THE MORNING came on damp and befogged, and the big bridge across the wide Tappan Zee seemed anchored on the west to nothing but clouds, its trusses and girders mere cobwebs. Pilotis and I rose from our cramped bunks and walked the long dock to a shower room only to find as we dripped across the floor a few minutes later we had no towels. Said Pilotis, “We’ve taken too far your dictum that we’ll carry not what we can use but only what we can’t do without.” As we dried on our shirttails, I heard muttering: “If you were a woman, you’d never forget towels.”
I fired up the motors, hummed them to synchronicity, and in the lifting fog we pulled onto the quiet river just above where it goes from three quarters of a mile wide to two and a half across. The Tappan Zee, an Algonquian-Dutch name meaning “cold stream sea,” is the first of two grand irregularities in the navigable Hudson, and its fourteen-mile length leads into the other, the Highlands. Our pilothouse windows fogged over, so we were glad to have the wide berth, although only someone from a small country like Holland would ever call this a sea. We ran against the ebb tide, but the broad water diffused the current, and we could hardly discern its movement to the ocean. Having no major tributaries below the Mohawk River, the Hudson is a remarkably constant thing, and to me who learned to boat on the vagaries of the Missouri, the Hudson is pleasantly predictable. On my home river in high water, a floating stick can travel two hundred miles downstream between one sunrise and the next, but here a piece of drift will ride two ebb tides a dozen miles down and catch two flood tides that will carry it back up eight, so that its 140-mile voyage from Troy to the Battery can take—if it stays out of eddies and backwaters—three weeks.
Pilotis, thinking of our showers, said, “Sixteen months of preparation let us forget something as necessary as towels, so what else are we without? Maybe the next discovery can’t be solved with shirttails.” I said that adventure was a putting into motion one’s ignorance. “I’ll remember that when I go down for the third time.” I said I’d looked long but had been unable to find a book of directions for crossing America by boat; for where we were going, there was no rutter. Digging into a bag of gear, Pilotis pulled out a sheet of paper and said, “That reminds me. We do have directions, a bon voyage gift from old Ed.” Edwin Miller was our nonagenarian friend.
“It’s a found poem,” Pilotis said of the directions. “Ed picked it up in Japan in 1935. It’s nothing more than a notice explaining rules of the road to foreign motorists. He hasn’t changed a word except to title it and set it in stanzas.” Pilotis read aloud:
Beware the Festive Dog
At the rise of the hand
of policeman, stop rapidly.
Do not pass him by
or otherwise disrespect him.
When a passenger of the foot
hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet
to him melodiously at first.
If he still obstacles your passage,
tootle him with vigour
and express by word of the mouth
the warning “Hi, Hi!”
Beware the wandering horse
that he shall not take fright
as you pass him.
Do not explode
the exhaust box at him.
Go soothingly by
or stop by the road-side
till he pass away.
Give big space
to the festive dog
in the road-way.
Avoid entanglement of dog
with your wheel-spokes.
Go soothingly on the grease-mud,
as there lurk the skid demon.
Press the brake of the foot
as you roll round the corners
to save the collapse
and tie-up.
We moved north past Sing Sing sitting close to the water and affording prisoners a similar riverscape as one gets from the mansioned estates of the Goulds, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and others not far upstream. Pilotis, believing that half the multimillionaires in the country should be serving time, found the shared view only just.
Across the water lay the broad, flattened convex shore aptly called Point No Point; resident author James Kirke Paulding in 1828 likened it “to the speech of a member of Congress, which always seems coming to the point but never arrives at it.” Opposite was a topographic reverse, Croton Point thrusting its rooster beak well into the Zee. Then the river narrowed again at Stony Point where General “Mad Anthony" Wayne directed a peculiar encounter in 1779. George Washington asked him whether he would attempt an attack on the British garrison there, to which Wayne famously replied, “I’ll storm Hell, sir, if you’ll lay the plans.” Washington allegedly said, “Better try Stony Point first, General.” Preparing for the night attack, the soldiers, so the story goes, killed every dog within three miles to prevent a bark that would alarm the enemy, and they even unloaded their muskets to ensure a silent approach as they slogged across a marsh and climbed the heights to level a most spirited bayonet charge. Too late, the Redcoats began pouring down a steady fire of musketry and bad language. In twenty minutes the garrison surrendered, and the Yankees had one of their few decisive victories in the Revolutionary War-encumbered theater of the Hudson Valley.
Above Stony Point, the river passes through the Highlands, a kind of older wing of the Appalachians, where granite hills rise to only about fifteen hundred feet, but their bulk and situation right along both banks make them appear loftier. The Hudson makes three major turns there, each one distinguished by water, rock, and history. As we passed under the first, which the chart tautologically calls Dunderberg Mountain, the sky went back into the glooms again as lore holds it typically does. Dutch settlers believed their “Thunder Mountain,” shoving the powerful Hudson a mile eastward, was the source of strange and nasty storms that struck ships sailing the Highlands and that this stretch lay under the mischief of other beings who haunted the forested dark cloves and the angled river, venting their spleen and indulging wicked humours by besetting boats with flaws and headwinds, countercurrents, rocky impediments, and unexpected mud flats. In truth, as we rounded below Dunderberg, the wind rose to smack our pilothouse and the current raced between the constricted shores and whopped the hull as if knocking for entry in a reach named the Devil’s Horse Race. In that land—Washington Irving called it “the fairy region of the Hudson”—a prudent mariner will beware the Skid Demon, especially one of the heart.
Then we came under the looming of Bear Mountain. At its base, just above the Hudson, is a kidney-shaped lake once known as Sinnipink, and later after the bodies of British mercenaries turned the water incarnadine, it became Bloody Pond, a name changed to Highland Lake when a company in the nineteenth century cut ice from it to sell in New York City. Now it has returned to its history, although a bit cleansed: Hessian Lake.
At Bear Mountain Bridge high hills drop directly to the Hudson, and I slowed to an idle to see the location of one of the two great chains Americans stretched across the water in 1776 in an effort to keep British ships from using the river to cut the northern colonies in half. The two-foot-long links each weighed 140 pounds and lay on a huge boom of floating logs, but when the forts guarding the river fell to the enemy, the English broke open the chains, later shipping some links to Gibraltar, others eventually ending as exhibits in Hudson Valley museums. The combination of a lovely landform against a thickly historied river, all so close to the most powerful city in the world, is singular and, as such, has furthered the New Yorker’s famed hubris into fatuous flights like this one from Henry Collins Brown in his inanely titled 1937 work, The Lordly Hudson, perhaps the biggest American river tome ever:
This book is written primarily for those whom a beneficent Providence has permitted to dwell on [the Hudson] banks or in its lovely villages. To less favored mortals, these pages are not expected to possess the same absorbing fascination. Yet a monograph of what is unquestionably the most beautiful river in the world is something the Hudson River man feels mankind should not be without. It is not his fault that everyone cannot live along the river. This volume is, therefore, designed also, as far as may be, to mitigate, to palliate existence away from the Hudson, if that is possible.
Four miles upstream we pulled into the willowed cove at the foot of Guinan’s store in Garrison, the village that passed for nineteenth-century Yonkers in the movie Hello, Dolly! The temperature was dropping and the mist becoming rain.