What Can a Report on a Bike Trip Offer Our Storm-Ravaged County? A Little Perspective
The best destinations in Upstate New York reminded me of the kind of community we have been in the past and, I'm sure, will be in the future.
WEEDSPORT, NY — Just off the Empire State Trail, on an empty rural lane in New York’s Finger Lakes region, I pedaled past undulating fields of a striking, yellow-flowered crop that extended to the horizon in all directions.
What was this plant, the one responsible for such a golden, sundrenched scene? Canola? Some mustard-type deal?
I thought of digging out my phone and clicking on my plant-ID app.
Then I thought this: Who cares?
It was the morning of Friday Sept. 27. The remnant of Hurricane Helene was battering Western North Carolina. My older son was texting me updates about, for example, the imminent collapse of the Lake Lure dam (which turned out to be the few regional calamities that didn’t come to pass).
Why would anyone want to read a story with the merest sliver of a news angle — an examination of distant trail towns now that Brevard seems destined to become one — when they were in the throes of the worst local disaster in memory?
I hadn’t heard from my wife, Laura, in more than 24 hours. I should be with her, with our community, I thought, rather than hundreds of miles away, selfishly riding my bike.
Why bother recording what I saw? Why am I now writing this outside the storm-shuttered Cedar Mountain Outpost, caging free internet, power and coffee, when I could be up the road at the Cedar Mountain Community Center serving up meals and friendship to storm victims?
To bring relief from relentlessly grim storm coverage and maybe a little perspective. To offer a reminder that, outside of the ravaged Southeast, peace abides elsewhere in this land, that it will return, eventually, to Transylvania County.
I write with the confidence that sometime in the not-to-distant future our home will again be a place where enjoying the outdoors can be seen not as a pointlessly self-indulgent pursuit, but as a way of life and the foundation of our economy.
Which is true of a lot of the towns and counties on the Empire State Trail, which did ultimately provide some lessons for Brevard upon the completion of the Ecusta Trail.
For starters, embrace the trail when it comes. Bring it as close to downtown as possible.
I rode roughly half of the Empire State’s 750 miles, starting in Wappingers Falls, about 80 miles north of Manhattan, and heading up the Hudson Valley. Just north of Albany, I hung a left to follow the trail’s east-west stretch along the Mohawk River and the stillwater remnants of the Erie Canal before arriving at my sister’s home near Lake Cayuga.
For all the hype about Empire State being the nation’s longest multi-use path, “it’s not really a trail,” said Martha T. Mooney, with whom I shared lunch at a table outside the Broad Street Bagel Co. in the Hudson Valley village of Kinderhook.
Unlike the dedicated trails through Pennsylvania and Maryland I took on a similar journey last year, the Empire State is a collection of local bike paths and quiet (usually) and signposted (sometimes) roads cobbled together in 2020.
Mooney is qualified to speak about the trail as the past president of the Mohawk Hudson Cycling Club and to speak about the area as a former editor from Manhattan who retired to Kinderhook in 1997.
It’s a great little village, the home of the Old Fox himself, the wily 19th century political operative and former president Martin Van Buren, whose retirement residence has been preserved as a historical site.
Kinderhook is close to the attractions in the Berkshire Mountains to the east, Mooney said, and not too far from ski resorts in Vermont. Old, lovingly maintained wood-framed structures dominate its small downtown.
Mooney described Kinderhook and its surroundings perfectly, I thought, as “very beautiful in a quiet way.”
But I would have missed the village if not for a mile-long detour from the trail, which also skirts the perimeter of nearby Hudson, reputedly the most vibrant town in its same-named Valley. I saw none of it.
Such alignments are one reason that local business owners I talked to didn’t report a major boost to business from the Empire State. In fact, many of them didn’t know it existed. The other reason is, at least so soon after its establishment, the trail doesn’t attract the large groups of long-distance cyclists I passed on my trip last year. On the Empire State, they appeared hours apart, mostly in ones and twos.
But the best of the Hudson Valley also provided a model of retirement and tourist destinations achieving a balance that, perhaps, has slipped away from Brevard and Asheville, at least before the potentially discouraging after-effects of Helene.
The Hudson and Mohawk valleys boomed in the 19th century, and every community on my route had experienced population decline or stagnation in recent decades.
In Kinderhook and another favorite destination, Catskill, this didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
These villages looked prosperous but nicely settled, not crushed by tourism or development pressure. History hasn’t been wiped away. And though the landscape is not as dramatic as our own — and the modest Catskill Mountains to the west seem barely worthy of the name — you can still see why this region was stunning enough to inspire a renowned group of 19th century landscape painters, the Hudson Valley School.
The home of one of these artists, Frederic Edwin Church, is now the Olana State Historic Site. I entered its 250-acre grounds on a gravel road steep and densely shaded enough that it could have been in Pisgah National Forest.
It led to the hilltop clearing around Church’s old stone mansion, lavishly decorated with tile and brick highlights in a variety of shades worthy of a stack of Necco Wafers.
There I chatted with a member of a local walking group who said she had retired to the area from New York City.
Good decision?
She paused to take in the wide view of the Hudson River and, behind it, the distant Catskill Mountain.
“Yeaahhh,” she said. Like, obviously.
There was another lesson to learn from some of the towns in the Mohawk Valley. Hate to pick on any one of them, but I happened to spend a night in Herkimer, about 90 miles west of Albany and nearly adjacent to Ilion, the longtime home of gunmaker Remington Arms Co.
The plant shed jobs for years before closing for good in March. Herkimer’s population peaked in 1920 at more than 10,000 and has since dwindled to fewer than 7,500.
I can’t detail the end result without descending into cruel snobbery. But it’s the most obviously depressed town I’ve ever set foot in; it’s what happens when industry leaves and nothing arrives to replace it.
It brought home how smart Brevard and Transylvania were to pivot to a tourism economy after major plant closures in the early 2000s.
Last week, I overheard a volunteer at the Community Center say — jokingly, I think — “at least we’ll have leaf season all to ourselves this year.”
Sure, but without the leaf peepers and other visitors, we’d be sunk. I know that the following will happen because of the pride and generosity Transylvania residents have shown since Helene, but we need to support our local businesses in the coming months just as they have supported us in the aftermath of the storm.
As my time in Herkimer showed me, we are very lucky to have these enterprises. I’m also sure we will recover because we are at least relatively lucky in another way.
Not to diminish the genuine hardship of the many owners of flood- and wind-damaged properties in Transylvania, but unlike other parts of the region, we didn’t lose whole neighborhoods. We didn’t lose lives.
Hurricane Helene, at last count, killed 40 people in Buncombe County and seven in Henderson County.
The generally calm acceptance of, for example, the ongoing power outage in our neighborhood, means that most people have kept this somber fact in mind, have remained aware that for many of us the consequences of Helene have mostly amounted to inconveniences.
My wife turned out to be fine and our home undamaged. To us, living in the aftermath of Helene has been like backpacking but with running water, soft beds and an unlimited supply of wine. We’ve talked more, read more, slept more and, of course, watched zero Netflix. No complaints.
And doing without a gas-guzzling generator seems like our symbolic due, given that the appetite for fossil fuel-powered niceties is what got us into this mess, or at least made it worse.
By the way, I did eventually reach Frank Clarke, the agricultural educator at the Cornell Cooperative Extension service in Cayuga County.
The fields of yellow blossoms I passed were indeed planted in either canola or a variety of mustard commonly planted as a cover crop.
That was his best guess, anyway. If you care.
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com
What a wonderful read.
Thanks for this, Dan.