165. Homeward Bound

I woke this morning with tears in my eyes.  From a dream my conscious won’t let me remember, except my head was full of colors, pinks and sky blue and golds and spring greens. But these colors of my salvation somehow seem too close and I am afraid.  I feel like a small boy and I want to go home.  But home and Mom and Dad are no longer there.  The house is, but that section of the city is now a ghetto and I haven’t driven through there in years.  I would today, however.  I knew I had to go home and at least drive by the house before I took one more step forward in life.  I took Bouncer with me.  A week out of the hospital, he wouldn’t have let me go alone.

If one zips along the New York State Thruway at a speed somewhat below 80 mph, the trip from Saugerties to Utica  takes a little over two hours.   The Thruway has been around a long time but the magnificent roadway still strikes me as a modern wonder.  More than a half century later the interstate highway still handles increasing amounts of traffic quite well as it runs for 570 miles from New York City to Buffalo.

We weren't going quite that far. After the hills west of Schenectady, the four lane highway dropped back down into the valley of the Mohawk and gradually rose again on the south side of the river where one looks out over what is left of the small city of Amsterdam, famous in the first half of the twentieth century for carpets. Far away to the north one can barely see the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, a beautiful tract of almost ten thousand square miles of wilderness, considered virtually worthless before minerals and timber began to float down its twisty rivers in the 1800's to welcoming markets along the Mohawk River where processing and manufacturing industries blossomed.

I could see the faint outline of the Adirondacks when we were high above the Mohawk Valley and I thought of those days in college drinking beer in the hundreds of summer bars for twenty year olds that closed down on Labor Day and reopened in November to slake the thirst of deer hunters.  Some of the businesses insisted on calling themselves restaurants, although a Slim Jim might be the only food item on their menu.  The Chambers of Commerce in the little towns  pointed to the many attractions and ice cream shops and didn't mention the huge percentage of profits in alcohol.  On one small lake to the northeast in Carthage, NY a popular beer joint overflowed the tiny island it was built upon and continued another 40 feet out over the water.   When the local assessor insisted the island had to have a name for his official maps, the owner's first reaction was, "What island?"  The woman was told pretending it was a barge would involve an inland salvage license.  She was at least honest enough to call it what the locals had always called it, Beer Island.  Evidently scandalized, a mapmaker in Albany added an initial so that it's official name is now J. Beer Island.