CHAPTER 28

When I’d first come to live with the Doctor and undertaken to study, among many other things, the history of my own country, he’d figured that the best place for me to start was close to home. And so my earliest voyages into what was, for me, a great darkness-the story of the world before my arrival in it-had been made up of books about the history of New York City and New York State. I’d also been on a few trips up north with the Doctor, when he’d had calls to pay on the penitentiaries and lunatic asylums what were located throughout the Hudson Valley, or when he went to Albany to give testimony to some commission or other about how the state should handle its mentally deranged citizens. So I was no stranger to the beautiful-if slightly spooky-landscape that surrounded us on our very pleasant voyage aboard the Mary Powell that day; all the same, a queer sort of feeling crept into me as we headed upriver, one that I’d never experienced on any of those earlier trips. I found that I was much more aware, not just of the misty mountains and green fields that lay beyond the river-banks (the usual objects of study for the sightseer), but of the towns that were cut into the countryside, and the many factory works what had been built over the years (and were still being built) along the river itself. In other words, the growing presence of people-in what I knew had been, just a hundred years earlier, a wild wilderness-was for some reason weighing heavy on my mind.

All through breakfast I wondered what could be making me see things so differently than I ever had before; and I got worried as to whether the change might not be permanent. It wasn’t until I went up onto the promenade deck with Miss Howard after breakfast to have a smoke that I started to comprehend my own feelings a little better: it was our recent discovery that Libby Hatch had been born and raised in similar surroundings that was changing my view of the country we were passing through, and the people in it, so much. This wasn’t some quiet, simple region where people lived close to nature and far from the ugliness and violence of cities like New York, I began to see; this was just a string of smaller New Yorks, where certain people engaged in the same kind of disheartening, and in some cases sickening, behavior that so many folks in the big city did. As this grim realization started to really sink in, I was surprised to find myself making a kind of wish: a wish that the great wilderness what still dominated up on mountains like the purple Catskills-standing in the distance to my left that afternoon-would spread back down over the earth and swallow up the ugly little nests of human beings what’d sprung up in the river valley. It was a wish that, true to my original fear, has never really gone away in all the years since.

And it certainly wasn’t altered any that day when we hit the middle stretch of the Hudson, where the manor houses of the old Dutch and English river families began to dot the hillsides to our right. Mr. Moore came up to join us, and both he and Miss Howard grew very quiet as they stared out toward those heights. I knew that each of them had real cause for sadness, being as they’d both spent much of their bittersweet childhoods there. In Mr. Moore the scenery obviously brought back memories of the brother whose death had saddened him so and caused such a breach with the rest of his family (Mr. Moore having contended that they’d driven his brother to morphine and drink with their strict Dutch ways). Miss Howard, on the other hand, was clearly thinking about the many summers and autumns she’d spent hunting, shooting, and generally living a boy’s life with her beloved father, who’d had no son (nor any other child besides his one daughter) to share his sporting pursuits with. Said father had died in a mysterious hunting accident in amongst those woods some years back, and there’d been talk of suicide. But Miss Howard-who’d taken the death so hard that she’d had to retreat to a sanitarium for a time-had always denied such rumors. Considering all this, it wasn’t too surprising to see the pair’s spirits sag beyond melancholy as they watched the high hills and the stately houses pass by. And though we eventually went below again to consume a very tasty lunch, and even managed to play a few silly but diverting deck sports afterwards, the general mood among our party remained what you might call reserved.

The Mary Powell stopped only briefly in Albany, a bustling city with many factories, railroad tracks, and workers’ houses lining its riverfront: not the kind of scenery that was going to put me or anyone else in a more cheerful state of mind. Many of the steamer’s passengers debarked at the state’s capital, leaving just them what were finishing off the round trip to New York, along with those of us who were going on through a dredged upper section of the river to Troy. Only a few miles of the riverside between Albany and Troy were still unpopulated, and the fiery, smoky factories that we passed, along with the large groups of dirty, miserable workers who were coming out of them, served to underline the notion that the countryside was becoming ever more infected by mankind’s petty but brutal desires.

As for the city of Troy, it was a prosperous but dreary place, its dozens of brick manufacturing works and cargo steamships fouling the river just so’s to make the latest laundry, gardening, and locomotive machinery available to the rest of the world. By the time we left the Mary Powell, a beautiful sunset had begun to appear above the western portion of the city, making me anxious to strike out into the country, toward that fiery sinking ball and away from the city; so it came as a great disappointment to discover, when we reached the Union Depot and the offices of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Railroad Company, that the previous day’s great gale had struck this portion of the state, too, and caused a bad derailment on the line between Troy and Ballston Spa. We’d have to wait until morning to finish our journey, which meant spending a night in the nearby Union Hotel: not a terrible joint, by any means, but still discouraging for a young man who was chafing to get away from civilization and out into the wilderness.

The train ride the next morning offered me some relief, being as once we’d left Troy and its environs behind, we did start to pass through patches of countryside what hinted at how magical that part of the state must’ve been before civilization hit it like a runaway streetcar. There were long stretches of what seemed like ancient woodlands, and we passed by a couple of big silver lakes; but each time we’d quickly move on to some cluster of farms or past a bustling little town, all of which hammered home the point that the old forest was losing its fight for control of the landscape. Before long the conductor on our train was announcing our approach to Ballston Spa, and when we arrived at the town’s outskirts I found that my mood of the day before had returned, and maybe even gotten worse; though such was not a bad outlook to have, I quickly discovered, when you were entering the seat of Saratoga County.

Cyrus had brought along a little guidebook to the towns of the northern Hudson area, and he read from it as we chugged slowly toward the end of our journey. Ballston Spa, I learned, had once been famous for its string of quiet little health retreats, but over the last century things had changed pretty drastically: many of the mineral springs had dried up, and the spas had been replaced by a collection of mills. In their early days these large brickworks had produced wool, cotton, linens, and a peculiar battle-axe what looked like a Turkish scimitar (this last for the Union Army during the Civil War). But even the mills had fallen on hard times by 1897. Most of them had been built along a rushing creek what ran through the town, the Kayaderosseras (an old Iroquois word what meant something to the effect of “stream of the crooked waters”), but in the years that followed so much lumbering had been done around the stream’s watershed that the Kayaderosseras itself had been reduced to a trickling little creek what couldn’t power anything of consequence. So now the black smoke of furnaces poured from the chimneys of the mills, which, though they still made some farm tools, were currently known mostly for paper products.