Réveil and The Old One at the Edge of the World
5
Foreword
by Stephen Cope
In the Spring of 1852, a twenty-six-year-old Henry David Thoreau had just finished his two-and-a-half year stint at his cabin on Walden Pond, and was engaged in perhaps the greatest literary challenge of his life. He was revising his greatest work, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, and had come face to face with the central challenge of that book: how to use words to make an energetic connection between the vivid and enchanting world of nature, and the inner world of the human mind and soul.
As we all know, of course, Thoreau succeeded brilliantly, and “nature writing” has never been the same since.
Gail Straub’s quiet masterpiece, The Ashokan Way, builds on Thoreau’s discoveries in every possible way. Her accounts of her daily rambles through her own Catskill Mountain by-ways move effortlessly back and forth between exterior and interior landscapes. We come to know Straub’s beautiful inner world as we come to know, too, the very real outer beauties—and occasional terrors—of her mountain home. And, indeed, we come to see how one creates the other.
The Ashokan Way must remind the reader of John Burroughs own extensively chronicled rambles through the self-same Catskill Mountains, or of John Muir’s epic relationship with the Sierra Nevada.
But there is something more in Straub’s work. It is the factor of time, of movement—of the cycles of the year and their relationship to our inner life. In many ways, Straub does for the Catskill Mountains what Henry Beston’s classic, The Outermost House did for the wild beaches at Truro on Cape Cod. It places the human experience in the context of the ebb and flow of the seasons—allowing us to bow for a moment to forces so much more vast than our small selves that we can for a moment feel our right relationship to nature. Just as Thoreau discovered the thrill of “the wild” on Maine’s Mount Katadhin, so Straub discovers the thrill of being “right-sized” in the face of awful, wonderful, terrifying, awakening nature.
Toward the end of his life, Thoreau wrote, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.” So, too, has Straub traveled extensively on the Ashokan Way. And we are the better for it.
–Stephen Cope
Lenox, Massacusetts
6
Introduction
Attention is a form of devotion and a pathway to intimacy. Each day I walk an hour-long loop along the Ashokan Reservoir surrounded by the grandeur of the Catskill Mountain Watershed. Between High Point in the west and Overlook in the east, eighteen peaks encircle the vast reservoir-like ancient bluestone guardians. Bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, great blue herons, leaping trout, and herds of deer are among my regular companions. Occasionally I have human companions too, but the vast majority of my walks are taken alone and used as a time for contemplation and quiet renewal. I‘ve long been enamored that Ashokan translates as the place of many fishes in the Algonkian language, and over the years I have discovered that on every conceivable level this is, indeed, an abundant place. And so I have come to call this daily walk the Ashokan Way, not only because it is a literal walkway, but also because this practice has shaped my way of life.
Though this book tracks one particular year of my rounds, my walkabout has been informed by thirty-six years of strolling through this landscape as well as living in it. For these last decades, I have either been exploring it, observing it from my home, or sleeping and dreaming in a bed that faces directly out onto the Ashokan and her eighteen mountain guardians. I would not be who I am without this body of water and this mountain range. My interior landscape is now so intertwined with this outer landscape that it is impossible to know where one begins and the other ends. Certainly along with my relationships with my husband David, my family, and my close community of friends, I count my relationship with this place as one of my most cherished. It has shaped me and perhaps, because I have loved it, I have also affected it.
On any given day, walking the Ashokan Way can lead me in any number of directions. Sometimes I am hurled back in time, and the ghosts and voices that haunt this place walk beside me, telling me their stories. Other days the outer landscape takes me deep inside my own territory, trekking the hills and valleys of my aspirations and sorrows, my joys and confusions. On many occasions, this open space offers a profound antidote to my interior terrain that has become overcrowded with distraction and workaholism. And on still other strolls, the land seems to cast me out toward the furthest horizon to a place where I can see through the material into the mystical.
My devotion to the Ashokan Way has opened gateways to mysterious worlds along with portals into self-understanding and restoration. And yet the more intimate I am with these mountains and this water, these forests and creatures, the more I recognize that I will never fully know them. I will never come close to receiving all the benedictions that this landscape has to bestow. Long after I am gone, the Ashokan and the Catskills will still be here. But before my time comes, I want to have written down what they have meant to me. And I hope that in doing this my readers, too, can benefit from the gifts of this place. In giving thanks, I begin and end this tribute on Thanksgiving Day.
Winter
November
High Point
My Living Mountain
Walking on this bright, crisp Thanksgiving Day, I can see High Point’s every contour, her gentle hollows and dales along with her stark ridges and plateaus. The soft valleys take my eyes deep into the landscape, while the sharp edges draw my sight back out to the sky. As the clear morning light amplifies the rhythmic inward and outward movement of my gaze, I have the sensation that the entire landmass could be likened to a giant rib cage, with the inner contraction followed by a natural outward expansion. On days when I am very still, I can feel this: the mountain breathing in and breathing out. And with all the leaves gone, the naked outline, the very bone structure of High Point is pronounced. Moving further east, I see the boney formation of the ridges narrowing like a great hand reaching upward toward the summit and once again I have the distinct experience of this mountain as a live being. A dominant influence in my life, this living mountain is my familiar.
Spiritual traditions from all over the world refer to sacred mountains that shape a person’s longings and aspirations. Looking back over more than three decades of my life, this is precisely the role that High Point has played. The first time I walked into the small A-frame house that David and I initially rented and eventually owned, I was shocked by the presence of High Point. The mountain loomed so large and so close that I felt like it lived in my tiny kitchen. From that moment of acquaintance in June 1981, the mountain’s outline and contours have been omnipresent in my life. And on certain days I still feel like my small home—perched on a bluestone ridge overlooking the reservoir—is, in fact, an extension of the mountain itself.
During those first weeks in our house, David and I spent hours and hours working at our kitchen table. With yellow legal pads and pens, we alternately planned our wedding and designed the workshop that would lead to our life’s work. Back then we were still getting used to the fact that every time we looked up from our work, the imposing presence of a mountain met our gaze. A few months later on a windy October day, we were married in our living room, with High Point as our witness.
Just weeks after we moved to our home, David and I asked the Woodstock artist Joan Elliot to draw a logo for our new business. Joan sat on our upper deck and drew a simple sketch of High Point and the bridge near its base that crosses over the Ashokan Reservoir. For more than three decades that image has been the visual symbol for all the work we have done not only in our small corner of the Hudson Valley, but across North America and in Europe, Asia, Africa, India, and the Middle East. Later, when we started our small indie press, we called it High Point, and the impression stamped on all our publications is the unmistakable