The deer have wiped out most of my tiger lilies, but a few managed to escape their predations. A pair of ’em blossomed this morning, after last night’s thunderstorm:
Take a Hike
(You can always skip the slight narrative and go right to the pictures! And my wife’s pictures!)
Amy wanted to break in her new hiking boots yesterday, so I looked up a nice route through Ramapo Mountain State Forest on my NJ/NY Trail Conference map. The weather forecast threatened rain, but the sky was pretty clear and the temps were only in the mid-to-high 70s, so we doused ourselves in sunscreen and bug repellent, drove up to the top of Skyline Dr. and a trail entry point, and got a-hikin’. (For reference’s sake, we took Hoeferlin trail down to the lake, MacEvoy trail north around the lake, and then Castle Point trail back up to Skyline Drive.)
I feared that our late start (10:30am) on such a pleasant day would leave us without a place to park, but I was happily surprised to find only 8 or 9 cars in the area, with plenty of spaces free. We always talk about hiking there, and it’s only a few miles from our house, so I feel bad that it took me this long to get out there.
When we pass the park area going to or from work, there’s usually at least one trail-biker armoring up for a trek through the forest. We didn’t see any in the parking lot as we pulled in, but plenty of cars with bike racks had arrived already. Once we set out on the hike, it didn’t take us long to meet some bikers. As expected, they were decked out like American Gladiators, ready for the day’s wipeouts on the rocks.
As unexpected, we discovered one of the trail-bikers was only half as sane as his compatriots: he was riding a unicycle. We’re still kicking ourselves for not snagging a picture of him. He tried to head down a rock ravine that we’d just passed, so we figured we’d get a photo when his group caught up to us, but it seems that they elected not to follow that path. Can’t say I blame them.
A few minutes later, while Amy was snapping pix of a spider’s web in the sunlight, a biker pedaled up the trail to us. He was armor-plated, wearing orange-tinted wraparounds, and exhausted. I made space for him, but he took the opportunity of my presence to stop and rest. I said, “You’re a better man than I. Oh, and my wife’s just up the trail; try not to run her over.” He panted for a while, and I thought, “I could be in shape like that if I bothered to exercise.”
Eventually, we reached the Ramapo Lake. I remembered walking on these trails with my family and our dog when I was a little kid, but only in the abstract. I mean, I remember getting out of the car at a different entry point to the trails, and I think I recall walking around the lake, but that was it.
As we began to skirt the lake on MacEvoy trail, I noticed that, amazingly, there’s a private home that overlooks the lake. I was impressed until I poked around this morning and found Ryecliff, an even more amazing estate in the park (got $5 million I can borrow)?
From the lake, we turned on to the Castle Point trail to get back. The map showed several good observation points on the trail, as well as the eponymous Castle Point. I had no recollection of a castle from my childhood trip(s) to the park, so we got our adventure on and began following the white trail blazes.
Unfortunately, I’m not great at figuring out the topographical parts of these maps, so I didn’t realize that we were in for a couple of quick ascensions. They only added up to 350 feet — we were around 550 feet at lake-level, and ended up at an elevation of 900 feet at the top of the trail — but they came upon us quickly and were tiring. Also, it seems like the bugs preferred the higher elevations, so this last stretch became much more of a hassle.
But it was awfully rewarding. We discovered Castle Point almost without warning, as gray stone ruins emerged under the sun-dappled green canopy.
There’s nothing more satisfying for me than when I can find a story. I treasure that unfolding process, when what we saw gains more meaning as we discover its context. Or maybe it’s like an iceberg. Whatever. Anyway, we walked through a ruined building in the forest yesterday, and I found out where it came from and how it fell today.
After we poked around among the ruins and took all sorts of pix, we continued on the trail, reaching a solid, square, stone building. I said, “Looks like I was wrong about those ruins being Castle Point! This must be it.” I added that this made the ruins “Castle Pointless,” but Amy didn’t find that very funny.
We circled the tower and then looked inside, but we couldn’t figure out what the building was, nor what its relationship to the ruins was. There were no stairs (or sign that there’d been any) inside, so it couldn’t have been an observation tower, despite its high vantage. We puzzled for a bit, gave up, had some water and some trail mix, and continued along the trail. Today, I discovered that this building served as the water tower for the ruins, which were the Castle Point. I had noticed a pipe heading out of the building in the direction of the ruins, but failed to put 2 and 2 together.
After the water tower, we finished the Castle Point trail and reached Skyline Drive, where our body-armored and orange-sunglassed biker passed by us. I said, “Wow! It’s like a Herman Hesse novel, but with a better plot.” Amy didn’t find that very funny either.
That pretty much covers the “facts” of our hike. I’m not feeling too reflective/ruminative, so I’ve held the commentary about the region’s history, the joy of nature, the folly of castles, etc. to a minimum. It was a lovely hike, and we had a great time. If you come out to visit and the weather permits, we’ll take you out to see it. I promise.
(Go check out the pictures. Amy’s are better than mine.)
Sprawl for Some
I don’t recall why I never finished reading Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History
Anyway, here’s an article by Prof. Bruegmann about the virtues and decline of sprawl:
But let’s assume for a moment that I’m entirely wrong and that sprawl is terrible. Could we stop it if we wanted to?
The record is not encouraging. The longest-running and best-known experiment was the one undertaken by Britain starting right after World War II. At that time, the British government gave unprecedented powers to planners to remake cities and took the draconian step of nationalizing all development rights to assure that these plans could be implemented. The famous 1944 Greater London plan, for example, envisioned a city bounded by a greenbelt. If there happened to be any excess population that couldn’t be accommodated within the greenbelt, it was supposed to be accommodated in small, self-contained garden cities beyond the belt.
Did the plan work? In one sense it did: The greenbelt is still there, and some people consider that an aesthetic triumph. But the plan certainly did not stop sprawl. As usual, the planners were not able to predict the future with any accuracy. The population grew, household size declined and affluence rose faster than predicted. Development jumped right over the greenbelt–and not into discreet garden cities, because this policy was soon abandoned.
The ultimate result was that much of southeastern England has been urbanized. Moreover, because of the greenbelt, many car trips are longer than they would have been otherwise, contributing to the worst traffic congestion in Europe.
I’m gonna get back to AstraZeneca’s annual shareholder letter now.
In bloom
Sorry I haven’t written too much lately, dear readers. I’ve been busy with work, and I’m also spending a lot of time reading and trying to write fiction. I have a bunch of posts I’d love to get around to writing, and I really do have notes about them on my bulletin board.
Till then, here’s a picture I took last week:
Cat-era Obscura
One winter afternoon, my cat returned to the house in a panic, bleeding from one paw. He’d ripped a claw on something, so we cleaned him up and decided he wasn’t going outside for a while.
Since there was a light snow on the ground, I decided to investigate by following his paw-prints. They led on through the yard, across the street, and into some woods behind the neighbor’s house. Given the distance between prints, I figured that he ripped his claw while racing back home, probably on rocks or hard ground.
Of course, anytime we let him out, we wondered what he was up to. A gentleman in Germany wondered the same thing about his cat, so he rigged up a tiny digital camera to hang from Mr. Lee’s collar, and thus began CatCam site.
Cowtown
Those of you who have come out to Stately VM Estates may think that Amy & I live out in the sticks. I go to some lengths to point out that, no matter how isolated my town is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the next town over, West Milford. And now I have proof.
You can’t build a house on anger
Jonathan Capehart of the WaPost visited New Orleans expecting to find anger and resentment:
And then I got my feet on the ground in New Orleans. The anger I was ready to embrace never materialized, because the people I met were moving beyond it.
He found people trying to build their homes. I find it a little weird that he was “ready to embrace” the anger of the locals, but we all project, right?
Meanwhile, we have a little bit of Louisiana right here in Ringwood, because one of our neighbors wasn’t as lucky as we were in that storm last week, and took a little roof damage from a fallen tree. Amy waves at the blue tarp on their roof when we pass it.
Your primitive intellect wouldn’t understand things with alloys and compositions and things with. . . molecular structures.
I may be crap with drywall anchors and painting trim, but I totally rock the shit with my electric chainsaw:
Here’s a set of pix of this evening’s “yardwork.” And one of yesterday’s mess.
Tree’s company
Amy pointed out that my fallen tree photos from yesterday didn’t give much perspective on just how big that thing is/was, so we shot some more this morning:
I call it “Tree’s Lounge”! Get it?
Anyway, here’s the full set. I busted out the hacksaw this morning to clear out some of the smaller branches, and I’ll start tonight with the electric chainsaw on the bigger limbs. I hope I can work my way back to the base of it by Sunday.
Dodging Bullets Like Keanu, Part 2
Or, “Missed by that much.” Seriously, this was a 40′ or 50′ tall tree, and it managed to just miss the house on its way down. I’ll probably post followup pix from when I bust out the trusty electric chainsaw this weekend . . .
(Update: turns out the falling tree took out another tree: a 20-foot-tall one, about 4 or 5 inches in diameter, that was 6 inches away from my window. And yet there’s not a shingle out of place on the house.)