The Road Trip - Chapter I: Darkness at Midday

All right. It's time to stop crying over unexposed film and get on with the story.

The first destination on my road trip was 139 Academy Street, Poughkeepsie, New York, an historic Hudson Valley farmhouse listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was the home where my first wife was raised with her four siblings in such a Bedlam of chaos and dysfunctional relationships that sanity was in critically short supply (if the family folklore is to be believed). Of course, many things become clear only in hindsight. Things seemed normal enough in the Poughkeepsie homestead during most of the two decades of that marriage (1970-1990) -- if one disregarded my ex-mother-in-law's penchant for collecting strange derelict characters and lodging them on the third floor, a kitchen which might have been condemned by the public health authorities (the refrigerator especially), and enough misery and weirdness to have filled a fat novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

So what drew me back to the place? Curiosity, plain and simple. Morbid curiosity? Perhaps. The house has been out of my late ex-wife's family for a good many years now. From outward appearances, it's in the process of falling down, like the House of Usher. It's hard to tell if the place is even inhabited (by living human beings, I mean); certainly no one challenged my walking onto the property to take pictures. It exhaled darkness and decay, even in the middle of a bright day in June 2010.

On this side porch, guests gathered to go through the receiving line after our wedding in August 1970. After looking at the pictures, you may decide for yourself whether or not you'd be willing to set foot on that porch for any purpose. The front of the house, facing Academy Street, was once an imposing specimen of Hudson Valley Victorian architecture; now it's just a specimen of faded glory.

Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. So far, my epic sentimental journey was looking a bit shabby and melancholy around the edges. You can't go home again, wrote Thomas Wolfe. It has something to do with time and the river.