Sugar for Sugar

It’s 10,000 years ago. You’re a mastodon.

(I mean, not you, you’re not a mastodon. I guess I mean “one” is a mastodon.) You’re hanging around at the edge of a vast marsh or lake, a remnant of glaciers that have been seeping away and melting down and flowing northward to join the young lower Hudson River on its way south to the sea. Maybe you’re gazing out there across the water, looking back on a life well-lived, surrounded by your loved ones, watching with a resigned peace as a cold mist closes in around your vision. Maybe you suddenly feel a shooting pain down your left foreleg. In any case, you die.

Sugar the mastodon

We know this because in 1972 someone found your skeleton. The New York State Archaeological Association or their friends named you Sugar. You see, 10,000 years after you lived, people around here call a nearby hill Sugarloaf, and the nickname seemed fitting. Sugar’s a sweet name for a big guy—20 feet long including your tusks, nine feet high at the shoulder. You’re mounted on some custom-formed steel rods and plates and exhibited in the Bio-Tech building at SUNY Orange in Middletown, NY. Congratulations! Lots of mastodons never even got to go to college.

(I’ll stop calling Sugar “you” now, because it will get confusing when I suggest you donate some money to Sugar’s restoration.)

Unfortunately, all these millennia later, Sugar is finally starting to show his age. The entry stairwell of the Bio-Tech building is a great place to encounter a mastodon, but it’s not the best possible place to be one. There were also some technological limitations in 1972 preservation methods, so it’s time for a sort of bone spa treatment to ensure skeletal longevity.

The science-minded folks at the college have a new location on campus and a plan. This is where we all come in: helping Sugar move again.

Sugar doesn’t weigh 8 tons anymore, but he’s just as hard to move. So we all have to push together.

As I write this, SUNY Orange is getting estimates for Sugar’s stabilization and move to more suitable quarters. In the meantime they’re collecting seed money to get things started and to launch a larger fundraising campaign once they know the cost.

Orange County apparently has the highest density of mastodon discoveries of anyplace in the world. Alive, these prehistoric elephant and mammoth cousins weighed something like 8 tons.

You

Sugar doesn’t weigh that much anymore, but he’s just as hard to move. So we will all have to push together. Consider a modest donation to get things started, wouldya? Then reward yourself with more reading about mastodons:

Let Us Browse for Local Gifts, Shall We?

Hello, Hudson Heartland pals. It’s that time of year, when we create a blog post, usually to do with local shopping. It goes like this: Hudson Heartland is happy to present a Holiday Shopping Guide featuring items that are sourced (or branded) from within Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties (with some peripheral overlap, maybe, and a little Dutchess), available for online orders (or a quick phone call), and available to ship. It’s regional online shopping. Let’s go:

  1. A pair of Prosecco glasses from Malfatti Glass, Beacon.

  2. Upstate Washed Twill Hat from Hamilton & Adams, Kingston. By the fire earlier we were discussing the Hamilton & Adams “Upstate & chill” line of clothing and housewares, and your author was kind of sniffing (firmly rooted in the “upstate starts at Poughkeepsie” school) at the questionableness of seeing these items as far south as Cornwall. THAT SAID, this Kingston concern is right in line with the Hudson Heartland ethos and we salute them. Buy a hat.

  3. A custom-filled gift basket from Jones Farm, Cornwall. Call the number, consult with the Clearwaters, and send your basket to someone who loves the Hudson Valley (or someone whom you want to love the Hudson Valley).

  4. Perennial favorite: a New York Pizza from Prima, shipped anywhere. “Call 800-22-NY-PIE and we will ship your fresh, never frozen, NY pizza overnight!”

  5. The Elsie Dress, from Mod. Nice.

  6. Over on Etsy they’re selling a Rosendale 1853 Old Town Map reprint that looks pretty sweet. If your municipal affiliations run to other towns, there’s more.

  7. A DVD, sold by the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, of the legendary concert to celebrate the legendary Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday in 2009 (that’s before some of you were born!). “Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, Richie Havens, Roger McGuinn, Ani DiFranco, Taj Mahal, Ben Harper, Dave Matthews, and many others who performed songs inspired by Seeger’s music and activism.” Read more about the show, and more about Pete.

  8. ARMY SOCKS

  9. The 2019 show poster for Nelly, TLC & Flo Rida at Bethel Woods. Setlist is here.

  10. The novel Bone Hollow, by Bill Braine. I mean, of course.

The Season's Cocktail

The King’s Daughter

1 part Amaretto
1 part Raspberry Liqueur
1 part Vodka
3 parts Half and Half

Cocoa Powder
Raspberry

Combine liquid ingredients in a shaker with ice, shake well. Strain straight into a champagne coupe or a rocks glass over ice; dust lightly with cocoa powder and garnish with a raspberry. For a holiday look, sprinkle with green and red colored sugar. 

Created by bartender/librarian Tim Tetreault with Claudia Depkin in celebration of the 125th+ Anniversary of the Haverstraw King’s Daughters Public Library, November 2021. 

Bone Hollow, the Audiobook

Quarantine seemed like the right time. All author’s proceeds go to charity. Search your favorite platform or use one of the links below.

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Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/24nCMaSiMQWp8J8SUB4qDA

Google Play https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Bill_Braine_Bone_Hollow?id=AQAAAEDsuBL47M

Apple Books
https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/bone-hollow-a-hudson-heartland-mystery/id1507373636

EStories
https://www.estories.com/audiobook/363328/Bill-Braine/Bone-Hollow

Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/bone-hollow-1

Scribd
https://www.scribd.com/audiobook/455981368/Bone-Hollow-A-Hudson-Heartland-Mystery

Chirp Books
https://www.chirpbooks.com/audiobooks/bone-hollow-by-bill-braine

Libro
https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781094271903-bone-hollow

2017 Hudson Heartland Holiday Shopping Guide

Buying gifts is hard. Buying distinctive gifts is harder. Buying distinctive gifts that mean something is harder still. But buying distinctive, meaningful, practical gifts that capture the inventiveness and essence of a place is fairly simple, now. Because once again Hudson Heartland is happy to present a Holiday Shopping Guide featuring items that are sourced (or branded) from within Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties (with some peripheral overlap, maybe), available for online orders (or a quick phone call), and available to ship.

The list is below, but while we're talking there's also an in-person shopping event you can hit if you're here: The Hudson Valley Farm & Flea in Newburgh on November 25. 

So, to the list. If you are: a) a Hudson Heartlander at home who wants to send a gift to a friend who lives elsewhere or b) a Hudson Heartlander who's away who wants to share the allure of your native soil with your new "locals" or c) a one-time visitor to the region who never forgot it or d) someone who wants to sustain your small-business neighbors—then these gifts are ideal holiday presents. Click to buy or browse these sites for more cool ideas!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and/or a gift-free Festivus to you!

New additions: 

Updated entries from previous years: 

Please comment in your favorite local online gift sources!

Running in the Hudson Heartland, 2016

With the formal 2016 race season winding down, here are Bill Braine's Running columns from the Middletown Times Herald-Record from the past seven months. The column hibernates and will return in spring, lean and hangry and fleet of foot. Run well this winter.

The start is the best part

Let it rain on your parade

Putting on a good race is daunting

A beautiful day for a 10K

Run the Hambo Marathon: You can do it!

I am not throwing away my trot

Heritage Trail appeals to different needs

Running safety is not just a women's issue

A lot of the mid-Hudson in England

Time shouldn't weigh heavily on your mind

October races celebrate life

2015 Hudson Heartland Gift Guide

Melissa McGill, “Constellation”

Bannerman’s Island, New York

The thing about a constellation when it’s close up is that it changes. There’s parallax. The far-off stars of the Big Dipper, Scorpio, or Cygnus are fixed points relative to one another, and the constellations themselves are fixed in relation to one another too. They’re pictures. 

Not so Melissa McGill’s work of seventeen new stars summoned to earth on a rocky becastled outcrop in the Hudson River known as Pollepel, or Bannerman’s, Island. This “Constellation”—the installation’s name—is a living, gently whirling cluster whose points speak to one another at varying distances, and to the fixed stars above, and to their own rippling reflections on the river, and to the crenelations and towers from which they rise. Moment by moment, they have something slightly different to say. 

Storm King Adventure Tours, the official kayaking tour company for the project (and whose principals were its lighting design consultants) offered my wife and me a trip to see Constellation during a press preview, from down low on the water, while the artist served as docent for the media aboard a nearby tour boat. We accepted and joined a few others on a Friday evening that seemed manufactured for the purpose. 

The Hudson here, at the south end of Newburgh Bay, is a mile and a half wide; the trip from the small cove at Donahue Park in Cornwall-on-Hudson, on the western shore, is most of that. It took about twenty minutes. We approached just before sunset over a mild chop, feeling a gentle breeze from the north that slowly died as we advanced. Someone asked a guide about the depth. South of us, he said, near West Point, it was 180 feet deep, the deepest part of the river. He didn’t want to say how deep it was where we were. It was deep enough. (Later I checked. It was 60 feet deep. We were all thinking about the apparent murder, this spring, of a kayaker in this spot.) The water that poured from the paddle blades was warm.

The SKAT guide filled us in as we reached the island’s leeward side, gesturing up at the former residence, one corner of the great half-folly, half-bomb that was Bannerman’s Arsenal. It was a 1901 storehouse for Spanish-American War surplus weaponry and explosives, built by a Scot who was prohibited from packing the dangerous stuff into Brooklyn or Manhattan warehouses. He gave it battlements and towers and arches, apparently without aid of an architect, and fudged the lines, lending it false perspective so that it would appear larger—a three-dimensional trompe-l'œil as advertisement for those on shore. We were told that he invited despots, would-be tyrants and revolutionaries from southerly climes to come lob shells at nearby Sugarloaf and Storm King, and sent them off with howitzers to work their violence on their own lands. In 1920 his warehouse blew up and more of it burned in 1969. Its picturesque remains have been crumbling since.

Melissa McGill is not the first to be taken by these ruins. Wikipedia helpfully offers a compendium of magical and mysterious purposes to which these stones have been set. McGill is, however, the first since Bannerman to orchestrate a major construction on Pollepel, raising 17 poles, the tallest of them 80 feet in height, at carefully plotted points around the arsenal. They’re anchored in bedrock, and each is tipped with a three-light cluster of LEDs and surrounded by a glass globe to precisely mimic the color temperature of the heavenly stars. A small solar array charges the 12-volt battery that gives power to the lights. A sensor advises them to come to life in sequence as night falls.  

There’s a viewing platform anchored to another rock outcrop on the Hudson’s east shore, looking across to the island, but from there nothing moves. A stationary observer looks over a narrow ribbon of water at a stationary installation. No, it’s on the water, or from Route 9D, or from the Metro North tracks, that things get moving. 

By the time we’d paddled around the small island to its north side, the sun had set and a long twilight stretched across the river. The lights of Newburgh lined its west shore, woods and train tracks its east. The Bay and the Island lie north of the point where the river bisects the Hudson Highlands, a reach between Breakneck Ridge and Storm King Mountain called the North-Gate, or the Wind-Gate, or the Worragut, so the horizons to south and east were hills. A waxing crescent moon was up over Storm King, and Venus and Jupiter, close together in the sun’s afterglow, grew brighter. On this side of the island the most intact of the arsenal’s crumbling walls remains, propped up by 21st-century hardware, the facility’s name in three-foot high capitals across it.  We paused to drift while the press boat circled farther out in the river, timing its circuit to nightfall. Our flotilla passed cookies from kayak to kayak.

And as we watched, precisely synchronized to the early glimmer of the first stars appearing overhead, one of the lights kindled. We oohed. And another, and more, each of them appearing subtly, very like the manner of the stars that emerged in the sky above—not there one moment, and then, your eyes flick away and back, and there. Some were on isolated poles in the woods; some rose directly from parapets; some sat nearly level with the top of the walls. We were told that from some angles they suggested the absent lines of now-ruined fortifications, from others, a terrestrial version of the Milky Way.  

It took about fifteen minutes for them all to light, and the poles, which were silhouetted against the sky, began to blend into the darkening background. We lingered there, trying to focus cameras, the pale lights set off against the background of a distant cloud-mountain that retained some of the sun, then we paddled around again to the east side, to stay out of the media cruise’s shots. 

And in that short paddle, the motion became apparent. It’s hard to imagine that McGill researched the positions of Jupiter and Venus at dusk on launch day when she plotted the position of her lights many months ago, but two of them precisely mirrored the 45-degree angle and distance that separated those two points in the sky, until they seemed so intentionally referential that it provoked a little gasp of applause. And then as we moved slowly through the water, heads swiveled to catch each shift, the stars aligned, showed us where perhaps old walls used to stand, and where the rock of the island itself rose and fell, reflecting a hard surface that resisted glaciation. The stones of Pollepel, like the Highlands themselves, are the oldest in New York State, more than a billion years old, products of the Grenville Orogeny. They are the earthiest of earth, and yet here their peaks and contours reached up to touch points of light in space. 

It grew darker. As we had been promised, the poles disappeared in the night, and then we were looking, indeed, at a new Constellation, but not at just one, no; with each dip of the blade a new star field was revealed, a new bridge to the sky—contiguous with Venus and with Jupiter above it—arose. Some of the lights shone between us and a castle wall, set off against pure black; others lay behind, or above, until Bannerman’s original tromp was retromped and then tromped again; until space, sky, tree, cloud, rock, castle and river were whispering to one another about just who was real, here, and who was not, and what exactly counts as light pollution, when the lights of Newburgh behind the island were just enough to silhouette one tower so that it could appropriately frame its own set of stars. 

We lingered a bit, but the business of being out on the river in full darkness meant we couldn’t stay long. Headlamps on, we began the return crossing under Scorpio and Cygnus and the moon, discarding metaphorical considerations because our arms were tired. But our flotilla paused mid-river when a glittering spray of fireworks launched from New Windsor, and again when they were emphatically answered by a full-throated display over Dutchess Stadium, signaling defeat (statistically) for the Renegades. 

Seeing McGill’s work from earth would be, perhaps, less than seeing it from the river itself. But stasis has its own power and one day in the next two years I will likely perch on that eastern platform to watch again as the lights come up after sunset, to see what Constellation tells me about permanence and place, when it has already offered me new ways to look at light and movement. 

—Bill Braine

Bone Hollow Book Group Discussion Starters

  1. The promotional copy for Bone Hollow says “No place is safe, if your enemy is everywhere.” Who or what is the enemy in this statement as it relates to the story? How is this enemy “everywhere,” if it is? 

  2. Whose story is this? Which characters do you identify with most strongly? Where does your outlook diverge from those of the characters?

  3. What part does the landscape play in the story? Have you been to the area where Bone Hollow is set? Have you been anyplace like it? 

  4. How does the Gales’ marriage change during the course of the story? How would you characterize it at different stages of the novel?

  5. What did you expect to happen in the story that didn’t? What did happen that surprised you?

  6. Where were you in autumn 2008? Were you aware of the economic and industrial issues that affect the story? Were you before reading the novel?

  7. What is the role of greed in Bone Hollow? What other forces cause the events to unfold as they do?

  8. Which character(s), if any, would you like to see again? Why?

  9. The Gales react to the stresses of the story in different ways. How do you think you would act in their place? Have you ever been in situations like those they face? How did your reactions differ?

  10. Does the prologue set up themes that you saw elsewhere in the novel? 

  11. Although the title refers to a fictionalized version of a real locale, what other associations does it raise? Do those have echoes elsewhere in the book? 

Buy Local

Bone Hollow will be on sale here (p'back & ebooks) soon (a day or two) and in Hudson Valley bookstores shortly thereafter. One place you won't be able to get it...

I like to shop on Amazon, but everything I understand about how they treat authors, publishers, and bookstores made me want this experiment to not-include them.

Will that mean fewer copies sold? Possibly. It will add a couple of clicks to the purchase flow, and it will mean a short delay before you're reading on your Kindle. Will it mean less revenue? Maayyyybe. Will it mean that more money from every copy sold stays in the storyshed? Yes. 

 

Achievement Unlocked

Got a bunch of these today. Finalizing this website and the ordering pages and the digital versions in the next two days, and expect to be selling on Monday March 2. 

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Say Hi to Pete

Hey, it’s Pete! Say hi to Pete, everyone. 

Pete’s the customer service rep at the printer where Bone Hollow is being produced.

He works in Castleton, New York, at IBT Hamilton. They’re my publisher’s preferred printer for some of the same reasons my publisher is my preferred publisher: They do a great job and they’re close to home. They also have every kind of printing machine in use from the mid-1800s until now—including the digital press and bindery that will produce Bone Hollow later this month.

It’s a cool place if you like clanky machines and conveyor belts and giant rolls of paper. (I do.)

I think "creating local" is a smart way to work. You draw your stories from where you are, and you get deep in there and find that where you are contains the whole universe. But also, if you're making something and you want to talk to someone who's helping you do that, you can do that. In person. In the place where they work. 

A lot of authors probably don't get to chat with the printer. Me? If I feel like it I can say hi to Pete. And thank him for helping me get my first novel published.

Which I did.