by Xen

Created on: July 07, 2009

Paradise Found

Also, Dan is a Communist revolutionary

Dan Kessler and Stephanie took the train from the city. Even though it is only a two-hour, scenic train ride in either direction, it is time and distance enough to present a barrier. Even were the travel instantaneous, there is something of the city that invites barriers. On the drive here, they spoke of neighborhoods and streets with a kind of mutual awareness, a gossipy tone about landmarks I had no way of knowing. The city changes you slightly, forces some inner evolution to compensate for underground travel and nights that never grow dark enough for natural sleep.

We wander through the Vanderbilt Estate (yes, those Vanderbilts) in Hyde Park, NY. I state that the scenery is familiar from Boscobel Restoration, in that it is in a forested slope ending in the Hudson River. Dan takes my statement further, positing that all those obscenely rich robber barons simply chose their lots along the Hudson the same way the kids pick a bedroom in a new house; the first one there gets it.

Even walking around this estate feels curiously like time travel to a version of the 1800s where all the inhabitants have vanished and were replaced by baffled tourists who move hesitantly on the grounds, as if a security guard (of which there are a sprinkling) or a ghost (of which there are likely more than we'd prefer to know) will tap them on the shoulder and admonish them over some unwitting faux pas. We three stay out of the houses, our concern more pastoral.

The day could not be lovelier, the temperature so frightfully perfect and the sun so unflinchingly bright that one could easily forget one has a body. It wouldn't take more than a suggestion to make one believe one had died and been sent to the afterlife. I do not know the lay-out of the estate, so I follow close to Dan and listen to stories of strangers on cruise ships making bad life decisions and having things work out anyway.

We wander through gardens, snapping pictures as though we were the first to discover these statues and shrubs. While all of this existed well before we were born, it is new to us and has the odor of discovery about it. We need to record our observations to relate to botanists and cartographers.

After the garden, we traipse down a hill toward a creek. Coming to meet us are two thoroughly soaked women and a man who was suspiciously drier. They look at me and smile. My trigger finger is itchy on my camera, because

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