“It’s like ‘The Shining,’ ” Mary said on our arrival last week at the Mohonk Mountain House, whose stone Sky Top tower nearby, dedicated to the massive hotel’s Quaker founder, a seeming lighthouse in an ocean of mountains, overlooks not only New Paltz, but is said to overlook six states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. We took their word for it, not wanting to venture up that craggy gray rock face to see for ourselves.
It was very still there. That’s the main thing I remember. Just us and the trees, whose red, russet, pink, and golden leaves, floating like butterflies in the breeze, may have upped our room rate, which, in any event, was, in keeping with the environs, steep.
“Yes, the stillness that is unnerving,” our eldest daughter in Ohio said when I told her about our three days up there. “You’re wondering why no honking, where are the a-holes? Why is it so peaceful. . . ?” Indeed. You’ll note that I said the mountain resort’s founder was a Quaker, as was his twin brother, Alfred, too. “That may account for the fact that while there are bugs up here, they don’t attack,” I said to Mary as we hiked — she 10 paces ahead, as always — up to the Eagle’s Cliff from which you could imagine yourself looking out over the bluffs at Montauk.
Albert K. Smiley’s annual Lake Mohonk conferences on international arbitration, the first of which was held in 1895, may have won him the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize had he not died that year, we were told, and also that these conferences were among the seeds from which the international court at The Hague, the League of Nations, and the United Nations grew.
One day it was foggy and drizzly and you couldn’t see a thing. The only thing to do was read, “The Little Prince” in my case, and eat. (The food, by the way, as you might imagine given that the Culinary Institute of America lies across the river in Hyde Park, was to die for.)
There were many photos of bearded men, many of them presumably international arbitration conference attendees, along the long dark hallway leading to the big dining room, one of them being Andrew Carnegie, he of the Homestead Lockout and, once he’d made his fortune, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Anti-Imperialist League that opposed the United States’ annexation of the Philippines. Carnegie, I’ve since learned, offered the Philippines $20 million — the amount the U.S. paid Spain for the archipelago — so that it could be independent, not an American colony.
“You say it reminded you of ‘The Shining,’ ” our daughter said in signing off, “but from what you’re saying, it sounds like a shining example of what could be.”