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A trip to Cruger Island (2024)
It’s a warm spring day at Bard College, and you are on a kayak on the banks of the Hudson River wearing a life vest. It’s noon and the ebb of the current makes it easier to paddle; the water works with you. The clear blue sky melts into the blue of the Hudson River, and there are fleecy clouds keeping you company, protecting you from the sun’s rays. You float into a patch of water chestnut, which gets entangled in your paddle, so you have to row a bit harder to get through it. Further ahead, you can see Blithewood at a distance on your right, with its colorful garden blooming in spring. You cross South Bay and approach a bridge where an old railroad is still in use by Amtrak. The tide is low enough to pass under the bridge, and you can see an inscription announcing the year it was built: 1913. Further, into the river, you can see a piece of land that extends from the shore: it seems to be a peninsula, but the tide has covered all connecting paths. The bushes and trees are overgrown and leafy, and the vegetation is green and lush. You have arrived on the south side of Cruger Island.
With your kayak pulled onto the shore, you put your feet on firm land. You take off the life vest and tie the kayak to a tree. From here you can see parts of a construction made of ledge stones on the higher ground. You walk up the hill, which is elevated but not steep. And so you find it: Cruger’s folly, ruins of fake ruins. The dilapidated remains of a nineteenth-century structure of piled stones, the scattered fragments of what was once a proxy for a Mayan temple. You sit on the detritus of what used to be a wall and look toward the river. This is the landscape that the Uxmal sculptures became part of almost two centuries ago. From here, they greeted visitors who came on canoes under the moonlight, looking for a picturesque scene from a Romantic, bygone era. From this spot, the stones longed for Uxmal in Yucatán, Mexico, for the Nunnery Quadrangle, for their former dwelling place. But here they were contemplated and portrayed: sketched, painted, photographed, studied—their history was rewritten and romanticized.
The Uxmal sculptures left the Hudson Valley in 1919 to enter the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Abandoned at Cruger Island are shards of a once idyllic, scenic view. The thought of the rise and fall of a forged pastoral vista accompanies you as you paddle back up the river.