2021-03-12 41 -73

Location

Just off an old road in rural, remote North East, NY.

Participants

Plans

Even though this hash is a bit of a poke from my humble abode, I'm deciding to pull the trigger. Venturing out into lands unknown on a Friday night is a good way to celebrate one's freedom from the rut of the workweek. I'm planning on heading here right after work, which will take about 50 minutes or so. If I get there by 6:00, I'll still have just enough daylight left to appreciate my quaint surroundings. I've never been to North East before, but it's intrigued me in the past because it's the farthest reach of Dutchess County, NY.

The drive itself should be easy even without a GPS, but the hard part will be figuring out where to park once I get there. It looks like there's not much room to pull over on the side of the road near the hash itself, and down the road there's an old barn and a dirt driveway but I don't want to risk parking on someone's front yard. There is a safe option though: 0.7 miles away is parking for the Harlem Valley Rail Trail. Ordinarily, I wouldn't mind walking 1.4 miles at all, but I'm worried that I'll be walking back to my car in the dark, which is a recipe for disaster on small country roads. Then again, it is a lovely day outside, and the hash will take me one minute to get to from the road so the whole thing shouldn't take too long if I'm brisk about it. Nothing risked, nothing gained.

One more thing I'd like to stop by on the way is the Coleman Station Burying Ground, also known as the Oblong Rural Cemetery. I didn't realize this area was so historic, and I'm a sucker for insanely old gravestones. I'll elucidate some more on the area's history once the deed is done, it's pretty cool stuff.

Expedition

Although I was trying to memorize the directions beforehand to make the drive unassisted, I did need to look up my location once. Amenia is pretty unfamiliar territory for me, and once I had crossed into the mythical land known as North East, I was really out on the wild frontier. I drove past the hash spot on Coleman Station Road, but before I got to the Rail Trail parking lot I had planned on using, I saw a small path leading off through a field that I decided would be a safe place to pull over. Hardly anyone was on the road, and it wasn't like a tractor was likely to pull in after a hard day's work tilling the barren fields.

Mother Nature's a certified beautician.

Taking a stroll down the road towards my destination at this time of time was extremely serene. The rolling brown fields, the birds tittering in the breeze, the lonely farmsteads guarding this magical land... you may not excuse my poetic license, but believe me when I say it was a landscape tailormade to rejuvenate the soul. After a couple minutes, I reached the spot where I'd have to veer off the road and up a fairly steep embankment. Any cars passing by would have thought it a bit sketchy to see some kid dash into the woods for who-knows-why, but I managed to do it undetected. The spot really wasn't far off the road at all, and now it was just a matter of making sure my phone could decide that yes, I definitely was where I thought it was. A bit of shuffling around later, and my second ever successful geohash was now in the bag.

One car passed by while I was up there, but even if they did notice me, I'm sure nothing more than a moment of confusion crossed their minds. After a minute, I shimmied down the hill and walked back down Coleman Station Road, stopping briefly to take in the Coleman Station Burying Ground I mentioned before. It was marked as Private, so I didn't take a stroll inside to find the gravestone that was supposedly from 1749. I did see a few from the mid-1800s from just outside the graveyard, and I reassured my deceased companions that I would be joining them in a figurative blink of an eye.

The last thing I did on my expedition was sit on a bridge passing over a babbling brook to take in the gorgeous evening for a little bit. Such an unseasonably warm day after weeks of snow and frost, a day where I could finally wear my spring jacket again, was an awesome reward for making it through the workweek. I feel enriched by reaching the geohash, but most of all I feel enriched by the countryside of North East I was lucky enough to take in.