Hitting Harriman Heights

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Hitting Harriman Heights
by Zachary Thacher
October, 2020 — Harriman State Park, NY

“You’ve changed. You’re… different somehow.”

I hear few comments about my new haircut, my no-gym yes-carbs paunch — I’m working on it—and, of course, on my location. From one city borough to the next. Not a big change; but different somehow.

After four months at a friend’s farm in Massachusetts and two months at a friend’s farmhouse in Vermont, and with a swap over the East River, life is changed.

It’s been nearly two months in Brooklyn. Back in New York City. Alone, first in Ditmas Park house-sitting at a friend’s mid-century apartment; now alone in Boerum Hill at a furnished rental in a 19th century brownstone. Alone and also embraced--by millions of New Yorkers with their bands of eyes and brows peering at me over their masks.

(I shy away from the full faces walking by. They’re either clueless or cowardly, can’t tell. I just don’t want Covid.)

The point: Our lives remain the same no matter where we go or how long we age. We are the subject, verb and object of our every sentence. I don’t mean this as narcissism, I mean it as subjectivity. Your experiencing the world is consistent. It’s always you.

What changes are the shadows and light and color. Textures and tones shift as the sun cycles above us in relentless persistence.

Maybe the clay settles into the mold by the time you’re forty. The years have a sameness to them as they adhere to form. This offers both comfort and warning. Sometimes you break the mold.

As Roy Ayers sang, “my life my life my life…” Now in Brooklyn.

Drive through schools of fish that are the millions of bicyclists, motorcyclists, scooters, skateboarders, sedans, vans, SUVs, busses, delivery trucks, tractor-trailers and pedestrians of every size and shape and cadence, who are as unheeding and surprising as minnows flinging themselves through traffic.

Scrutinize the map every minute of every journey until I learn that you bike down Dean to go all the way east and then Bergen to return west. Traveling all the way from Cobble Hill to Bedford Stuyvesant is a good long stretch; but it’s also one slim slice of what would be America’s fourth largest city if we split from New York. From always getting lost to no longer paying attention, it’s the journey that yields a sense of home.

Hunt for apartments online and off. Visit empty spaces waiting for someone — me, a stranger, you? — to fill them in Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carrol Gardens, Gowanus, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Crown Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant — yep, I’ve looked at apartments in all these neighborhoods. If you have questions about the market for two-bedroom apartments with outdoor spaces I can’t afford, or for actual houses I also can’t afford, hit me up.

Date first online then off, which doesn’t take me to as many neighborhoods but is as emotive and imaginative and loaded with potential for disappointment or finding that someone who is truly home. Always searching for home. If I have a theme since I was a teen, this is it. 2020 and my age and Covid has condensed and compressed this search until it’s now as hard and focused as a period.

But back up a minute. Dating. It’s as fickle as it ever was in NYC: high churn with low retention. Probably due to my poorly segmented target audience and low cost of acquisition; because people are yearning to get out of the house and meet for an outdoors meal if the weather is nice. Doesn’t matter the reason, keep going. If I get past a fourth date and generate enough traction to lose track of time, you’ll know first.

Reconnect with old friends who remind me whom I am. I’m lucky in New York to have a fistful of people whom I love and who are most definitely my home, who do not require swiping on faces or clicking on listings to enjoy and to celebrate and to walk in with in silence.

Which takes me to Harriman.

After nearly two months in New York I rarely catch a sunset; barely hear the wind whoosh through trees; never watch a distant lake guarded by still mountains. It’s all human-formed terrain here. Brooklyn is greener and quieter than The City, but that’s relative to the grey stalagmites of Manhattan. Brooklyn buildings slouch just low enough to not crowd out the sky, like polite tall people stooping to shake your hand. But still. Urban. Always.

Wake up. Lace up boots. Drive from Boerum Hill to Manhattan’s Meat Packing District. Pick up the talented Mark Grochowski. We met a long while back courtesy of another friend, the talented Darci Manley. We are co-conspirators in our mutual escapes.

Mark is a professional photographer, videographer and film editor. He plays guitar and tells stories. He knows more than I’ll ever remember about lighting and music and film. We’ve grown close over the years. Perhaps because we look so much like, except that he’s 6'3", better looking than a model and has long dark hair. Otherwise, identical.

We cross the George Washington Bridge, pass New Jersey strip malls, roll over the Ramapo River in Mahwah. Highway 17 brings us back to New York and we do feel like we’ve left and returned, but not within the imaginary confines of lines on a map. Parking lots and fast food restaurants and car dealerships and gas stations and furniture stores and shopping malls disintegrate in the rearview.

Forested hills and dales lie thick with green and, in October, they’re streaked with paprika and turmeric. The waning leaves undulate in the distance like a living fur on the warm skin of the planet. You want to run your fingers through it.

I decelerate and shift from Highway 17 to turn to the southern reaches of Harriman State Park, a tract of 47,000 acres surrounded by even more parks like Storm King, West Point’s private reserve, Bear Mountain, Sterling Forest. It’s well over 75,000 acres of forests spreading like an open hand west and north and south of the Hudson River. After the Adirondacks, this is New York’s biggest parkland. If all this space hadn’t been kept from development, subdivisions and strip malls would line Interstate Highway 87. We’re lucky. The wealthy widow Mary Harriman donated her inheritance in the early 1900s. Here it remains, under the same sun traveling the same sky, different in time, unchanging in season.

Cars and families line the road and swarm over the parking lot at the preserve entrance but we keep going. We find a quiet patch to park near a trail head some dozen miles into the forest. We thread our arms through backpack straps and jog down a dip in the woods behind the road. The leaves have become cumins and curries and cinnamons.

We see a trailhead and take it without knowing it’s name but seeing it ascends, which is why we’re here. We walk, talk, wonder where the trail leads, don’t care, talk more — we’re big talkers — eventually we connect to the right trail. After an hour and a half we reach the peak of Diamond Mountain. Lake Sebago pools blue and grey in a nearby valley. The Shawanagunks rise to the northwest and when we turn south — wow. Just wow.

Midtown Manhattan forms a wall of distant peaks. The towers are silent and grey in the distance. A flat, vertical range.

I unthread my water bottle cap to take a long drink. Mark hands me an extra snack bar he brought along. We rest and watch on the solid, risen rock.

I remember now. This is who we are. The same, just different.

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