The Catskills in Spring

Marry me and your life will be full of adventure, Alan said. He wasn’t kidding. Our latest adventure was a cross-country trip to the Catskills, by car. What would posses us to make such a trip with three preschoolers?...the final clean out of my father-in-laws place. Alan’s family has owned 16 acres near Boiceville, NY for 47 years. Originally the property consisted of only a sculpture’s studio, but when his parents retired, they moved there to live fulltime and in the process they constructed a house and a four car garage. Up to the time of Paul and Marie’s retirement, the family spent weekends and summers living at the studio, playing in the spring-fed mountain brook and nearby Esopus Creek, hunting, fishing, swimming, skiing, and growing up. Marie died 3 years ago, and for a 90+ year old, the property was too much for Paul to keep up, so the time has come to sell it and move on. Last spring Alan discovered that a pipe had broken in the house during the winter and the house and contents were ruined, so he spent a lot of his time away from us while he was salvaging what he could and supervising the gutting and clean out of the house and other buildings. On this the final trip, Alan didn’t want to leave his family behind, so we packed up the Suburban and took the children on an adventure.

During the 3-day drive over and back we saw wind farms in the plains, drove through the inside of a mountain and up into the clouds, and watched oxen graze on a mountainside, and stopped to admire the Peekamoose Falls. We arrived in the Catskills expecting cool temperatures, but soon we had the boys stripped down to overalls and no shirts and were cooling the baby off in the brook because of temperature in the high 90’s. The warm weather awakened the mountains a little everyday as they slowly turned from winter brown to spring green starting in the valleys and stretching to the peaks, and the forsythia, dogwood, and other flowering trees burst into bloom. By the end of our stay, Zac and I had started a wildflower collection. Of course his favorite was the dandelion, and he picked new ones everyday to add to our pressing book.

The wildlife was everywhere (including our constantly on-the-move little boys). We saw woodchucks, a beaver lodge, deer, wild turkey, owls, hawks, nesting Canadian geese, and a golden eagle. We have golden and bald eagles here in South Dakota, but no matter where I see them, I am struck by the majesty of these magnificent birds. The cabin where we stayed had a dumpster that had to be chained at night because of the bear that liked to visit after dark, and yes, we could see the evidence of its visit by the huge claw marks on the lid. We also discovered some robins’ eggs on our porch steps one afternoon. When we sat on the steps and looked waaayyy up in the tree, we spotted the perfectly made nest right over our heads.

The boys had two favorite places to play. One was on a train caboose near Mt. Pleasant (between Phoenicia and Boiceville). The other was near the water, either the brook at Grandpa’s place or in the Esopus near the cabin. Zac was fascinated watching the fly fisherman and with building rock sculptures on the banks, and both boys spent hours throwing pebbles and small rocks into the water. I should qualify “small” rocks as any rock that they could pick up that would make a satisfying “kerplunk” when it hit the water. Sometimes they didn’t qualify as small and the boys almost fell in the water for the effort. When Alan was a boy, there was a crawfish that used to live in the brook near a bridge at the house in Boiceville. Alan took the boys to the brook to show them where he and this crawfish had played and wouldn’t you know it, there sat a fat and happy crawfish! We joked that it must have been a great grandson of Alan’s former playmate.

One of the major attributes of the Catskills is that it is the water source for the City of New York. Much of the land has been purchased by the City, and reservoirs have been created. The day we left, Alan drove us out around one such reservoir deep in the mountains. I was struck by the solitude. The only boats that could be seen were row boats, and we passed just a couple of cars in an hour. There were also only a very few home sites. It was just water, trees, wildlife, and quiet. Alan said that the City not only owned the reservoir, but most of the land surrounding it, and only non-motorized vehicles were allowed on the water. To live in such a nurturing environment! At least we were able to visit for a little while.

Oh, and the reason for which we went…well, Alan finished the clean up and closed the chapter on Boiceville with a For Sale sign, and we headed for home. A few days after we returned, a late afternoon rain shower ended with a spectacular rainbow that we watched develop from our front porch. Even with our adventures, there is still no place like home.