NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHER’S BLOG

So I’m back.  All in all it was a pretty bad trip.  The car ride up wasn’t terrible, though dad and me got into a couple of personal fights (basically he was upset that I wasn’t closer with my middle sister).  That relationship – is a long story that I won’t go into here.  But at one point we were yelling at each other.  Than we came to some sort of agreement to let it go and the rest of the ride was okay.

The camp was a camp.  It didn’t excite me very much.  It was the trip back where the nightmare started.  The first leg of the flight was fine.  In fact that was my favorite part of the trip.

The first plane was a small Cessna 8-seater.  If I stretched my legs, I could just about put my feet in the cockpit.   There were only four passengers.  And  I really do love flying – at least on these small planes – and I had a nice clean window and did my best shots (see below) from the plane.  If the pilot had anything to tell us, he just turned around and told us.

I know some people are afraid of these small planes but for me they feel the most like flying and I have a sense of wonderful freedom on a small plane.

I think I had fallen asleep as we approached Boston where I was supposed to make the change for the flight back to JFK.  So they took us out onto the runway and to make a long story short, we sat on the runway for at least three hours.  Every few minutes the pilot would say it would be a half hour, or fifteen minutes etc. while they waited for thunderstorms to clear up at JFK.  Eventually, they ran out of fuel sitting there so had to go back to the gate to get refueled, and at that point let us out.

That began another three or four hour wait at the airport.  Eventually, the flight was canceled though I only found out because the flight number disappeared from the board.  I found a pilot and asked what happened to the flight and was told it was canceled.  I was told that there was another flight to JFK I could try and get on but they weren’t sure if that flight was going to leave or not either.  Eventually, around eight-o’clock I had had it.

I went to the ground traffic spot and found the taxi dispatcher and told him the story.  He said there was a Hilton Hotel at the airport and that if I called a certain number, which he gave me, and mentioned his name, I could get a room for $149.  Which I did.  Another 45 minutes and the shuttle bus to the Hilton arrived.  I was beginning to feel like Jack Lemon in the Out of Towners.

Exhausted and frustrated, I approached the check in desk at the Hilton, gave my name and told them that I had been promised a room for $149.  The check-in person said they didn’t have any rooms for $149.  At this point I felt like saying, what is your name and writing it down.  But luckily I had called on the Blackberry so I held up the number I had called and told her to call that number.  Which she did.  After a brief conversation she said, yes, we have a room for $149.

That taken care of, I headed to the room.  No mini-bar.  The restaurants were closed.  I still had some potato chips from the airport, and ate them, set the alarm on the Blackberry for 6:30 a.m. and the next thing I knew the alarm was going off.

I decided I was sick of flying with American and took a cab ($30) to the Amtrak Terminal and paid $129 for a ticket and took the train back to Penn Station.  The ride back was non-eventful except at one point the conductor announced that they were having signal problems and would have to wait at least ten minutes for another train to pass.  This scared me, but it really was ten minutes and soon I began to see signs that we were close to New York.  New Rochelle passed by (Dick Van Dyke show).  I saw a sign for the New York Post.

When I got back to Penn station, I wanted to kiss the ground.  Back in beloved New York.  Back on the subways that I knew so well.  And what did I return with other than aggravation, one or two shots that were so-so from the small plane.  Buddy was overjoyed to see me, and kept rubbing against my leg as I crawled into bed.  TCM was playing old Perry Mason movies.   I was back home.

Now, of course I need to see if I can get AA to pay for 1) the canceled flight and 2) the hotel.  But I’d just as soon forget about the whole trip and maybe someday, in some other sphere, I’ll get some extra credit points for this journey.

Route 91, NH, from the Cessna.

“In the long run men hit only what they aim at.  Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond (From one of the downloaded classics that I am told is not read any longer.)  How can such wisdom fail to inspire?  When I told my friend that I had downloaded the works of Aristotle, I was looked at askance, as if I had confessed to an odd eccentricity.  It is a shame that kids are forced to read the classics before they are ready for them.  The good ones begin to strike home when you are in your 40s, if you are still able to read a book by then.

Hudson River from Rockwood St. Park

Eventually, we parked the car where it said, no parking and trudged up a hill.  (Those tire tracks were there already).  And the first view, with this emptiness and a few trees – Lester was already far away – and I yelled to him, “Ah this is great!”  He’s usually far ahead of me since I walk slowly and stop to look at every little thing.

I know that this image doesn’t capture the feeling I had as I stood atop the hill with the Hudson barely visible off to the left.  But this is what we had been looking for.  Lots of grumbling as we approached it about State Parks, and rules and regulations.  A sign proclaimed that this was the height of cayote season and to be on guard against cayotes.  I asked Les if cayotes were dangerous and he said they weren’t, as a rule.  That you could feed them from your hand.  I think he was mistaking them for dogs in the dog park.

Read the rest of this entry »

While we were traveling in circles trying to get close to the Hudson (Rockwood Hall State Park), we spotted what looked like an abandoned house on a hill.  After a few wrong turns we found ourselves near the driveway and turned in.  There were a few cars there and I took what I call “the first shot” just to get something before someone came out and chased us away.  But no one did come out.  And so we walked up to the house, and I went to the front door to see if there was a name, and there was: James House.  And beneath it, the word, Hospice.*

Read the rest of this entry »

It was a good day.  More walking up and down than I’m used to.  Cold but not crazy cold in the morning.  By the end of the trip I was walking around with just my sweater on (okay I still had pants).  Now, isn’t that banal commentary on such a place.  The park itself is both beautiful and boring.  At least in the winter.  The really cool places, like the Rockefeller Estate (located in the middle of a private golf course) you need to get tickets and do a tour.   When we got close, Lester wanted to drive around the golf course.  He was obsessed with the idea of someone owning their own golf course and having it so completely fenced in.   We kept going ’round the course looking for ways in until – well I won’t bore you with the circling.

I figured there must be plenty of people with private golf courses of their own.  But he kept ranting about this particular golf course.

We drove into the park proper finally after reading a sign that I tell you up front did not say anything about “no cars.”

We were yelled at later  by the gatekeeper when Lester went in to try and pick up a map of the place.  Turns out it was the same map he already had downloaded from the web.

The gatekeeper wanted to know how we got into the park.  As mentioned, I didn’t see any signs saying “no cars” so I was driving all over what I later found out to be “trails.”  And that’s what the gatekeeper was upset about.  I think he was going to send choppers out to block our way.  According to him there’s one place to park the car and then you are supposed to walk all over the park.   What do I know.  If it’s wide enough for a car and it’s tamped down, and there are tire tracks, then by golly it’s a road.  No wonder a few people we asked directions from while we were driving around seemed aghast.

Bare trees get boring after a while and we left to find what we thought was another part of the park near the Hudson.  Turns out that you weren’t supposed to park there either, but we did (come on you guys, we’re from the city) – and went up a hill to suddenly reveal the river.  Spectacular.  (Will post some later).  And no – didn’t see any swans in Swan Lake.

Only got lost once or twice during the day.  I came home pooped and after doing the backups of the raw files I  fell asleep for a short nap and awoke to find it was dark outside.

I’m in pretty good shape now.  I’ve got the 22 inch monitor hooked up to the laptop.  I can either stretch the screen across both the laptop and the big screen, or turn of the laptop monitor and just use the real monitor.  I bought a Toshiba dock which has 6 usb ports, a built in card for the external monitor, and a couple of other things.  So I’ve got like 5 external drives which can be unhooked from the laptop by hitting just one button.

I’ve got one more program to transfer over to the laptop (Dreamweaver) and I’m looking for the serial numbers etc. which is a pain since it was an upgrade and it wants the original serial number which I haven’t dug up yet, but I will. (Since I wrote this I got Dreamweaver CS3 installed okay.  I don’t really know if there’s a good reason to upgrade it).

And business remains good.  I’ve got about 7 orders in the in-box – which is great for this time of year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t know what type of tree this is – though it looks something like a willow – but it was yellow.  It was in the Hudson Park which is this strip of  land near Croton that juts out into the Hudson River.

Two Old Friends hit the trail again…  It’s been decades since we crossed the country together in our teens.

Lester is navigator, and I’m driving…  Just like old times.  When we arrive at the Croton dam, it’s just like discovering one of the wonders of the world…  or at least of New York.

The place is desolate.  It should be filled with tourists, but no one seems to
know about it.

There’s the roar of water – and we can’t hear each other anymore.  It’s not massive, like Niagra Falls, but that this beautiful piece of workmanship is sitting here, practically unknown – a few miles from New York – it’s strange.  I remember thinking – a lot of water over the bridge… or under it.

View Looking South from the dam

That was a pretty amazing feeling, turning off onto a side road and hearing the roar of water.  There’s a lot of history about the Croton dam which I won’t go into because I don’t know that much about it. But barely 17 miles out of New York is this amazing place and I’m going through the photos now.

A perfect day to go. A warm winter day. Still ice on the lake and the river. And luckily, I expected to be shooting landscapes so I had my 20mm lens with me (used for all of these). There are four or five other places we passed on the way up that I want to go back to. You might say – well how did I know about the dam? I picked up a book called Walking Tours near New York about five years ago and I’ve been thumbing through it all this time. There are abandoned iron mines in the area that you can still go into according to the book; and there are grand mansions, and a lot of the area where painters like Homer Winslow and some other Hudson River painters have been preserved.

I remember being somewhat bored when I first went to Yosemite.  I had the Adams calendar on my wall for a long time and knew most of the famous spots.  But the idea of finding things I haven’t seen before – that’s exciting.

* * *

HISTORY OF THE NEW CROTON DAM (From “A Walker’s Guidebook, Serendipitous Outings Near New York City.”

“400 million gallons of New York’s 2 billion gallons a day come from this dam.  Building began in 1892.  There were all sorts of labor issues. On April 1, 1900 workers staged a huge wildcat strike.  They came roaring down the hill with knives threatening to blow up the dam.  The Westchester National Guard and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were called in to quell the riot. The masonry was all imported from Italy.

It was finally finished in 1906.  At 297 feet high and 2,1678 feet long, it was the largest dam in the world at that time.  The amount of masonry used was said to be equal to that used in the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.”