Night Film

Trip to Crowthorpe Falls, NY, and The Peak Estate

S. McGrath

Kate Miller

May 28, 2003

5:30 am

On May 28, 2003, at 5:30 AM, sixty-two-year-old Kate Miller was walking along deserted Old Forge Road in Bainville, New York, a small resort town a hundred miles north of Albany and forty-five minutes from Crowthorpe Falls.

It was the end of a long night. Miller worked at the front desk during the all-night “witching shift” at Forest View Motel, a vacation resort south of town. Every morning, regardless of rain or snow, six days a week, Miller hiked the two miles from the motel to Bainville’s Main Street in order to catch the Trailways bus that took her twenty miles north to Danville, where she lived with her husband and twelve-year-old grandson.

Old Forge is a narrow two-lane road that heads toward town at a steep incline. Its hairpin curves are notorious spots for car accidents — mostly local teenagers or tourists. Miller told me she was two miles from town, walking on the left side of the street, facing oncoming traffic, when a silver sports sedan careened past her in the right-hand lane.

“I thought it was a drunk driver [because] he was all over the road,” she said. “He disappeared around the bend, there was silence, then a crash, glass shattering, and a cracking noise. The horn was going off, too.”

She hurried toward the accident, though the arthritis in her knees prevented her from running. Less than a minute later she saw what had happened: Miscalculating a turn, the driver had lost control of the car and collided with a hemlock standing at an eight-foot drop off the road.

The car was severely smashed, and a blond woman in her fifties was crawling on her hands and knees up the dirt bank to the street. She was badly shaken, but didn’t appear to be injured apart from scrapes on her face and arms.

“She was crying. And shaking all over. I asked if she had her phone on her but she said she’d left it at home. I’ve never had a cellphone.

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