NORTH OF NEW YORK CITY: PART TWO

… After leaving Warwick we drove up to New Paltz, a little college town that reminded me of Ellensburg, with quiet streets and an old downtown with only one Starbucks that also happens to be the home of Total Immersion, my favorite method of making love to water. We parked near the tiny Rhino Records store and went looking for something to eat, settling on a little eatery that still served breakfast in the afternoon and had an autographed photo from The Frogs hanging on the wall for indie clout. I needed coffee afterwards so we dropped into this classic hippie café where the java was a bit weak for my taste, and the musky in-store aroma smelling something like an incense-stick scent extracted from armpit juice.

Our destination, The Mohonk Preserve was a short, loverly drive from town, and we had enough time to stop and get some pumpkins at a farm that billed itself as “The Most Sincere Pumpkin Patch,” whatever that means. We got three nice pumpkins, a peck of delicious Empire apples, and one gourd that Cara liked cos it bore a startling resemblance to a series of vaginas. We made a quick stop in at the Mohonk visitor center to find a hike then headed up the hill to the trailhead. It was balmy, the last really warm day of the year, and the path was almost deserted save a handful of people. We had most of the walk to ourselves, which took us up on a ridge overlooking the valley below complete with giant millipede. I’ve posted these photos earlier for those who are curious. Fall color like this is almost surreal and it has this affect on me that borders on dreamy delirium. This is the first time I’ve been in New England in the Fall and it was exactly as I had hoped for, sublime and spiritual. We had come here to be restored.

The day was fading so we headed back into town for some more food then out to the Headless Horseman Halloween Hayride and Haunted Houses about 15 minutes out of New Paltz. This is my favorite time of year, and Halloween my favorite holiday so I love shit like this, but all the places in NYC seemed too crowded (with too many loudmouth drunks) and too expensive for what you got. I wanted something authentic in New England, and felt my Halloween balls tingle when we pulled into the staging lot. The place was set up like an amusement park, walled in stores and shops in Halloween theme and with more rules than Disneyland, so no cameras. We were the first hayride tour of the night and about 20 of us rode feet dangling over a cart as a tractor pulled us through the woods. Our ghoul dude on-board host narrated some Faustian necrophilic tale of a mad doctor trying to revive his dead bride and there was one brief exchange between him and some woman who had a boyfriend serving in Iraq which was awkward and somewhat sad given the carnage we were about to see for kicks.

The ride went on through the deep dark woods for quite some time, through stage-set towns and over covered bridges, all with heavily produced special effects like shooting flames, trick lighting and costumed people performing the usual “Boo” scare tactics while killing people and others dying all around us. Some guy in a Headless Horseman outfit came galloping out from the woods at one point to chase us for a bit, and then we passed under a gallows where the hung man had his pants around his ankles. Soon we pulled in front of the first haunted house and some death, which was followed by a corn maze with crazy hydraulic skeleton things and death, and then two more haunted houses and more death, all with the familiar bloody tableaus you expect to see in this sort of spectacle: heads sawed off, torture, evisceration and of course—death. The whole thing took almost two hours. It was first class. After all that there was also a magic show by a guy name John Shaw that was filled with delicious self torture and some bizarre sexual innuendo for what was supposed to be family oriented evening. When he called himself a whore for money in front of the kiddies Cara and I lost it. It seemed like the most overt the top part of the evening; then again this whole business of seeing seasonal reenactments of murder and dismemberment for entertainment has to be one of the greatest things about our country and something Americans can really relate to.

On the way out of town we got some home-made ice cream back in New Paltz and listened in on a conversation with two young women where one of them claimed “Girls don’t have to worry about keeping it up, they can have sex all night.”