Breakfast was no betrayer of the expectations raised by supper. The
Good Dame of Plattekill Clove, (as our hostess is registered in
heaven,) brought in buckwheat cakes that had to have a cover on them
to keep them down, and there was nothing at all inconspicuous about
their size.
The weather did not do so well by us. The air tides were still
setting in from the north; the tinselly snow was still flurrying;
and, since there was no likelihood of a view from any of the
surrounding points of vantage, we made a virtue of abnegation and
wanted none.
There is at the top of the Clove a gorge called by the ambitious
inhabitants the Grand Canon. We visited this, and found that to
loiter down it, to really digest the formations and appreciate the
trees, is a matter of many hours. At the very top, in the Devil's
Kitchen, as their fancy names it, there is a scene that distresses
all artists who have not brought along the means of reproducing it.
The road passes over the gorge by a small arch so beautifully rounded
and bastioned with rock that it is a little sermon on the value of
doing the ordinary well and with an eye to beauty. The brook sings a
little lament as it goes through this arch. it is leaving lovely
fields and is about to be lost in a series of mad plunges. When we
saw it first it had whitened the entire cavern with frost. In the
spring it riots down those great stone steps. Our guide, she who
keeps the charming Inn near by, said that in great freshets it was
master of the gorge, filling it with f oam and noise and demolishin g
the stairways, which they annually rebuild.
In this microscopic Grand Canon grow primeval trees that can never be
cut. Above, boulders lean over, and are ready to pounce down when the
magic command is given. Dark dens lean back into the mountain from
which skew-eyed goblins can be drafted into Puck's midnight gang. On
a day of dark bluster, with thin snow sifting down the while, this
gorge becomes almost sinister and oppressive. But in June, when the
sun beats on the fields of hawk-weed and daisy and the roads are hot
with dust, this place is a cool refuge, a wonderland for wandering
in. Occasionally the scene opens and you look out over a green floor
of light-tipped hemlocks down the Clove. Far out to sea-the blue sea
of distant counties -farmlands lie in the haze of heat; but always
you are buoyed by the cool breeze from down the ravines.
Water runs everywhere, mosses drip, and some leisurely bird warbles
in content. |
The plural of cats in Dutch is katten, or at a pinch katte, but never
kats. By a confusing coincidence, the bay lynx, which once made so
free with most of the colonial forest, chose these woods for his last
fortress. Even to-day they are more abundant in the mountains
surrounding Slide, Hunter, and Peekamose than they are in the larger
Adirondack cover.
But it must be remembered that, at first, one little stream was
called Cats' Kill, which was -named in honor of the poet of
Brouwershaven. In his day Jacob Cats cut considerable figure at the
Dutch bar. He was made the Chief Magistrate of Middleburg and
Dordrecht, the Grand Pensionary of West Friesland, and finally the
Keeper of the Great Seal of Holland. He is found in our libraries
to-day. At the very time that Hendrik Hudson was eating roast dog
with his red-faced hosts near the outlet of the brook that was to be
Cats' Kill, Mr. Cats was penning amatory emblems behind his native
dikes. He wrote "Sinne en Minne Beelden," a collection of
moralizations and worldly wisdom, perhaps derived from his own
experience, as in the following:
Nineteen nay-says o' a maiden are ha'f a grant.
By his indefatigable industry he turned out nineteen volumes of this
sort of thing, with poems which a critic of the time declared to be
characterized by "simplicity, rich fancy, clearness and purity
of style, and excellent moral tendency."
With a record like that, it is small wonder that the map-makers, half
distraught for names for the myriad brooks of the region, should
decide to call one after the Grand Pensionary, in the same way that
they were naming Block Island after Adrian Blok and Kaap May for
Admiral May. So Cats got his Kill, and the mountains in which it rose
were soon called the Catskills, the name spreading until it took in
first the whole region north of the Esopus, then the still higher
group at the head of which stands Slide, and -finally some of the
out-running ranges to the west.
Brute and I covered, in our several trips, a block of highland
country occupying about sixteen hundred square miles, all of which
has a right, by origin, contour, similarity of surf ace, and
interrelation, to be known as the Catskills. - The limits are roughly
as follows: On the east the nearly vertical wall extending from High
Point by the Reservoir parallel to the Hudson, and about ten miles
from it to Mt. Pisgah about thirty miles north. On the southwest from
High Point along the valley north of the Shawangunk Range to
Napanoch, west to Livingston Manor, to include the wild region of
small trees and small ponds. On the west a rough line from Livingston
Manor up to Stamford, through Arena, Andes, and Bovina Center. On the
north by an are from Stamford to Livingstonville. There pretends to
be nothing dogmatic about our trip, the limits we reached, or
boundaries suggested. But this rough block of elevated territory
constitutes a unit for adventure and exploration. The blue line on
the State Forest map follows about the same boundaries on the east
and south, but has not included the interesting but more, open
country in the neighborhood of Mt. Utsayantha at Stamford.
This great isolated citadel of upland appealed to the Indians as
something extraordinary and to be accounted for. They said that
Manitou had erected it as a defense from hostile spirits. As a
citadel the region made its first appeal to me.
Any person passing along the Hudson, and seeing this dim, impressive
wall of rock through the lowland haze, must be reminded, I should
think, of that legend. Rising abruptly from the valley floor and
continuing with high rampart and tremendous buttresses, it watches
over the peace of the plain. The great wall is no longer grim, as in
Manitou's day, for it is usually veiled with mists of blue. It is the
gigantic memoir of some far-off time.
This citadel is easily visualized. Picture the eastern rampart, three
thousand feet above the farmland, running for thirty miles along the
river, towered at intervals and at both ends by massive Gibraltars,
broken only a f ew times by giant causeways which lead up into the
central fortress. You have then the aspect from the East.
The central fortress is divided into the northern Catskills, with
Hunter Mountain as the chief height, and the southern Catskills, with
its group of mountains culminating in Slide, both peaks being a
little higher than f our thousand feet. The Esopus Creek runs between
these groups from west to east. The fortress has no pronounced
western wall. Valleys lead out into the plateau country. In the north
this high region, only slightly under two thousand feet, is rich with
pasture. In the south it is still covered with forest and small lakes.
This region-bounded on the east by the Hudson plain, on the north by
fertile farmland, on the west by a ridgy terrain that is to rise
again in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and on the south by other
farmlands -- was the fortified abode of the Great Spirit. It became
the storehouse of the early settlers, who took from it furs and game,
hemlock bark, timber riches, slate, and who finally moved into its
sheltering valleys. This region is still a citadel. In winter, though
but a hundred miles from the center of the world, it is as isolated
as a frontier. In summer into this capacious f ortress withdraw
thousands of city people seeking refuge from heat and the stress of streets.
It is a refuge apart. Looking down from the great rampart on the
ordinary world below, many a man has thanked Manitou for this
retreat. Not only the casual transportation facilities but even the
geology of the region contributes to the feeling of separation. The
citadel is an anomaly amid its neighboring mountains.
In one of those leisurely ages some 43,000,000 years ago, as some
geologist has bravely computed, there was a gulf in the vast Devonian
sea which had thrust itself between the Adirondack Plateau of
Laurentide memory and the Green Mountain Range. Into this gulf poured
silt. Its bottom subsided for about a mile, and the sediment
continued to settle in layers until the coal-making era was about to
commence. By then the bottom of this particular gulf had heaved above
the ocean level and became the Catskills. The early rise accounts for
the absence of coal in the Catskill region, for these lands never
went under water again. Hence all the formations and discoveries can
be allotted to the subcarboniferous period. Even before the Catskills
had entirely emerged, the interior of the continent had begun to
rise, and this accounts for the slight southern dip of the strata.
The succeeding age, the coal age, came to a conclusion with a
tremendous upheaval. The f orce of this upheaval caused the formation
of the main ranges of the Appalachian system, and doubled the size of
our continent. Most mountains are caused by the buckling of the
strata, the warping of the earth-skin; but the Catskills, despite the
rigors of the surrounding performance, remained unconvulsed.
Isolated, hardened, they kept a level head, and are so to-day. You
End outcropping ledges, an absence of pointed peaks, a multitude of
waterfalls, and you realize that erosion has done it all.
There is another difference, too, between the Catskill fortress and
the surrounding mountains. They did not succumb to the ice age. All
the true ranges of upheaval, like the Appalachians, run from
southwest to northeast. The Catskill ranges run from southeast to
northwest. So, when the great Glacier gouged out the Adirondacks and
kindred regions, damming the valleys and sweeping easily down the
southwestern avenues, it could no more than slop over the transverse
Catskill ridges. In this case the Catskills' strength was their loss.
They have no large lakes.
For all the hardihood that had withstood the ordeal by primeval fire
and the assault by ice, the Citadel bad finally to compromise with
water. It surrendered to the tiny stream. The tooth of rills has
gnawed out the vitals of the proud plateau until the Kaaterskill
Clove, the Stony Clove, and the other valleys made it possible for
the well-rounded Dutch to conquer the interior.
This was the stronghold that Brute and I were entering with our
rover's commission. From this mountain fastness, towering above the
Shawangunk, the Green Mountains, the nursling hills of the Delaware,
and rising to the chin of the elder Adirondacks, we were to look down
on a rich green land. We thought that we were taking possession of
it. In reality it was taking possession of us. With every step we
took we delivered ourselves into its hand. For it came to exercise
upon us the only power that can conquer, assimilate, and ruthlessly
possess f orever, -- the power of perfect beauty.
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