The Mid-Hudson Bridge

I remember long Sunday drives from Red Hook to Highland to visit our Nana and Grandpa and Aunt Rose.  At age eight or nine the most exciting moment was crossing the Hudson from Poughkeepise to Highland.  I loved everything about that bridge, from the towers and majestic sweep of the suspension cables to the safe feeling given by all that steel between us and the terrifying long drop to the water below.  This sketchy drawing emerged from random doodling and quickly came to embody how I still feel about the bridge and the old neighborhoods near its east end.  The neighborhoods are a more recent, adult memory, going to Rossi's Deli on Clover St. on the recommendation of someone I met here in North Carolina.  The streets felt strangely familiar and comfortable to me, and it wasn't until afterward, talking with my Uncle Jack, that I discovered our family lived there, on that very street, three generations back.

And this drawing helps me understand how art transcends reality, because the bridge's towers don't loom over the town like this, and the cables don't run up into the streets this way.  But this is how it always felt to me.  This bridge reached down to pull the road and the cars up onto its back, and we soared up as if we were riding the cables into the sky.  The only difference now is that I'm the one driving and gleefully paying the toll like a kid getting a ticket to ride his favorite roller coaster.