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Rebuilding What Was All Anew
Some Thoughts While Walking The O&W Rail Trail

KERHONKSON – If there isn't some old idiom like "the railroads bring change" then there should be. Because even today — almost two centuries after Tom Thumb first steamed out in 1830 — at a time when electric cars practically drive themselves and most of the Great American Trains have been abandoned, consolidated, or miniaturized, their tracks torn up and famous tycoons buried... even today there's the promising potential of progress stowed in the old lines.

We're talking about rail trails.

Across the country, more and more dilapidated rail beds have been cleaned up and converted for pedestrian, cycle, and sometimes horse traffic. A network of complete and near complete trails snake along old railroads like the O & W Line that cuts the Rondout Valley.

Newly opened, albeit in a rough state as yet, the Kerhonkson Rail Trail heads off from the terminal end of Main Street in the hamlet's tiny downtown. The trail is wooded and serene amid a familiar din of insects, distant cars humming down Route 209, and a lone, occasional rooster. The scene might best be described as poetic or contemplative — and, like walking inside a Billy Collins stanza, you can hear yourself breathing, doing nothing, not thinking. Or thinking: Isn't it funny how there's only a single letter difference between train and trail? Isn't it odd how, every year, in the second week of May, I, like a lot of other people I've found on internet forums, find black morel mushrooms popping up in the middle of gravely old railroad trails like this one? Isn't it scary how, en route to Kerhonkson via Catskill, driving south along 9W, I passed a mile-long string of black DOT-111 traincars, tankers moving to and from Albany on still-active CSX train-tracks that annually transport several billion gallons of hazardous Bakken Crude oil cargo across New York State. Senator Chuck Schumer said these cars have "proven particularly prone to spills, tears and fires in the event of a derailment," and almost a hundred of them derailed near Kingston last February. Isn't it brutally honest, that old saying... "the railroads bring change?!"

Meanwhile, out in the quiet, calm, peaceful, O&W Rail Trail woods near Kerhonkson, the Rondout Creek, which dumps into the Hudson River just south of Kingston, winds along under a thin film of algae, its waters relatively still. The path is cindered, not paved, lined with catalpa and ash and maple and littered with acorns. I pass only one other hiker and he is wearing spandex bike shorts and a Thoreau t-shirt. I spot some blue jays and pick up one of their feathers. I flush a catbird and a crow. I hear an ovenbird and suddenly jump out of the Collins poem and into a Robert Frost poem, "The Oven Bird," which metonyms the noisy songsters: "There is a singer everyone has heard." The final lines might as well have been written about towns like Kerhonkson and the railroads: "The question that he frames in all but words/ Is what to make of a diminished thing."

Back on Main Street, Venus Paulsen, owner of a small used clothing shop, stands in front of a handful of brick rowhouses, an occasionally open cafe, and a jewelry store. "This town has seen livelier days," she says, recalling a bulldozed tavern and some steelballed apartments. "That," she adds, pointing toward a parked U-haul truck, "is where the train station stood." The building burned down some years ago.

Advocates of the trail argue that it could bring back some much needed business, an economic boost to transform the struggling communities in this portion of the valley. A well connected trail could attract hikers and riders, the kinds of tourists who would presumably carry dollars as well as the desire to spend those dollars at Kerhonkson's modest array of shops. With the Rail Trail, as with the railroads that came over a hundred years before, the future seems promising.

Even still, Venus very much misses the old Kerhonkson. "I run a vintage shop," she explains. "I love old things."



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