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Up River with Diana Stevenson

April 2, 2010

Setting out from Bushwick, it was hard to believe that I would be floating up the Hudson in a few hours.

My brother gave me a pirate PEZ dispenser for the trip; sent from my mom for Easter.

When I got to Bard, I met Diana with some of her friends.

Diana found a pretty spot right by her school to launch the boat.

Her friend Sohrab saw us off. He would be calling us later to make sure we made it out safe.

It could not have been a better day to take a boat trip. The week before was unusually cold and rainy.

As we left the protected bay by Annendale however, the wind picked up.

We passed under a train bridge,

and pulled up the boat to look around.

Diana wanted to see some fake ruins she had heard about out here.

Back out on the Hudson, we seemed to be floating up river with large amounts of debris,

and a plastic chair.

Diana paddled in the back for a bit,

and we crafted a sail to take advantage of the tail wind.

Diana checked with Sohrab to make sure all of our pictures were uploading correctly to the website. He said that everything was working just fine, he had just read the post about the sail.

We kept seeing trains heading to and from New York.

We knew we only had a few more hours to ride with the tide. When it turned around we would not be able to paddle against the current.

Huge houses lined the bank of the Hudson.

The sail was working great, and we were making much better time than I thought we would.

We passed by a huge factory. We could hear machinery humming for miles.

We tried and figure out how far we had come, but my map only prints the distance in nautical miles,

and I can never remember how far a nautical mile is.

The wind was dying. The tide was turning around.

We would have to find a place to camp soon.

We pulled over to the bank on the East side of the river.

Where are we?

It was almost dark.

We stashed all the stuff under the boat,

and decided to walk North a bit and try to find Germantown.

It seemed like we had made it to Germantown.

We walked along in the pitch black, but we couldn’t find the town.

Suddenly we saw the lights of civilization.

Mmmmm,

dinner.

We walked back to the boat in the dark. It turned out we walked in a big circle. Consulting a map at the gas station, we found a better way back.

We set up our camp for the night.

The next day, we saw how close we were to the train tracks.

We both had slept fitfully because of the passing trains. No matter how I had tried to mentally prepare myself, I kept waking up in a panic when the train came by.

Breakfast.

We packed up the boat and got ready.

The water was much more choppy than the day before.

Even though the tide was flowing against us, we had a nice wind going in our direction.

We stopped on shore to fix the sail.

With the wind this strong, we needed to be able to control the sail quickly.

We struggled against the wind to get to a little island.

We discovered the remains of a broken up house. It looked like this whole island had been under water at some point this winter.

We set off again with a revised sail.

Around mid-day we passed the house of Frederic Edwin Church, the famous painter of the landscape we were traveling through.

The wind was pushing us along quite well.

We stopped to take a look at Roger’s Island.

How well named, I thought. My uncle Roger had been on my mind the whole trip. I went camping with him often as a child and the whole idea of stuffing some sleeping bags in a duffel bag and setting off to explore by boat, I inherited it all from him. (I even inherited some of the actual duffel bags themselves from him)

Goodbye Rogerâ€™s Island! Happy Easter Sunday, Uncle Roger!

According to our maps, we were coming into the town of Hudson.

We found a little beach just before the town.

We hid all the equipment under the boat and left it on the beach.

I wondered what kind of town Hudson would be.

This must be where they store or fix the river buoys.

A wonderful coincidence happened when we got into town. We saw a friend from New York, Gareth Mahon. He and his friends were on a long bike ride. We compared travel notes and then his friend pointed out some good camping places just north of Hudson.

We hung out in the train station waiting for my phone to charge.

At the train station I found a magazine with an amazing image: New York City covered in a waterfall. It reminds me of something my friend Melissa Brown would make.

We pushed off and say goodbye to the pretty town of Hudson.

Diana had been on the phone with Sorhab and his friend Michael. They were planning on meeting us along the bank of the river and camping out with us overnight.

We had to find someplace good to camp that was not too far from a road that they could drive to.

We thought we found a good spot, an island just North from the town of Hudson.

It was getting dark, and the report from Sohrab was that they were driving North with hot dogs and beer.

We pulled up to have a look around the island,

but there didn’t seem to be a good place to pitch a tent, and we were quickly overcome by mosquitoes.

We got back in the boat and paddled to the other side of the island.

We found a sandy, pretty spot and left all of the stuff. We planned to paddle over to the shore and pick up Sohrab and Michael to take them back to the island.

Now the only problem was finding them in the dark.

“Just walk down to the train tracks,” said Diana to Sohrab on the phone, “we are on an island right across from there.”

“The train tracks are 70 miles long!” said Sohrab. He had been driving up and down the bank of the river for over an hour trying to figure out where we were.

Miraculously, they saw our little flashlight out in the boat and flashed back to us. We paddle over to shore to meet them.

We loaded Michale and Sohrab into the boat and headed back to the island.

We gathered wood for a little fire,

and soon,

dinner was on the way!

I was so tired that night, I felt like I was sinking into the sand.

The next morning we woke up with the sun.

I found some little animal tracks by my sleeping bag. I thought I had heard something scurrying around last night.

The was no wind and the water was like glass.

All aboard!

Some of the confusion of the night before was explained,

when we realized that we had not been on the island that we thought we were from the map.

When we looked around that morning, we realized that they had found us just by chance!

We left the boat while we went to get a cup of coffee.

We planned out the next step.

We took a few things we need for the day, and Sohrab helped us by taking the rest of the gear home with him in his car.

The wind and tide were heading South, so Diana and I decided to try and float our way back to Hudson and see some of the things that we had passed on the way up.

All along the banks we had been seeing little temporary houses, so we pulled up to explore.

This notice was attached to one of the houses. It looked like things changed out here in 2008. When we started to look around we realized that the houses had not been temporary at all.

Diana said, “If the state wanted the land back so bad, youâ€™d think they would have cleaned it up.”

“This makes you afraid to stand in the same place for too long,” said Diana, “like the trees will just swallow you up.”

We pushed off from Middle Ground Flats.

Before we rounded the island and finished our trip at Hudson we decided to stop for a snack.

After lunch we sat in the sun and listen to birds. There actually seemed to be less of them than in on islands right around New York City. Maybe they like the city.