The Esopus Creek above the Ashokan Reservoir is a cold water trout stream. In mid-summer some few catfish and bass might migrate up from the impoundment to take up residence in the stream, but in Spring only trout and other cold-adapted species are active in its icy waters. My older brother Al and I have been fishing the Esopus since I can remember. When we were boys, Dad would take us on weekend trips to the Woodlands Campground which was situated on a tributary of the Esopus. We would fish our way downstream to the where the little creek met the big creek near Phoenicia, NY.
The Esopus wends it way through the Catskills in Ulster County, the character of the stream changing with place and season. Upstream of Shandaken it is a small stream of rapid runs and pocket water with overhanging branches limiting casting room. At Shandaken is the "portal", an inlet for the system which controls the level of water in the Ashokan reservoir. The Ashokan is the linchpin impoundment for the Northern Catskill watershed area supplying fresh water to New York City far to the south. The inlet at Shandaken has scoured out a large, deep hole in the stream bottom making it a gathering place for fish. "Meat fisherman" favor this area and it is usually crowded with them, sinking their baited hooks down deep into the swirling pool. Downstream of the portal, the stream broadens and meanders through the valley between high Catskill mountains. In some places it is wide and shallow and riffles over gravel beds, elsewhere it narrows into deep, fast runs. At Phoenicia, it is fed by two tributaries and grows powerful. It widens here and often has a shallow look, but mostly runs too deep to wade completely across at any one spot. There is good trout water all long this section until it empties itself into the reservoir at Boiceville. It exits the reservoir at Hurley, NY and continues to the Hudson, but it is more a warm-water creek below the Ashokan and is rarely fished by the trouter. The Ashokan Reservoir itself can provide good rainbow trout fishing in the spring. Most reservoir 'bows are caught on minnows by still-fishing from boats. The rainbows head upstream to spawn in the Spring and this is of great interest to fisherman, as all the spawning trout are big. I have twice hooked, and failed to land, very large rainbows during cold, nasty weather in April on the Esopus, once near Mt. Tremper, once just downstream of Phoenicia.
I recall one trip in particular to the Woodlands campground in the Spring of my eleventh year. The day we arrived my older brother Al and I fished our way downstream without so much as a sniff from the trout. Getting skunked was nothing new or even unusual with us but the fishing this day was truly slow. We did not see anyone catch a single trout all day. All the fisherman we encountered were as fishless as we were. It was a beautiful day, otherwise. It was warm and clear in a good world where my father was still young and strong and my older brother and I were still boys happy to be included in a congress of menfolk. Accompanying us were my uncle Bob Cassidy and my Dad's friend Lynn Lyford who had so often been with us on other fishing and camping trips.
We returned to the campground to pitch camp and start supper in the late afternoon of that first day. A troop of Boy Scouts in their paramilitary attire was marching in and occupying the wood lean-to's athwart the stream bank. They snapped-to and front-and-centered about as their Eagle Scouts and troop leaders barked orders. The adult troop leaders were, in those days, largely veterans of the Korean and World wars and had not yet got the military out of their systems. Some few had seen combat, others had been in supply or other rear echelon duty while the great wars raged. None missed the confused terror of combat but all missed the camaraderie of barracks life. Now, they played army-camp with their young charges.
I was not in the Boy Scouts, though I had been invited to join a few months earlier. After school one crisp day I was talking with an acquaintance named Dave Berman. He was not really a friend, just a classmate. Chuck Paine -- a very decent kid -- approached me and asked Dave and me if we would like to join the Boy Scouts. I remember being flattered at being asked by Chuck as he was a very popular guy at school. I agreed to show up at the appointed time and place that coming Friday with Dave.
The meeting took place as scheduled in the basement of a local Protestant Church. The single adult Troop leader turned the meeting over to the senior Scouts and made off for the local Irish gin mill. There were about a dozen newcomers -- "tenderfoots" to the official Scouts. We were made to stand at attention in our civies and practice saluting while several self-important uniformed Scouts chewed us out over trivialities. They grilled us on our knowledge of camping and woodsmanship. One rather tubby boy, who appeared somewhat older than the rest was particularly displeased with us. He warned us that this was an evaluation process and we stood to be "black-balled" were we found to be sufficiently wanting. When none of us knew how to tie a double-hitch knot or whatnot, he was exasperated. When we neither knew a cross-over slip knot, he was apoplectic. I figured Tubby for a schoolyard bully who had found in the Scouts an outlet for his petty brutalities. After twenty minutes of group-abuse, we were led individually into a separate room to be interviewed.
I was selected as the first to be led into this private room. The fair-sized room seemed to serve as the church's storage closet. It was packed with boxes and had several folded tables and chairs stacked against the wall. The Scouts had errected one of the tables at the far end of the room. Behind it sat Tubby and several of his servile lackeys. I had been instructed to walk to the table, salute, and announce myself as "Tenderfoot Lockwood reporting as ordered, sir!" I was to stand throughout the interview. These things I did. I was quite nervous, but the interview turned out to be nothing at all, really. Where did I go to school? What grade? How old was I? What church did I attend? What does your father do? Any brothers or sisters? That was it. Nobody bothered even to write the answers down.
After all of the tenderfoots (tenderfeet?) were interviewed, we waited for the caucused senior Scouts to vote on our individual worthiness. After some minutes, the door to the inner sanctum opened and a lackey appeared. "Berman!" he piped. Dave walked to the room and entered. The door was closed behind him. A minute later the door opened and Dave walked out. He strolled casually to the table where our jackets lay and picked his up and put it on. He did not say anything. I went over to him as he was heading out the door. "Hey, where are you going?" I asked. "Home", he said, "black-balled. It's okay, it don't mean nothing." I stood there too stunned to speak as he sauntered out into the night and was gone.
We were called to fall-in single-file at attention as Tubby and his pals emerged from the judgement chamber. Tubby stood stern-faced as a lackey intoned our names one-by-one, paused, and said "accepted into our troop". Berman's name was not mentioned. I was distracted, standing there trying to imagine what could possibly have caused Berman to be rejected. Had he told them all to screw off, or something? I went over my answers to the simple questions I had been asked. There was just nothing there. Tubby then started in on an inane suite of clichés on what it means to be a Scout, about honor, truthfulness, loyalty, this stuff, that stuff, la-dee-da-da-day. He was in mid flummery when a blinding flash of revelation lit the interior of my skull -- What church do you attend? Tubby himself had asked that question. I had indicated the Christ the King Catholic church up the hill a block or so. All of the other Scout-candidates would have answered the same except the kid who I knew was a member of the Episcopal church over on Palisade Avenue. Oh yes, and David Berman. I knew instantaneously and with utter certainty exactly what had happened. Berman was jewish. These dinks had blackballed Berman because he was jewish.
At the conclusion of his remarks, Tubby announced "At Ease!" There was mixing and talk and jocularity. Tubby was now smiling and fat and jovial -- just like Hermann Goering. I was only a kid at the time. I knew nothing from boycotts -- didn't even know the word. Yet I knew that I would not be returning next Friday. It was not really a protest. It was simply that I had decided that I did not like these people. David Berman was not even my friend, but I had shown up with him. He was a classmate. So to hell with the Boy Stinkin' Scouts of America. My parents were somewhat put out the next Friday when I told them I had decided against joining the Scouts. They thought I was being my usual moody self. When prodded, I just said that I didn't like it much, it was no fun. I cannot really say why I did not tell them the real reason. A few months later, I decided against becoming an altar boy when, at altar boy practice, the reverend Father Foley of my church told an appalling joke to amuse the altar boy candidates. The joke was about the first black astronaut and it featured such funny lines as they'll be a coon on the moon by June and [punchline] the jig is up!. I had to sit there with a slap-happy grin frozen on my face as Father John J. Stinkin' Foley had my friends rolling in the church aisles. Sheesh! He was in church, standing right in front of a crucifix depicting Jesus dying for Foley's worthless soul when he told that joke. We had been excused from class at the Catholic grade school to attend the altar-boy meeting. Upon returning to class, my imbecile fellow servants of Christ begged Sister Mary Catharine to be allowed to share Father Foley's story with the whole class. Amazed, I asked to be excused and went and hid in the bathroom for ten minutes. I never revealed that experience to my parents, either. My parents, like most of the depression and WWII generation, had an over-developed respect for authority and for societal institutions. I knew that they would rather think that their son was a liar than lodge a complaint against the Boy Scouts of America or complain to the diocese about a priest who told blatantly racist jokes to schoolboys in his charge.
I thought of Tubby as I watched the Scouts pitching camp at Woodlands that fine afternoon. I think of him every time I see a Boy Scout today. I think of Foley every time I see a Catholic priest.
As we fisherfolk prepared supper, clouds had begun to form around the tops of the mountains and cool breezes kicked up. My father, against the advice and counsel of my brother and I, had selected a campsite near the entry road. Romantics, Al and I wanted to camp streamside, but Dad knew that would likely turn us all into mosquito-fodder. The site he chose was on a flat, elevated area with good drainage away from the rough wood table and rougher rock-and-mortar fireplace which served as the campsite's only furnishings. We started the fire and broke out the provisions -- there being no fresh trout for dinner. We drank beer. At least the adults did. I pretended. What was it we ate? Hot dogs? Hamburgers? Perhaps even steaks -- the four decades that have past since have dimmed my recollection, but I can recall the rest of the night without difficulty.
Darkness closed in around the campfire as we munched away at our chow in the dim light. Outside the warm canopy of flickering red and yellow, the invisible trees swished and hissed in a building wind. The sound came from overhead and competed with the rushing sound of water and the chatter of the Boy Scouts that drifted through the black towards us from down by the stream. From time to time a wisp of air carrying the smell of rain blew by us. The trees increased their swaying and creaking. Rip van Winkel's wood-elves started playing at bowls in glens and meadows tucked between the mountains. We could hear the distant rumbling of their bowling balls. Thunderstorms were rolling about the Catskills.
We had no tent. My brother Al and I were to sleep in our car which was a long Ford Country Squire station wagon with plenty of room when the rear seats were folded down. The menfolk were to sleep on cots under a large, heavy canvas that they intended to sling between four trees. At the first crashes of thunder, the men hastily rigged the canvas. They got it up just as the rain started. The tarpaulin covered the entire area of our campsite even affording some protection for the fireplace which lay under its very lip, the wind fortuitously blowing the smoke away. The rain pelted against the stretched canvas in a series of drumming pops. The drops sounded big and heavy. In imitation of my father, I stuck my head out into the dark night outside the tarp's protection to inspect the sky. I was rewarded with a splash of icy water which anointed my forehead. I retreated. We sat around the camp table beneath the middle of the canvas. The menfolk broke out more beer and Dad lit a cigar. In the darkness, I stuck a stub of a pencil, which I illogically had with me, into the corner of my mouth and played Humphrey-Bogart-smoking-a-cigarette with it. Thus assembled, we proceeded to ride out the storm.
Thunder crashed with deafening loudness and the rain intensified. The wind largely quit as the storm, having fought its way past mountains and ridges to assail our position in a dead-end of the mountain range, found itself stuck. Lightening periodically lit the Catskill woodlands, always followed fast upon by a great, ripping blast. Rain poured down in thick, shivering shawls. It cascaded through the trees and gathered above us in the canvas. Our tarp bellied deeper as the squalling storm roared and bellowed in the dark. The men became concerned that our canvas roof would collapse. One of them repeatedly used the butt of a fishing rod to push the cloth skyward. Each time a great flood of water spilled over the side and drained off into the woods. The campfire hissed and spit as falling drops found it again and again, but it did not go out. The storm, hemmed in by the surrounding mountains as it was, lasted longer than a thunderstorm should last. It occasionally waned only to wax again, repeating this cycle for well more than an hour until it at last stumbled its way out of our glen, leaving us doused and dazed but none the worse. The thunder became less frequent and the flashes less intense as the storm moved off toward the Hudson Valley to the east. The rain slowed to a trickle until at last there were only drops falling from the waterlogged trees. We all sat there for some minutes wowing at the experience. It was the most prolonged thuderstorm of my acquaintance.
My father and Mr. Lyford, speculating on the degree of protection afforded by the lean-to's, decided to check on the Boy Scouts. Off they headed through the dripping woods guided by a single flashlight. We could see it dancing its way down toward the stream where the scouts had pitched their camp. The boys had been routed by the storm, their gear soaked, their food stocks floated off, scattered and ruined. Many of the scouts were so drenched that they looked as though they had taken refuge from the tempest by ducking themselves under the stream like U-boats in a North Atlantic squall. Dad directed one of the Scout leaders to the emergency phone at the entrance to the camp. A call was put through and a schoolbus was somehow arranged to come up the twisting road to pick the boys up. It arrived very late at night. The scouts trudged over to it and boarded it in silence. There were no shouted orders, no dressed ranks, no by-the-numbers. They looked like a defeated army. Dazed, they ceded their position and walked -- not marched -- into captivity. They slid down wearily into their seats on the bus, leaning their tired and wet heads against the windows. Throughout, the bus growled and rumbled, disturbing the night. Its headlights stabbed two prongs of light into the woods, glistening off the drenched tree trunks. After some time it lurched, jerked and maneuvred toward the road, then rolled downmountain carefully, its rear red lights dimming with distance and was gone. The night quieted to the sounds of dripping trees, the occasional snap of the fire and the distant voice of the stream, newly emboldened by freshets from the storm. I crawled into the back of the Ford and dozed off quickly.
At first light the next morning I woke in the back of the Ford. Having no sleeping bag, I had slept in my undies using a heavy pea-coat as a blanket. I felt cold and so damp that I thought I had wet my pants during the night. The men were stoking the fire and trying to get coffee going. I pulled on my clothes and donned the pea-coat against the early morning mountain chill. The fire was just beginning to spread its drying warmth. I sat near it on the bench of the wood table. I began to feel better. A mug of instant coffee was thrust into my hand by one of the men and I began to sip at it. I did not often drink coffee in those days, but I was glad to savor its heat in that raw, wet morning. The rubble of the storm lay about the campground: a few downed branches, many pine needles, and green spring leaves littered the forest floor. Looking through the trees, I could make out the morning sky. It was gunmetal blue and still waiting for the sun to put in its official appearance. This may have been my initial experience with the pre-dawn -- the time of day I have grown to enjoy most. My father took a flash photo of me sitting there before the fire. There I sit in a heavy coat with my cold feet extended toward the fire. The dawn silhouettes the trees in the background as mist starts to rise among their wetted trunks.
I was sitting like that when I noticed my brother Al approaching distantly through the morning fog near the flooded lean-to's where the Scouts had tried to weather the storm. He had his fishing rod in one hand and something else in the other. As he arrived at the camp I could see that that something else was a trout. Typical of Al, he had headed streamside for a few casts before breakfast as soon as he awoke. He related that he had caught the trout almost immediately and had had a few other strikes as well. The storm had washed all sorts of things into the stream and touched off a feeding frenzy in the trout. After breakfast we had easy pickings in the stream fishing with worms. The creek, low and crystalline the previous day, was now running muddy and deep. This was the only time I can recall catching trout on dunked worms as easily as if they were sunfish in a farm pond. Mr. Lyford had even rigged his rod with a bobber and he derricked trout out of the stream one after another.
The sun rose on a clear Catskill day, burning off the thick dawn mist. The fishing slowed with the sun and eventually stopped. That afternoon, laden with trout, we headed down the mountain road to Phoenicia. We tried the fishing at a few other spots. At one of these places, near a bridge spanning the stream, my father took another picture of me.
I have it still, in faded colors. I stand at the rear of my Dad's old Country Squire with New York State suburban tag number 174056 dated in the year of Our Lord 1956. I hold Mr. Lyford's bait casting rig -- red and white bobber and all -- in my right hand along with one end of a stringer on which four fine brown trout are hung. Crewcut and dungareed, I smile for the camera. I remember that picture being taken in the warm sun of a long ago mid-May afternoon in the old, good, Dutch Catskills. The memory is as plain as a flash of lightening at night in a mountain thunderstorm. I remember the Boy Scouts, the storm, the smell and feel of the woods both before and after the rain, the morning mist and the lively trout.
There were other events in my life that seemed to matter so much to me in 1956: my schoolwork, the crush I had on a lovely classmate named Elizabeth Lyall, the New York Giants run for the National Football League championship, among others. Yet it is this two-day trip to fish and camp in the Catskill Mountains with my father and brother and good company that stays with me. I often think of it four decades later. The memory of it lifts me from the swelterof this desert-city and places me atop tall woodland peaks, where I am refreshed in rustic air and rushing waters.
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18 July 1997