On to Opus 40

From Princeton we drove north toward New York City, and then turned slightly east. Our destination was Saugerties (pronounced SOUR-deez by especially hickish residents, otherwise SOG-er-deez), a small town in upstate New York, near Woodstock, whose main distinction is Opus 40, an amazing environmental sculpture created by Harvey Fite. We didn't make it there the first night, though, because after the hectic day Colin's foot was too sore to drive and I was too sleepy to drive all that long either.

We stayed in a Super8 at the confluence of I-87 and I-84, technically in a town called Newburgh. Don't think sleazy, though--this was a $90 Super8, and crowded too. It was our first inkling of the mistake we had made in trying to drive halfway across the country on Fourth of July weekend. However at this point at least there was room at the inn. We settled very gratefully with ice for Colin's foot and cold water from the tap. The water up there in the Catskill Mountains was delicious. That may be where bottled water comes from.

Next morning we spent two hours going three exits due to traffic. It should really only have been about half an hour to Saugerties, but fortunately our plans were fairly flexible. We listened to what scraps of radio we could pick up and talked about the traffic jams. I remembered Dad talking about the line where traffic jams and un-jams, how it travels toward you at 35 mph. I have always found that fact so fascinating that I think of it every time I am in traffic. In fact, as I told Colin, I used to be really interested in complex systems like traffic jams and FedEx routing (also, now, Netflix) and originally considered trying to do an applied math major or something like that in college and become some sort of systems analyst. One of those alternate lives!

Colin's musings were a bit more practical. He pointed out that although in theory the maximum number of cars that could pass any given point on the freeway would be a densely packed continuous line, in practice a densely packed continuous line is a recipe for trouble in the real world (though it wouldn't be if the cars were fixed on a cable and kept at a constant speed without being allowed to change lanes or exit--go car-ferries!). If you correct this theory by making it less dense--leaving enough of a cushion between cars that speed and lane changes don't interfere with anyone else on the road--everyone gets by faster. We think. Anyway, it was an interesting musing (I'm not sure if I'm representing it right) and he said he may even use it as an example for his idealization work. After all, traffic is someone everyone can relate to!

The unjamming line reached us without giving us much clue about why we'd been stuck in the first place. The best we can figure is that it was a particularly short exit and entrance ramp for a travel plaza (big commercial rest area) that had been poorly planned and was being heavily used. Coupled with Fourth of July weekend traffic. (Inkling number 2.)

We reached Saugerties around noon and headed up to Opus 40, which is in the middle of nowhere. For official information and some more professional pictures, go here [http://www.opus40.org/]. We got there around noon.

Briefly, the story about Opus 40 is this: the sculptor Harvey Fite bought a bluestone quarry for the purpose of making pedestals for his sculptures. He was going to make a big sculpture garden all around the area, but the pedestals outgrew his sculptures. It's really true--we saw a few of his sculptures and they're just not all that interesting. But the alien geometry of Opus 40 has a real fascination to it. Harvey Fite decided it was going to take 40 years to complete, (hence the name--not the same convention as for composers) but only worked on it for 37. Mowing the lawn one day he fell into the sculpture and died. He was over seventy, but still a sad thing. And a strange thing, karmically speaking. Nonetheless, Opus 40 is not noticeably unfinished. It is made all out of different sizes and shapes of stone, cut out all with traditional hand-tools and stuck together using keystones to hold the shapes--no mortar. At the middle is a huge obelisk. The rest is terraces, steps, ramps, ravines, and ponds.

As Colin pointed out, when you are walking through it there are very few dead ends. It's like thinking in spirals--you may not get very far but you get somewhere. And there was a wonderfully quiet feeling in the air. It made us walk slowly and talk softly. It's hard to know what else to say about it. It wasn't all that set up for tourists (no penny squisher, though I can totally see what it ought to look like if they got one), a rather sparse giftshop, a workshed converted into a "Quarryman's Museum" (whence the above tools).

Far below in a pond, there was the head of a green frog, the exact same green as the pond algae. I saw its head, but I doubted that it was a frog because it sat so still. Then Colin threw a rock down near it and it made one really lazy lollop and came to rest about six inches away from where it had been, still with its head sticking out. A frog all right, but a mighty self-confident and fearless one!

It's hard to know exactly what else to say about the place, except for that it could probably last a really long time. Apparently, plants are its main enemies. The inevitable freezing and melting of upstate New York winters cause no difficulty because the stones are fitted rather than mortared together: they have room to expand and contract. What would archaeologists of the future say about the place, we wondered. Would they be able to tell it was a product of the twentieth century, or would they be defeated by the self-conscious archaism (e.g., the fact of his using only traditional tools when more modern ones were probably available, at least eventually)?

Anyway, here are some more photos.