Day 2 -- Goosekiller in the Catskills
Ridge top reward in Catskills — Autumn in August
My mom was born the eighth child of twelve to a poor family in Hungary. Starting when she was around seven, every summer her parents would ‘lend’ her to a wealthy family with a big farm a few villages away. In exchange for tending to the farm’s large flock of geese, she’d be given a few sets of new clothes, a pair of shoes, and a winter coat when she was returned to her family. Undoubtedly, this hard experience in her early childhood affected her in many ways. But there were three that I could discern as a child. She didn’t share my father’s love for goose liver; she was handier with a bullwhip than Indiana Jones; she called steep hills ‘goosekillers’. Apparently, if you march a flock of fat Hungarian geese up a steep Hungarian hill under the hot Hungarian summer sun, what you’d get is a hill sprinkled white-feathered Hungarian goose carcasses. And, if you produced a certain number of white-feathered carcasses over a summer, what you got was a pair of shoes for the school year that were one size too small.
When I was a kid, my family went hiking quite often. And, every time we came to the bottom of a steep climb, my mom would look up at it somberly, and with a shake of her head say, “goosekiller.” Then she’d step into the lead and slowly climb; hissing, just like a nasty gander, if anyone tried to pass her.
Most trail riders will tell you, a horse’s approach to a steep climb is pretty much the opposite of my mom’s. Horses hurl themselves at steep climbs. They start at a gallop and drop to a trot and then a walk only if they run out of steam. Usually, you let them do it, trusting they know best. But, a horse only sees what’s in front of him. He may not understand that sometimes, over that rise is another damn rise, and another and another.
Day two found us picking up our horses and driving pretty much up the center of Pennsylvania to the New York border. I’ve decided that Pennsylvania is the Missouri of the Mid-Atlantic. If you know me well, you know what that means. If you don’t, look back into the blog for last year’s post from Bourbon, MO. I’ll just say that we need to find a mapping ap that offers the option ‘no piece of shit roads.’
Once in New York, we found our way to a state wildlife area called Bear Springs that has a horse camp. Sign one that we were in for a doozy of a ride -- we were the only rig in the lot on a Friday in August. Sign two – the trail register used to find human carcasses listed the last rider had come through more than two weeks prior and that rider was from Idaho, a notoriously wooly place to ride.
We saddled up and got going. No shitting, 10 yards into the forest, we hit our first ‘goosekiller.’ Juneau attacked it with gusto but petered out to a walk not even half-way up. Huffing and puffing we got to the top, walked around a bend, and there it was – goosekiller number two. And, so it went for about 90 minutes that gained us probably about 1,000 feet of elevation. You may ask why -- why keep going up that crap? Let’s start with the fact that this was one of the most beautiful forests I’ve seen in years. Lots of maples mixed with big hemlocks. The ground covered with wispy grass and ferns. And, then there’s this thing about being a wanderer – every time you see a bend in the trail, you wonder what’s around it. And what we saw at the top of this climb is that in the Catskills, late August is the start of autumn.