Feature Story:
The Bike Trip
I have an old roadmap of New York that was put out by the Shell
Oil Company in 1946. "Tour with confidence," it says, under the
familiar scalloped-shell logo.
In those days, you could pull into
any gas station and pick up a map for free, but this one was published long
before I was able to drive. It covers northern New Jersey and parts of New York
as far north as Bear Mountain State Park. The paper is brown with age, and
there are tears along the folds, but every once in a while, I open it up just
to relive one of my favorite memories.
In the summer of 1958, George Cole
and I decided to ride our bikes to Bear Mountain. There was only one drawback.
Since we planned to start our trip on a Saturday morning, we had to be back in
Rochelle Park by 7 pm, so we wouldn't miss American Bandstand. For anyone under
30, American Bandstand was one of the first "modern" music shows on
tv. It was hosted by Dick Clark, and featured recording artists like Bobby
Rydell, Paul Anka, and The Drifters. If I’m not mistaken, we were anxious to
get home that night to see Clarence "Frogman" Henry. It was the only
opportunity we had to see these artists "live," and the Saturday
night shows were always special.
On the day of our trip, we left
around 7 am, rode to the top of the hill on West Oldis, and headed north on
Rochelle Avenue. We didn't have much money, so we made peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches, wrapped them up in a brown paper bag, along with our bathing suits,
and tied them to the back of our bikes. Looking over the roadmap we were using, we
figured we could stop along the way for sodas.
We took what seemed to be the
easiest route: Rochelle Avenue to Farview, right on Spring Valley, north on
Forest, and across Soldier Hill Road to Kinderkamack, and then north into New
York State. Sometime around the middle of the morning, we ended up in a very
rural area, farther from home than we’d ever been on our bikes. We probably
didn't know it at the time, but we were somewhere up in the mountains above
Haverstraw, with beautiful meadows and rolling hills all around us. At one
point, the road took a natural bend to the right, and I remember heading east
toward the sun, before we came to a rock quarry with a crane and a couple of
conveyor belts visible just over the horizon. We must have been riding along a
mountain ridge, because as we got closer to the quarry, the road made an abrupt
left, ran uphill a little, and passed through a man-made notch. When we reached
the top of the hill, the view in front of us was so breathtaking that we both
stopped pedaling, and pulled over to the side of the road.
Off in the distance, thousands of
feet below us, was the Hudson River. Patches of morning sun sparkled off the
water, and we could see Route 9W, and the tops of trees and houses and stores
in the area along the river, and looking farther upstream, we could see the
Bear Mountain Bridge, and the mountain itself, but what really caught our
attention was the fleet of Navy ships anchored along the edge of the river. We
knew right away it was the Mothball Fleet. I had passed it once on a school
trip to Bear Mountain, but seeing the gleaming grey ships from our vantage
point high above the river was the first time in my life that I ever encountered
such a fantastic view.
There was so much to see that it
took us a while to get going again. We took in the whole scene, pulled out our
map and identified parts of the area below us, and then coasted down the
mountain and headed north on 9W until we reached Bear Mountain. It was 12:30 in
the afternoon when we got there. We ate our sandwiches under the trees in a
small shaded picnic area, and then rode our bikes to the pool, where we swam
for an hour, sat out in the sun, and then got dressed and started on the trip
home. On our way back, we stopped at the "Snack Shop," on 9W, in the
shadow of the same mountain we had crossed over earlier in the day. We had
about $2.00 left between us, and had a hard time deciding what we could afford,
but when the woman behind the counter asked us where we were heading, and heard
our story, she made us both sandwiches and gave us sodas for free. I still
remember her kindness, and the red checkered table cloth on the small table
where George and I ate.
The rest of the trip was easy. We
made a wrong turn and ended up on Route 59, but once we came to Nanuet, we took
a left on 304, and followed it down to New Jersey, where it becomes
Kinderkamack Road. It was 6:50 pm when we walked into my house, just in time to
watch American Bandstand.
My mother asked me where we'd been.
"Out riding," I said,
trying not to let on that we had just taken the longest bike ride of our lives.
I wasn't sure what she would have said if she knew we had gone all the way to
Bear Mountain and back, but after all of these years, it remains one of the
most memorable experiences of my childhood.