Five days, six states: this must be the college tour. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Yale. New England is small, so flipping from Dartmouth to Brown, Columbia to Tufts requires efficiency but is quite do-able. This was a trip into the future, done in two-hour chunks, info session and tour, or tour and info session, and then a couple of hours to drive to the next university. It’s our daughter’s future: a place she will go and perhaps never come back from, a place where she will find herself, a life of her own, without us.
And, in the gap between Friday’s early-morning Columbia and Saturday’s afternoon Amherst, we barreled up to Esopus. Staying in Stone Ridge, inland, we got a different view of Ulster County. We drove back roads, we crossed creeks and rivers, peered down quarries, and slept and ate in ancient buildings. And–prowling four cemeteries in two days–we went on a binge of gravestones, time-tripping backward as well as forward.
