FOUR MILES UPRIVER from West Point and about three hundred yards off the east bank of the Hudson lies Pollepel Island, a hump of dark granite and gneiss sloping low on one side and rising about a hundred feet on the west, just enough to open to a good view of the river as it enters the Highlands. Across the water from Butter Hill, Pollepel was once Cheese Island, but those benignly bucolic names never fit the history, topography, or, above all, the weather. The Mohicans would not spend the night on the islet, and apparently, until Frank Bannerman bought it in 1900, the only ones to live there were a fisherman and his erratic wife who thought herself queen of England and waged long battles with storm goblins that rent the air with sudden squalls and meteorological occurrences more than passing peculiar. Since the seventeenth century, river travelers have attributed the capricious weather in the bends of the Highlands to elfin malfeasance.
Lore says old Dutch captains paused to douse their green crewmen in Pollepel water to immunize them against the bedevilment of hobs from Storm King and the dim, wet cloves around it. Another legend holds that the master of the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail the seas forever, finally and gratefully saw his ship go down just south of the island on a hidden mud flat that today still grips the spars and ribs of the cursed ship to snag shad nets. And on the northwest shore lies an odd slant of rocks that wails like an injured woman when a certain northerly blows over it.
During the Revolutionary War Pollepel anchored a cheval-de-frise to halt movement upriver of British ships, but, while those sharpened, iron-capped timbers must have looked formidable, the enemy somehow passed through without let. The inconstants of Pollepel are so great that even warfare cannot properly proceed from it.
Pilotis and I had heard that Pollepel is sinking. Certainly it’s one of the last islands in the lower Hudson, many others having disappeared not from subsidence but from being silted into peninsulas by human actions. We received warnings about goblins and deer ticks, so we took what precautions we could against the insects but didn’t know how to proof ourselves against imps, and we believed the deep gloom was mere chance. As modern travelers we admitted no faerie to our plans and set out with a friend who had just joined us for a day, a reporter from my first hometown newspaper; he, looking remarkably like Shakespeare, was an earnest man, happier with a pencil than a paddle. We eased Nikawa up the channel east of Pollepel and shut off the motors for a downstream drift that would take us safely over presumed obstructions for a clandestine landing on what was now state land. We mostly discounted rumors of steel spikes and mines, even though one of the buildings carried big letters: BANNERMAN’S ISLAND ARSENAL. Under the grim sky, Pilotis went to the bow with the sounding pole to call out the depth, but the wind began to rise and I had to spin the propellers every so often to keep our course. I could imagine the rocks, invisible as bogies, of Bannerman’s old breakwaters lying inches from our blades. Pilotis liked nothing about this expedition and kept the phrase “holing the hull” bouncing against the pilothouse, but I wrote that off as the cry of a deep-water sailor who feels safe only with six fathoms under a keel. I repeated that we were in a flat-hulled boat specially chosen for river shallows. “Damn but you’re insistent.” I replied that in trying to cross the continent, our strongest ally was insistence, and Pilotis said, “How about intelligence?”
Bannerman’s castle began to emerge from the dismals, veil after veil falling away, and slowly we could make out the turrets and crenela-tions, parapets, embrasures, and battlements, some built from nineteenth-century New York City paving blocks. The shadowy aura silenced us, and we drifted closer as though being pulled in. The Reporter put his pencil down and whispered to me, “Are you ignoring good advice?” and Pilotis raised four fingers to give me the depth, then it was three feet, and then came a godawful shattering whack, then another, as if we too had snagged on the Flying Dutchman. Pilotis, face full of alarm, whirled toward me and shouted, “You’re on the bottom! You’re on the goddamn bottom!”
I raised the stilled motors, and my prudent mariner yelled, “You just can’t enter these places like Farragut charging into Mobile Bay! What’s on your sign? ‘Proceed as the way opens’?” I said the hitch in such advice was that much of the time we would have to proceed to learn whether the way was indeed open. When the motor stems came out of the water, we could see an anti-ventilation plate had snapped off. To fix it would be a major repair, and I knew we’d somehow have to continue over the next months without it.
I guessed we’d suffered the hit as we passed over one of Bannerman’s breakwaters into what had formerly been a small harbor. The sounding pole indicated as much, so I started the engines, got up some headway, shut them off, raised them, and put us into a glide I hoped would let us reach deeper water. We’d have to use the canoe. A hundred yards south of the submerged breakwater, Pilotis went forward again and began working to set the anchor, but it took half a dozen tries before it stuck. We couldn’t find the abundant Hudson mud and finally had to trust a less sure grip on rocks.
The Photographer was bringing the trailer up the river road from Garrison. I managed to reach him on the marine radio and make arrangements for our canoe to come out to the anchorage. We pulled on our rain suits, all the while explaining to the Reporter how to move the boat to safety should the weather change and the anchor slip. He said uneasily, “What if I can’t remember all of this?” Pilotis mockingly answered, “Rely on your insistence.” The Photographer, noticeably disturbed, told us a man had just committed suicide by walking into a tunnel as a Metro-North train rushed through. He added, “Ironically, quite close to the Breakneck Ridge stop.” Pilotis said, “Nightfall’s got more light than this day.”
We boarded the canoe and struck out for a landing on the north of Pollepel, just above the old arsenal. Indeed, when we reached shore and started up the slope toward the fractured buildings at two P.M., the wind seemed to blow in not air but dusk. Pilotis carried a large corn-knife—allegedly only for brush—and kept one hand on it, allegedly only to prevent it from slipping from the belt. Forsythia blossoms, casting an unearthly yellow into the gray air like little jack-o’-lanterns, seemed to light our path more than the afternoon as we walked up under the tall shell of Bannerman’s derelict dream. Years ago, his grandson Charles wrote, “Time, the elements, and maybe even the goblins of the Highlands, will take their toll of some of the turrets and towers, and perhaps eventually the castle itself.” Seven years later, a night fire of unknown cause turned that eccentric structure—one of several along the storied Hudson—into a skeleton, and the immigrant Scot’s most American longing for an instant ancestral dwelling became a romantic ruin, a fit end, some people thought, for a thing built on war profiteering.
We crossed the remains of the wharf in front of the arsenal where Bannerman used to store black powder, bombs, torpedoes, cannons, and more, all of it guarded by armed men, nasty dogs, and mounted Gatling guns. Now the seven-storey building was open to the sky, and trees and vines grew inside, right through heaps of cinders, broken glass, fallen brick, and steel girders serpentined by the fire. It had become like what it dispensed—a ruin of war.
After the First World War, the federal government tried to enforce the beating of sabers into plowshares by assuming greater supervision over secondhand arms merchants, and Bannerman’s business following his death in 1918 became more of a big—very big—army-navy store with a fat illustrated catalog published well into the 1950s. It was full of uniforms and cannonry that outfitted Buffalo Bill’s road show, movie regiments, courthouse lawns, and ten-year-old boys’ imaginations: Civil War battle-rattle ($3.75), German bear-hunting sword ($14.00), Gatling gun barrels ($2.00), Spanish morion ($22.00), stone cannonball ($15.00), defused torpedo warhead ($20.00), as well as pith helmets, military ribbons and medals, buttons from the coats of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and enticing descriptions: “Tree trunk from Civil War battlefield. Log is 42" long, 12" in diameter. Has 3 Minnie balls and one cannonball embedded. Packed for shipment.” Everything sold only for spot cash.
Frank Bannerman, whom the New York World-Telegram described as a “one-time seller of death in wholesale lots,” wrote in an early catalog: “St. John’s vision of Satan bound and the one thousand years of peace is not yet in sight. We believe the millennium will come and have for years been preparing by collecting rare weapons now known as Bannerman’s Military Museum, but which we hope some day will be known as The Museum of Lost Arts.” And, in fact, some years later a portion of his immense collection did go to the Smithsonian. Bannerman’s logic echoed that of Richard Gatling himself: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—that would by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, it would to a great extent supersede the necessity of large armies and, consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.”
We walked up to the old residence, across the drawbridge, under the portcullis, and through the sally port. From the scorched and ruptured shell hung eroded stone armorial shields, cannonballs, and other architectural details no longer identifiable. Inside were floorless upper chambers, crumbling fireplaces clinging to the walls, stairs leading into space, and a litter of broken radiators, snapped pipes, exhausted dreams. As we wandered, we separated in the mist, and I found myself alone in a low, brick room like a dungeon. The ceiling dripped, darkness seemed to gnaw at the beam from my flashlight, and before and behind were cobwebbed corners and who-knows-what coiled under fallen plaster. I played the light over the chamber, across a rotting table and onto a thing that froze me: on top lay a wet face. I fell back, dropped my light, scrabbled about to grab the rolling beam, played it again toward the horrid visage and then onto a chair holding a sagging skeleton. As I backed up, I realized the face was a painted mask of the kind a Mexican might wear on the Day of the Dead, the image seared by one of the fat and moldy candles. The skeleton was a deflated piece of soft plastic. On the floor lay a stretched-out condom.
What in hell had gone on in here? I picked up the mask, one of several, tried it out. The temptation was too much. I went to the window and waited till I heard my friend, who believes not at all in goblins, crunching toward me. I lifted the mask to my face, stood low in the narrow window, and groaned. Pilotis looked up, recoiled violently, and jerked out the cornknife. I rasped out, Hello, Mate.
Too relieved to curse, Mate later recounted the incident with relish, since there’s nothing a person of words likes more than an incident of survival.
We climbed to a second-storey room still possessed of its floor, or most of it, and sat down amid the rubble and rusting bedsteads to wait out a wind quickly turning vehement. It was one of the black squalls off Storm King we’d read about, and it beat the river relentlessly. Even from this high point on the island, we were unable to see through the pounded air, and we could only trust Nikawa was holding anchor or that the Reporter had moved her to safety, if there were such here. Said Pilotis, “Was this side expedition a good idea?”
I answered to the effect that there was little better for a traveler than reading about a distant place, absorbing its past, its legends, and then arriving to walk smack into them. For us, it wasn’t just the old Scot’s castle and his faux barony nor the strange island with its hobbed history; it was the whole aura of a weirdly weathered and demonic stretch of the Hudson Highlands. We’d taken chances to encounter something with an aspect beyond the probable, and we’d found it, perhaps by losing a boat.
Pilotis said, “You’ve always tended to equate caution with cowardice. I never knew a man so afraid of cowardice.” I said that, at times, only risk could bring about such an intersection of books and life, tales and actuality, history and current moment, and it was for all that I’d come; surely we both knew that our time on the blasted island would long hold in our memories. But you’re right, I said, if only we also could be sure of Nikawa.“Sudden, violent things never endure,” Pilotis said.
The sky at last began to open and the wind drop, and we went down and pushed through the brush for a view of the river, and there, sweet and white in the quieting water, tidily at anchor, lay our little river horse, and soon we heard the canoe approaching to take us off odd Pollepel.
An hour later, Nikawa was sliding over a glassy Hudson and under the wondrously high and now abandoned 1888 railroad bridge at Poughkeepsie, the whilom home of brewer Matthew Vassar who proposed building a monument to Henry Hudson on Pollepel but, fortunately, failed to find support and founded a college for women instead. We moved past Hyde Park and the riverside mansions of Vanderbilts and Roosevelts. The cruise gave the Reporter a chance to recover from having been severely shaken in body and mind as he tended Nikawa through the squall. He said several times, “I thought she was going down. Capsizing on your second day out.” We came, I said, to encounter the rivers. And he: “But not death.” I mentioned I knew of a good glass of nerve-settling porter up on Rondout Creek, along what used to be the old Delaware and Hudson Canal, and Pilotis said, “Now there’s something I’d like you to insist on.”