A Catskill Catalog by Bill Birns

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.