§1 Foreword

How absurd it is to imagine man living in a time completely disassociated from space. How absurd, yet when it comes down to it, how casually we pretend it can be done. Day by day, we do our best to obliterate all ups and downs, all spatial differences and textural dimensions. Almost absent-mindedly, we cut down our trees, level our Hills, straighten our roads, and pave over our schoolyards. What we call progress becomes a kind of ignorant plot against the nervous systems of our children and their social future.

Can you remember your own childhood without remembering where it took place? I can't! I see now in my mind's eye every hummock, almost every raspberry bush in a pasture on a farm in Scotland, Connecticut. I was only six years old when I lived there, and I lived there only six weeks. And the pasture in Scot­land re-evokes other places: places of warmth and coolness, of in­tense excitement, places of loving and, most of all, of being loved.

Today, in their turn, my own children are seven and nine, and it is already four years since we left Pine Plains. Yet with what shouts they remember the great hollow bee tree, and the patch of chives beyond it, and shooting pooh sticks through a culvert on the way down Bean River Road. And up on Globe Hill behind our house, there was a little ground cedar which used to stick up over the snow. We called it the "cactus Indian." Here too, on this Vermont farm, they have been naming places: Frog Hollow, Mouse Corner, Hidden Meadow, Kissing Tree and Crooked Birch. And an intimate sense of place is clearly not parenthetical with them. Particular places are the navigation lore of childhood. And now in the heat and difficulties of our late lives, remembered places become anchor blocks - primordial gyroscopes to keep us steady and going on; to bring us back to our senses, so to speak; to remind us of what is most important; of why we are here. Perhaps this is what Wordsworth means when he says, "Heaven surrounds us in our infancy." With some of this in mind, I think, our Society from its beginning has tried to focus on the places as well as on the people of historical action.

One cannot write history, of course, without a very basic under­standing of the economic limitations of soil type, of the avail­ability of water, or of the distance of a given farm from market at a particular time. Yet all of this may be of no more importance to a farm's success or failure than a farmboy's sheer exuberance as he yodeled cows down a favorite lane and out of a back pasture -or perhaps than his memory of his mother as she moved about her kitchen garden. What is it, really, that makes us glad to be alive?

One of our first projects as a historical society was to engage Alvis Upitis to photograph certain of the great trees of Pine Plains over the cycle of seasons. We have, too, held several enjoyable and mutually profitable meetings with the Pine Plains Garden Club. At the Harris-Husted house, it is very much a part of our plans to have a characteristic herb garden and other planting. Over the years, we have spent several weekends entertaining the New York section of the Appalachian Mountain Club when they came to shoot the rapids of the Roeliff-Jansen Kill, to explore Stissing Mountain, or to walk the old railroad rights of way. Even our failures illustrate our interest and concern. One of our greatest disappointments has been our lassitude in laying out and clearing a system of walks and paths from Hammertown upstream along the Shekomeko: paths which would touch the major mill-sites but which would also open for all of us again the birds and stream life which we need to experience from time to time. Clearly we have felt it a major task of our historical society to explore and celebrate our memorable and changing landscape.

This second volume of historical essays is certainly not meant to be an exhaustive examination of the natural history of our area. It is rather a first attempt to describe and annotate in per­sonal terms the Hills and dales, the unique flora and fauna which have meant something to us. What this volume wishes to say is that each of us cannot think of our own personal history without also thinking of a score of pleasant walks up Stissing Mountain, of hundreds of blooming peonies, of Thompson Pond changing with the seasons, of the great Angus herd moving ponderously over the old lake beds of Briarcliff, or of walking eastward across the fields past the Morris Graham house on a Sunday afternoon after church. How exciting it has always been to come down into the little valley of the Shekomeko. Behind us are the old orchards of Jordan Lane. To our north is Hammertown Hill. Ahead of us, the great sycamore of the old Deuel homestead.

For history is really what we choose to remember of the past. It is what catches us in the throat. And we remember not just people in some kind of limbo, but people and animals moving across a familiar landscape - changing it, being changed by it, but always holding it close.

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