One of my Wildcat Mountain neighbors, Les Stone, just won an award for photography for his photos of Voodoo practices in Haiti. It’s pretty amazing work: follow the links for some of the photos (more on his site than on the award site). The more I know about my neighbors up here, the more I’m [...]
Category Archives: Life in the Catskills
Vodou Pilgrimage.
05-Mar-13Beech Bark Disease.
14-Feb-13The bark of beech is famously smooth, providing a space for people to carve their initials. But most beech in the Northeast, and almost all in the Catskills, is infected with beech bark disease, an imported European pathogen to which the American species has no resistance. The young trees grow fine, until they reach about [...]
Wildcat Mountain Homestead.
14-Feb-13Sunny Winter Days.
14-Feb-13A pair of gorgeous, sunny winter days. Cutting wood, as always. I’ve been working on my Arabian Nights project, and making good progress. Some sap dribbling out of the trees, but it quickly freezes – it’s still cold. Happy days, after a period of darkness.
First Tree Taps.
10-Feb-13I tapped three maples yesterday. I was planning on doing only one – so if I did something wrong which would become clear only with some hindsight I could correct my course early on – but it was so easy to do (taking about twenty seconds), that I did two more. You drill a hole [...]
Spirit of the Woods.
07-Feb-13A barred owl (Strix varia) arrived today, and despite having to fly off a few times when I got a bit too close – and whenever I pulled out binoculars, which he apparently hates – he has come back again and again, and watched over my garden all day, as I cut wood, as I [...]
Tapping, Tapping, Tapping.
06-Feb-13Maple sap-tapping supplies arrived yesterday. The weather isn’t quite warm enough, I don’t think, to drive the taps in – it hasn’t gotten above freezing during the day yet – but the time is near. This gives me time to look around for my drill bits, which wandered off somewhere during the winter. I was [...]
Tracking the Wildcat.
04-Feb-13Sometimes I hate the fact that I don’t wake up about an hour before dawn, when all the animals are doing interesting things. I woke up yesterday morning and went to the spring for water, when I saw an unusual set of very clear prints in the snow. All the local carnivores (except the bears) [...]
A Winter Day.
02-Feb-13The day started sunny and cold and bright, good woodcutting weather, and I ended up bringing in something like nine bags of wood today. This is a good day’s work. I split some black cherry, which is so beautiful that I often feel a little bad about burning it. It supposedly takes the knife and [...]
Cold, Cold Wind.
01-Feb-13Cutting wood outside today I found it colder than any previous day in the whole winter – even though it was 19 degrees, a good 15 degrees warmer than the coldest days we’ve had so far. The difference was the wind – a bitter, terrible wind. Not even chopping wood could warm me in that [...]