After ushering in the weekend with some trail-oriented Platypussery on Friday…
[The Platypus, shown here in warmer times. It was like 20 American Freedom Degrees™ Friday and I wasn’t about to take my mittens off to take any pictures.]
…I awoke Saturday to somewhat warmer temperatures, as well as a dusting dusting of snow, so I ventured back out onto the road:
Then by Sunday it was not only warmer still, but also sunny, and so I crossed the mighty Hudson and took in the so-called “River Road:”
I’ve been riding River Road going on thirty years now, and like most cyclists I almost never take the time to stop and explore this beautiful park. However, a section of the route is currently “closed,” and as I dismounted to circumvent a barrier I spotted something I’d never noticed before:
It was an old cemetery:
So I headed over to check it out:
It was difficult to make out the dates or really anything beyond the names:
Though I could see this one marked the grave of a child aged two years and 10 days:
Someone has also been visiting this one:
That appears to be a solar light at the foot of the tombstone, and on top of it is a candle, a coin, and a bite-sized Snickers:
When I got home I consulted a popular search engine and found the following:
[This is in NJ, not NY, so I assume that’s a typo.]
“Wack Me Jug” is not the name of an adult magazine, rather it is the sobriquet of the beloved town drunk who is apparently buried there:
Apparently “Whack me Jug” was the town’s fabled alcoholic who ran around the neighborhood towing his jug of alcohol and jumping over it while singing, “Whack me jug” to the amusement of the children in the area. Sadly he is rumored to have died on the beach and was found by the same children that adored him early in the morning, his jug laying beside him. He is rumored to be buried here in this graveyard with his jug- hence the name.
People may bemoan the fact that today’s children are a bunch of screen addicts with the attention span of a hummingbird with a learning disability, but it’s important to maintain some perspective, and to remember that the entertainment-starved children of yesteryear were so abjectly bored that they had to look to indigent drunkards for their amusement.
I was also fascinated to learn that these erstwhile townsfolk were displaced by what today people would call “gentrification:”
This cemetery is located at the base of the Palisades Interstate Park in an area which was once part of the Undercliff Colony, AKA “Fisherman’s Village”. The community consisted of Dutch immigrants who fished and mined the nearby area in the early 19th century. Many of the families that are buried here can trace their lineage to either the Undercliff or Bloomer’s beach areas. (If you are interested please look at my posts for Undercliff Bathhouse and Bloomer’s Beach Bathhouse . Both bathhouses as well as the cemetery can be done on the same day).
With the popularity of the Hudson beaches rising, as well as negative sentiment directed towards the quarries in the area, many of the hardworking families of Undercliff were forced out. This cemetery, as well as the bathhouse ruins, are all that remain of their existence.
I’d only learned about the history of those long-closed beaches just last year:
So at this rate of one (1) historical fact per annum I’ll be an expert on Palisades Interstate Park by the early 22nd century, by which point some e-dork will “write” an post on his AI-generated space blog about how people once rode these curious contraptions called “bicycles” on River Road, until they were supplanted completely by the e-shoe:
In any case, as final resting places go, this one remains quite serene all these years later:
My own bicycle may be an antique, but they never would have conceived of such a futuristic machine, let alone an electric shoe:
Maybe they’re the lucky ones.