Waiting for the crisis to pass, our thoughts go out to friends and loved-ones who also shelter in place. Old friends pass away, people we loved and admired. Immobilized for the time being, we can revisit destinations, near and far. join me in celebrating the joys of Quaranteam travel, the hope that these diversions might inspire us to value things we had taken for granted, to draw strength, wisdom and compassion from deeper engagements with nature.
Rondout Creek below High Falls. July 4, 2010
(Image and text were featured in the exhibition James McElhinney. Discover the Hudson Anew, curated by Laura Vookles. Hudson River Museum. Yonkers, New York. September 13, 2019 to February 16, 2020. Published also as a limited-edition in Hudson Highlands. North River Suite Volume One. Needlewatcher Editions. New York. 2018)
Rondout Creek is born at the confluence of Sandburg Creek and Shingle Gully, just east of Ellenville. The stream flows in a northwesterly direction, parallel to the Shawangunk Range, through Kerhonkson and Accord, north of which it turns abruptly to the east, falling in a vertical drop of twenty feet into a swift declivity hewn through sedimentary limestone. Inclined stratifications bend and buckle as trees cling to its walls. Every summer bathers gather on the rocky ledges bordering the creek, defiant of its dangers and of local ordinances. A hundred yards downstream from this place two stone bridgeheads stand opposite one another across the creek–once linked by a canal-bridge carrying barge-traffic on the Delaware and Hudson Canal between Honesdale PA and Kingston, NY. Almost like a pagan rite of passage, young divers would run along the towpath, leaping from the tower to plunge into the stream. Every year it seemed that someone either lost their life, or suffered crippling injury by misjudging their trajectory and colliding with submerged rocks. Lat year I visited High Falls, the eponymous village where Marc Chagall resided from 1946 to 1948. Walking along the towpath, my way was blocked by a new chain-link security-fence, enclosing the perilous diving-platform. No doubt reckless youth with invent new modes of recreational suicide.
Check out April 2020 Quaranteam Traveler Dispatches
(A preview of SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER by James L. McElhinney (c) 2020. Schiffer Publishing).
Copyright James Lancel McElhinney (c) 2020 Texts and images may be reproduced (with proper citation) by permission of the author. To enquire, send a request to editions@needlewatcher.com