While I was in upstate New York I walked along the “extended Wallkill
Valley Rail Trail,” in and around Rosendale.
I used to spend a lot of time in Rosendale because my girlfriend lived
there, and we did often go walking around the area. It was a while ago, and not all the routes
are very clear in my memory anymore, and although I did remember walking along
a former railroad line here and there, I certainly didn’t remember it ever
being called the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, extended or not.
I also remembered that on one of ours walks we found some ruins,
decaying stone buildings, with the windows and half the roof missing, perhaps
originally a site office or workshops, and nearby were various bits of abandoned
machinery and pipes. These, like the railroad itself, were remnants of the
golden days when Rosendale cement ruled the world, starting at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, peaking around 1900, but still in production in a minor
way even today. Rosendale cement is in the Brooklyn Bridge and the base of the Statue
of Liberty. Consequently when walking
around the woods you’d often suddenly come across the opening of a former mine,
a big, dark mouth in the rock.
Back then you could walk right inside the mine
openings, which actually looked very much like caves, and I did. Being of sound mind I never went very far in,
not least because most of them had flooded, but it was good to be able to go
just far enough inside to scare yourself.
If anyone ever came to any harm in there I never heard about it.
Far more scary was an abandoned railway trestle that crossed
the main street of Rosendale, some 150 feet above road and creek. I never went up there because it was unfenced and
it looked kind of lethal, and (I was told) it was a favorite spot with suicide
jumpers, though I now suspect this may have been an urban, or I suppose, rural,
myth.
Well it’s all different now. The
trestle is part of the rail trail, a pedestrian walkway. It’s been tidied up and made very secure
indeed. I’d read an article in About
Town magazine (a Mid-Hudson Valley Community
Guide)
by one Vivian Yess Wadlin that “the trestle has substantial railings that
cradle you and yours in safety, actual and psychological.” And when I got up there I saw it was
absolutely true. The handrail across the
top was thick and broad, the uprights plentiful and close together: something
with half the heft would be enough to stop you falling off, but its good to
feel doubly secure when you’re 150 feet in the air. They didn’t use to care so much about these
things apparently:
It was cool walking up there, but the real task was to
find those ruins and mine openings. It
was actually no trouble at all to find the mines, but – will it surprise you? –
they’re now are all fenced off.
And there are signs like this to keep you on the trail:
Now this strikes me as some sort of apotheosis of 21st
Century priorities, authority and control.
First of all there’s the primacy of private property. Then there’s some unctuous plea to protect
the wildlife. Then, as a bit of an
afterthought, there’s some bogus health and safety concerns for the individual. And finally there’s the threat of
prosecution, to be shored up the evidence from electronic surveillance. Authoritarian? You think?
I knew I would have to wander from the straight and narrow in order to
find the ruins, and after a while I did find them, or at least some very like
them. In fact I can’t absolutely swear
these were exactly the ruins I’d been before.
That tank and its extraneous bits and pieces didn’t look quite like the
machinery I recalled.
And this giant stone chimney, no longer attached to anything, and hemmed in my trees, was far
bigger and more impressive than anything I remembered. I was pretty sure I was seeing this for the
first time. And I was impressed, and
moved.
And I absolutely didn’t recall this vast, substantial, stone edifice. In fact it contains a series of kilns, and
presumably something pretty massive was needed to withstand the extremes of
heat and chemical reactions, but surely they didn’t have to make it look so
picturesque.
In fact from the back it was crenelated (crenelated!) so that it looked like a castle, English perhaps, though I think
more likely to be Irish. Since
Rosendale is in Ulster County I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suspect there
may have been a few Irishmen involved in the building trade around those
parts. Whether they knew it or not (and
frankly I reckon they did) they managed to create something that a century and
half down the line had turned into a very impressive, utterly convincing (if
not in any sense genuine) ancient ruin.
I wanted to cheer. I wanted to
blub.
Eventually I got to the trailhead where another notice told me that the
old kilns I’d just visited would be the site of the “future rail trail
café.” I was ready to blub for quite
different reasons.
