It is a pity that the profession of “explorer” doesn’t exist anymore. If I were around much earlier, maybe I’d have been born in the Netherlands like my mother, my grandparents, and their grandparents.
Then, if I were born far back enough, back in the 1600s, I could have weaseled my way into a position with the Dutch East India Company, and been part of the mutineering Dutch crew aboard the Half Moon, gliding by this stretch of river. Or perhaps I’d have been then like I am now, an indoor cat.
When I stand by the river and unfocus my eyes, visions of large wooden ships barge into my imagination from the periphery. I see men hoisting wooden crates of tobacco, pottery, and guns onto the dewy banks. I hear an unfamiliar Dutch, as they trade guns for pelt, tobacco for wampum with the Native Americans. Then I snap back to the present. Whether it’s in my daydream or in my waking life, I’m standing on this same stretch of riverbank.
Part of the reason I love Hudson and Columbia County is that even though the English influence came to be the dominant one, a Dutchness persists. It’s observed not just in town names and their curious spellings, more so, there is a charm in the architectural beauty, walkability, and neighborliness that is summed up in a single Dutch word, gezellig — a word for which there is no direct English translation. It means warm, convivial, merry, cozy, in both setting and company. I find its usage goes up as winter draws in and we scurry indoors. Gezellig can be used to describe a narrow staircase, a lantern smoldering outside a snowy stoop, brick buildings bunched neatly together, hopefully full of your friends.
In May this year, I wrote about Dutch stone houses in the Hudson Valley for Dutch, the magazine. I visited three houses in Beacon, Stone Ridge, and Coxsackie. In the article, I wrote about how the Dutch mindset is reflected in their architecture: sturdy brick and stone, carefully hand-hewn beams, sculpted iron doorknobs. Early Dutch colonial houses contrast with the hastily put up shacks of the western frontier, constructed to be soon abandoned as more destiny was left to be manifested — the Dutch did the opposite. They settled, creating that homely atmosphere. In the article, I quote Franklin D. Roosevelt, a famous Hollandophile, who wrote the introduction to Helen Wilkinson Reynolds’ 1928 book Dutch Stone Houses in the Hudson Valley Before 1776.
“So often these houses of the Hudson Valley are found in cosy places, back from the highway, down below a hill, far from a neighbor, snuggling as it were into a perfect landscape-setting and happy in their isolation.” The word you’re looking for, President Roosevelt, is gezellig.
While the early Dutch houses in question are not in Hudson (although close by, the Luykas Van Alen House in Kinderhook is a prime specimen), Hudson nonetheless feels homely, cosy, settled, set back from the highway. Hudson is the embodiment of gezellig.
I often run into Dutch people in Hudson today. It’s as if they’re magnetized to their old colony via a DNA-bound internal compass. As they pass, speaking in Dutch, thinking no one can hear them, I hear them say gezellig — an observation, a declaration — as they coo at brick buildings and huddle under the antique shop awnings.
I may not be a seafaring adventurer or a buccaneering mutineer, but when I think about the Dutch in New Netherland, I myself (half Dutch) feel, in my own tiny, modern, incomparable way, somewhat connected to that story of when the new world was the new world.
The Hudson Observer is an adventure. It is my own way of going out into the world and exploring, discovering new places, communities, and people, and (with an ever-growing, swashbuckling crew) laying out our finds in the form of words and images.
As noted on the history section of Hudson’s .gov website, Hudson has the highest number of self-employed people of any city in New York State. Indeed, now I count myself as part of that demographic. My self-appointed occupation: explorer.
— Tristan Geary, founder and editor, The Hudson Observer