"I Hear The Train A Comin'...It's Rolling Round The Bend" (Fifth Leg)

The sun beating down...the sea grass waving in the (very) occasional breeze...possible danger lurking behind every bush and around every tree! And, why didn't I eat any breakfast?

I'm feeling a bit faint...

We're not in the savanna, but on a stretch of trail hugging the Hudson River south of Dyckman Street. We left all those happy kayakers behind and are strolling along a mostly deserted path that seems to get smaller and smaller with every few steps...or is it just that the tree branches are spilling across the walkway for lack of trimming and the thicket of bramble, bushes and tall grass largely obscuring the river view (save a few clearings like this),

are starting to close in on us! No, the path really is getting smaller.

And then there are these strange side trails leading down to the river. Hmmmm...

NG had some thoughts of what they were being used for, but I am trying to keep this blog as PG as possible...and isn't it more exciting to leave such musings to the imagination? Or, as The Band's Levon Helm said in "The Last Waltz" -- "I thought you weren't supposed to talk about stuff like that."

Suddenly, a rumbling in the distance...

We are mighty close to those old Hudson River line tracks! At least there's a fence between those hurtling engines and us. But, I spoke too soon... Sacajawea has forged ahead and she

suddenly disappears from view. Rounding a bend at an accelerated clip, I see that the path has officially ended. This being New York, that means little to enterprising walkers who forged this trail before us. There's a massive hole in the fence that separated us the certain doom of being sucked into the speeding train's tailwind. Like Alice going through the looking glass, we step over the line and onto small stones that are embedding the tracks...and those tracks are now a mere five or six feet away!

We make our way gingerly over the stones, and I can swear that the tracks and the fence are getting closer and closer together.

Images of being squeezed, like those movies where the intrepid heroes are thrown into a giant trash compactor and the walls start moving towards them, are playing in my mind as we pick up the pace to make it to what we hope is going to be another hole to safety before the 10:35 comes roaring down from Yonkers.

Suddenly, we see him, like a shimmying mirage that those dying of thirst in the Sarah see just at the horizon. Can it be a guy sitting on a piling on the northbound side of the train, with a T-shirt cut up to his breast bones, reading a book? There's no view of the river, or anything save the hurtling trains, and yet, there he sits, reading a book. How had he even gotten over there?

Now, the trail is really getting narrow...I could probably touch the third rail with my big toe with not too much of a stretch (upon reflection, I actually don't think Metro North trains have a third rail -- should look it up to see exactly how much danger we were in). And, yet, no visible exit hole in the fence. I'm having fevered visions of us having to turn around and walk all the way back...approximately 1/2 hour's walk back...to Dyckman Street, then follow the bike path up a very, very steep hill to Riverside Drive. In the (starting to) sweltering heat. Time to take action.

I shout across to 'the reader,' "is there a hole in the fence down there?" He looks up, not at all startled, and just points to where the tracks are nearly touching the fence. Sacajawea is ahead...and again, she disappears.

Through what he was pointing at:

I am through this rabbit hole, quick like a bunny, and there is Sac with a smirk that says

"are we having some fun, now?"

But, who got the "last laugh" when Sac scampered up the dirt embankment and did a rather bad imitation of a much more elegant slide she took (many, many eons ago) down a mountainside with a just-cut Christmas tree (which I caught with my pre-digital camera: "all from the mind of an Minolta"). My reflexes not being what they once were, I missed the actual stumble, but caught an instant of pre-recovery. Being the much better balanced of the two of us (that last statement is debatable, in so very many ways), as well as the more cautious and gingerly, I made it to the top without stumble or incident. Back to the road more traveled...

Our 45 minutes of uncertainty, doubt and trepidation (as well as a few curses and good laughs) was now behind us as we forged down the slope to both a mighty, and a tiny, Hudson River monuments...