Going With the Glow: A Fall-Foliage Bike Ride
Cyclists in front of the Akin Free Library in Pawling, N.Y.
When it comes to the finer points of nature, I often feel at a loss. When I see a bird turning lazy circles in the sky, the feathers at the tips of its wings spread like fingers, I am pretty sure it’s a hawk — though what kind, I have no idea. A rose is a rose is a rose, I know, but what is it if it’s not a rose? I can tell deciduous from conifer with all the certainty of a sixth-grader, but about the only way I recognize a maple tree is by the sap bucket attached to its trunk in fall.
Still, as three friends and I rode our bicycles around the Harlem River Valley one Tuesday at the end of September, the myriad shapes and shifting colors of the trees leapt out at me. Across a horse pasture, a single tree, every leaf cherry red, sat below hills of its still-green brethren. Another — an oak? — loomed over a quiet road through a golf course, its thick yellow leaves glowing against its somber bark. At the western edge of Connecticut, before we hit a series of long, thigh-burner hills, a skinny tree rose to my right, shrouded for most of its height with green leaves, but at its rounded top they shaded red, like a perfectly ripening apple.
But I want to make one thing absolutely clear: we were not leaf-peeping. Yes, we had rendezvoused in Pawling, N.Y., to examine the annual transformation of these verdant hills into an autumnal furnace of yellows and reds, but it was nothing so clichéd, goofy-sounding or late-middle-age as leaf-peeping. No, we were, uh … following the foliage? Or maybe simply seeing the colors. That sounds much better, doesn’t it?
The Metro-North line runs from Grand Central Terminal.Whatever you call it, we were doing it cheaply and efficiently. We had conceived this as a single-day call-in-sick journey into as rural an area as we could reach by Metro-North, the train lines that extend from New York City north into the Hudson River and Harlem River Valleys, and east into Connecticut. Pawling, we saw, was near the end of the Harlem line (about an hour and 50 minutes from New York), close to the border with Connecticut and in a zone that YankeeFoliage.com, which maintains an excellent leaf-peeping map, had shaded yellow for “turning” colors. Round-trip tickets cost $26 each, and would have been slightly less if we’d ordered online early enough to receive them by snail mail.
More important, Pawling had Pawling Cycle & Sport (12 West Main Street; 845-855-9866; www.pawlingcycle.com). The shop, right in the center of the picture-perfect small town, was where we rented our bikes and planned our route, advised all the while by the owner, Rob Kelley, who was helpful, knowledgeable — and jealous of our plans. “I’d kill for a day off just to go off in whatever direction,” he said.
One unemployed friend, Tater Read, had brought his own fixed-gear bike (which necessitated a $5 pass for Metro-North), and the others, a former New York Times Web producer named Matt Klein and a guy who didn’t want to be named because he’d called in sick at work, rented mountain bikes — not necessarily ideal for road riding, but only $20 a day and great for the numerous trails in the region. Meanwhile, remembering the difficulty of my cycling trip last spring in Oregon and Washington, I sprang for the shop’s only road bike, a lightweight Raleigh that rented for $30.
Biking through the Harlem River Valley.It was a wise investment. As we took off north, on a scenic 26-mile route outlined by Mr. Kelley, I struggled with some of the bike’s features — its 24 gears, its uncooperative-at-first toe clips — but the basic act of pedaling was easy at least, and I often found myself overtaking my more experienced comrades without much effort. Not that we were trying to go too fast: there was scenery to take in. First, we cycled along West Dover Road, which twisted and turned past stately Colonial homes, red and ebony barns, horse farms with broad pastures and neat fences, and a few new, suburban-style houses. On the pavement were odd painted messages that seemed to be directed at cyclists: “Off to a good start,” “View the enjoy,” and, as we passed a pond, “No swim b4 hill.”
Ah, the hills. That little one, which turned our tight peloton into an archipelago of huffers-and-puffers, was just a foretaste of the ascents to come, and at its top, noted Matt Klein, was a street called Hillcrest Lane — a throwback to a time when place names actually described places. I dubbed this dying phenomenon onomotapavement.
The leaves were still mostly green, though by the time you read this in mid-October, they should be peaking. As it happened, the predominant green of early fall only served to highlight those places where changes had begun, and to make us wonder at the underlying mechanism. The tops of ridges, for example, might be mostly green — except around rocky outcroppings, where the rusty colors of the stone seemed to bleed out into the foliage. Or we’d cycle through two nearly identical valleys, one deep green, the other tinged with yellow.
I knew from a recent Boston Globe article, about the likelihood of a spectacular leaf season this year, that the colors were caused by the breakdown of chlorophyll (which reveals the yellow beneath the green) and the release of anthocyanin (which makes red), but there seemed a random element here as well, a fascinating irregularity that matched the up, down, left, right, swerving nature of the hills themselves.
A meal at Pizza Express.Those hills grew ever more complicated after we stopped for pretty good pepperoni pizza and Stewart’s root beer ($24.63 with tip) at Pizza Express (1468 Route 22; 845-832-3400; www.pizzaexpresswingdale.com), in Wingdale, N.Y. (The highly regarded Big W’s Roadside Bar-B-Q, across the street, was closed Mondays and Tuesdays, alas.) As Rob Kelley of the cycle shop had explained, the north-south route is fairly flat, but east-west gets bumpy. Once we crossed the border into Connecticut — recently demilitarized, we joked — it certainly got bumpier, but it also felt older. Towns here were incorporated as far back as 1712, and some of the houses — classic two-story New England homes with white-painted clapboard and contrasting shutters — looked not much younger. The trees, too, were denser and older-looking, shrouding the stone fences, some with wrought-iron gates, that lined small lanes. And though they looked old, I had to remind myself that this area, and much of New England, had been cut down by the end of the 19th century.
In South Kent, about 13 miles into the trip, we stopped to examine the covered bridge at Kent Falls, which was gray and unadorned and paved with cement. It was, I’m guessing, the least exciting covered bridge in the world. But it marked the halfway point for us. We cycled on, uphill and downhill, past what appeared to be an old one-room schoolhouse with a miniature bell tower and a farm stand that tempted me until I realized I’d have to lug the produce back home. At the junction of highways 55 and 39, we made a fateful choice: Instead of continuing west on 55 and retracing our route, we turned south, opting to explore a bit more of Connecticut before cutting back over the border to Pawling.
It was, to be sure, a beautiful route. Here the colors seemed to be deeper, as if the age of the land had accelerated the aging of the trees. Red shone. Yellow glowed. And the hills rose. And rose.
The hills around the Harlem River Valley.At first, it was subtle — no sudden steeps here — but the slopes just seemed to go up and up without end. The highest mountains here are only 1,300 feet, so it couldn’t have been too bad, but they were exhausting just the same. One of our number even wound up walking, and thumbed a lift to the top of the final hill. (Tater, admirably, led the way the whole day, despite being unable to shift gears.) When we checked Google Maps on our iPhones to make sure we weren’t lost, we found more onomotapavement: Wakeman Hill Road, Kirby Hill Road, Quaker Hill Road.
But climbing all those hills meant that eventually we could descend, and descend we did, at borderline-unsafe speeds, through villages that looked as though they hadn’t changed in a century. A history museum we passed was closed, as was the amazing late-Victorian stone Akin Free Library. We just cruised.
One hill remained to climb, and though it was nothing compared with what had come before, after the day’s exertions it was arduous (for me, at least). It was called, according to a brass plaque at its peak, Purgatory Hill, and in 1778 the Continental Army had held a “great barbecue” there to celebrate the anniversary of General Burgoyne’s defeat. After that, it was about half a mile back to the center of Pawling, and time for our own great barbecue.
Well, not a barbecue exactly. After dropping off our bikes and changing our clothes, we took Rob Kelley’s recommendation and had dinner at McGrath’s Tavern (146 East Main Street; 845-855-0800), which looked rustic and charming from the outside but inside was your average Irish pub. No matter. Earlybird specials ($9.95 for prime rib) were ordered, I had the McGrath’s burger (with bacon, Gorgonzola, barbecue sauce and an onion ring, $9.50), and a fair but not excessive amount of alcohol was consumed.
As far as leaf-peeping went, we agreed over dinner, the leaves are really only an excuse to get out of the city and into the countryside on a potentially quixotic quest. And we’d proved that, without a car and without spending a lot of money, we could have the kind of day that, in Rob Kelley’s words, you’d kill for.
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