Beacon Hater

Experimenting with a super late send. Sorry to be finishing at this hour! Maybe you’ll read it when you wake up.

Some people say the only way to love New York is to leave. You have to take little vacations, have little escapes, and remember what stars look like. I’m not so sure I agree with that yet. Leaving always feels so fun, and I’m probably a 1:1 ratio of joy to return and a deep sadness of remembering how sticky everything is here.

Friday provided one of New Yorkers’ most coveted getaways: a day trip to Beacon, a town in the Hudson Valley known for its natural beauty and bustling (compared to other towns’) Main Street. I was going to meet my mom up there since she was in town making bagels. Beacon was at the top of my list for commuter rail getaways based on aspirational TikToks and various “upstate” life fantasies my friends illustrated for me. I was super excited to take the day off of work.

This was my first time taking the Metro North and first time taking a train from Grand Central station. I hadn’t been inside since walking around as a high school tourist. I accidentally woke up with the sunrise due to a poor round of sleep and anticipation for the day ahead, so I used my lack of sleep as fuel to get out the door quickly. I took my trains to Grand Central and took in its, well, grandeur. I wish all train stations were given the same veneration and love.

I’m early for my train and expect to arrive in Beacon about an hour after its departure, a few minutes after 10 a.m. I unknowingly chose a car whose seats face the wrong way, making everything I see out the window zipping quickly in front of me. I’m ready for a peaceful trip of gazing out the window and listening to music.

The Metro North’s first stop is in Harlem, and three people get into my car. I see some distinctive curls and realize one of the new passengers is Kayla, a girl in my improv class. Shocked, I say hi and meet her partner and his mom. They decide to sit at the three-seater across my aisle, and I spend the majority of the trip talking to Kayla and them, who also happened to be taking a day trip to Beacon. What a treat! I have such a superpower for running into people; just today, I ran into two separate friends on the train at different points in the day. Kayla kept using the word “kismet,” which I think we all should integrate into our vocabulary better.

My improv class doesn’t have too many opportunities to get to know each other in a real way, so we got to really get into it about our lives. We swapped all kinds of stories with the Hudson River as a beautiful backdrop on the window near her seat. My side showcased rolling hills and towns I would give proper face time to on my trip back to the city. 

After some lovely conversation, I checked my phone and saw a strange text from one of my friends at work asking me to call him. I did, and it was icy water to the face: he and 10 others had just been laid off, kind, smart people I talk to daily and are critical to how my job functions. I couldn’t believe it and was so, so sad. It did not feel like I was on a day off anymore, trying to get information and figure out if I should be expecting a scary call soon. I ignored the beauty in front of me to serve my sadness at this surprising transition. I had no idea what next week at work would look like, and I mentally sorted through how I thought each person would react to this change (bad).

I’m snapped out of my anxieties when Kayla points out this beautiful, abandoned castle on an island she told me about earlier in the ride. She’s also one of those people who says you love New York when you leave it and was regaling me with tales of these sweeping orchards and adorable restaurants. We’re almost at Beacon, and I need to remember that I took today off from work. I checked my work email anyway and found an inquiry from a job another friend put me down as a reference for. They reached out asking if I could talk about how amazing my friend is at 1:30 that afternoon. I said yes because I can’t screw this up for her. Too much bizarreness at once!

We arrive, and my mom is parked outside of the train station. We haven’t seen each other in a little over a month, and it’s such a blessing that Pittsburgh and New York aren’t too far away. I try to get in the groove of yet another day of legendary Mom x Syd time, but I spend the first chunk of our time together telling her what I know about my job’s layoffs since I can’t think about anything else.

She drives us into town up the hill from the station. We pass by an art museum we would go to later and plenty of houses that look like they could be in New England. Main Street is not too far away, and she drives us up and down to see all of the little shops in search of food, something I hadn’t had yet that day. We park at the bend in the road and nab some solid bagels. We sit outside for a while and catch up.

I try to remember to be present, which feels correct for how I planned this day and incorrect for how I’m feeling. Sometimes when I’m seeing my mom for a short period, I build a lot of pressure to have the best day ever, which can usually backfire if I get too in my head. I often think back to a time she visited me in college where we aimlessly walked around Brookline while I tried to create an itinerary and just ended up being cranky. This situation is much different, but I needed to remember to just hang out with my fave.

We always have something to talk about. After chatting up and down Main Street in the heat, we both decided we weren’t that impressed by Beacon. New England makes braggarts and for good reason, and I find the Hudson Valley — although a great place to be — inferior to the towns and hamlets I love further north. It didn’t make sense to either of us, considering the natural wonders and sweet little businesses that would make a great small town.

Our one planned event of the day was a trip to the town’s renowned art museum, the Dia Beacon. Multiple worldlier friends of mine insisted I go, and I always trust their tastes. We parked at this serene spot that already met these expectations. Tickets are $20 each, and I thought they would be worth it. After the narrow vestibule, the museum opens up. An old Nabisco plant, the building has all of the space, brick walls, and industrial vibes necessary for a great museum blooming from the aftermath of industry. The Mattress Factory museum in Pittsburgh has a similar feeling.

We start down the winding halls and look at the exhibits. My first qualm: the art descriptions. I love reading the text accompanying any art, learning of the artist’s motivations and context for creating their work. At the Dia, none of these descriptions sit alongside the art. Instead, you have to go in the corner of each room and take a laminated piece of paper from a folder and read from there. I am not motivated enough to walk to every corner like that. I want to look back and forth.

Whatever, maybe the art will be provocative enough to be fun on its own. Guess who was wrong! Thankfully, I got my taste from my artist mother, who hates almost all of the same things that I do. We started making fun of most of the artwork, plenty of pieces that looked costly to produce but amounted to nothing. Something like student work but with so, so much funding. A big pile of sand in the middle of a room, strings of barbed wire hanging from the ceiling, blue curtains on a window, a wooden ramp…simple things that meant nothing to anyone but the artist. To be clear, this was a list of separate exhibits. Blue curtains! We went downstairs, where the entire floor was a single exhibit, and it was just an empty floor to walk down with eerie music and lights that would fade from red to pink. We got shushed at one point down there.

The most egregious case was a set of three rooms that each had a few squares of white paint with some tape in the corners. I assumed it was a placeholder for where an exhibit would soon go, but my mom worried that this was the actual exhibit. After locating the corner with the description, we learned that this was, in fact, the exhibit. The artist said that one mustn’t ponder what to paint but how to put paint on a canvas. Just sweeping, white paint. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen, so dumb that it almost made me like Rothko.

My favorite part of the museum was its chairs, comfortable, wide, and only found in a museum. We sat at them to gawk and take breaks from the terrible exhibits.

Soon, I had to do my reference interview. I left the building and took it outside on a faraway bench. I walked past a man yelling on the phone to someone about taking better care of some kid, saying Why is she in a stroller? She’s 6! Once I got far enough away, I got the call. I’ve only been called as a reference once before and helped someone get a job. I wanted to be 2 for 2. Three other people were on this call with me asking about my friend, who I used to work with in New Hampshire. Beforehand, I was trying to think of every possible anecdote I could squeeze into this call.

They seemed sold on her from the moment the call began, calling her fabulous four separate times. I talked her up with ease, she’s hardworking, kind, and a fast learner. What’s her biggest weakness? I gave the best answer: she’s a perfectionist that can get mired in the details, wanting to make something the best it can be. Then they threw me a curveball that I’ve never head before and asked me for another reference, someone else that could talk about her. I panicked and named one of my friends and references in hopes that he could talk about her (which ended up working because I found out today that she got the job).

With that call over, I went back to my mom who had perused the gift shop, which she said had a great kids section and a poor showing for adults. She ate a yogurt and drank sparkling water while I drank the younger version, a refreshing yuzu soda. We people watched at the young families with kids dressed in that stylish, pretentious way and other adults wearing linen and earthy bags. We saw three shaved heads.

In our people watching, we realized that what we hated about the museum is also what we hated about Beacon. There is a specific brand of pretentiousness that comes from people who grow up somewhere urban like New York and pivot to a more rural, tranquil place after enough years in the city.

New York is such a pretentious place that this attitude comes in spades. It also is a city that skews your standards on what good living is. When I used to think of a great apartment, I thought of luxury buildings with gyms and doormen. Now, it’s hard to imagine anything more luxurious than multiple closets, a dishwasher, and in-unit laundry. This lowering of standards with a conflicting pretentiousness creates the kind of person who moves to Beacon, someone unaccustomed to country living who thinks that living an hour from New York in a town with five coffeeshops, an art museum, and a commuter rail stop is what living in the country is like.

My mom kept using the word indulgent to describe the museum’s display, which soon turned into masturbatory, artwork done by people so intoxicated by their own genius that their ego splooges all over their work. The museum and Beacon are both masturbatory places for New Yorkers, fetishizing some sort of manifest destiny that they’ll never really know unless they grew up somewhere actually obscure.

I think this is a pretty Gentrifier Olympics quality that I find myself and my Bushwick peers deep in. It’s almost like how people on study abroad can only talk about abroad and come back saying random phrases they picked up. As immersed as you can be, most study abroad kids cannot understand what it is like to truly live or grow up in their temporary homes. This same phenomenon applies to gentrifying neighborhoods like Bushwick and gentrifying towns like Beacon. People are just so excited to feel something exotic that they don’t really know what’s going on.

We walk around outside for a while, sitting out on a bench and staring at the train passing by. I’m so eager for her bagel shop to open (@balenabagels on Instagram and Balena Bagels on Facebook), and I love hearing about all of the minutiae in her prep. After enough time in the sun, we return to the museum, oddly determined to finish every inch.

We had the most fun on the higher floors, enjoying one massive, metal spider atop and Richard Serra structures taking up a middle wing. Richard Serra makes these massive, metal structures that you can walk in and out of. They’re not super complicated but easy to lose yourself in. My mom said I used to run through one at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh before it went away. I don’t remember this at all.

We left the museum in search of the wild. We drove to a park with a dam and waterfall that we stared at for 15 minutes before getting coffee at Beacon Coffee Company, my favorite treat of the day. The decor was as fanciful and expensive as the menu, but I loved my Churro not Charo cinnamon iced latte. I did just spend the majority of this newsletter crapping on this town, but I still had a great time and think I’m an outlier. I guess I’m repulsed by posers and more so by the mirror.

We got dinner with my mom’s business partner at an Italian place on Main Street, and it was my first time meeting someone I’ve heard so much about. She’s a great foil for my mom, always providing a different perspective and observing everything. The complimentary bread was garlic knots, which filled me up before I got my spinach ravioli doused in cream sauce and mushrooms. I never go out to eat Italian when I always feel like I can make pasta at home, so this was a nice departure.

It was a bit after 6, and the ladies dropped me off at the station before they set off for Pittsburgh. I was worried about making my train but still had enough time to give my mom a strong hug before running and just making it through the doors. I really did not want to leave her. I feel understood by a lot of people, but no one makes me laugh or think like my mom does. Both of us are on the precipice of exciting changes.

I took the train home and felt melancholy wash over. Back to real life and checking in on my laid off friends. Would they take a little trip somewhere you can see the stars soon as a break between jobs? Did they use all of their PTO beforehand? I stared out the window at the towns passing by, flexing through the start of sunset. My phone was on its last breath after being on it so much of the day. I ended up reading some of my book as we eventually dipped back underground.

I returned to Bushwick and Meera and had the rest of my night. My mom kept driving. Being a hater with her is so fun because both of us love things so deeply, so you know it’s never something permanent.