January 12, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

No matter where you live, absent war, fire, community neglect, there is beauty – in mountains, woods, fields, architecture, water, favorite streets, other haunts.

Given the day, the time, your mood, your history, you can visit these sights as old friends who extend a squeezed hand, reaffirming touch. That can make you smile, or cry, or be renewed.

Where I live, in what most generalize as “upstate New York” (any acres beyond Gotham, New York City), we are fortunate to have such treats as mountain ranges climbing from the Hudson River, woods, rivers and ponds in large sections of state parkland, the High Tor rock formations off Haverstraw that Maxwell Anderson, the playwright, highlighted in a 1937 Broadway production about relentless “progress” and the Palisades, the heights off the Hudson.

On any given day in any year in any century, from Native Americans to the Dutch, the English, to total diversity and the ghosts of wrecked ships, these places have been visited, are being visited. To live, to clear your head, to be with someone, to get in touch with yourself.

Largely, the visits are free, without hassle, friends waiting for you. And in my case, you can always go “downstate,” to the urban landscape, and see it too.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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