Poughkeepsie, NY. My father used to like bridge openings. For some reason, he was drawn to them like a fly to honey. I remember opening day on the Throggs Neck Bridge and later, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. So it should be no surprise that I had to go to Poughkeepsie today. Why? Because today, the old Poughkeepsie-Highland railroad bridge was reopened as a pedestrian walkway.

The event was celebrated with a complicated double parade, which started a Poughkeepsie contingent from the east and an Ulster contingent from the west. Meeting in the middle, crossing, doubling back, all very confusing on a 20 foot wide walkway. We came after the start, and took our place among the civilians, behind the bands, jugglers, unicylists, pipers, scouts, touts, louts, majorettes, minarets, old sweats and cigarettes. Dancers, prancers, necromancers, thieves, scoundrels, politicians, activists, pacifists, terrorists, conservationists, preservationists, communists, environmentalists, bigamists, pessimists, soloists, flutists, trombonists, anarchists, masochists, psychiatrists, cyclists, specialists, separatists, recidivists, technologists, and  optimists. In short, every nut case in the Hudson Valley. And we were last in line, behind an incongruous brass band that played New Orleans with all the soulful enthusiasm you would expect from a bunch of white guys playing black. We had to wait mid-bridge until the Ulster parade turned around, watching all the high school bands from Ulster troop proudly by in alphabetical order...New Paltz, Kingston, Esopus, Marbletown, Hurley...it brought tears to the eyes of this old Alligervillian.

The weather cooperated, and the mountains and river were unusually beautiful from our perch 200 feet above the water. Despite this, I didn't feel the elation of a bridge opening. Because this wasn't an opening, but rather a memorial. Once we built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time. Now it's just a footpath, now, it's done, now it's lost in the mist of time. Another whistle stop on the road from metropolis to necropolis.

The bridge begins in a tired but gentrifiable section of Poughkeepsie, and ends in Highlands. The Highlands side is a wilderness so uninteresting that even the salamanders despair of finding a homey rock to crawl under. The struggling humanity on the  Pougheepsie side could probably have found better uses for thirty million dollars than building a play bridge for white folks.  No matter. There are  plans to extend a footpath 28 miles into Ulster along old rail rights-of-way, and to string LED's so that they can have bridge parties at night. A bridge from nowhere to nowhere. In time, this folly will be an irresistable attraction to waste  pumpers, garbage dumpers, bible thumpers, teenage humpers and bridge jumpers. Muggers, huggers, buggerers and mothafuggers. Needle Bridge may be it's new name. Meanwhile, minimal work was done to prepare the enormous, rusty structure before laying five inches of concrete along the top. Nor is it clear to me how the state can pay to maintain such a trifle when it can't even afford to paint useful bridges. In time, the walkway will succumb to time and the elements. Like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land, our colossus is doomed to kneel before the mountain gods and sink forever beneath the relentless Hudson. 

And so it was, on this beautiful day, looking out over that skinny railing at mid-river and watching a boat make it's way up the Hudson, I couldn't help but think....what a great place to hock a lugey. God bless Governor Patterson.