Why Poets Love Walt Whitman

Posted on May 16, 2012 by admin

(In their introduction to an anthology of 100 poems, Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life & Work of Walt Whitman, the editors, Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro, explain his enduring appeal. Here’s an excerpt.)

1865. Leaves of Grass. Has there even been a year or a book—before or after—so important, so vital, to the life of American poetry? And Walt Whitman. Has there ever been a poet—before or after—so central to the life of American poetry? Consider him sensational, mystical, erotic, and expansive; consider him the good gray poet, the moral crusader, the prophet of Democracy, and the enemy of social injustice; or consider him libertarian, lecherous, homosexual, perverted, unsavory, inconsistent, passionate, macho, masculine, feminine, androgynous, rebellious, ideological, controversial, or subversive (of course, he is all of these and he was aware of these assesments in his own time)–there is no getting around his genius for liberating poetry from the stultifying “emotional slither” (Pound’s indictment of Victorian poetry) of the nineteenth century. Whitman is the architect of American vers libre. As Annie Finch has written in her intriguing study The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, “For American poets in general, Longfellow’s hexameters [in Evangeline] and Whitman’s triple rhythms were crucial in establishing a new freedom of resources, an enlarged metrical vocabulary. Remarkably quickly the ‘new’ metrical mode came to carry a connotative weight capable of balancing the four centuries of iambic pentameter’s hegemony.” Whitman holds the door open for generations of writers to pass through as they “simmer” their way toward true poetry. This anthology, we hope, represents a diverse group of writers who have come to terms with their “pig-headed father.”

Perhaps Walt Whitman remains imprinted in our minds because he is everywhere. He was never camera shy: we have over 130 photographic images of him, from the swaggering, youthful portraits of the 1840s to the pensive, meditative good gray poet images of the late 1880s and early 1890s. And perhaps he haunts us because he is likely the first recorded American poet. On an 1890 wax cylinder recording, a voice thought be Whitman’s reads his six-line poem “America” (asserting as always that America is the “Centre of equal daughters, equal sons”).

Whitman is the democratic poet par excellence and is everywhere accessible in his democratic immanence. Jorge Luis Borges recalls, “The smell of coffee and of newspapers /. . . lazily he fills / The weary mirror with his gaze. His eyes / See a face. Unsurprised he thinks: That face / Is me. . . . / His voice declares: / I’m almost gone and yet my verses scan / Life and its splendor. I was Walt Whitman.” And Pablo Neruda reconstructs a liberating first encounter with the poet: “I don’t remember / at what age / or where, / whether in the great wet South / or on the terrifying / coast, . . . / I touched a hand and it was / the hand of Walt Whitman.” Erica Jong captures Whitman’s ecstasy of being: “Unhappiness is cheap . . . / I say to hell with the analysts of minus & plus, / the life-shrinkers, the diminishers of joy. / I say to hell with anyone / who would suck on misery / like a pacifier / in a toothless mouth. / I say to hell with gloom.”

Never deliberately inscrutable, Whitman equally inspires imagining in a variety of contexts from the irreverent to the sublime. Thomas Lux memorializes Whitman’s dying wish as a bungled autopsy: “At his request, after death, his brain was removed / for science, phrenology, to study, and / as the mortuary assistant carried it (I supposed / in a jar but I hope cupped / in his hands) across the lab’s stone floor, he dropped it. . . . dropped and shattered, a cosmos, / on the floor. . . .” Frederico Garcia Lorca lovingly resurrects Whitman from a “New York of mud, . . . of wire and death” in his “Ode to Walt Whitman,” chanting “Not a single moment, old beautiful Walt Whitman, / have I stopped seeing your beard full of butterflies,” and sees him as an “old man beautiful as the cloud / who cried like a bird / with his sex pierced by a needle, / enemy of the satyr, / enemy of the vine / and lover of bodies under the heavy cloth.” And our contemporary, Sherman Alexie, envisions Whitman watching your Indian boys playing basketball: “stretches his calf-muscles / . . . His huge beard is ridiculous on the reservation / … He wants to run. He hardly has the patience to wait for his turn. / ‘What’s the score?’ he asks. . . . / Basketball is like this for Walt Whitman. He watches these Indian boys / as if they were the last bodies on earth. Every body is brown! / Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God. / Walt Whitman dreams of the Indian boy who will defend him.”

Wildness multiplies in imaging Walt Whitman, for all that we can know about him and his poetry is what we can know about ourselves. Aliki Barnstone’s “Wild With It,” for example: “I am your underground river, flowing in the dark / beneath the earth’s skin, and I am your blood. / . . . I am a Greek island redolent with oregano and thyme, / dry salt air. I am the sea voluptuous against your naked thighs, / the sunlight drying the blond hairs on your legs and arms. / . . . I am your world wide web, I am your easy chair— / . . . I am I am I am. And in you I am, for you erase / and make new our two conjugating shapes.” Whitman is unruly, impertinent; he flaunts yet embraces all moods. If, as Howard Nemerov states in “A Modern Poet,” Whitman “given a Ford / Foundation Fellowship, he’d buy a Ford,” Sharon Olds’s “Nurse Whitman” sees him “move between the soldiers’ cots / the way I move among my dead / their white bodies laid out in line. / . . . You write their letters home. I take the dictation / . . . They die and you still feel them.”

Ever catalyzing, whimsically or calculatingly unapologetic, we cannot know, except to know that Whitman deliberately taunts us with the confidence of knowing so much about the world, the body, the self, the nation, the cosmos. Inevitably then, Whitman’s vastness makes itself known and felt in our poetry as the all-encompassing corrective to the Puritan via negativa transplanted in the American psyche. Transfiguring the shadows of democracy by saying them into being, Whitman invites America to examine its own boot soles, articulates a democracy so radical it leaves no room for sentimental patriotism, embraces every marginalized individual so thoroughly and in such a militant poetic voice writ large by shocking imagery that we often lose sight of the fact that his method was often a cultivated, hyperbolic posturing. He believed, as Whitman critic and biographer David Reynolds states in Beneath the American Renaissance, that “social corruptions . . . could be overcome only by passionate defiance. ‘Give us turbulence, give us excitement [Whitman] wrote.” And Whitman gives writers this excitement, this permission to go wild, to “turn and live with the animals.”

Ever endearing, dear Walt salutes us while we salute him! Lynn Emanuel expresses this impulse that many writers have, this mirroring need to acknowledge Whitman in their own reflections: “from the back streets of Pittsburgh / from the little lit window in the attic / of my mind where I sit brooding and smoking / like a hot iron, Walt, I salute you! / Here we are. In Love! In a Poem! / . . . My every dark and slanderous thought. Walt I salute you!” Whitman is dear to us because he is us and he lets us be ourselves. Anyone who aspires to write can at least pretend to be Walt Whitman as a starting point—without embarrassment and without self-consciousness! Strangely, or logically, we are all “one sap and one root” when we enter Whitman’s world.

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Walt Whitman, an American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos

Posted on May 14, 2012 by admin

(In 2003 The Country and Abroad published this appreciation. Though we no have Laura Bush to kick around, we will always have Whitman.)

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
My words itch at your eyes till you understand them.

–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Walt Whitman. You know the name. You may have seen an old daguerreotype of him in 1870s as the Good Gray Poet with a bushy beard and pale eyes under his felt hat. You probably read his classic book in high school or college, Leaves of Grass, a monument of American literature and character. And if, like me, you read contemporary poetry of a certain school, i.e. understandable, you know that Whitman is the patron saint of the belief that poetry should belong to any and everyone. In the thin volume that I own, The Essential Whitman, edited by Galway Kinnell, one of my favorite poets, Kinnell thanked Whitman in his introduction for nothing less than transforming his writing life. After rediscovering Whitman in his late Twenties, Kinnell wrote, “Soon I understood that poetry could be transcendent, hymn like, a cosmic song, and yet remain idolatrously attached to creatures and things of our world. Under Whitman’s spell I stopped writing in rhyme and meter and in rectangular stanzas and turned to long-lined, loosely cadenced verse; and at once I felt immensely liberated. Once again, as when I began writing, it seemed it might be possible to say everything in poetry.”

Allen Ginsberg said the same thing in his own way. For an epigraph to Howl, his amazing bombshell poem that launched the Beat revolution, he quoted Whitman directly: “Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jams!”

Freedom, brotherhood, democracy. Walt Whitman has come to represent the best of our national beliefs. Even the President’s wife, Laura Bush, intended to celebrate him last February at the White House, until an invited poet proposed to read an anti-war poem at the event. Not a week goes by that I don’t seem to read his name somewhere. Along with Emily Dickinson, he’s the founder of American poetry, the subject of many homage poems, old and new biographies, even an unusual novel, Tripmaster Monkey, in which the author, Maxine Hong Kingston, recasts him as a Chinese American hippie in San Francisco in the Sixties. And why not? Whitman strikes a chord in everyone. Except me.

For years, I didn’t get Leaves of Grass. Not that I didn’t read my slender edition of The Essential Whitman from beginning to end once or twice, or open it many times to a random page in hopes of chancing upon a passage that captured my fancy. But all that I could find were the long lines, heavy repetition, and Nineteenth Century diction. What was so exciting about:

The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The sun I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

Even the sex sounded peculiar:

Magnifying and applying come I,
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
The most they offer for mankind and eternity less than a spirt of my own seminal wet.

To be fair to the Whitmanites, I blamed myself rather than the poem. At my New England boarding school in the Seventies, I fell under the sway of Howl at that impressionable age when teenagers in traditional English classes read Leaves of Grass. When I finally tried Whitman in my 40s, I figured I was just too old, too settled in my contemporary tastes to stretch and adjust to this odd Nineteenth Century classic. To be honest, I rarely read poetry published before 1970. Anything with a “thee” or a “thou” looked deadly.

Then I attended a poetry festival in downtown Manhattan that featured epic poetry. For some time, I’d been interested in Joseph Campbell’s analysis of the Hero’s Journey in myths, a storyline that screenwriters often use in movies. While I’d seen this journey recast for modern times in films ranging from Casablanca to Chinatown, I now had the chance to hear the ancient epics. And I wasn’t disappointed. I was captivated by performances of Gilgamesh in modern English, Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon, and the Kalavela in Finnish. I attended lectures on Dante’s Inferno and Hart Crane’s The Bridge that made me eager to read both. By Sunday morning, I was enthusiastic enough to wake up at 6 a.m. in order to drive back to Manhattan from our country house in time to attend an “Epic Writing Workshop” at Poets House in Soho. (When I told my sleepy girlfriend that I was “an aspiring epicist,” she said it sounded like a disease.)

In the next few days at home, I raced through Beowulf in modern English and struggled over The Bridge with my dictionary in hand. Then, on a lark, I opened my Essential Whitman for the umpteenth time. As you’d expect, Whitman had been an prominent figure at the festival, as Galway Kinnell, himself, had read long passages from Song of Myself, Whitman’s epic poem. Although I’d missed that reading, I’d sat at a workshop table in Poets House directly across from a Whitman quotation painted on the wall:

I stop some where waiting for you.

As usual, I didn’t understand the genius of the line. I preferred the Basho haiku wrapped around the floor-to-ceiling column:

Do not forget the plums
blooming
in the thicket.

But within minutes opening my Essential Whitman this morning, I came under its spell. On the second page of Song of Myself, Whitman writes:

Spend this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

And that’s exactly what I did, then finished the night by reading Howl for the first time in years. (The two were less alike than I thought. Ginsberg was in your face, Whitman at your side.) Contrary to my image of Whitman as an avuncular figure of history, a poet safe enough for Laura Bush at the White House, he was truly a radical thinker. And not just in 1855 when he first published Leaves of Grass. Time and again, I felt his bracing challenge to put down my world-weary attitudes, my cynicism about American society and government, my disappointment with my dysfunctional family and everyone else’s, my sadness over the fate of the environment. Not that Whitman was a Bush clan kind of optimist, a privileged Wasp who lived in snide denial of the harsh unfairnesses in life. To the contrary, I wondered if Laura Bush had even read this poet, who proclaimed:

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs….

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts–voices veiled, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

(By the way, although Whitman doesn’t write anything unkind about politicians in Song of Myself, he also doesn’t get around to including “the president” and his “cabinet council” until the 48th line in a long passage describing the occupations of his day. The president doesn’t rank any better or worse than trappers, carpenters, whale-boat mates, printers, immigrants, reformers, connoisseurs, canal boys, paving-men, peddlers, drovers, reporters, or the others who all have a role to play in the bustling America economy.)

Yet Whitman wasn’t a pessimist. Somehow he described slavery, warfare, and other brutalities in vivid detail while also incorporating them into an overall appreciation of life that was joyous, cocksure, even cosmic. He considered himself a direct descendent of the universe.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid–nothing could overlay it,
For it the nebula cohered to an orb–the long slow strata piled to rest it on–vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauriods transported in their mouths and deposit it with care.
All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now I stand on this spot with my soul.

In the past my mistake had been to read Song of Myself as I did contemporary poetry. It wasn’t the lyrical distillation of an experience. It wasn’t the product of painstaking wordsmithing that used metaphor, imagery, and sound to pack big emotions into compact verse. At times, Whitman tosses off a lovely phrase, such as a description of an alligator’s “tough pimples,” but I’d always been disappointed in past readings and skimmings by how few dazzling word-pictures I found. He relies on alliteration and alliteration and alliteration to move us along .

But my exposure to epic poetry had loosened up my expectations. Now I understood that Song of Myself should be read as a manifesto of values, a guide to a worthy life. It’s a litany of praise for what Whitman cherished: the landscapes he traveled, the people he met, the ideas he found most useful for uplifting the human spirit.

Start with his attitude towards time:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or of the end.

There never was any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

In other words, Whitman didn’t believe in “the good old days” or “the best is yet to come.” He rejected nostalgia, progress, and the many other ways in which the rest of us imagine a better world than the one we have now. Whitman was satisfied with the present. He revered the present.

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.

Who among us actually lives this way? Maybe some veteran Buddhists in Woodstock have achieved this state of appreciating the eternal present, but I certainly haven’t. Every week, my therapist wrestles with me over these very issues, pushing me to let go of past regrets and future hopes that may always remain unfulfilled. Whitman wanted to be my therapist, too.

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Which isn’t to say Whitman didn’t have bad days. But he didn’t identify himself by his failures or wounds, or by his achievements. He saw his essential self as someone separate from daily vicissitudes.

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet–the effect upon me of my early life, of the ward and city I live in, of the nation,
The latest news, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, business, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks, or of myself, or ill-doing, or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
They come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Historically, Whitman belonged to that remarkable generation of American writers, also including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who created the Church of the Self. They believed that each of us should be God to ourself, that our highest authority should by our inmost thoughts and feelings.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from,
The scent of these arm-pits is finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.

These days, the Church of the Self has largely degraded into the Altar of Me. Individualism has been contaminated by narcissism and selfishness. While the President’s wife contemplates poetry, the President impresses himself on the White House running machine.

To Whitman, individualism didn’t mean privilege.

I speak the pass-word primeval–I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

(What was Laura Bush thinking? Just imagine Whitman addressing the CEO at a shareholders’ meeting.)

Individualism meant that through our senses we had the medium we needed to understand the world. To hell with creeds and beliefs. We have ears, eyes, and skin.

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
The seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

And what a lively world we inhabit. Song of Myself repeatedly weaves great webs of places, people, sounds, and animals, all of them deserving our devout attention and respect.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg and the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adon the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking shortcake.

By the end of Song of Myself, I appreciated the genius of the Whitman quotation on the Poet’s House wall. In the final stanza he invites us, for the umpteenth time, to join this journey of appreciation:

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you.

Weeks later, I’m now on my sixth or seventh reading of The Essential Whitman. Much of it is now familiar. But much of it also seems new with each reading. There are passages that suddenly make sense, and passages that suddenly don’t. But what I am sure of is that Whitman is the ideal tonic for 2003. His optimism isn’t triumphalism, or even happiness, but the confidence that each of can find our rightful place in the world.

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The Unabomber and the Poet

Posted on May 11, 2012 by admin

Fortunately, I don’t suffer from fears of serial killers. They come and they go from the news without my learning their names. But years ago one did fascinate me, that rare case covered by The Nation as well as the tabloids: the Unabomber. In the mid-1990s when he rode high in the news, I was an environmental journalist intrigued by the radical view that, contrary to popular wisdom, human beings were not inherently driven to progress, were not born curious and destined to invent the Internet and other marvels of technology, but were, instead, creatures that had evolved for the vast majority of our time on Earth to be hunter gathers, until, in recent millennia, we’ve undergone drastic transitions into agriculture and now industry that have left us disoriented and disconnected from nature and ourselves. The Unabom Manifesto, which I first tried to read in tiny print in The New York Times, makes an argument along these lines, though I found it turgid, dogmatic, hostile, and pretty quickly unreadable. Yet the bad writing didn’t dim the dark charisma of the madman behind it, a character out of Dostoevsky, it seemed, or Thomas Pynchon. Whomever he was, the Unabomber was the thinking man’s serial killer.

Then Theodore Kaczynski got busted. My intellectual fascination suddenly turned personal. At the time, I was preparing to live out my fantasy of quitting city life for a Catskills log cabin. Naively, perhaps, I assumed that countless Americans shared this Thoreauvian dream. It was my good fortune as a freelance writer without a family or an office to tie me down to move into what looked like a tree fort perched on a hemlock hillside above a trout stream. But to read the accounts of Kaczynski’s arrest in Montana was to sense that in the popular media mind his cabin was proof of his madness. “It was a hermit’s nut house, a psychopath’s tool shed, a Walden gone mad,” I later wrote in an essay. In fact, his defense attorneys had the place loaded onto a flat bed and trucked to Sacramento to introduce as evidence in his insanity defense. This popular condemnation made me wonder if I suffered from my own dark side.

Yet in the summer of 1996 as I settled into my cabin—news frenzy be damned—another person lived through a much greater personal crisis. That would be David Kaczynski, the younger brother who’d read the manifesto in the papers and realized whom the killer must be. At the time he worked in an Albany youth shelter; nowadays, he’s a public advocate against the death penalty. What I didn’t know until recently was that in 1996 he began to write poetry. Our publisher for Walking Woodstock also did his collection A Dream Named You which appeared last year.

None of the poems mention the Unabom case. If not for the Kaczynski name on the cover, you’d never guess the extraordinary circumstances behind this book in which poetry arrived, once again, to serve a human soul in need of expression. “I aspire to help/pacify winds of anger,/the craving for suspect/love, to heal faces/collapsed in hard knowledge,” Kaczynski writes in “Aspiration,” one of his most explicit statements of hope. Elsewhere, the poems are more meditative, more conflicted about this tough world. Certainly, none traffic in easy sentiments. They’re clear, heartfelt, well crafted poems of the sort many of us write to find our way forward. Several first appeared in literary journals. Here’s one about a mother and a bird, a subject always close to my heart.

Sacrifice

Envy of my friends,
I caught the little bird,
but Mother wasn’t so happy
with the prize, her face a
gray reservation as we locked it
in the screen box in our dim
basement where—at times—
I imagined holocaust fires.

Returning from play,
we remembered to take it out
(my privilege), but I wasn’t so
proud when I noticed tiny bugs
milling under the limp feathers.
“It’s sick,” Mother commented.
“Go wash your hands.”

Later that night, she wrapped
the dead bird in soft tissue and
placed it on the furnace coals.
A bird isn’t a person: somehow
it escaped Mother’s care,
my sympathy, our need to survive.
“Mom, the bird,” I reminded her.
“It didn’t suffer,” she replied.

The furnace kept the bird for weeks.
The coal ashes were gray feathers.
The iron door swung open on sacred fire,
slumbering light. Mother was keeper
of the bird’s immortality, with mine.

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Hudson Gorge Panorama: Hiking Breakneck Ridge

Posted on May 9, 2012 by admin

(Here’s an expanded version of “Hudson Gorge Panorama: Hiking Breakneck Ridge,” the cover story for the July/August 2011 issue of Adirondac, published by the Adirondack Mountain Club.)

Twenty years ago, when I lived on East 47th Street in a six story brick building surrounded by steel and glass high-rises, my favorite description of Manhattan was as a densely inhabited island off the coast of the United States. People lived differently in the City, no way around it. The refrigerator might hold nothing more than a water jug, proof that every meal was eaten out, even coffee. Dog walkers carried plastic bags left over from the pharmacy to slip over their hand like a mitten to pick up their pets’ specimens. Hailing a cab was a competitive sport, especially in the rain. And cars? Forget cars. My wife, born and raised in Manhattan, never learned how to drive. My license, rarely used, expired for months at a time. Trains and buses were my lifelines to the wilderness, or at least Harriman State Park or the Hudson Highlands, which were wilderness enough to me. On a weekend morning, I’d bus up to Tuxedo Park, wend my way out of the village onto the trail, and within an hour reach the high rocks of Claudius Smith’s Den, an outlaws’ hideout during the Revolution. From there, I’d choose one of half a dozen loop routes for the day before returning to the late afternoon bus, refreshed by the exercise and by the beauty of those hills with savanna-like clearings. On hot summer days, no air conditioning could match sitting on a rock to be washed by the wind cooling my sweat, while I gazed off at green ridgelines that seemed to roll on forever, as if this was Ecotopia, not Orange County. But for sheer adventure, drama, the kind of hike that took me back to my California college days in the High Sierras, I skipped Harriman. I took the train up to Breakneck Ridge.

This stony buttress rises 1200 feet above the Hudson River in little more than a mile, the most arresting feature in a river gorge lined with imposing mountains. Yet the slopes are rounded except for the southern cliffs on Breakneck Ridge, towering, fractured pillars and slabs that seem like ruins of an ancient cathedral for Pagans eight feet tall. Seen from the south on Route 9D or the train, they force you to look upwards for a vertiginous moment of thinking, “I’m going to climb that?” Then you shoot through the tunnels under the base of the ridge and come out on the northern side where the forested flank looks steep but manageable.

On a Sunday in early April I returned to my old proving grounds. It was the brown season between winter and budding. Since leaving midtown Manhattan for a Catskills log cabin in 1996, I’d rarely returned to Breakneck Ridge, driven instead to climb the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and now the Whites as an intermittent but proud peak bagger. In my absence the world had changed. Twenty years ago, my handful of hiking buddies and I had fancied ourselves pilgrims, meeting at the Port Authority or Grand Central to travel up to the trailheads, where we seemed to have the park lands almost to ourselves. Twenty years ago, in short, the world didn’t have Meetup.com. I was astounded to find the roadside pullover filling with upwards of forty cars. Two dozen hikers stood milling about. Then another happy mob marched out from the railroad tracks. Apparently, three separate groups had ridden up on the train together. This, I noted to myself, has become the Adirondacks High Peaks parking lot experience on the Hudson.

So be it. Breakneck Ridge was never a pristine wilderness. There’s graffiti on the lower rocks. There’s a flagpole on the first buttress hump overlooking the river with both the Stars and Stripes and a black POW-MIA flag signifying what I’m no longer sure. There’s a feeling that the area has long been claimed by daredevil beer drinkers as well as by hikers. Nor am I sure I’d want it any other way. Breakneck Ridge deserves to be rough and tumble. (According to legend, it was merely a bull chased over from the neighboring Bull Hill that broke its neck here, not an outlaw or Revolutionary war hero.) Once I started scrambling up the well trod gully trail anchored with rocks I felt like a boy again too young to care about trail etiquette, simply driven to get to the top. But so doing so amid two dozen others was a healthy reminder of how exposed this trail can feel. One poor woman felt so intimidated at the bottom of a V-notched slab that she turned around for the day, not ten minutes from the start. “She’s hugging the rock rather than walking on it,” someone observed someone from above. Everyone else scampered successfully upwards, many in sneakers and jeans, but not without nervous banter flying back and forth. It’s one thing to jungle gym over the rocks. Another to glimpse the Hudson under your armpit surprisingly far below. “It’s all mental,” reassured one young fellow. “Famous last words,” his friend shot back. But the best line belonged to one of the young bucks in ball caps and bright sneakers who were skipping the slow moving crowd in the gully rocks by winging outwards to scamper up the bare slabs beyond the safety of trees. Even I got the jitters from watching them go. But after they came bounding over the final rise I overheard one joke, “That last step I had my leg over my shoulder.”

The rewards, of course, are the breathtaking views from the buttress humps. Storm King Mountain stands across the river, a massive stony mound with a roadway gash like a tight lipped frown. Together with Breakneck Ridge, it forms the northern gateway of the gorge. To the northwest, lies a broad valley with scatterings of Newburgh and in the farther distance the Shawangunks and the Catskills. Looking down the gorge brings you to West Point. The river itself appears wrinkled and sometimes flecked with whitecaps. Train tracks line both banks, the near side for passengers, the far side for freight, both shrunken like model trains until they yank on their whistles, louder than any toys. South of Breakneck Ridge across a wooded valley stands Bull Hill like a sister ridge. Twenty years ago, I’d get off the train in Cold Spring to climb Bull Hill in the morning, cross the valley which has the intriguing stone ruins of an estate-like farm and finish by descending Breakneck Ridge into the lowering sun. Even the clouds looked more dramatic than anywhere else, splitting sunlight into spokes over the darkening mountains. Seen in museum paintings I’d consider that effect overly religious. Seen from Breakneck Ridge it looked entirely real.

There are three major humps up the buttress, followed by the final climb to the top. For me the moment of truth comes after the first, when the trail swings out to a balcony-like view of the southern vertical cliffs not thirty feet away, a distance that would be your death should you slip down the gap between. These are Edgar Allan Poe cliffs, largely charred black with a copper sheen exposed on the highest slab. Almost at eye level under a cliff roof the dark rock sports a large white oval of bird shit. Vultures frequently soar low on the thermals over Breakneck Ridge. This is an appropriate spot to consider them. I stepped toward the dirt balcony edge until the tingle in my groin started like a rattlesnake’s tail warning me to step back for my safety and sanity.

Past that, I’m relaxed enough to enjoy the rest of the climb. The panoramic views keep coming, growing more expansive, though losing the intimacy down closer to the river. Between humps the trail crosses wooded saddles that offer hiking rather than gully scrambling, a preview of the enjoyable ridgetop walking you’ll find for the rest of the day, should you continue toward Beacon Mountain or loop back below Breakneck Ridge on a yellow marked trail that hits the lower summit of Sugarloaf Mountain, a bald with wonderful views of its own.

The third hump requires a slab ascent from under several pines at the base up across smooth rock with airy views. Here’s where Breakneck Ridge shifts from being the Hudson Highlands’ most thrilling climb into sacred ground for me. In the spring of 1989 my mother suffered debilitating strokes that would ultimately leave her crippled in a nursing home for a decade. I was probably more distraught than I realized for I also had a writing assignment that was falling apart. To get away for a day, I took the train up to Cold Spring to hike Bull Hill and Breakneck Ridge. All that exercise proved to be the right tonic for my grief. On my way down I found a bench on this slab to sit for a water break with a great view and for what turned out to be one of the most profound half hours of my life. Seated on that slab, which came to feel like my mountain throne, I realized that my mother would never again step outdoors into the green kingdom that looked so majestic from this perch overlooking the river and mountains. She’d been the nature buff in our suburban family, the one who hung bird feeders on the patio and kept binoculars on the kitchen counter, the one who gardened tomatoes and grew mint like weeds for our ice tea, the one who loaded up our station wagon for family camping trips to Maine, where I’d seen my first moose, caught my first fish, and met my first lumber-jacks. Those early adventures had led me to Boy Scouts, then to backpacking the High Sierras in college. Now that my mother would never step outside again I felt it incumbent upon me to experience the natural world in her honor and mine. During my eight years in Hoboken I’d grown distant from the outdoors I’d loved through college. Now on that slab, feeling the airy exposure of mountain views, I had what I’d later describe as my born again nature conversion. In the ensuing years I’d find a job at an environmental magazine, then leave City life for a log cabin. I’d get to know the Catskills and the Adirondacks. But Breakneck Ridge would remain the place that made me a hiker for life. Ten years later, when my mother died of further strokes, I returned to that spot on a gray day in January, when the trail held pockets of ice but little snow, to scatter ashes from my cabin stove in her memory. Off the trail I tied a strip of red plaid from a dress of hers to a juniper tree. I made that spot the shrine for my nature worship.

More than a decade has passed since her death. On this busy April Sunday a small line waited to scramble up the slab, so I slipped off discretely to the side to visit my tree. I angled upwards across the grass patches and smaller slabs crunchy with lichen, feeling a bit guilty at not sticking to the trail, and reached the lone juniper standing sentinel on the open hillside, not much taller than a Christmas tree but tougher and prickly. I saw no remains of red plaid knotted to a branch, nor should I have expected to, I suppose, not with birds and rodents to put that red wool to good use in building a nest. But I also saw two other junipers down by the bottom of the clearing and wondered if I’d chosen the right tree. Maybe that was the blessing for the day, that such an intense experience of loss could be partly forgotten with time. Instead of scrambling down to check the other trees, I continued up to the hump to rejoin the trail and the living. Soon I was eavesdropping on a conversation about Jack Russell terriers, handsome little dogs that turn out to be murder among cats. The same could be said for sentimental memories, cute but potentially deadly.

But the time I reached the summit of Breakneck Ridge I finally had the mountain to myself. Not that I’m a fast walker. But hiking groups proceed like inch worms, spreading out, bunching up, slowing themselves down. Back at the first hump I’d overheard a chubby young woman, who’d had her thrills for the day and was ready to find an easier route down, offer some folklore that made me smile. “I’m pretty sure there’s an eagle’s nest at the top,” she’d said. “You can’t go near them.” In truth, the top may be the least exciting part of Breakneck Ridge. Yet, as I started into the woods I spotted a small pool thick with marsh reeds that had always struck me as an anomaly, a pocket wetland at the summit. Twenty years ago, I’d discovered some-thing more amazing than an eagle’s nest. It was late winter with a lingering blanket of snow. I was about to descend the ridge before sunset. Coming up towards the summit from the woods, I heard an incredible noise, a jingling racket, a sound that almost scared me. Could there possibly be an engine up here? A plane flying that close? It turned out to be nothing, a musical roar rising out of this black pool still frozen in spots with ice. I was a resident of Manhattan, an island off the coast of the United States. I was sophisticated, worldly. What did I know about spring peepers? All I knew was that Breakneck Ridge held wonders beyond my imagining.

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The Hudson As You Haven’t Seen It Before

Posted on May 7, 2012 by admin

Thomas Wolfe wrote big rhapsodic novels such as Look Homeward, Angel that I read as a teen. After his early death in 1938, an enthusiast named John S. Barnes went through Wolfe’s prose to convert passages into poems with line breaks, which were collected and published as A Stone, A Leaf, A Door. I love these examples of cross dressing poetry and prose. Jack Kerouac cannibalized his haiku for Desolation Angels. Melville was so immersed in Shakespeare while writing Moby Dick that whole paragraphs scan in iambic pentameter. Even Donald Rumsfeld had a book of poetry in him surely more entertaining than his current biography.

Here’s Thomas Wolfe’s rhapsody to the Hudson River.

Like the Light

And above all else,
The Hudson River was like the light—yes
Oh, more than anything it was the light,
The light, the tone, the texture of the magic light
In which he had seen the city as a child,
That made the Hudson River wonderful.

The light was golden,
Deep and full with rich golden lights of harvest;
The light was golden like the flesh of women,
Lavish as their limbs,
True, depthless, tender as their glorious eyes,
Fine-spun and maddening as their hair,
As unutterable with desire as their fragrant nests of spicery,
Their deep melon-heavy breasts.

The light was golden
Like a golden morning light
That shines through ancient glass
Into a room of old dark brown.

The light was brown,
Dark lavish brown
Hued with rich lights of gold;
The light was rich brown shot with gold
Like the sultry and exultant fragrance of ground coffee;
The light was lavish brown
Like old stone houses
Gulched in morning on a city street,
Brown like exultant breakfast smells
That come from basement areas
In the brownstone houses where the rich men lived;

The light was blue,
Steep frontal blue,
Like morning underneath the frontal cliff of buildings;
The light was vertical cool blue, hazed with thin morning mist;
The light was blue,
Cold flowing harbor blue of clean cool waters
Rimed brightly with a dancing morning gold,
Fresh, half-rotten with the musty river stench,
Blue with the blue-black of the morning gulch and canyon of the city,
Blue-black with cool morning shadow as the ferry,
Packed with its thousand small white staring faces turned one way,
Drove bluntly toward the rusty weathered slips.

The light was amber brown
In vast dark chambers shuttered from young light
Where in great walnut beds the glorious women
Stirred in sensual warmth their lavish limbs.

The light was brown-gold
Like ground coffee, like the merchants
And the walnut houses where they lived,
Brown-gold like old brick buildings
Grimed with money and the smell of trade,
Brown-gold like morning in great gleaming bars of smart mahogany,
The fresh wet beer-wash, lemon-rind, and the smell of angostura bitters.

Then full-gold in the evening in the theaters,
Shining with full golden warmth and body
On full golden figures of the women,
On fat, red plush,
And on rich, faded, slightly stale smell,
And on the gilt sheaves and cupids and the cornucopias,
On the fleshy, potent, softly-golden smell of all the people;
And in great restaurants the light was brighter gold,
But full and round like warm onyx columns,
Smooth warmly tinted marble,
Old wine in dark rounded age-encrusted bottles,
And the great blonde figures of naked women
On rose-clouded ceilings.

Then the light was full and rich,
Brown-golden like great fields in autumn;
It was full swelling golden light like mown fields,
Bronze-red picketed with fat rusty golden sheaves of corn,
And governed by huge barns of red
And the mellow winey fragrance of the apples.—
Yes, all of this had been the tone and texture of the lights
That qualified his vision of the city and the river
When he was a child.

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Why We Climb Mountains (The View in 1843)

Posted on May 4, 2012 by admin

The world has changed—and it hasn’t. Here’s a statement about the value of climbing the Catskills made by Park Benjamin in 1843, which I found in Picturesque Ulster.

“’Tis pleasant for awhile to leave the heated pavements and the garbaged atmosphere of the ever bustling, noisy city; to bid adieu to the continued rattling of all the various vehicles that the worried horses are destined to drag in merciless labor to and fro the city’s length; to shun the charcoal vender’s unearthly guttural, the cries of newspaper urchins more varied in tone than the gamut itself; to flee from patients, clients, patrons, and all the constant, never varying avocations that tend to harass and perplex the lives of toiling citizens, and perch one’s self upon some mountainous elevation where nature’s calmness changes the current of our thoughts, and turns them from the real and artificial miseries of humanity.

“On such a spot we can enjoy an inward elevation, partaking of the beauty and serenity of the scene, and indulge the mind in instructive reflections upon the past, the present and the future. It would seem that the great Creator of the universe had built up this mighty eminence that man might know his power, and feeling his own insignificance despise and shun the vanities and hollow-heartedness of life. Here the belief is taught that there is but one religion and one great family of mankind. Station yourself upon that projecting rock that hangs in such terrific altitude over the immense space beneath, but attempt not to give utterance to your feelings. Language could not express them.

“Have you ever stood upon a vessel’s deck, lashed to her for security, amid the howling tempest’s rage, the wind driving her into the sea’s deep chasms, and suspending her on the lofty pinnacle of the waves, the lightning flashes brightening the surrounding hollows and showing by its vivid glares the perils of your situation? Have you ever known the mightiness of the tempest’s angry mood at such a moment, and felt how utterly inadequate is speech? If so, then stand upon this high-poised rock and learn that it is not the awfully sublime alone that seals the lips, but that nature in her calmest mood can subdue the mind to silence.

“The checkered scene below lies like the lowliest meadow, in variegated patchwork. Hills have disappeared. Here and there apparently within a narrow lane a mite is seen. It is the vehicle of some sturdy farmer, drawn by his well-fed span, measuring with rapid pace the broad highway leading to the distant village, whose diminished spires decorate the landscape. Observe that quite stream attenuated to a brook, one bound would carry you to its opposite bank, where it what it seems, and by that bound you would leap the Hudson. See that tiny cloud—smaller than the puff just issuing from your Havana—as it rises from the river’s surface. That speck beneath it is speeding on its way with a velocity that gladdens its living freight of anxious travelers, and yet to the eye it moves not. Those far off mountains, rising from the horizon in varied obscure shapes and heights, belong to other States. The fleeting clouds in graceful movement pass beneath you, dragging their lengthened shadows over the colored plain, until nature’s curtain, being drawn, shuts out the view. And now the whole becomes one vast fictitious sea, placing you in feeling near the ocean level, and relieving for a moment the nervous throbs the dizzy heights occasioned. Soon the clouds disperse, and separating in changing form, the quiet region underneath lies again before you in all its beautiful and glorious sublimity. Such is nature’s tableau.

“Why was creation formed with features so imposing, but for man’s great benefit, that he might learn the power and majesty of the Omnipotent? Come, then, ye multitude of uneducated mortals, and from this great book store your minds with deep reflections leading to wisdom and happiness.”

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The Most Magnificent Fliers of All: Turkey Vultures

Posted on May 2, 2012 by admin

Reading a description of turkey vultures in an old natural history book inspired me to write one of my favorite poems. (Unless you prefer Sparrow’s version.)

Trespassing at the Leap
–Platte Clove, Catskills

The sign said, “Strictly Forbidden.”
I stepped over the guardrail and surged with happiness.
I dug my heels down the deer path of slippery duff
and grabbed the green paws of hemlock branches.
At the leap overlooking the gorge and waterfall,
I crawled to the edge and counted seconds,
as my spit dropped into rocks and ferns
of scree below. My groin tingled
with vertigo. After crawling back,
I rubbed off pebbles pressed in my palms.

How often had I seen this chasm painted?
The famous Devil’s Kitchen and Bridal Veil Falls.
Yet as I sat where artists sit,
this scene refused to hold itself still,
not the forest leaves shimmying like sequins,
nor the valley humidity stirring with airborne seeds,
nor the slender waterfall shredding itself
into frothy diamonds. As a poet,
I wanted to join this flow.

I studied the vultures rocking on wings,
trolling the clove, then raised my arms in a V.
Impatient in the breeze, I leaped
and almost snagged my foot on a pitch pine
knotted to the cliff, then nearly shed my face
on a jutting bluestone brow spotted with lichen.
But somehow I soared into thickening air.
Pennies tumbled from my pocket like copper moths;
my falling wallet flapped like a bat.
Steadying my arms, I coasted into a thermal
that carried me high on a warm carousel.
Hunger awakened me to all the odors in the air.
I knew the smell of death I once feared
was what would sustain me now.

This poem appears in My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse. The notion that I might fly like a turkey vulture occurred to me as I read the claim in A Natural History of American Birds of Eastern and Central North America by Edward Howe Forbush and Joh Bichard May that these birds fly the way we do in our dreams. Here is the book’s description of turkey vultures, an animal I’ve written about more than once.

“The Turkey Vulture, or “Buzzard,” as it is commonly called in the South, leaves the ground with a bound and a few flaps, unless gorged with carrion, when it must disgorge much of its filthy cargo in order to enable it to get away; but when once in air and gaining height it moves with the ease of a master. No other American bird is so generally celebrated for its perfect conquest of the aerial currents. It seems to sail and soar gracefully without effort and to gain altitude even in windless air with few motions of its widespread pinions, which carry it up as if by magic. It seems to materialize the flight of the dreamer who imagines that he floats through the air by the mere effort of his will.

“There are, perhaps, not more than two or three Turkey Vultures to the square mile in their southern range, but on their aerial courses they patrol the land thoroughly, and probably there are few dead animals that escape their telescopic vision. Over hill and dale, lake and stream, farm, forest and village, the Buzzards wheel, adding life to the blue vault above, until one of the tireless birds sees some prospect of a feast. It may be that its keen eyes have spied a dead or dying animal, or a corpse rising to the surface of a stream, or even the village toper fallen by the wayside. Immediately the watchful fowl descends to the hoped-for feast, lowering its legs eagerly, long before it actually lights. Another, circling in the distant sky, sees that sudden “stoop” and follows. Others in all directions mark the descending twain and wing their way to the common center. As they go they are seen from afar by others still, and soon every Vulture for miles around has assembled near the expected feast. Scores as they arrive alight on trees or fences, while a few of the boldest drop to the ground and with exceeding circumspection approach the object of their quest, for your Buzzard is a cowardly fowl and intends to take good care of his precious skin. They often gather thus, not only about dead animals, but also about the sick or disabled when death seems imminent. If the death of the victim seems assured they approach their prey. Over what follows let us draw the veil.

“It is supposed that the Buzzards find their food entirely by sight; they frequently have failed to locate it when it has been covered by so frail a substance as paper; but their nostrils are large, and probably they have a sense of smell, as often they have hung about malodorous decaying bodies, apparently searching for them, but unable to discover them when hidden from sight.”

* * * *

The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.

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Flying Over the Catskills

Posted on April 30, 2012 by admin

(This essay appears in the Spring 2012 issue of The Country and Abroad.)

Isn’t a vacation an adult version of running away? Mine always leave me wishing I didn’t have to return home to some drudgery or other. My dread has been as big as a job that I decided from afar I hated. Or as grim as the determination to get in better shape on a StairMaster. All that freewheeling energy set loose by traveling makes the humdrum routine seem like a prison sentence you shouldn’t agree to. And this vacation had been a doozy: two weeks of road tripping and backpacking in the California deserts. I’d seen rattlesnakes, meteors, petroglyphs, Joshua trees, Martian red landscapes with palm tree oases. In Death Valley I’d camped beside the world’s lowest elevation golf course, which had miniature rainbows in the dawn sprinklers and coyotes that stood back from the spray tame as dogs. (Park roadsigns warned motorists not to stop for coyotes that trotted beside cars, begging for handouts.)

Overnighting at Red Rock Canyon State Park on my return drive to Los Angeles, I’d discovered that I was in the landscape used for filming Planet of the Apes II, holy ground for me. Growing up churchless, I’d found surrogate Bible stories in the Planet of the Apes series, especially Charlton Heston’s unforgettable discovery that humans had annihilated themselves, leaving the Statue of Liberty half sunken in beach sand. That apocalypse had given me an illicit thrill as a boy, the dark satisfaction that lies behind fire and brimstone religion. In the morning while exploring the red rocks, exotic pillars of sandstone carved like organ pipes from the mesa hillside, I’d imagined myself starring in my own Planet of the Apes sequel. How often at home does your life verge on becoming a movie?

On my final day I drove Mulholland Drive high above Los Angeles where Jack Nicholson and his fellow Hollywood ne’er-do-wells enjoyed their hideouts far from the grid-lined sprawl of ordinary lives below. By sunset I sat in a bar on Venice Beach, savoring a Weiss beer and more than half believing a young Los Angeleno eager to sell me on the revitalizing benefits of human growth hormone shots. Why not? Wasn’t I in the capital of self invention? Why fly home to a log cabin with a chimney leak and mice that ate shoelaces? But I did. Because the ticket told me to.

Not until the plane was descending into Stewart Airport did I perk up with an idea. Staring dumb faced out my window at the anonymous scenery, I suddenly recognized the stone tower at Mohonk, the solitary sentinel on the Shawangunk ridge that put the other landscape features into their familiar places, though miniaturized in an enchanting way.

On the final leg of my desert trip, I’d stopped at a local airport and hired a small plane to fly me back over Death Valley, an exhilarating ride at 10,000 feet across a vast sandbox with mountains. The lonely ribbons of road I’d driven for hours now passed below within minutes. The timeless solitude I’d experienced through my windshield was replaced by the brusque commands of air traffic controllers in our headphones. We had to be alert, for we were flying in civilian corridors through military hot zones. As we chugged forward, pulled by the nearly invisible propeller past an 8,000 foot mountain shoulder pebbled with boulders, two fighter jets darted into view straight ahead of us quick as dragon flies, then chased themselves off. Top Gun for real. At such moments I was never too old to be a boy.

Children love miniature worlds. Maybe that’s the magic of flying in a small plane. Why not try this same trick with the Catskills? I thought, as we touched down at Stewart. Why not see my home terrain transformed into a model playland from the cockpit of a Cessna?

Not that my cabin hadn’t been an adventure. In 1996 I’d left midtown Manhattan for four log walls and a green roof perched like a tree fort on a hillside bench amid hemlocks and solitude. A yellow birch grew through the porch like a flagpole. Behind the cabin, I could hike up deer paths zig-zagging through hemlock duff and in twenty minutes reach the wilderness boundary beyond which no one had logged or perhaps walked in decades. Truly, I was living at the foot of the wilds. No TV. No curtains. No morning Times on my doormat. Hell, I didn’t even get radio reception unless I crossed the footbridge out to my car parked on the road, where for some reason radio signals reached that couldn’t find my cabin under the trees. And only once did I do that, feeling obligated to listen to the Clinton Dole debate, which after a few minutes I quit, satisfied that Clinton was in no danger of losing. Among my goals at the cabin was detoxing from the news that had grabbed at my attention all day long in Manhattan. I wanted to decouple my nervous system from the world’s troubles.

Not that I was a hermit. I kept busy with writing assignments for magazines. But after faxing in my work, I’d celebrate by wandering up the hillside in search of, say, a fresh crop of mushrooms to harvest and study in my field guilds. After my final dispiriting years in Manhattan, life at the cabin was like a working vacation. The only thing I missed was cappuccino. In 1996 the Starbucks revolution from Seattle still hadn’t reached my little hamlet of Phoenicia.

But any routine grows familiar, and the familiar grows stale. By now I’d lived in the cabin for four years. The chimney leak, no matter how many times it got fixed, would never really get fixed. The drip bucket on my stone mantelpiece had overflowed by the time I got back from the deserts. The newspapers laid out as sponges were moldy. And the mice, oh, the mice never stopped coming. One morning I found one doing the dead man’s float in the toilet bowl. Another, a pair of them up on tiptoes to hold up their faces so as not to drown in the bottom two inches of the yogurt smoothie I’d forgotten to finish in the blender. My story of mice would have been War and Peace had I bothered to write it. Most disheartening of all, my cabin no longer provided a working vacation, not like those early days after leaving East 47th Street. My cabin had become my office. And an office can be an oppressive place to live. Maybe flying would help.

On a sunny afternoon I arrived at the Kingston airport north of the Kingston Rhinecliff Bridge tolls, a runway I’d seen many times but had never considered visiting until now. At $90/hour my flight wouldn’t be cheap entertainment, but, realistically, it also wouldn’t much more than therapy and would be a lot more fun. I buckled up and donned my headphones. The pilot reviewed his laminated checklist and tested his dashboard switches.

Those with a fear of flying might consider committing themselves to a small cockpit to be an advanced form of psychological torture, but I’d really enjoyed my half dozen Cessna adventures. Small planes were like bicycles. You felt the effort, the balancing, the connection to the wind or the road. You weren’t encapsulated in the ease machine of a jet or an SUV. You were riding on the earth’s elements, not checking your watch and worrying about arrival times.

Then we were off, speeding down the runway behind the loud, almost flatulent propeller until we were airborne, quickly rising above the trees that shrank into a model landscape. Ahead, stood the Great Wall of Manitou, the Catskills Eastern Escarpment, the choppy mountain profile that dominates this portion of the Hudson Valley like our answer to the Rockies.

Once upon a time, while traveling the river, Washington Irving peered up into those mysterious blue mountains cut by two major notches and went home to write “Rip Van Winkle,” set according to legend and even some maps high in the northern notch, Kaaterskill Clove, toward which we now flew. Irving’s amusing tale has a more serious side as the parable of a brash young society after the American Revolution that could afford to mock its elders. Nor am I sure we’ll ever grow up. We’re still punch drunk on progress, the flashing excitements of the new and the now.

Yet the cabin had offered me some protection. It taught me to appreciate seasonal changes, the recurring events that we look for year after year, the experience of time as a merry-go-round rather than a straight highway to the horizon. Each August, a bush down by the stream unfurled its pink petals, an annual announcement of itself that caught my eye because I would have thought that flowering was done for the year. But that bush was sending a message. The year goes round from August to autumn to winter to spring to summer to August to go round again. Not until the Jews of the Bible did people conceive of time as forward progression, an opportunity for societies to improve, or so Thomas Cahill extols in The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. Before that, people believed in the Round, the notion that events recur and can be foretold like the seasons.

At the cabin I’d seen the Round up close and personal in its natural form, the ferns, birds, and weather repeating annual cycles right outside my door with no evident discontent over the way things were. The promoters of progress would have us believe that the drive to invent and improve is bred into our genes, but I grew skeptical after being steeped in the seasons. Even the media, I noticed, follows Rounds of its own, be they political campaigns, holidays, anniversaries, or those annual bonanzas of the media’s own creation, the Superbowl and Oscar Night. It’s no mistake that “news” often sounds like we’ve heard it before. We are still people of the Round more than we may care to admit to those constantly pushing us to upgrade and adapt. We remain deeply tied to our planet’s annual journey around the sun. We should honor ourselves as animals meant for this world, not a virtual one. The phone jack plugging me into the Internet wasn’t the secret to happiness.

And sleep? That poor victim of City noises and anxieties? After my first night in the cabin, I’d woken up to gray light in my window facing the mossy hillside rocks and thought, “Oh God, I’m still waking up at 6 am.” But, no, the clock said 8 am. I hadn’t heard a single car horn or jackhammer or ceiling pipe flush. I felt rested for once. The cabin, I’d discovered, was a sleep factory. Maybe Rip Van Winkle hadn’t been a snoring buffoon but the ultimate master of a neglected art form. Maybe some future writer will tell us what Rip learned from his dreams.

As we climbed loud and steady, the Great Wall faded in prominence, revealing itself as the front edge of the Catskills plateau, a forested province of broad valleys and mountain ridges humping their way westwards. The pilot didn’t know any of the mountains’ names, nor, I suppose, did he need to. But I was a proud hiker.

In the autumn and winter after moving into the cabin I’d climbed all thirty five of the peaks over 3500 feet to join the Catskill 3500 Club, an achievement that made the mountains feel like home. Almost half had required bushwhacking off trail, immersing me in the forest far beyond the well trodden paths. Route finding forced me to pay attention more than I had on trails, where my mind drifted into daydreams while the forest faded into scenery. Navigating made me aware of every fallen tree trunk I clambered over and each band of cliff rocks I figured my way up. I started noticing tree fungi as if I’d never seen them before, ranging from blank shields grafted onto grandfather trunks to miniature coral kingdoms under rotting branch armpits. I grew grateful for soft summit fern glades after suffering through stinging nettle patches on the wet spring-fed hillsides. Even the smells seemed stronger: the spruce, the dirt, the sunlight warming rocks. Bushwhacking made the Catskills much larger and wilder than the forests I’d know only by trail, but also more intimate and private, a wide open refuge for my adventures in solitude.

From the plane, of course, those charms were hidden under the forest blanket. But I could still be impressed by the scale of what I’d climbed: the three camel humps of the Black Head range; the World War Two bomber plane profile of Kaaterskill High Peak with its neighboring tail fin, Round Top; the Hunter massif with its grass tattoo of ski slopes on its northern buttress. Maybe the pilot didn’t know their names, but I’d claimed them as my home terrain.

Yet at 6,000 feet one of my cherished illusions was lost. From trail lookouts you could imagine that these mountains rolled outwards for days, as if America was still largely a wilderness. You might see a few ribbons of valley roads amid the forest, a cluster of rooftops for a hamlet, a farm clearing. But the rugged mountains still ruled to the horizon. Not so from the plane. The Catskills did stand apart as an elevated province guarded by peaks around the rim.

But the surrounding valleys looked much larger, spread outwards toward Albany, the Berkshires, and the Hudson Highlands, that southern barrier against Manhattan and Westchester. The Catskills weren’t the big impregnable kingdom they’d seemed from my cabin. Had we flown straight from north to south, we could have crossed them in twenty minutes. Jets at 25,000 feet crisscrossed them with contrails in minutes. My wilderness hideout was rung by dominant flatlands. Down there, people had two car garages, swimming pools, lawn doctors, the homogenized lives trained into them by watching TV for four hours a day. I reminded myself to feel lucky at having escaped.

Below us, I spotted Kaaterskill Falls, comically small, a stone well carved into the forested hillside with a slip of water spilling over its rim. Or perhaps rather than a well it was a keyhole into our national history. The first painting in Robert Hughes’s American Visions: The Epic History of Art of America is Thomas Cole’s 1826 rendition of these two-tiered falls—the tallest in New York State—as a dark, brooding wall essentially guarding the unspoiled continent that lies beyond. Cole framed the scene with rust autumn scarlets and dead weathered tree trunks to cast a Shakespearean somberness, for he feared that loggers and miners, serving our burgeon industrial appetites, would spoil the mountains he painted as pristine. In the center, dwarfed by the scale of the waterfalls, he added a tiny Indian warrior standing on the tier shelf like the gatekeeper between his vanishing world and our own.

Today, we look back upon Cole as the founder of the Hudson River School, which enchants us with almost mythical scenes of wilderness so much more monumental that these mountains seem to us today. We look back, in other words, with nostalgia.

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Blood Brothers: A Poem Inspired by a Werewolf Double Feature

Posted on April 27, 2012 by admin

Blood Brothers

Remember the werewolf double feature
at the old porno theater on upper Broadway?
The seats had no room for our knees;
sticky paint covered gum barnacles.

We howled at the full moon slipping free
of bruised clouds, then the actors’ faces growing
into wolf snouts with sounds like breaking furniture.
Their blue eyes kaleidoscoped into green.

They peed on hedges and hunted subway tunnels,
leaving shredded raincoats, a beggar’s cup, teeth marks
on the turnstiles. By the office cooler the next morning,
they laughed at blood stains on their tasseled loafers.

In the end they died from silver bullets
to the heart. Filing out, we discovered snow swirling
like torn pillow feathers. A cab tried to splash us with slush
and missed. We celebrated our new lives

in Manhattan by howling at the “Don’t Walk” light
and walking. Within a year you moved home,
joined our father’s timid life. You burned
pork chops, overboiled beans, made bowls of popcorn

that lasted into Letterman. You slept in fire engine sheets
in your boyhood bed, let the clock radio whisper
soft rock all night, as if you didn’t trust
silent dreams. Your degrees

didn’t matter. You worked the Christmas season
at the Post Office, rang bells for the Census, added blank years
to your resume. Maybe you were happy. I suffered
the hunger of wolves in Manhattan.

By Will Nixon

(Published in My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse. Click here for the spoken word version.)

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.

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A Poem for the New York Knicks of my Childhood

Posted on April 25, 2012 by admin

Twenty-One

Such a bruising game, driveway basketball:
hip-checking allowed against the garage,
rose thorns stealing the dribble down the left side,
crazy ricochets off the low eves,
no out-of-bounds except the tomatoes.
To win, you risked scraped knees, black eyes,
making an enemy out of a friend for a week.

But why not? To rise for the jump shot
with your feet kicked back like Dickie Barnett
and snap the net with a swish. To haul down
a rebound like Willis then spin for the feather-light
hook. To stand at the top of the key, 20-20,
knowing your next fake could open the lane
for your best move: a reverse lay-up and glory.

(Click here for a spoken word version.)

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The Mother Grouse Blog is produced by Will Nixon, author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges.

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