Benched

After many weeks submerged in his recliner and packed in ice like a halibut, Tom was desperate to get back on the trail. His doctor said his shoulder was recovering nicely, so go – but: “Don’t fall.”

We had to plot carefully. Most of our usual trails include climbs with at least some rock scrambling, and something to slip on or trip over – slick rocks, tree roots – with every step.

Fortunately, our area is crisscrossed with rail trails, carriage roads, canal towpaths, and other multi-use trails that promise easy walking on easy grades. And benches. Tom asked for benches, and these trails deliver. These are community spaces used by dog walkers, officemates on lunch hour, parents pushing strollers, retirees pedaling Schwinns, teenagers taking a shortcut, and middle-aged folks urged by their cardiologists to get in a few more steps. They are generally not the well-outfitted, goal-oriented people we find atop Hunter Mountain or the Kittatinny Ridge. And the scenes we pass are not scenes of pure wilderness. Like the trains and coaches and canal boats that once traveled these industrial corridors, we move into towns and out again, plunging into deep woods, cutting across lakes, and tunneling under mountains before arriving at the next boomtown, whose approach is heralded by scattered structures showing their business ends – gas grills, dumpsters, heat pumps, woodpiles, ladders, doghouses and storage sheds. Then we’ll cross a country road or a busy intersection near the town center before the quiet reasserts itself, somewhere past the point where the officemates turn around.

The main line of the New York, Ontario and Western Railway (O&W) opened in 1886, connecting the Hudson River with Lake Ontario. It built east-west branches to the old industrial boomtowns up and down the track, the Port Jervises and the Scrantons and the Middletowns. The O&W was an all-purpose workhorse, carrying vacationers to the Catskills and Pennsylvania anthracite to New York Harbor. Coal dropped from the trains a century ago remains thick on the ground, crushed to powder on the trail between rotting railroad ties, or in lumps to the side. But the “Old & Weary,” as the line was known at the end, faded out of existence. Its passenger service stopped in 1948, and the last O&W train came to rest at the Middletown, N.Y., station in 1958. In the mid-1980s the rails-to-trails movement gave these old routes a new, more pedestrian, use. The Sullivan County Rails-to-Trails Conservancy opened its first segment of the Sullivan O&W Rail Trail in 1990.

The 5.7-mile Wurtsboro section travels the length of the spectacular Bashakill Wildlife Management Area and most resembles our usual trails in its unbroken nature and solitude. I was soon surrounded by a cloud of tittering birds, brushing against my cheek and landing on my shoulder. I lifted my arms, transfixed, like Snow White after escaping the Huntsman. So many birds! Here’s where they all are, in every color and size, generous and charismatic. That’s because the Bashakill, the largest freshwater wetland in southeastern New York, gives them everything they need. This section has two nature-viewing towers and passes under Route 17 on its way north.

The 2.6-mile Mountaindale-to-Woodridge segment runs through the heart of the Borscht Belt, where Jewish vacationers once flocked to see world-class entertainers at glamorous resorts or get back to nature in housekeeping cabins. Jazz Age bungalows are everywhere, sinking picturesquely into the devouring woods. Here and there are peeling columns that once flanked the entrance to a fancy hotel. The raised rail bed cuts through the middle of beautiful Silver Lake and passes a wastewater treatment plant, an egg processing facility, and the towering carcass of an agricultural building built in the 1930s by a farmers’ cooperative. And there are plenty of benches here, each in a different design, making this segment the most sitter-friendly trail I have seen.

The 1.9-mile Hurleyville-to-South Fallsburg section starts with a ghost story. In February 1907, a train’s boiler exploded as it approached the Hurleyville station, killing three railroad workers and injuring 12 passengers. As you walk through the Smith Hill rock cut, near where the explosion happened, the air gets noticeably colder. Students of the paranormal believe “cold spots” like this one indicate the presence of ghosts – who, as everyone knows, drain thermal energy from the air – and they visit Smith Hill to communicate with the souls of the departed railroad men. But – obviously! – the cold air is coming from fissures deep in the rock un-warmed by the sun. That’s what I told myself as I hurried past.

For lunch that day we settled down on a concrete bench that caught my fancy, ugly and massive but with lots of character. It was stamped made in Michigan, which made me wonder why anyone would import something so heavy, that could be made anywhere, from so far away. Oh yes, the train. Maybe the bench was ferried across the Great Lakes to Oswego, where it boarded the O&W before being dropped off at this perfect spot three feet from the rails. All things are made light, if you know how to move them.