Breakfast the next morning was something of an adventure in and of itself. As recommended by Doug, we headed to the cafe the locals swore by. It was a small place, almost an apartment kitchen, the room itself a sub lease underneath a Motorcyle shop. Behind the counter a short, eccentric, bottom-heavy New-Yorker with a nose that could only mean Italian roots was making a grilled cheese for a kid headed off to school.
“I owe you five from yesterday right?” The kid was asking, to which the chef nodded. “Just give me the two for today and we’ll figure it all out later.” Two wadded up bills changed hands. Big city business ethics didn’t seem too prevalent here. Wasn’t exactly a hardline stock exchange.
Dad and I ordered, took a seat, had a casual conversation with the chef as he worked up our breakfast wraps with special care asking occasionally of we’d like Sriracha or peppers or this or that. And damn was the food good, the ingredients inside each wrap artfully layered, made just so.
Some interesting folks came in as well. A lanky guy sporting a mullet and a jean-jacket went at it with our chef. And was promptly put in his place with a well-aimed verbal jab that went something like this: Denton, maybe if you got a haircut you wouldn’t be such a dick. You look like a penis.” Denton left pretty quick after that, back down the street to his VW van with the alligator sticker and the “420” spray painted on the side.
We met a trail engineer as well, and a woman who came in laughing – something about the park ranger’s truck getting stolen only for him to find it later behind a house a block away. “Can’t catch the pranksters if he doesn’t have a car!” The woman cackled.
There was also some sobering talk too, at odds with the coffee shop laughter but meshing well with the ambulance sirens that routinely gyrated in through the half-open door. As flashing red and white lights passed on the street outside the cafe window somebody in the shop would mutter, “There goes another one,” or “Wonder who it is this time.”
Just some casual, callous talk about people jumping from the 160 foot Hudson River Bridge. We asked the guy sitting next to us and he said it was a “popular spot.” Lots of people in New York have been having tough days it seems.

Crossing the Hudson

Dad left after that. And it was a long hike.
Our endpoint for the day was Fahnestock State Park which supposedly had a campground with hot showers and toilets so we pushed.
It was 8 and getting dark when we got in, tired and expecting nice squared off tent sites and bathrooms with said showers. But park lodge was cordoned off for construction. The tent sites were rockier than the trail back in PA. The bathrooms were all locked.
There was an outdoor shower though. More of a spigot that someone had misplaced 6 feet up a wall. In rebellious fashion we bypassed the yellow caution tape to wash and cook dinner in the midst of abandoned circular saws and work tables. The sun was down at this point so when the nightly routine was done we pitched our tents on the Fahnestock Lodge’s front lawn, leaving the designated tent sites for some other poor schmucks with less audacity.
I hoisted my bear bag twenty feet up the ceremonial flag pole.
Then, just as we were settling in for some much needed sleep, the fuzz showed up. Two white cop cars, Chargers by the look of them, gunned into the clearing and fish tailed to a stop. My eyes may have been closed before but I was up and fully alert now. Cosmo and I kept quiet, fearing the worst. I was already trying to find the perks of spending the night in the slammer. A real roof. A/C. Bet you get a meal too.
As we huddled in our tents, we could hear laughter from the two parked cars. There were no flashing lights, no sirens. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions but it seemed like everything was a-ok, even — as impossibly as it seems — on a legal level.
There was still a gorilla beating on the bars of my ribcage though.
I lay watching from my mesh tent as two figures got out of the cars and proceeded to sweep the construction area. A minute passed. Then two. Still neither came over to us.
I for one expected more of a fiasco, a loud voice through a PT system, the view from a cruiser’s caged-in back seat handcuffs somewhere in the mix. None of those ever came. Not even when Cosmo and I emerged to see what was up.
They were just two cops killing time on their late night shift. One had a cup of coffee. After talking a bit about the trail and what we were up to, we went back to the tents and bed. The cops left soon after.

The beach at Fahnestock

Running into the law on the right day — Nomad