Cabin In The Catskills

The little cabin in the Catskills (see Hermitage and Building the Hermitage). The door is always inviting, but especially in winter when it's snowing and the woodstove is fired up and glowing. And then you step in, close the door, start boiling some water for tea, and dig out Red Pine's The Zen Works of Stonehouse: Poems and Tales of a 14th-Century Chinese Hermit. And fluff up the sleeping bag.

Building the Hermitage

Over eight years ago I built a little cabin in the Catskills (see Hermitage). Great fun and a lot of work. A wonderful place to spend a fall or winter evening reading a book of Chinese Zen poetry and sipping a cup of tea.  While the wood stove roars. Fondly thinking about those evenings now that the weather around here is starting to cool off. [NOTE: That's a People and Plants International cap hanging on the pole with my shirt. A collectors item].

Diverging Paths

Start of the trail system at Camp Deerpark (see Stonewalls and Elias Drops a White Pine) before the blue, white, red, and yellow trails diverge. Robert Frost got it right:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

[NOTE: The entire text of Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken (1915) can be viewed here.]

Hermitage

In the summer of 2006, I built a small cabin in the Catskill Mountains of New York. All made by hand (my hands). No power tools. This is what 6:07 AM looks like in October after you've crawled out of your sleeping bag and got the wood stove going.  

Elias Drops a White Pine

Camp Deerpark is a summer camp/retreat center in the Catskills operated by the Mennonite Church.  For about 10 years now, I have been collaborating with the camp to develop a management plan for their forest.  Much of the success of this forestry work is due to the efforts of Elias Ebert, the local logger who fells the trees, skids them out of the forest, and finds the best buyers for the logs.  Elias is quite gifted with a chainsaw. After the pine starts to go down, he quickly puts down his saw and gets out of the way.  Seconds later, a large branch falls right on the spot where he was standing. [NOTE:  The man indicating where the tree is going to land at the beginning of the clip is Ken Bontrager, the director of Camp Deerpark].