Fact and Fiction

What can I call this mountain?  

Take the name away from the land.  Ask yourself what it is.  That is what people do: the Lenape did it, the Dutch settlers and the English and the Department of Environmental Protection and all the native people born and raised on the land and every flatlander who visits does it.

Pepacton Reservoir
Where there was once
Pepacton, a town.   

Give a name to a place, base it on how you want to use it. Name it to show ownership of a place.

Hudson River School
Redefining A Place

The Catskills were at first unnamed by European's.  It was wilderness: chaotic unknown.  But give it a name Blue Mountains because they look blue from the Livingston estate, the Kaats Kill Mountains because the Dutch settled there, the Catskills because the English came and the tourists knew the English ways.

Shale.  Outcroppings everywhere.  An industry mined it.  But a mile below the fields and the mountains there is Marcellus Shale.

People lived for thousands of years without a name for it.  But now the fact of the rock generates new meanings.  Hydraulic fracturing, gas, property values of second homes, tourist trade, pollution, wealth, jobs.

Fiction comes from naming the facts.

     

Cloves

Platte Clove Falls

I don't know any place in the country that has cloves as part of their geography other than the Catskills. To me it is one of the features of the terrain that make the hills mysterious and formidable. 

When I went to the Platte Clove AIR orientation two artists who were from the area were talking about walking up the clove from Saguerties to the top and that they only knew one person who succeeded climbing it the whole way.  

Steep Terrain

I could see the challenge when we walked down to look at the waterfall below the cabins where the artists in residence stay.

Alf Evers in his chapter on cloves writes about them as somehow connected to Hell.  I can't imagine climbing from the base of the mountain the top.  The water runs down the cleft cut between two mountains which seem to be having a pushing match to claim the same space.  The stream cools the conflict down but it doesn't end the battle and it makes it tough going for any hiker.  Marcellus Hale would know how to get around in the hills and know the particular kind of Hell which is so different from the hot sand hell and dunes in the Mideast.  No water to cool the war.

Platte Clove AIR Cabin

The trails that lead through the Catskills must have been forged years ago by the Native Americans and I can't imagine they were ever improved upon.

Catskills, Witches and Commuting

Forest Hills, Queens, LIRR

It's Friday and the Catskill experiences of this past weekend have left me.  Everything from the  taste in my mouth, the lack of green growth filling my eyes, the undisturbed sleep, the ultimate in quietness. Gone for the time being. Place being gone. I look forward to being there again soon.

LIRR Forest Hills Station Hurtling Backwards to NYC

In Alf Evers book The Catskills: from Wilderness to Woodstock I'm reading the chapters on witches.  That strange spirituality that is in the Catskills I believe comes from the land.  

When I got home on Sunday I told my wife Beth that I had the Catskills Fever by which I meant that I was bewitched in a way by the environment.  Marcellus Hale would feel that fever  coming back from Iraq. Desert sand sun dry heat. Catskills forest green trees moss moist soil dark shaded places under branches and rock. Scorpions can hide in the desert sand.  Man can hide in the Catskills and live off the land with the spirits. 

Two Sides of a Catskill Morning

Pepacton Reservoir

I spent three days doing research in Delaware County.  I was in Hancock to talk about economic development, then in Prattsville where I stayed in the Moore Motel that is rebuilding from the Irene flooding, then in Stamford for the Roxbury Arts Group's Open Mike, then to Platte Clove AIR cabin for an orientation, then to Roxbury for the Arts Groups Villa Lobos concert, and then down to the Mountain Dell Farm.
I’m having some difficulty in knowing what to share.  Talking to people on two sides of the issue and having the desire which is characteristic of me to explore two sides of an issue in order to understand, I find it difficult to know what to communicate.  Have people confided in me in a way that is personal and therefore not to be shared?  I don't want to gossip or start trouble.  I do want to know what people think about what other people think.
I am a fictionalist and not a reporter.  I create from the facts that I know, and I don't know all the facts, in order to tell a story that has some truth which the facts seem to suggest to me.  My imagination takes off from the information I receive like the clouds lifting off the Catskills in the morning.  At this point what I imagine doesn’t hold its shape and I am trying to get to the clarity of daytime and see the water, mountain, trees, sun, sky for what they are.