Candlepower
by Jeffrey MacIntyre
In the lower reaches of the Hudson Valley, daytime hours now are well fastened with fall’s rust. Red-yellow patches freckle hillsides, leaf pilings assemble curbside. But lately it’s nightfall here in our semirural surround that has us most absorbed.
They come in the gloaming, padding downhill sometimes as far as the Hudson’s banks, in full gawking view from our home. Late last night I urged the sedan past the village green slowly, watchful for the deer. My wife happened upon a gaggle of them the other night, nestled there in ceremonious semicircle like village founders. In daytime they amble brazenly out of thickets, where for all their obliviousness roadways must seem asphalt meadows. Even the flying turkeys — our first sighting had us breathless, the bird hurling itself across our windshield with the poise of a winged ottoman — show better road sense.
Meanwhile, down at the dock they are lighting the dark with the best in nineteenth-century derring do. New waist-high bollards, proposed to replace the current lamp posts, shed a dimmer light, letting the ridgeline above West Point speak for itself. Set your latterns low and cast a ballot for old-timey night, tut-tut the new low-light advocates with their haute design pastoralism. And yet. It really is a pretty patch of starlight hung overtop these mountains, and every urban visitor to Cold Spring — we’re no different — votes less-is-more just in stepping off the train. It’s why we’ve come. It’s nearly enough to warm oneself to the developer doggerel of viewsheds and kilowatt-engineered atmospherics.
Still, night is the visual face to the singlemost all-conquering state of things here: quiet.
Half the newcomer appeal at this remove from the city is the enforced curfew, adjusting your night life down to candlepower measures. Stick to your knitting, the evenings seem to say. Which is part, after all, of what leaving New York lets us do.
Maybe country calm edges too easily into pensive cliche. Say what you will: it’s a healthy habit of mind.
Much of what brought me to New York — the steady gruel of Grub Street gigs — is in deep, and deeply unromantic, sunset. Even so, amid signs of decline there’s a bright fuse on developments that feel encouraging, projects that are purposeful, and talented friends brightening the path ahead. Still and all, in stretches of long twilight there’s no epiphany in store. (Darkest before dawn! Well. Too easy!) Maybe things feel less cockeyed by the combined distance of time and miles from more hardscrabble days.
Back here, the simpler fact of after-dark is you don’t venture far and, practically speaking, these towns shut down early. But on walks most weekend nights there’s friendly hubbub rising from backyards, passersby trading small talk, and low key music pulsing at house windows. Kids marauder around the bandstand in their best lanky impression of adults having someplace better to be.
We know this since we venture out often enough ourselves, curiosity and cabin fever our guides. Tonight we’re settling into folding chairs in the great room of the village library, named for and anointed by one of the local antebellum swells. The chapel-like confines, really a vaulted great room, its foyer and a basement conscripted to perennial book sale, are somehow quaintly grand. It’s a postcard setting and, tonight, the only cinema for dozens of miles.
I take a pull from my coffee cup, the lights come down and, just like that, the room flickers to life: the pianist knocking out the first chords of accompaniment to the silent we’ve gathered to see. There’s carousing and fisticuffs and a flash of romance down at the New York dockside of the film, one that makes a far cartoon cry of our own as the piano tinkles happily away. At intermission a couple introduce themselves, recalling their own Brooklyn migration forty years prior. In younger years they took the work week’s last, standing room-only train from Grand Central, coming unspooled from a Friday’s fun in Manhattan.
Heading back, my eyes light on the homespun local excitements. How long will they feel so unfamiliar? Any given weekend there are lights on at the VFW. The local paper notes the Masons are recruiting. I don’t know about the Knights of Columbus or the Legion, but the odds favor festivities underway someplace near. It’s like some Grand Wood hereafter.
The reality is I’m yawning into my sleeve, the chill outside is biting, and we point ourselves home. We’re in fine fettle alone together, easing down the steep hill, no wildlife escort in sight. Small town Saturday night is well underway.
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Photo credits sequentially: “Sky of West Point Evening” by Wei Zhang. “We have to shoot that church” by grace*c*. “409 143a” by Paul Grebanier. “Cold Spring, NY” by D Dipasupil. “my morning commute (1): waiting” by jennifer könig. “Service Station 05” by rt48state. “the divisive nature of the trees” by jennifer könig. “Cold Spring” by Jordan Confino. All images used with permission.
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Jeffrey MacIntyre is a freelance writer and consultant. His writing appears widely.