Local News From The Last Century

Garrison Keillor reminds us:

On this day in 1878, Walt Whitman took a steamboat ride up the Hudson River and wrote a letter to his niece Hattie. He wrote: "I came up here last Thursday afternoon in the steamboat from NY — a fine day, and had a delightful journey — every thing to interest me — the constantly changing but ever beautiful panorama on both sides of the river all the way for nearly 100 miles here — the magnificent north river bay part of the shores of NY—the high straight walls of the rocky Palisades — the never-ending hills — beautiful Yonkers — the rapid succession of handsome villages and cities — the prevailing green—the great mountain sides of brown and blue rocks — the river itself — the innumerable elegant mansions in spots peeping all along through the woods and shrubbery — with the sloops and yachts, with their white sails, singly or in fleets, some near us always, some far off — etc etc etc..."

He went up for a visit with John Burroughs, who Whitman said had "plenty of strawberries, cream etc. and something I specially like, namely plenty of sugared raspberries and currants."

Yes. And today there were strawberries for sale at the side of Route 9-G in Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, New York. And the traffic passed the stand by as if it were a mirage. The last century lingers, but it's virtually invisible from a car. The idea, I think, is to get the juice all over your steering wheel, so that it is sticky, and smells sweet, and makes a sucking sound.

An Environmental Success Story

Today's New York Times has this good news about bald eagles in the Hudson Valley of New York:

Bald eagles, among the largest birds of prey in North America, were once plentiful in New York. Before the 1900s, they used as many as 80 nesting sites, primarily in northern and western New York, according to the State Department of Environmental Conservation. But by 1976, only one pair of eaglets remained. Environmentalists blamed pesticides, particularly DDT (which was banned in 1972), for interfering with the raptors’ ability to reproduce.

In 1976, the state began its Bald Eagle Restoration Project in an attempt to re-establish a breeding population. Over 13 years, 198 nesting bald eagles were collected, mostly from Alaska, and taken to New York. They were reared in cages in towers in the mid-Hudson region and released.

Today, roughly 500 bald eagles winter in New York (they migrate here when the waters begin to freeze in Canada and Nova Scotia), and 143 pairs remain in the state during the summer. Dr. Koontz said that eight pairs had stayed year-round in the lower Hudson Valley.

This is good news. And I notice when I take the train from Hudson to New York City that the number of aquatic birds in the river is slowly increasing. You still cannot eat the fish from the Hudson River. And you probably shouldn't swim in it in many areas. There's a long way to go to restore this river to health. But this is a hopeful improvement.