Every summer when I was a little kid I spent with my grandparents in South Bristol, New York, which is 10 or 20 miles from Naples, at the bottom of the Finger Lakes. My grandfather bought a sheep pasture in 1949 and made it his mission, as a sort of gift to the world, to plant trees. And between 1949 and probably 1960, he planted over 9,000 trees. My grandparents were very German and very Spartan.
The property was very long, maybe a couple thousand feet wide and then a long strip all the way to the top of a mountain. The first 300 yards was flat with a stream known as Mud Creek that flowed to the left side of it where my grandfather built a bridge that crossed the creek. In that area is where we would build bonfires, but they also took the organic garbage there that attracted the raccoons at night.
There were two cabins on the property. The first house my grandfather built was one room, maybe an eight by twelve-foot shack where he put a kitchen in and a wood stove. Eventually they built another room on the house that was probably twenty by twenty and a place next to the kitchen where they stored wood. There was a wood stove, and every morning we'd get up at seven o'clock and we'd come into the kitchen and my grandmother had started a fire on the wood stove, and it was a toasty place.
Then in 1950, they built a little bathroom that we never really used as a bathroom. And then a kind of open space that had a wooden divider. My grandparents would sleep on one side of the divider, and all of us kids would sleep on the other side kind of crunched up against the table looking out of a bay window. And every morning my grandfather would be at the end of that table looking out the window to Gannett Mountain across the street and he would be smoking either a cigar or a pipe. Grandmother would make two soft boiled eggs and a piece of toast, and that was his breakfast every day. In the early years there, we didn't have electricity. So everything was lit with kerosene lamps. I remember that sort of deep red, yellow glow of kerosene lamps at night. And the heater was this big old kerosene heater just behind the wall from the little cooking area. When it got dark we went to bed because there was no television and no telephone, so we would read magazines and books and my grandfather would read stories but we were all in bed by nine o'clock.
And then by 1959, my grandfather built what we call cabin number two. And I remember going to the sawmill and to get the oak wood. And if anybody remembers how hard it is to build with oak, you basically need a sledgehammer to put in every nail. We had just the simplest of tools, the simplest of everything. It was sort of damp in there and we had a little Franklin stove and my job was that every morning around 6:30 or so, I would wake up and get the firewood and start number two stove so everybody was warm by the time they woke up. Behind number two was the woodshed where they stored the wood. There were always enough trees falling down, so we always had plenty of wood. And my grandfather spent usually two hours a day chopping wood, organizing it for kindling and fuel. And that stack of wood was about six feet high and about eight to twelve feet long. There were these old steel iron wheelbarrows with wrought iron wheels, and we still have them. By the 60s, only women were allowed to sleep in number one, which was the house, and it had a toilet but no running water. We had to get our water from this hand pump that we pumped up and down and just filled jugs for drinking water. Running water came around ‘62 or ‘63. They finally dug a well, and it wasn't a very deep well, but it gave them running water and a holding tank. Men always had to go to the outhouse, and my grandfather would dig out the house every year. And then if we wanted to shower, we showered in a big basin with water and a sponge.
Next door to us was a family, the Hartleys (names changed to protect privacy), who did rodeo and they had five kids. The first time we drove by, I saw three little girls in their underwear and one little girl naked waving to us. The yard had these gigantic dogs which I found out later were crossed between shepherds and wolves and were very vicious. They each had huge chains on them and they always had a dead animal hanging from the dog or the wolf's neck. So it was very scary. My older brother finally got the nerve to go up there and meet the oldest child Earl and then came and got me and that was the first time I walked up to the property, and the dogs were lunging at me. I met the little girls, the oldest was Emma, the next was Raeann, then Laramie, and Amelia was the very youngest. And they were all very excited to meet us. The girls wanted to take us around and show us their kittens. So I remember I had just flip-flops on and I walked through this cow corral and my feet sunk in manure, and I had the smell of fresh manure between my toes. Their mother wouldn't let us go in the house because they only lived in a three-room house. So to me, they were quite poor. But they were allowed to have any animal they wanted, which made us suburban kids very envious. If they got a raccoon or they got a pheasant, whatever animal they could catch, they were allowed to keep it. I remember playing with a raccoon and playing with a crow. So it was a menagerie of animals.
We became really good friends and played together. We would play cowboys and Indians, and the girls were always the Indians. They realized they could put manure on a stick and throw it at us and they could actually beat us back into the pine trees by throwing manure. Their father Merle was a calf roper, and he had won the 1954 National Calf Roping Champion. So he had a big rodeo buckle and they had lots of horses. Merle's horse was a stallion named Big Red and we never went near the stallion. Once one of the wolves got free and it jumped on the back of the horse trying to get it and the horse kicking it and Merle the father was beating the horse and the dog with a stick. So there was a kind of level of violence among these animals and among the people's relationship to these animals that I'd never seen before, kind of very rough.
It's beautiful, it's very hilly, the mountains, the hills there never go above 2,500 feet. It was the birthplace of the Seneca Indians, which is the furthest west tribe of the Iroquois nation, and there was this canyon, and every summer we climbed up the canyon and the mythology was that a dragon guarded the canyon and kept the Senecas inside. Eventually a warrior killed the dragon but all the stones in the creek represented the heads of the native people who had died there. Across from our tree farm there was a place called “the jump off” and it was a Romeo and Juliet kind of story where a young boy and girl fell in love with each other, and the clans didn't accept it so they jumped off Gannett Hill, which is very steep, and killed themselves.
So the question was asked why I always considered Naples, the tree farm, my real home versus growing up in the (Philadelphia) suburbs. I considered that place my childhood home because it was an intense involvement with my grandfather and with nature. My grandfather took us walking in the woods every day and taught us how to identify plants and streams. He would interview all the older people in the hills to find out where the old Indian trails were, and we would find abandoned buildings and barns in the woods. We would find life magazines in them from the 1940's, old cookware and clothes. Fun stuff from the woods which included headstones, markers, and fossils.
Every day was a history lesson about the land and what was growing on the land. There was a farm across the street and I remember as a little kid we'd pay 50 cents and we'd fill up a gigantic quart of strawberries so that we were always there for strawberry season, picking strawberries and picking raspberries. And my grandfather dug a water hole on the other side of the road to make a swimming hole for all the kids in the community. We'd catch frogs and my first confrontation with a snake was when I was four years old. I was scared. And my grandfather having to tell me just step over it, it won’t hurt you. That was the first point I became absolutely fascinated with snakes. When my grandfather's friends caught a snake, they’d bring it to me. And my first pet was a garter snake. It got out, I remember grabbing it, getting bit which felt like a bee sting. And I'd feed it toads and frogs. So there was this direct involvement with nature. And at the same time, we were still studying the Indians. And my grandfather started helping us make our own Indian costumes. We made a full-size tipi that we slept in. And probably about the age of seven, I started learning beadwork, and I beaded all my clothes.
That's where I wanted to be. I would cry when they took me back home to suburban Pennsylvania because I just didn't want to be there. And I remember like when we got back to the suburbs, I didn't want to wear white people's clothes. I just wanted to wear my breech cloth. So I’d take all my clothes off and just wear my breech cloth around.
My home in suburbia, my mom designed it and it was a beautiful, mid-century modern. And we found a guy who built a factory. So we built a mid-century modern building that was built out of girders and was built like a factory. It was very open and sparse and we had land but we just didn't have the kind of wildlife and there were no friends on my street. It wasn't until I was six or seven where my closest friend was about a half mile away, and I had to walk there and to go to the candy store I had to ride my bike about a mile, mile and a half to get to a candy store. So everything was far away, very few animals, my folks, my mom and dad didn't have dogs or cats. So I just kind of got through. I did start going to art classes though, and that was sort of the center of my life from the age of six on, when school was done, I'd go to art class, and on weekends I went to art class. But I didn't have a lot of friends there, my friends were the Weatherups and another family who lived next to them.
Where I grew up in the suburbs, we each had our own bedroom we were all very disconnected. And so there was a sense of isolation where in Naples, all my brothers and sisters slept together with my grandparents on the other side of a wooden wall. There was a kind of family atmosphere that I liked, where everybody's on top of each other as opposed to my suburban home where everybody was isolated. So it was just a very sparse kind of cold living in the suburbs and the tree farm was this intense living with nature. And eventually, I guess at the age of nine, my grandfather helped me build my first lean-to inside the pine trees. So that I actually, with just, you know, pine boughs and pine, I built a little hut for myself and that's where I'd go. And then when I was 10 years old, I moved way up on the hill with old lumber. My grandfather and I would take wheelbarrows of lumber and take it to the top of the hill and I built myself a whole lean-to that had a bed made out of pine tree boughs and my own little kitchen and I would go up there and cook my dinner and and I'd sleep up there in the woods because that's where I wanted to be. I did not want to be in a classroom. I had a very hard time in school. I was always in trouble because I wouldn't sit still or I just did not want to be in suburban people's homes. I wanted to be in the country.
The tree farm was passed on to my mother and her brother, so it's been kept in the family. Now my generation, my cousins and my brothers and sister, there was also a little pot of money there to take care of the farm, that's where the inheritance went, to take care of the tree farm. And the trees now are 70 to 100 feet tall; it's this dark pine forest now. A lot of wind storms have been through and there's real damage, and I realized that the process that this land would slowly progress back towards an oak and maple forest.
Because my parents and my uncle are gone, I lost my connection to the place emotionally. I bought a house in the Catskills and that's giving me this kind of rugged mountain area. It's even more rugged than Naples, and it's giving me an art and culture scene that's really rich. Where I live now, the naturalist John Burroughs lived. And so there's a great, great involvement of walking and John Burroughs' philosophy of deep seeing, of being in the woods and meditating. And so that's still very much part of my life now.
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