A Catskill Catalog by Bill Birns

His name, in his native language, means ebb-tide. Fitting for a man of “the people of ever-moving waters,” the Mohicans. He carried a Christian name, Hendrick, fitting for someone who had been dealing with Dutch and English neighbors his entire life.
Among his own people, he carried a Mohican name, rendered variously in English as Kackaweeriman or Cockalalaman. Known to history as Hendrick Hekan, he was a Sachem of the Esopus people, the Mohican river-Indians who had long made a home of the lands washed by the Hudson River and Esopus Creek.

Wiltwyck, Beaverwyck, and New Amsterdam were the three Hudson River settlements of New Netherland, listed from smallest to largest: today’s Kingston, Albany, and New York City.
Settled in 1651, Wiltwyck quickly became a vital agricultural outpost, site of the best wheat-growing land in the colony. The creek-washed flatlands of the Esopus Valley had long been the cleared, productive cropland of the Lenni Lenape, the Algonquin-speaking “common people,” native to the place. To the colonists, it was perfect for wheat, the European staple.

Seventy-five years ago this month, federal agents raided a farm in the Town of Halcott, where they discovered an operating still.
It all started with complaints that someone was jacking deer at night with a light. Game protectors went to investigate. While on farmland in Townsend Hollow belonging to Fred Matthews, the officers smelled alcohol: a still.

If you know any little girls in the three- to seven-year-old set, you know that princesses are in. Disney has a stable of them; slender and brave girls who appear in 3-D movies and coloring books, on backpacks and as collectible figurines. They’re gold. Gold clad in pink, that is.
Gather round girls. Our Catskills may have their very own princess, replete with noble birth, forbidden love, and luxuriant black hair. She is Utsayantha.

The most famous resident of the Catskills never lived. We can all picture him, though. The beard, the dog, the pipe, the rusty gun.

The most famous resident of the Catskills hunted and was hen-pecked; kept a loyal dog and a comfortable pipe; loafed and drank; slept for 20-crucial years, yet never took an actual breath.
The most famous resident of the Catskills is, of course, Rip Van Winkle.

I’m writing this thing on a laptop computer. My smart phone is within reach. Technology has wrought a communications millennium, an opening to the world that seems to eclipse all other openings. The ridgeline-walled world of Channel 6 on the TV, of WGY and WDLA on the radio, is within my memory. I love to remember those simpler times, while embracing technology.

Not all do. I have friends who fear technology, distrust its effects on our lives and the lives of our children, abhor the way it has changed how we interact with one another. I get their point.

First published here a year ago, “A Catskill Mountain Holiday Party” is a year-end greeting-card, as 2011 enters history, and 2012 becomes reality.

’Twas a mountain holiday party, and stockings were hung from the bluestone mantel of a Livingston.
Whether Robert of Clermont, or Robert the Judge,
or Chancellor Robert, doesn’t matter a fudge.
For a hundred years, they held in their hands
millions of acres of wilderness lands.
Whole Hardenbergh Patent, they’d bought it all square:
the view from their window to the west Delaware.
Money talks. Deeds matter. That is the reason

The old Margaretville Department Store would fill up, on Christmas Eve, with young husbands seeking last-minute gifts. If a fellow went down there around 4 in the afternoon, he’d meet several of his friends and acquaintances around the sweater shelves.

It always seemed to be the young guys who converged on the women’s department in the east end of the store, looking for something we knew we should have picked-out weeks before. Shopping thoughtfully, in advance, seems to be a skill learned with age – at least for a lot of guys I knew 30-40 years ago.

Couldn’t help but think of John Halcott, as I rode an Amtrak train recently over New York’s City’s Spuyten Duyvil. He was the young Eton-educated Englishman who swam that channel with his sword clutched in his teeth, once he “became convinced he was fighting on the wrong side,” during the American Revolution.

My friend is 86 years old, yet he remembers where he was that day like it was yesterday. He was coming out of the woods, deer hunting. Sixteen years old, he got in the car and switched-on the radio. This was 1941, and car radios worked on vacuum tubes, so it took a while to warm up, but when it did, those old car radios could bring in some distant stations. That’s when he heard.