The myriad ways people use the Hudson River have undergone fundamental transformations over the centuries, but a timelessness endures. You can see the past and, perhaps, the future of the Hudson along a bucolic stretch in Bethlehem at Van Wie Point, where Hendrick Gerritse Van Wie, a Dutch colonist at Fort Orange, built a house on the outskirts of Albany in 1679. Van Wie's descendants built a dock and landing and leased it beginning in the 1830s to the Hudson River Steamboat Co., where passengers from New York City caught a stagecoach to Albany. The scene along Van Wie's Road could be from another century. Orange day lilies bloom along the shoulder.
Wide lawns stretch down to river's edge.
The only traffic on a weekday morning is a flock of wild turkeys and a lone muskrat. What passes for hubbub here is Reeves' rouster each morning of Canada geese who foul his lawn. On Reeves' shoreline this morning, at low tide, pilings from the old steamship landing jut from the mud, reminders of an earlier century.