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the stereo fireworks of Kingston
Sunday, June 29 2003
At 2pm this afternoon, Gretchen and I were in the center of old Hurley with about eight other people on a tour being conducted by Hurley's historian. We walked around, the historian pointed out various stone houses and told us about their rich and storied pasts. Hurley dates back to the 1600s, when it was bilingual community of Dutch merchants and English settlers. We didn't learn much about Hurley's earliest history, though; this particular walk focused mostly on the time of the Revolutionary War, back when Hurley was a strategic grain provider. (Indeed, the Esopus Valley fields of Hurley still are the source of enormous corn harvests.) According to our historian, George Washington considered Hurley so important that most of his other strategic centers (including Valley Forge) were linked to Hurley by a system of direct roads. Oh, the doings and the goings on in Revolutionary Hurley! We were shown the house in whose tiny basement a spy and 20 British sympathizers were imprisoned. We were directed to look at the site of the present Hurley library, where once an elaborate tavern and inn had been situated, ultimately succumbing to Hurley's first electrical fire. Then there was the old Hurley graveyard, most of whose stones appear to date from the 1700s and 1800s. It wasn't a bad tour, all in all, but near the end the historian's presentation was hijacked by the subject of the Masons. He mentioned that George Washington, a Mason, only stayed at the houses of other Masons. Suddenly everyone wanted to know about the Masons, what they were up to, what they were about, who belonged to the organization, and why George W. refused to stay with anyone else. Gretchen began rolling her eyes as the dead horse continued with its punishment. I was reminded of the time in Nyalaland, South Africa, when our group sat around the campfire quizzing our guide about the flavors of various bush animals. Annoying little Nicole had been the worst, listing animals as quickly as she could think of them in a childish attempt to impress somebody. This recollection led to a little inside-joke banter between Gretchen and me. Impala? Oh yes, he was a Mason. Kudu? Definitely a Mason. Crocodile? No, he probably wasn't a Mason. Elephant? He was actually the founder of the Hurley Masonic temple!
The tour was cut short by a few drops of rain from developing thunderstorm. A few minutes later it began. Over the next several hours it crashed, boomed, drowned the land, and even killed our power for a few seconds, long enough to turn off the four up computers on the network as well as the DVD player (we were watching Blue Crush).
The skies didn't exactly clear, but at least the rain quit by early evening. Maybe not God, but at least Nature appeared to be co-operating with the City of Kingston, which had chosen this evening to celebrate its Fourth of July. Neither Gretchen nor I have much reason to be proud of our country these days, but we're big Kingston boosters, and if Kingston wanted to celebrate July 4th today, then to us it was a celebration of Kingston. (We're actually going to be in Montreal, Canada on July 4th - we're kick-starting a tradition of leaving the country every July 4th until America begins respecting the principles of its founding fathers.)
The celebration was being held down on the Rondout (or, as it's also known, the Strand). We parked several blocks away without difficulty. In fact, there was room for an American SUV behind our car after we parked, so Gretchen backed up a little. This neatly solved the problem of her wanting to be randomly nice but not wanting to benefit random assholes.
The Rondout was crowded with people milling around various circus-style concessions and low-budget amusements. The people seemed to represent the great American average very well, 55 percent of the people being overweight and 35 percent of them obese. A smattering of prematurely-middle-aged teenage girls were pushing strollers. No matter their age, a plurality of the people appeared to be maintaining the hairdos they'd worn back in high school. But as Gretchen pointed out, the amazing thing about Kingston is the sheer number of interracial couples. They seem to be nearly as common as the non-miscegenating kind one sees in commercials.
My favorite amusement of the entire festival was its simplest. A guy had a bicycle whose handlebars were set loose into the fork so that they couldn't control the steering. The sign said that this was "the Crazy Bike" and that if anyone could ride it ten feet, he'd win $25. The Crazy Bike guy showed us how it was done - he pedaled it without difficulty, leaning back and forth to control its direction. So one after another, people tried to win the prize. All of them failed. But nobody was especially upset. The rules were simple, and the bike was clearly rideable. Obviously the Crazy Bike guy had mastered his machine and no one else was his equal in this particular field. I'm sure he was perfectly willing to cough up $25 if anyone could just ride that Crazy Bicycle for ten lousy feet.
Another amusement featured a guy standing on a grate above a tank of water. If you could hit a little metal target with a ball, it would trip a lever, release the grate, and the guy would go kersplash. This amusement was actually a little more rewarding for the unpaying spectator, because we got to see the guy fall into the water numerous times. It was most satisfying for Gretchen whenever a little girl successfully hit the target.
We had dinner at a Rondout Chinese restaurant called the Golden Duck. I can't say exactly what it was, but the Golden Duck is a very old school kind of place, the way Chinese restaurants might have been back in the 1950s back when they only served chop suey. This place actually had a complete menu, and though the food was good, the "spicy dishes" (red items on the menu) had a rather anemic bite. I suppose they might have seemed exotic if you'd just arrived in a time machine from 1954.
Over dinner Gretchen and I had an interesting discussion about what exactly she is doing in her poetry, and how it is different from the stuff done in the poetry of others. Gretchen said she has a special appreciation for poetry whose meaning is just a little unclear. I knew immediately what she meant, because I've sensed it in her poems lots of times - she was referring to something I describe (for lack of a better term) as "noise." By noise, I don't mean completely meaningless information. In artistic expression, I use the term "noise" to describe something that is so compressed, distorted, overworked, frayed, and unfinished that it's developed a massive layering of possible interpretations. Think of a knot of lumpy oil paint used to represent someone's forehead. I'm talking about that. Think of the accidental side effects of strumming the muted strings of a severely pre-amped electric guitar. I'm talking about that. Think of a vaguely-heard lyric buried behind a particularly mood-altering chord change. I'm talking about that. The more you take in these instances of artistic noise, the more you discover. They are fractals of beauty and ugliness, placeholders left by the artist for the imagination of the audience. I'm not as attuned to poetry as Gretchen is, so I don't always recognize the value of well-constructed poetic noise, but I know it must exist and I've recognized it in Gretchen's poems.
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Just before the fireworks went off, I waited forever in a beer line just to get a lousy Budweiser. The girls working the bar were all pretty hot, but they weren't working efficiently. The cash register seemed to be taking up too much of their time. The bartender chicks all were wearing the sorts of tank tops that revealed their belly buttons. This is how I happened to notice that one of them had a scar from having had lower back surgery. Since the fashion craze promulgated by Britney Spears, I've come to realize that spinal repair is rather common in our country.
Meanwhile Gretchen was sitting in a plastic chair outside the bar area waiting for me. She was having a good time watching people. When I finally got back to her she expressed her delight at the discover of a new fashion trend among women. It seems they're all wearing tight clothes these days, no matter how plump they happen to be. This is radical departure from the fashion sense of only a few years ago, when only the anorexic chicks wore the tight (in their case) bone-revealing fashions.
The Kingston fireworks were the most impressive either of us had ever seen. They were launched in a series of calls and responses from two different places: the 9W bridge over Rondout Creek and some distance further downstream, perhaps near the mouth of the Rondout. There were also a few fireworks tricks I've never seen before. A whole series of powerful munitions were dropped from the bridge and detonated beneath it. The resonance under there produced eardrum-rupturing concussive waves. Near the end they fired off a huge series of gravity-influenced white sparklers that produced an unbelievable Niagara Falls of fire flowing over the bridge.
When it was all over, we hurried back to our car and navigated southwestward on tiny side streets around the ensuing gridlock.
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