We had entered the water three hours before sundown by taking advantage of some dock-works floating off the riverbank in Newburgh.
Martin and I carried our kayaks down the bobbing slats, past sailboats and stinkpots in full view of the diners of one of those riverside restaurants which specialize in fleecing the weekender boating crowd. Expensive drinks. Overcooked meat. The peak of civilization.
As we labored past, the music that drifted out of the speakers was soothing and electronic.
“Like the lobby of a W Hotel,” remarked Martin – bearded, neon yellow life-jacket, baseball cap.
“Trash,” I alleged – bright floral patterns, sunglasses.
Once adrift and paddling, the plan was to let the suck-tide pull us down the four miles or so along to that place in the Hudson River to where the land crowds in, creating a fjord-ish narrows between the Storm King mountain on one side and Breakneck Ridge on the other. On a map, this portion of the river describes an S-like path. At the other end, past Bear Mountain, the military fortress West Point squats on the rock.
Martin had timed the tides so that with the current traveling three miles per hour, in theory, we could make it as far down as the fortifications, arriving during that hour when the tides hesitate. A kayak-borne approach on the military fortress along the S-shaped channel, and then a river-borne retreat, carried back north on the flood tide. Let the river do the work. Leave no trace.
“Probably for the best we forgot the spray paint,” Martin observed.
The air was hot, the sky was blue and the sun was sinking. Scattered groups of sea gulls screamed and wheeled about above us.
As we approached the bay of Cornwall-on-Hudson, Martin shielded his eyes and contemplated the Storm King Mountain rising above us.
“Looks like a lump of butter,” he said, setting his paddle down across his legs in order to retrieve his pipe and put spark to the bowl.
Musing while he smoked, Martin said, “So during the revolution they welded a giant chain to hang across the river to stop the British boats.”
I confirmed it. I had read that the chain was stretched across the river, link to link, from shore to shore. Each link weighed more than a cast iron wood stove. Daydreams of revolution and grapeshot were conjured in the air. We speculated.
Imagining old wars, before the rockets and machine guns had been invented is a pleasant pastime in peacetime, though the dying and barbed wire must have been just as painful.
Our decision to cross the breadth of the river was inspired by this turn in our conversation. As we headed out towards the center, a fresh wind leapt up out of the east to buffet us back. We paddled through the spray across the troughs of waves, the fore of the kayaks slapping the water as we went.
The first of a host of clouds appeared in the sky above Breakneck Ridge. Once over, sullen, charcoal and pewter-colored clouds sank low and the whole sky lowered, the river surface grew choppy, and yes, all at once a pouring rain set to falling.
Which gave me pause. Observing the concentric circles of splashing raindrops – water above, water below – the shore closer behind us exuded a cowardly pull.
The river bottom, I have been told, is 180 feet down and the crossing there more than a mile wide. I may have hoped that Martin would relent first but he just churned along, charging headfirst into the downpour, heedless of the clouds and the darkening sky and so I did too.
I imagined anchors and sturgeon-cleaned skeletons littering the riverbed floor as I paddled.
Then began the waves. The struggle was now in earnest. The Hudson can behave like an ocean and a man floating there in a ten-foot plastic kayak is an insignificant piece of driftwood indeed. We were taking on water and the far riverbank was hazy behind a mist. I repented my low opinion of the riverside restaurant. Overpriced cocktails and overcooked meat could be a paradise too.
Surrounded by the spray and the chop and the foam, hearts pounding and breath working in our throats, Martin gave a shout. He had spied a flashing beacon, a buoy indicating the limit of the channel lane. He cut through the chop of the river with his paddle, leading the way. Only as we got closer to the buoy did we see that what we had taken for a section of the forested mountain had all at once separated itself from the background.
Materializing out of the rain and mist, there floated an island. In the water surrounding it, there was a ruined arch and a half-sunken tower of some kind.
And so it was that we gained the shore, kayaks full of water and clothes sodden. It was a small spit of beach that we hauled our crafts onto as whichever petulant force had opposed our crossing raged on out on the water still. We laughed at our daring. We shook hands.
“Well, well, well,” said Martin, as he stroked his beard, and he meant each word. Like checking a wristwatch he searched the sky for the sun. “I’m not sleeping here,” he said.
I guessed we had two hours before what sunlight there was drained out of the sky, the hour of nautical dusk. But considering the cloud cover, the daylight would likely die sooner.
It wouldn’t be so bad, I told him, looking at the soaked and dripping trees. If the rain stopped we could build up a fire, I gamely lied. Anyway, the night would be warm. Though we had no food, we had beverages. We would dig comfortable beds out of the sand. And the tide would rise and cover us over with watery blankets while we slept.
“I don’t want to have to make the crossing back in darkness,” Martin said. “If I can’t focus my eyes on something stationary I go sea-sick.”
But there was nothing to do but wait. While Martin gazed out over the water and fretted, I turned my back on him to take stock of the island. Scrubby and unkempt near the beach, thick with bushes and trees higher up, and there, my perusal stopped. Aye.
There, incongruously, were the contours of a well-maintained, multi-terraced garden. Flower-petal, leaf and vine along with purposeful stonework confronted me through a diminishing rain. Up the side of the little mountain island a path must wind. And then at the very top, just peeking over the trees, the top of a chalet. Or a castle.
I brought Martin’s attention to the structure.
Martin acknowledged it. “I think we should leave.”
“Nonsense,” I countered. “The river and the clouds brought us here. And the rain is tapering off. We’ve got an hour to kill before we absolutely have to leave.”
We looked out at the chop and the foam for a good while before Martin sighed. Caught between the approaching darkness and the waves, he fortified himself for the climb.
As we followed the winding paths away from the beach, higher through collections of varied and exotic flowers, the rain fell off to a pinpoint mist and in short-lived splashes and scars of orange through the clouds off to the west, the approaching sunset revealing itself.
“Bannerman’s Island!” Martin said, rolling his r’s. And it was. That’s where we had washed up. Though the island was named Pollepol before anyone had ever heard of Bannerman.
The storm had conspired with Martin’s own Scottish blood to bring us here. We had heard something about the castle on the island over the years. Just rumors. Tavern gossip. Claims that someone had camped there on a kayaking trip once, paddling the length of the entire Hudson. It was haunted, the kayaker claimed, he said that it had been the setting of suicides, drownings and executions, and then contrariwise, slow starvation, because the island was considered sanctuary to anyone pursued by hostile tribes.
And again I considered how many skeletons were hidden beneath our feet, picked clean first by the screaming seagulls and polished by the rats, bleached by the sun, scoured by the rain and wind, and then covered over by decades of dirt. And forgotten.
As it turns out, the castle is a fake. But the Scotsman who had it built, one Francis Bannerman, was real. He was a munitions dealer who found some success buying one war’s surplus and selling it off for the next. In the end he accrued such a frightening amount of unexploded ordinance that it made the Borough of Brooklyn uncomfortable. The city managers worried that the whole pile would go off like Chinese New Year.
So Bannerman purchased the island for use as an entrepot. He stored his bombs and cannonballs, bullets and gunpowder, anticipating a future in which he could find a buyer. As it happened, the whole thing did go off – gunpowder caught a spark it’s said – and everything there together exploded inside the castle. Francis Bannerman had been dead for decades when it happened. The business he started had soldiered on without him.
Badly damaged, structurally unsound, the castle became derelict. In the late sixties, the island was sold to New York State, and the ruined castle too, in the bargain.
When we made it to the top of the island, the rain had stopped entirely but the clouds remained, glowering with the promise of lightning, if not the guarantee. Up close, the building we saw wasn’t so much a castle as an eccentric architectural creation. There were obvious signs that it was far from haunted – the fresh plaster and concrete, and the presence of railings strung higher with guy wires to prevent lawsuits. The island had transitioned from its gunpowder-haunted history to the inevitable afterlife of all architectural achievements: it had become a tourist attraction.
“The only thing to really worry about are those massive barges,” said Martin. “What do you do if you see one of those?”
“Paddle faster,” I said, thinking of what it would be like to drown. “I mean, you can see them coming for miles.”
Overlooking the river, standing at the legally defensible railing, Martin watched the clouds and waited for them to break up as if they were floes of ice which he was stranded by and not the water itself. He was lying to himself if he thought that there would be any other way back but under those ugly clouds.
“The first chance I see, I’m taking it,” Martin announced and started back down the path to the beach.
And wise he was. By contrast, I reasoned that as I was already here, I might as well go exploring. And exploring I went. And thus did I find the castle.
Cream colored and brick red, what remained of the actual castle was on the far side of the island, standing propped up by long steel booms, decorated and augmented with so many architectural flourishes that the ghost of Ayn Rand would still spit diamonds into the dirt if she saw it, and regret every carat lost.
But it was impossible to get into the castle itself. The approach paths were blocked. And anyway there really was no time to tarry, the light was dimming and would soon be gone. As I retraced the path back, the green fires of fireflies winked on and off, hovering over the garden path.
Just as I came in view of the water again, I heard a rude shout and then through a gap in the trees I could see Martin already astride his craft paddling madly out from the beach. He would wait no longer. Fear of sea-sickness had driven him back out into the tender mercies of the waves. Though true darkness was near, the river had not settled and he had no headlamp.
When I made the beach, I splashed my kayak into the waters after Martin. He had already a formidable lead. There was really no hope of catching up to him. The goal was to keep him in sight in case he foundered.
Because they couldn’t stop even if they saw you, scanning for the enormous barges and tugboats becomes the priority, trying to separate out possible running lights from the lights on-shore, buoy lights, sailboat lights… motion is the key. When drawing close the noisy slush of the water split by the prow grows louder. The wakes of passing barges s threaten to capsize a kayak. I had set two headlamps a-flashing on my head.
The wind was now coming from the south, pushing with it small waves broadside, forcing us to paddle in the troughs and taking on thimbles and shot glasses of water for every wave which passed. But the rain had stopped and the clouds never did throw any lightning and halfway across the river it seemed the game was won and the contest became pleasant. Martin was nearer to land than I was and I let up the paddling.
There is a constant revelation available to all kayakers if they choose to stop paddling that comes from floating in the dreamy silence of living nature… and I dangled my hands in the water and listened to the river splash and only regretted that the stars were obscured behind the clouds so that I could not see them. The castle floated in my memory and I closed my eyes and thought of sinking all the way down to the bottom.
When I made the far shore, music and laughter carried over the water from a bar in a nearby marina. Martin had already dragged his kayak onto land and was laying there in the cockpit smoking his pipe, well content with himself.
“That wasn’t nothin’,” drawled Martin. “Just a spirited wash cycle.”
Outlined in the afterglow of adrenaline, sloshed in the splash of endorphins, lectures about probabilities are tiresome and I would be the last person to give one. Sermons and didactic poetry are for self-righteous scolds. Heavy-handed fables are for children.
The waves subsided, as they often do when the sun is gone and the clouds scudded on. In the end we didn’t need the stars to navigate, but they decorated the firmament nonetheless. We had the electric glow of the city and the electric lights to show us the way. The paddle back up to Newburgh would be easy in the darkness.
If being washed ashore by dramatic cloudbursts and frenzied waters isn’t your kink, totally responsible, booze-free guided tours are available at various price-points through Storm King Adventure Tours, a domestic limited liability company who pays their taxes in Orange County. Pay $120 for the privilege of kayaking yourself across the Hudson, taking in the castle from the water, and then walking around the island grounds with a historian to guide the way.
The island also hosts movie nights, farm-to-table dinners, concerts and theatrical productions with attendee’s boated to the island on a vessel that leaves from Beacon.
The Bannerman Castle Trust, Inc., a not-for-profit works with the the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation to rehabilitate the crumbling, faltering castle walls and keep up the absolutely astonishing botanical flower garden.
The trust itself provides for a variety of live theater performances on the island, arrive by boat, take in a show, theater by the river.
Join the family! 
