Hudson to Coxsackie, New York
There’s a place just south of Hudson called Olana. It was built by Frederick Church, one of the central figures of the Hudson River School of painting, and it is not a house so much as a philosophy made physical.
I hadn’t planned to stop there. I pulled in because something caught my eye from the road, walked into the gift shop, started watching a short video about the property, and forty-five minutes later I was on a guided landscape tour that I didn’t want to end.
The Painter Who Built His Own Frame
Church studied under Thomas Cole, the painter who essentially founded the Hudson River School and spent his career arguing that the American landscape was a worthy subject for serious art. Church absorbed that and went further, traveling the world to paint — South America, the Arctic, the Middle East — and eventually coming back to a property above the Hudson River to build something that exists entirely outside of any established style.
The house is Olana. Persian arches, Victorian detailing, Moroccan tilework, Catskill views through every window. It reads like a man who had spent decades looking at beautiful things and decided to live inside one of his own making.
But what the landscape tour taught me was the thing I keep thinking about since.
Church bought these forty-two acres in 1870 as open meadow. Then he began composing it the same way he composed a canvas. He moved paths not to get you somewhere faster but to change the angle of what you saw. He planted trees not for shade but to act as frames, blocking certain views to concentrate your attention on others. He described what he was doing in letters as “painting with nature.” The tour guide kept using the word study — each turn in the path was a new study, a new painting he was creating not on canvas but in the land itself.
Standing at one of the overlooks, the guide pointed out that the farthest mountain range visible on a clear day is the Berkshires — North Adams and Williamstown, exactly where I’d been two days earlier. Fifty miles away, framed by trees Church planted a hundred and fifty years ago. I mentioned I’d just been there. He seemed pleased.
Here’s what I took from it: Frederick Church wasn’t just a painter. He was someone who spent his whole life training his eyes to find frames, to compose perspective, to understand that beauty isn’t stumbled into — it’s searched for, built toward, shaped by a thousand small decisions about where to stand and where to look.
Camera in hand, walking his paths in October light, I couldn’t help but recognize something in that.
Hurricane Milton
I drove out of Olana with the radio on and the beauty of the Catskills in every direction, and the news coming through was the opposite of controlled.
Hurricane Milton was making landfall near Sarasota. Tornado outbreaks across South Florida. Palm Beach County. Martin County. My mom lives there. Denise lives there. My friends, my rental properties, everything I’d left behind when I flew north two weeks earlier.
I kept driving. I had the radio on one ear and a live streamer on my phone through the dash mount. Calm, steady voices reporting something catastrophic. A multi-vortex tornado on the ground moving into Martin County. The St. Lucie Medical Center in the direct path. I was watching the Catskills turn color out the window while tornadoes spun off a hurricane two states south and I couldn’t do a single thing about any of it.
I’d been thinking all morning about Frederick Church and his carefully shaped world. Every sightline controlled. Every frame deliberate. The light arriving exactly where he wanted it.
Nature doesn’t actually work that way.
Coxsackie
I pulled into Coxsackie — pronounced, I believe, Cok-SACK-ee, though nobody corrects me confidently — which is a small Hudson Valley town I’d actually passed through the previous year, a couple of weeks later in October when the color was further along. The James Newberry Hotel, same place I’d stayed before. Reasonable. A restaurant next door called Patrick Henry’s where I watched the hurricane coverage through the window and talked to the server, who had been following the storm closely even from upstate New York.
She said a lot of people had family in Florida. I said I was one of them.
I saw a cat run across the street after dinner and told her about the cat rescue in Hudson earlier in the day. She looked at me the way people look at you when you’ve told them something about yourself they didn’t expect.
The hotel bar used to be an ironworks administrative building. The bricks in the wall are original. Someone had the good sense to keep them. It was nicely lit — I say that as a lighting designer and mean it as a compliment. A good use of what the building already had.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to get further into the Catskills before heading toward Nyack and the airport. My family was fine, as far as I could tell. The storm passed. The tornadoes missed.
The colors up here were still doing everything I’d come to see.
