Hope Hangs Heavy on Hudson
Lately, I’ve been deep in an autumnal funk.
Two children plus a demanding job plus a health scare that required thyroid surgery have all left me feeling husk-like and depleted, suddenly relating to every cliched aphorism about working motherhood I once scorned. I’ve been Googling things like ‘when does it get easier?’ I’ve been underlining passages in Nightbitch. I’ve been reposting Kate Baer’s poetry at a troubling rate. I am, in other words, muddling through it.
So when my 36th birthday a few weeks ago coincided with my in-laws visiting – someone else to help my husband tend to the kids! – and time off work – someone else’s job to care for the clients! – I immediately thought: how far away can I get in a day?
The answer? Hudson. Just two hours north of New York by train, it seemed like the perfect place for a solo day trip. Ever since spending a long weekend there with my Mom in 2016, when it was merely a Catskills boomtown teeming with ex-Brooklynites and not yet the stratospheric world of real estate oneupsmanship it’s become since COVID struck, I’d been meaning to return. I’d loved the city my first time around, for all the borderline-embarrassing reasons so many people do. It has great coffee. It has a bookstore with a bar. It has all the artisanal trappings of Boerum Hill or Fort Greene – cedar-scented hand soap in amber bottles, seed-speckled sourdough, and French flax linens – but in Hudson, instead of feeling pretentious, those details simply feel homespun. Part of the terroir, if you will.
I bought an Amtrak ticket a week in advance and immediately fell into a narcotic state of pre-travel anticipation, building Notes app lists of routes to walk, restaurants to dine at, and stores to shop in. Two days before my trip, I stood in front of my open closet, asking myself (with only a hint of irony!) which precise layering of knits would help me realize the ‘art mom on parade’ vibe I was hoping to achieve. I considered, at length, the purchase of a $600 hat and how it would feel to stroll down Warren Street swinging a giant round milliner’s box. As I planned every detail of a trip that, I reluctantly remind you, was only 12 hours long, I became a caricature of myself. And it wasn’t lost to me, as I spent the night before the trip whitening my teeth and applying an exfoliating face mask with the kind of care I once reserved for major life events, that this was a lot of pressure to place on the whole thing.
So now, with Chekhov’s gun placed decisively on stage, it’ll be no surprise when I reveal: the trip didn’t go as planned. From the jump, things were off. My departure coincided with Finnegan’s daily pre-school tantrum, and so the sunny sendoff I’d imagined – a hug from Fig! A snuggle from Kip! A kiss from Emmett! – was replaced by some combination of writhing, screaming, and grimacing that left me with a pit in my stomach. And Hudson itself, far from a merry backdrop to Mom’s big day out, was quiet and gray, hungover from Thanksgiving and not yet in the holiday spirit. As I wandered the town listlessly, I imagined some god looking down and judging me: “You spent $150 to take a train to a tourist town in the off-season and skulked around looking for things to buy and finding nothing and looking for things to eat and finding nothing?”
Well, not exactly nothing. I went to the bookstore slash bar, The Spotty Dog, which closed at 5pm and thus had a vaguely transgressive, devoted-daydrinker energy. I had a hot toddy at The Maker and purchased a perfume from its gift shop called Wild, though I couldn’t have felt less wild and seriously considered buying a scent that smelled less appealing simply because its name better cohered with how I thought of myself. I tried on the $600 hat and it looked ridiculous on me. I ate both lunch and dinner at Kitty’s, a counter-service spot across from the train station that makes a very good roast chicken and appeared to be the only open restaurant in town. Then, because it closed two hours before my return train to New York, I sat for far too long in a deserted and unheated station, shivering beneath approximately seven layers of looks-perfect-but-doesn’t-insulate-for-shit wool and considering the futility of trying to shed all that ails me for a day. When I finally got home to Manhattan, I ate a Big Mac in the rain while waiting for my homebound Uber to arrive and it was, pathetically and perfectly, the highlight of my day.
Better luck next birthday, I suppose.