Alice had her rabbit.
I have a garter snake.
Can you see her? No? That’s because the little reptile was so fast. By the time I computed her sweetly swinging vertebrae, she was in the grass, hiding from my phone’s prying eye.
I met her on the Old Croton Aqueduct (OCA) trail in Tarrytown, New York, about 40 minutes from Manhattan. Feeling great about being fully vaccinated, I needed practice traveling and socializing after months of quarantine. My plan this April morning was to board Metro-North and head north along the Hudson to catch part of the trail.
The Old Croton Aqueduct, also known as the OCA, was a 19th-century answer to a crowded city dependant on polluted wells and ponds. Fatal fires had long been a problem. So had water-borne diseases. In 1832, a cholera epidemic killed 3,515 people out of a population of 250,000, according to a 2008 article in The New York Times. In today’s terms among a city of eight million, the equivalent death toll would exceed 100,000.
Cholera, spread through contaminated water, revealed sharp class divisions, a fact not lost on me during this current pandemic. Many of the city’s poor Irish Catholics stayed in Lower Manhattan because they had nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, many in the Protestant majority were able to relocate to places with clean water.
“The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city, as we may suppose the inhabitants of Pompeii fled when the red lava showered down upon their houses,” according to an 1832 article in The New York Evening Post.
from Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct website
Begun in 1837, the Croton Aqueduct would move clean water from the Croton River into Manhattan, an engineering marvel changing the future of public health in big cities.
On June 22, 1842, water first entered the aqueduct and traveled into reservoirs in Central Park and what is now Bryant Park — “to great civic rejoicing,” according to the website for Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct.
I felt similar rejoicing once I found the trail running over the surface of water tunnels below. In the more southern towns of Irvington and Hastings-on-Hudson, the mostly flat path moves easily from town to town. I’ve spent hours strolling from village to village as far south as Yonkers. In Irvington, where I had hiked part of the trail a year before, a street named Aqueduct Lane is an obvious marker. Just get off the train in Irvington, walk up a steep hill past a statue of Rip Van Winkle, and voila, you’ve found the trail.
But in Tarrytown, only one train stop north of Irvington, no one could tell me where the trail began. So I spent more than an hour wandering through quaint streets named after characters in Washington Irving stories. Ichabod Lane was an especially adorable name that could and should be lengthened to Ichabod Crane Lane, I thought.
“I think the trail’s somewhere on Neparan Road,” a man in a lovely white gabled house told me. Then he said, “Huh,” very much an Irvingtonian. I had already been up and down Neparan Road, as far as Marymount Convent. So I made note of his friendliness and the intriguing thought that locals don’t see things the way outsiders do. I smiled sweetly and headed downhill toward the Hudson River, closer to the village’s center, where I might make more inquiries.
“I think it’s off of Benedict,” a flame-haired woman told me. She was walking her dogs and enjoying a full argument with them. I may have been the first human she’d spoken to this morning.
Soon, my bladder was so full that I began running toward the bathrooms in the nearest 7-Eleven on Neparan Road, just as it turns into Main Street. I stumbled upon the OCA that had indeed been off of Neparan, parallel to Grove Street, with this hard-to-spot marker:
The path quickly took me to First Baptist Church. I couldn’t resist entering, as it was around 10:30 AM, time for service. I stayed for about 40 minutes, impressed with the church’s use of Zoom from a massive screen and a live pastor who spoke from a pulpit covered with plexiglass to protect the few socially distanced parishioners.
Then I was back on the trail, where I got nosey looking into people’s gardens. Check out this neat greenhouse setup:
But then I had to stop at Pretty Funny Vintage, the huge Victorian house set up as a gift shop right against the OCA. When I climbed the steps trying to make sense of COVID instructions, the owner waved me in. Dressed in a trendy long-flowing tunic and owl-eyed spectacles, she was supportive of my immediate purchase: a whisky flask decorated with 1930s rendering of a squirrel.
“Are you out on the trail today,” she asked. “Yes,” I answered.
“Oh, it’s a beautiful day for a walk on the trail.”
But I quickly lost the trail through parking lots and driveways. I found it again near Benedict Avenue only to get lost again in the spaghetti of roads that make up the Sawmill Road.
A sign from the Friends of the Old Croton Aquaduct was almost a help.
I wandered through some auto parts places on South Broadway, past Sleepy Hollow High School, home of the Horsemen. If you’re taking Metro-North and want to follow my path, don’t, because you will become a lost and angry soul. Just keep walking on South Broadway until you get to the high school. Stay on the right side of the road.
Then look for the OCA marker here near the Lyndhurst site, once the property of hated railroad robber baron Jay Gould.
Here is where I met my garter snake friend with her well-oiled backbone. Just like the trail, she disappeared. When I looked up, two happy bikers rode past me, planning their next road trips, as happy bikers tend to do. Thanks to my serpentine sister, I decided to keep going, just a little longer.
To my left was a decrepit swimming pool house for the Gould family.
To my right ahead of me was the stunning Lyndhurst Mansion, which opens for socially distanced tours on May 3.
I continued through stunning backyards of New York’s rich and famous. Some homes were ghosty-looking, like the mansion that once belonged to Madam C. J. Walker, the first female self-made millionaire in America. She made her fortune selling African-American hair products. Recently, her story was made into a bio series starring Octavia Spencer. I can just imagine Madam Walker hosting parties here to honor her top saleswomen.
I enjoy seeing structures on the path. What on earth is this important-looking tower?
Now, exhausted, I finished my walk in Irvington, where two side-by-side churches have parking lots leading back onto the trail. There’s Irvington Presbyterian Church and the Church of St. Barnabas, both just gleaming with Gilded Age stained glass.
Perhaps I should walk part of the trail every weekend. I could consider my adventures a type of post-quarantine travel: part pure observation and part exaggerated folk tale made true.
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