I had three hours before my flight out of Newark. Most people go straight to the airport, find an overpriced coffee, and wait. I found a two-hundred-year-old mill with a waterfall in Clinton, New Jersey. This is what travel days can look like if you take a little time to look around.
But first, Bethlehem in the morning.
The Christmas Market I Didn’t See
The Christkindlmarkt — and I’m fairly confident I’m mispronouncing that — is one of the things I’d written about on my blog before this whole journey started. A research post on Christmas markets in America worth visiting, and Bethlehem’s came up near the top. Wooden huts lit with amber light, handmade ornaments, the scent of cinnamon and roasted chestnuts, the whole thing rooted in the town’s Moravian heritage going back to the 1700s. One of the oldest and most beloved holiday markets in the country, and it opens at the end of the week.
I was there on a Monday.
I walked through the empty setup anyway — the infrastructure of the market in place, the stage set, the music not yet playing. There’s something interesting about seeing a thing in its quiet form before it becomes itself. I took a few photos. I thought about coming back with a mug of something warm instead of an umbrella. That’s the plan for next time.
The Drone Flight Over the Steel Stacks
The morning cleared overnight. I woke up to 32 degrees and a sky that was done with the rain, and I took the DJI Mini 4 Pro up to get a view of the steel stacks.
I’d been standing outside the fencing looking up at these structures for two days. From the air, they become something different — the full scale of the complex visible, the furnaces and catwalks and pipe systems laid out against the city grid below, the Lehigh River running beside it all. Five blast furnaces, still standing. Bethlehem Steel built ships and bridges and skyscrapers from this site for over a century. The furnaces went cold in 1995. The structure remains.
Cities look honest from above. No hiding what they are. No pretending. Just the bones of a place, laid out for anyone willing to look.
I got the flight in before the cold took my hands. It was worth getting up for.
The Two Cities
I walked down toward the river for one last ground-level shot, following a path along a small park at the base of the steel complex. I found what I was looking for in terms of the angle. I also found eight or ten tents.
People living there. In 31-degree weather, in the shadow of the furnaces that built the infrastructure of this country, in the park below the Christmas market that opens later in the week.
I stood there for a while. I didn’t say much to the camera. I’m not sure what I would have said. Travel has a way of showing you two cities at once — the one in the brochure and the one that doesn’t make the brochure. Bethlehem showed me both that morning, within about twenty minutes of each other.
Clinton, New Jersey
I had some voiceovers prepared for Clinton that didn’t feel right to use after the morning I’d had. I’ll let the images speak instead.
Clinton is a small town in central New Jersey that sits on the Raritan River, and the old Red Mill — a grist mill built in the early 1800s — still stands at a waterfall along the water’s edge. The kind of scene that makes you pull off the road and point a camera before you’ve fully registered why. Good reflections, good light, a reminder that New Jersey keeps surprising me at every turn. Newark and Hoboken are the New Jersey most people know. This is the other one.
Season Six
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia. State twenty-nine through thirty-three by my count, though I keep recounting. The first season where I left Penny with a sitter and spent most of the trip wondering if she was okay.
On the plane home I wasn’t thinking about the steel mill that built half of America or the two-hundred-year-old waterfall or any of the states I’d seen or the ones I still hadn’t. I was thinking about whether I’d left enough food for the cat.
I got home. She looked at me like I’d been gone for twenty minutes.
That’s the whole reunion. No running to the door, no dramatic welcome. Just the look. I’ve been told I should want more from this relationship. I’ve accepted that I won’t be getting it.
Season seven next.
