|
|
|
Storm King
Sunday, October 21 2001
Today we went on a roadtrip up to Storm King, an outdoor sculpture garden in Upstate New York. It was to be the first time I would leave New York City since the events of September 11th. Truth be known, I didn't want to go and would have preferred to stay home and work on my projects, but Gretchen isn't happy with my housebound ways and made it difficult for me to refuse to go.
The trip had been arranged by Ray and his friends, two of whom came in a car to our house to pick us up. These were Linda and Adam, Linda being the sister of Ray's girlfriend Nancy. It was a beautiful autumn day, perfect for a road trip. The leaves along the New York Thruway weren't quite in peak color, but they were getting there. The sycamores were all shriveled greens and browns, the maples yellow and orange, with vines of Virginia Creeper providing dashes of crimson. Crimson is a word that should be reserved for the sole purpose of describing the color of certain shades of autumn leaves.
This was the first time I'd ever crossed the Tappan Zee on the New York Thruway>. I'd always been intrigued by the unexpected width of the Hudson River just north of New York, but now that I've crossed it I can see some of the basis for this width. The Hudson appears to be cutting through a range of low Appalachian ridges just downstream from the Tappan Zee and perhaps these have affected drainage and caused the river to pond slightly upstream. There are also high bluffs on either side of the Hudson in the vicinity of the Tappan Zee bridge.
We all got into Storm King on the cheap $5/student rate, though only a few of us are still students. We all looked young to the old lady collecting the money.
Storm King was set upon a vast farm. It consisted mostly of open fields, though there were also a number of wooded areas. The only artwork displayed at Storm King is contemporary sculpture, mostly the permanent kind made of steel. There were also a few ionic columns in a cluster near the main building, but they weren't part of the exhibit.
The main building used to be someone's rambling farmhouse. Now it serves as the indoor part of the exhibit. On this day, they happened to be running a big exhibit of the works of Alexander Calder. Calder's metal sculptures and mobiles feature the flat shapes with rounded edges familiar Paul Klee paintings. Truth be told, though, I'm not much of a fan of sculpture, particularly modern sculpture. I'm vaguely offended by the way it useless occupies space. Space, to me, is precious. Similarly, I've never been a big fan of huge computer monitors (they're functionally two dimensional devices seizing a huge cube of desktop). Still, while it's easy to prefer painting to sculpture, the alternatives to cathode ray tube monitors are prohibitively expensive.
Gretchen and I wandered away from the others (in total, our contingent was comprised of four heterosexual couples) and gradually found our way into the woods, past a sculpture called Suspended by Menashe Kadishman, the only sculpture I saw that interested me (since it looks like a gravitation impossibility). At this point my interest turned entirely to the trees, especially when I found a Black Birch. I tore off a branch and showed her how it tasted exactly like wintergreen. I kept my Black Birch twig in my mouth considerably longer than Gretchen kept hers, eventually chewing it into something that resembled an old witch's broom. There was a brief period there when were were lying on our backs in the softgrass of a clearing and Gretchen was telling me some of the little atrocities of the Holocaust.
[REDACTED]
When our group reconvened at the pre-arranged rendezvous point outside the main building of Storm King, Ray showed me a Black Walnut he'd found. He proceeded to peel the husk off, inadvertently dying his finger yellow in the process. I suggested we could eat the nut if only we could find a rock to smash it with. There was such rock only a few feet away, so soon enough I was showing my city slicker friends the joys of wild walnut meat. It had the fine flavor of aged cheese.
Now suddenly everyone was interested in eating wild plants, so I cracked open a Red Oak acorn and demonstrated how bitter it was, and then described the Black Birch I'd found in the wood. Ray and this guy named John wanted me to show them Black Birch, so we set off to find some. Unfortunately, there was none growing around the Storm King center and we would have had to go on a little hike to get to it, so I demonstrated the joys of sassafras and Eastern Hemlock instead. In our society, where we grow up completely alienated from the natural world and assume that plants are poisonous unless shown differently, my wild-plant-eating ways have always been regarded as a delightful eccentricity. But I've never been with a crowd as eager to participate as this one.
All eight of us did dinner at a nearby diner. For a diner, it wasn't an especially cheap place. But it did have a salad bar, and there was calamari in that salad bar. So I, like many others in out contingent, opted for a pasta dish with unlimited salad bar. Both Ray and I made the mistake of ordering the clam linguine, which, at this particular establishment, was not very good. You can tell bad clam linguine by the lack of rich white dressing and the little stones that someone has failed to thoroughly rinse from the clams. I bit down on one and feared I'd broken a tooth. Ray did the same a few scant minutes later. But my stomach was full already, mostly from bacon bits, coleslaw and calamari, so when he came around, I told the waiter that no I didn't want my linguine to go and that he should throw it "into a trashcan." There was, however, a period of time during which I was bent over my linguine, forehead resting in my hand, doing what I could to eat the stuff.
Since we got a round of desert with our meals, I, like Gretchen, ordered red Jell-O. Red Jell-O is the only animal product Gretchen still eats, though she can theoretically justify it by rationalizing that the jelly keratin proteins in the Jell-O is made only from hair and fingernail clippings of still-living people and animals.
What with a huge Yankees game, the beautiful upstate weather, and all the security checkpoints, traffic back to New York City was slow the whole way. What should have taken 40 minutes instead took four hours. We were listening to classic rock the whole way, often singing along. You should have seen me in the backseat singing Foreigner's "Hot Blooded" to Gretchen, pausing between cheeseball lyrics (the whole song is one big nasty pickup line) to do little air guitar solos.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?011021 feedback
previous | next |
