to keep it all in place for an entire day, requiring many trips to the boy's room. Some were Brylcreem men, others wore Vitalis, but I was down with Dixie Peach Pomade. Way down.

I'll never forget the day when Sister Clotilda (her real assumed name; boy, did we have fun with that one) was walking up and down the aisles during a test and as she came up behind me she must have been driven into a sexual frenzy and, losing all control, grabbed me by the duck's ass, yanked me out of my seat and dragged me to the front of the classroom, berating me passionately all the while for my degenerate ways. I didn't really mind her grabbin' at me that way, but what really pissed me off was, man, she really messed up my freakin' D.A.! I forgive her, though, because I'm now old enough to understand what a powerful effect it must have had on her; after all, look what Travolta's D.A. did to Olivia Newton-John. Of course, I would have preferred Olivia, but hey. Grease is the word.

Bridge Adventure Redux, with Ducks

Not the bird kind, the shoe kind, where you use the upper case: Cordovan Ducks. (Even now, that phrase has a godly ring to it.) History. Cordovan Ducks, the NY teen male footwear of the gods that I sported in the 1950s. They and their fashion sequel, Baby Ducks, both purchased in their turn with my own hard-earned paper-route money and worn with maximum Pride of Teen, were the stuff of life to me. I carried my own shoe polish everywhere I went and shined my Ducks whenever there was a smudge (or at least as often as I combed my hair) to keep those beauties as pristine as Cordovan Ducks had always to be in yesterworld. Needless to say, I wore no other footwear and woe to any who came near those gem-quality surfaces.

Faithful readers of these humble chronicles are by now likely wondering why in the world I'm talking about shoes (particularly, in this case, Baby Ducks, the more mature teen form of the deific shoe) in connection with a bridge. It is because I must establish the flawless qualities of Baby Ducks and the slickness of their ironlike soles - to say nothing of a necessary touch of 1950s fashion (since unequaled, in my opinion) - before I begin this brief tale. And because when we "did" the bridge for probably the last time I was wearing - you guessed it - Baby Ducks.

It was a very cold, clear and windy fall day in 1956 or '57 when we set out, the mixed country/city boy gang of us, to do the bridge one more time. We conducted some requisite general teen-dallying on the bridge proper, doing that nothing in particular we always did to use up the time we had in such vast quantities, then we headed across the bridge on the under-catwalk, leaping and fearless as usual. When we reached the other side, in quest of continued variety one among us noted that there were steps heading up along the arching span itself (see Mick's photo), which towered another 30 or 40 (?) feet above the tracks.

There was no question posed, we didn't stand there discussing any chickeny dos or don'ts, there were no wimpy whys and why-nots, no shilly-shally shall wes; no, we set out at once, as one person heavenward, to climb beyond the steps onto open steel and cross that mother of a bridge at the very top because it was there, because out across that rivet-studded, no catwalk, no-handrail top was our test, our arms-as-at-our-sides-as-possible manly challenge, and we would do it cold, right out of the moment's box, in a strong icy wind above the implacable tracks to the right and the whitecapped water far, far below the bluest of skies...

By the time we reached the top of the first arch - which was the 'easier' part because we were walking into the direction of our leaning - there was no turning back, which would be much harder, and not only for the sequential turnarounds required (and who would turn first?); we would also then have to do what lay ahead in any case: walk down a slippery slope in slick shoes, leaning backward. So we walked on, murmerless.

There at the top was indeed the test we each were after: Can I stand here buffeted by the wind, keep my balance and look around me at the majesty of this broad perspective that now and forever belongs to me by virtue of conquest, or will I fall to my knees in a quivering teenage mass and cling to cold steel for dear life, calling to god and my mother or anybody please to deliver me from this slick, windy hell I don't deserve, I'll be a good boy? And then we headed up the central, larger arch.

Since I'm writing this, you know I survived, and that insanity has many forms. And that Mick survived too (though I'm not really sure about his choice of footwear that day). Amazingly, in fact, all the other guys survived, though I don't know where they are now or if they're writing or thinking about that afternoon, or what their footwear was then, either. Yes, thanks be to God and her motherly oversight we all made it across, over the very tops of the bridge, and didn't sweat it a bit, at least in my case until some 40 years later and beyond, when every once in a while I wake up in the middle of the night - always in slick Baby Ducks atop one bridge arch or another - and pray that I may get back to peaceful sleep, I’ll be a good boy.

Important interpolation: Some laments are bigger than others. I Googled "Cordovan Ducks" so I could get a photo of actual Cordovan Ducks to use with this post, Ducks must certainly be in some hip, rock-and-roll-remembering rich guy's collection, or certainly in a world-class museum like the Prado (since Cordoba's in Spain) or a cool art gallery like the Guggenheim or the Getty, or in one of Warhol's collections - he was negative-hip actually, but still I can imagine him secretly yearning for a pair of genuine Cordovan Ducks as cool validation... Or how about a photo from a museum of cultural essentials or a compendium of the history/ style/rock and roll/spirit/epitome of the 1950s or something, one of the coolest durations of at least the last millennium, but there were only two mentions of "Cordovan Ducks" in the entire cyberarchives, and both were from my blog, PureLandMountain.com. Pathetic. You'd think the world would do better with such crucial aspects of its heritage. The photo I finally had to settle for, though acceptably in the shoe ballpark, and Cordovan, is in no way a Duck, so do not be misled.

It's all up to me now, I guess, Cordovan Duckwise. I don't know what to say about how history disappears not only so fast, but so completely, unlike genuine memories.

trust your instinct, kid...

"'Imagine a Bridge in the Distance" was one of the most evocative, scene-setting, best titles ever and went perfectly with that first heart-stopping photo!! Carried you right headlong into the tale!! How come you changed it? How come you took that way from me and everybody? Huh? Huh? Blue Steel Rollin could serve beautifully for any of your numerous pending RR-related memoirs, but there's only one bridge with that beauty you just built... you gotta trust your instinct, kid..."

That was taken from an email I received from Bob this morning after he discovered my late-night title change in the preceding 2-part series. Out of respect for my older brother and his more advanced literary sensibilities, I have restored the original title, even though this necessitates the mothballing of "Blue Steel Rollin''", a title which would have done the late Woody Guthrie proud. He's right; the bridge is the thing. There are some tales itching to be told which might live up to the promise of that secondary, slightly more seductive title, but until that inspiration comes along, it's being shunted off to the railroad yards. Much obliged, Bob.

In the process of making that change, however, a conflict developed in the republishing which caused the loss of several of our readers' comments, and to the authors, I apologize. If there is some way to restore them, I welcome it.

Imagine a Bridge in the Distance, Part II

Being light, agile and foolhardy enough to make the aforementioned leaps, we eventually arrived at our destination: the top of the first of a line of massive concrete pylons (see image in Part I) stretching across the Hudson River, holding up both bridge and train at a height of 135 feet. In other words, we were looking down at the river from the top of a 13-story building, and we were actually beneath the railroad tracks; they were perhaps 3 or 4 feet above our heads; we could probably touch them if we had any desire to stand on one another's shoulders. Between the ties you could see the bright blue summer sky.

The five of us - you and I, Jacky, Teddy and farmboy/part-time daredevil, Charlie P - sat there for awhile, collecting our collective breath and chattering wildly about the ships going past underneath, when suddenly Jackie interrupted: "Shhhhhh! Train coming!" We sat there transfixed as a low and distant rumble became more and more distinct, soon turning into a ground-shaking roar. As I sat frozen to my square foot of concrete, the entire universe began to tremble; the bridge, the pylon, the ties, the rails, even the sky was turned into a roaring, thundering, rattling crescendo until the train broke forth above us and shook us to the bone. We were in an absolute fire-and-brimstone hell, sucked into a tornado that wouldn't let go (funny how tornado survivors always say it sounds like a freight train). I was certain we would all die; there was no way out. We were being run over by a train.

Just as I dared to look up at this flying beast, I was struck by what seemed at the time to be a mortal blow. I had no idea what had happened, but it felt like my face had been attacked by a flying jellyfish. In fact, a large blob of axle grease, jettisoned from the train's underbelly, somehow flew miraculously between the ties to find my face at the exact moment when I lifted my unsuspecting head. My head, like the prophets of old, had been anointed with oil.

After an overly long period of laughing and scraping, we were ready to move on. Back onto the catwalk to head further out over the river, presumably to get a better view of things. We were on a roll, and getting cocky. As we reached mid-river we spotted a small, single-engine plane flying downriver towards the bridge. He was awfully low, flying just above the water. As he got closer, we began to get a bit nervous. "He's gonna hit the bridge!", "He's way too low; he's gotta pull up!" This little rocket was headed right for us, and before we knew it we were standing bolt upright looking straight down at the most beautiful little plane, waving to the pilot who smiled as he flew beneath us, not more than 20 or 30 feet below. In less than an hour we had been run over by a train, and flown under by a plane. These country boys sure knew how to rock and roll, and rock and roll hadn't even been invented yet. But the fun wasn't over.

We managed to climb up onto the tracks at that point, and with no trains in sight, began to toss whatever odd objects we could find into the river below. As I recall, it took a disturbingly long time for those objects to hit the water. Charlie spied a very large freighter heading down toward us, probably from the Port of Albany, and instantly conceived of a brilliant plan; a plan that could only be hatched in the great, wild, lawless country we now inhabited. We would all stand on the downriver side of the bridge and wait for the ship to come through. At the moment the bow appeared, we would all start to piss down the middle of the deck and whoever could make it all the way to the stern would win.

Five very intense young boys began their masterpiece on cue, and all went considerably well until they reached midship. At that point it became clear that a good portion of the crew was taking a leisurely break on deck, sitting about smoking, laughing and talking. All of a sudden it began to rain right down the middle of their conversation, and a very strange rain it was. Five lines of precipitation streaked down their backs, legs and heads, probably even putting out a cigarette or two, but there was nothing they could do but stand up and shake their fists and curse at us in some foreign language, all to no avail. We were petering out one by one as called for by the rules, and of course, Charlie the mastermind won the challenge.

It has occurred to me that it may have been a Turkish ship we strafed that day, because many years later I was sleeping on the deck of a ferry on my way to Istanbul when I awoke to a burning sensation on my right arm. After putting out a cigarette which had burrowed itself into my coatsleeve, I looked up to find that I was surrounded by a group of Turkish soldiers, all laughing at my misfortune. I remember that one of them had a particularly intense look of satisfaction on his face. Could it be?

On the Road

Beautiful, Mick. Talk about evocation. That bridge lives in my mind as an icon of all that can be conquered if you survive (one of our Albany friends, who later worked on maintaining the bridge, fell to his death from it, as finely detailed to us by one of the locals), and I'll let you go on with your tale of our bridge adventures; but just as if we were remeniscing in person, already there are several points regarding which I have my embellishment brush immediately at hand, and John's store is one of them.

John's was the only 'emporium' within many miles of our cousins Jackie and Teddie's house on Route 9J, the original old road along the east side of the river. Aunt Madeleine would now and then send us all to John's, a mile north of the house, for a pack of cigarettes and a couple of hours of peace and quiet. "Always walk facing traffic," she'd say, as she sent us off. A mile was the distance you'd walk for a Camel in those days, but we did it for Aunt Madeleine's Luckies. And the exploratory fun involved.

Psychologically, though, a mile was a huge distance for us, not because we had short legs or it was all that far (we hiked much further distances all the time), but because of the summer-shimmering highway and how long it takes 4 or more pre-teen boys to traverse the distance with all the fascinating distractions that lay between.

But at last, thirsting and exhausted from walking five miles in the space of one and spending a day in the time of an hour, and with the whole return distance yet ahead we'd arrive at John's, ready to party with our leftover pennies, as soon as he heard us and came down from the house. John's Store, with its old solitary gas pump, was the only source of gas along that stretch of road, but even so I don't remember anyone else ever being in the store at the same time we were there; it was a very small shop at the foot of the steep slope up from the narrow, dusty pulloff.

Slantways across the slope to the left of the store a wooden stairway led up to John's weathered house. (The store/house layout was somewhat like the motel/house arrangement in Psycho.) We'd yell and John would come moseying down, a gentle solitary man who for whatever reason preferred to eke out a living there occasionally selling gas and the soda and snacks of those days. Years before, Route 9J had been superseded by route 9W as the state had grown away from the riverside, which was now traveled mainly by the New York Central Railroad line to NYC.

So only locals and local deliverers passed John's place on the old　two-lane highway, and he was always delighted when our cluster of kids would suddenly drop in on summer afternoons to spend a while looking at stuff and talking. How I'd love to step in there just once more. He had one of those primitive slot machines that you'd drop a precious penny into the top of (nickel or dime if you were rich) and the coin would bounce around on the pins for a few thrilling seconds, and if it came out where you hoped with both fists it would, you'd get 10 times your money back in merchandise. From what we had left after losing enough to still buy soda, I'd always get birch beer or crème soda, my favorites, and be no less contented than if I'd won it. John's was always a bargain.

Over time, John's store (what was his last name? I seem to recall it began with an 'S') became a magical terminus for guykids like us on the road along the river, and it never left my mind. In my world travels over the many years since, I'd been back there mentally numerous times, so one summer afternoon about 40 years later, when I was staying with you in Castleton and I had our cousin Cathy's pickup while she stayed in Albany, I went off on my own to find John's place once more.

I knew right were it had always been, beside the railroad bridge whose photo begins your post that begot this one. I drove back and forth several times past what must have been the spot with the bridge overshadowing, but there was no visible sign that anything at all had ever existed on the now completely overgrown hillside; there wasn't even a pulloff anymore. (Which now makes me wonder how in the world John had ever chosen the site for a store... that would be a fascinating story in itself...) But even though it was a sweltering summer day - as it always had been when we went to John's - I wasn't going to come all this way, from all those places through all those years, to be denied. I stopped the pickup at about the place I thought the store must have been and climbed into the thickening woods there...

Many meters up on the hillside I found parts of an old woodstove and scraps of decayed timber that must have been the house; I edged down from there to where the little store must have been and searched around, but there was nothing anymore except the fun I remembered. So I stood in the woods with my eyes closed and put a few pennies in the slot before plunging my hand into the ice-cold water for one last birch beer. With it I toasted John, for all he'd meant to us.

Imagine a Bridge in the Distance

Bob, it's high time we took a side trip down the Hudson River to Schodack Landing, a place you mentioned in an earlier blog (The Gun That Won the Imagination); a place not far in miles, but an entire universe away from our comfortable world on Delaware Avenue. This was a land where country boys actually lived the kind of hair-raising adventures that us city boys could only dream of, the kind of adventures that mothers should never, ever, hear about.

Fortunately for us, we seemed to spend a good deal of time there during the dog days of summer (Mom needed a break?). Our cousins lived right on the river, and from the front porch we could see Schodack Island, ancient haunt of the Mohicans; and before that, running right along the riverbank, were the New York Central railroad tracks (Grandpa Robinson was a conductor on the 5 o'clock run to New York City, you may recall; we'd lie on the grass and wait for him to open the back door and wave as he went by); just in front of the house was the river road, a ribbon of hot concrete. As we awoke each morning, there it was arrayed before us: the road, the tracks, the river, the island, and off in the distance, the old Castleton Bridge, where trains coming from the Selkirk Yards crossed the Hudson River on their way to Boston or New York. More inviting paths to danger and adventure couldn't be found anywhere else in the world, and who better to set out upon them each day than a band of pirates and wild Indians such as us?

Sparks started flying as soon as we arrived from the city, when our cousins (mostly boys our age) and their band of brothers would drag us out into day or night to launch one hell-raising mission or another. Country boys, it seemed, were well-organized and committed to their mischief; not a day would pass but that they weren't dreaming up some new way to ravage the countryside (city boys, on the other hand, were known to waste hours just trying to decide whether they even wanted to do something). It may have been boredom, it may have been that they were often far from the prying eyes of adults; or it could be as simple as the fact that there were virtually no police. Anywhere. For miles. We had somehow arrived in the legendary land of the lawless.

One fine day we set out to conquer the Castleton Bridge. We began by riding our bikes several miles up the river road to its base, conserving the rest of our energy for what lay ahead. We would leave our bikes at a dusty little shack beneath the bridge, where old John's country store held the greatest reward a tired and thirsty cowpoke could ever imagine after a hard day's ride: a big, red, beat-up old soda cooler full of ice and water, with dozens of glittering bottles suspended just beneath the surface. It was a tricky enterprise, though: you had to choose your soda in advance, because there was no time to decide once your hand was beneath the surface of the frigid waters. One could almost hear the faint strains of "Nearer, my God, to Thee" in the background as you plunged into the deep; there was no surer path to heaven than an icy cream soda on a mid-summer Hudson River morning.

At the top of the hill, the bridge stretches out as far as the eye can see. The river glistens far below. "There are only two ways to cross it," our country comrades explained; "you can make a go of it on the tracks, but if a train comes while you're out there, there's nowhere to go but down." The other option, which didn't appear to be a whole lot better, was to use the catwalk suspended just below the sides of the bridge, consisting of an endless line of six-foot marble slabs a couple of inches thick and suspended by a steel grid. They were hair-raising enough to walk on, but absolutely heart-stopping when, further out on the bridge, we began to realize that quite a few of them were missing and the choice each time was to jump to the next one and move on, or chicken out and go back. The further out we went, the greater the distance to the landscape below, the harder it was to jump. But there was no turning around; we were city boys.