Personal Day

A. took a ride to the country as a break from 21 days of non-stop work. That morning, I woke up with a headache spreading from my third eye out to behind my ears. I was still coming off a miscalculated, sleepless night in the city and I was anxious about meeting the expectations of my day-tripper.

A weighty challenge these days, meeting expectations. My own in particular. Never one to accept "having a bad day," it's a much more economical use of my time to simply ignore it. However, today I was encountering a particularly stubborn form of glum. First, I was questioning whether I wanted human interaction. A bad sign. Second, I could hear myself being testy with A. on the phone.

The first sign of improvement was her arrival and, in an instant, my world got bigger. She was feeling particularly raw from an exhausting job, so we just let loose and bitched for a while. It was a mutually-beneficial decompression period, A. away from work and myself out of isolation.

The weather turned out to be good, so we committed to hiking Mt. Beacon. You can see it from my kitchen window and, from there, it is indeed imposing. I had been reading a lot about the abandoned incline railway at the top, where there is now a jumble of radio towers. Even as we walked out the door, I wasn't convinced I had the required motivation. We stopped to visit Dan at the gallery and told him where we were headed. All he said was that it was totally worth it.

We walked and talked for an hour so, ascending the mountain by increasingly steep inclines, our bodies pitching forward to keep up the pace. Toward the top, we approached a massive cement wall that could only have been a damn and, around the corner, we came upon a very large, placid reservoir. Reward #1.

At the top, the town below us slowly revealed itself in a breathtaking 180-degree panorama. I thought I could see my house. The plateau is comprised of old foundations of buildings and the remnants of the incline railway that remained in operation for more than 70 years. The entire Hudson Valley was on view. Reward #2.

Mental challenge and physical exertion aside, it was one hell of a fun day. Walking home that night from dropping A. off at the train station, when I turned the corner onto my street, I looked up to the mountain and at the radio towers on the horizon.

No big deal. We were there.