My father had grown up in the Catskill Mountains a small-town boy. He had an unsettled childhood of which he seldom spoke except to tell stories of a boy's chores on a chicken farm. Most of these tales illustrated the stupidity of hens and roosters and the unpleasant aspects of caring for them (" turkeys are dumber than chickens and chickens are dumber than flies" ). Were we to sit down at dinner during a snowstorm, my father would invariably be moved to relate of the habit of chickens on the coldest winter days to congregate in the warmest corner of the coop where they would pile upon each other and thereby trample to death the smartest chickens who had got there first. The smarter chickens thus died young, reproducing fewer of their kind, and so chickens as a group become stupider over the generations. This was Dad's personal contribution to evolutionary theory.
I never met my paternal grandfather and learned most of what I know about him from my mother as Dad didn't talk much about him. I knew and loved my grandmother whom we called "Nanny" . She seemed a sweet old lady who kept cats and lived near the banks of the Sawkill River in Kingston, NY. It was years later that I found out that she was probably not the best mother in the world to my father and to my Aunts Dottie and Marje.
My paternal grandparents had apparently got married because they were the two best-looking people in upstate New York. This is a poor reason for marriage. My grandmother, neé Belle Dickerson, was a descendant of Puritans settlers who had arrived in Salem, Plymouth Colony in 1637. She was a tall, thin woman of elegant appearance. We have a framed photograph of her, taken on her wedding day standing in the good, fresh snow of upstate New York. In her fur hat and respectable, republican, cloth coat, she can still catch the eye today through the sepia tint of the antique photgraph. Her five and my seven-greats grandfather was Philemon Dickerson, the son of an English tanner named Henry from East Anglia. A dissenter from the Church of England, Philemon Dickerson set forth from Great Yarmouth, England on the ship Mary Ann, mastered by William Goose and arrived in Salem Village, Massachusetts (present day Danvers) just fifteen years after the Mayflower Pilgrims founded the colony of Plymouth Plantation under the Mayflower Compact. Subsequent groups of Dickerson descendants moved to Long Island, New Jersey, and upstate New York, mostly in the Catskill region. My grandfather, Albert Francis Lockwood, was descended from some of the earliest settlers in New York State. Gravestones carrying the Lockwood name dot the Catskills Mountains, as well as the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys and into the Adirondack region. My grandparents were Protestants, but my mothers' family came from Irish and Scottish Catholics from Londonderry (which they invariably called "Derry" ), Northern Ireland. My father had become Catholic to marry, but the Protestant roots of his family lay deep in the Presbyterian and Reformed Dutch churches. When I began to attend Catholic parochial schools in the sixth grade I was put off by the rather nasty references to Protestants in the history books and lectures to which I was subjected. I got a stern look indeed from the Irish nun in charge of my sixth grade class just before Thanksgiving when I pointed out that the godly Pilgrim Fathers, whom she had been praising and from whom I, but not she, was descended, were Protestants and exceedingly anticatholic ones at that.
Despite our family's history stretching back to the Puritans, my grandparents' marriage was not a fine example of solid American family values. My grandmother could not decide what she wanted to be in this life. Born in the small Catskill village of Bloomington, NY to Peter Weller Dickerson, she grew to dislike farming but disliked city life all the more. My grandfather obtained good employment with the Hudson Night Line Shipping Company which transhipped cargo and passengers from New York harbor to various upstate points such as West Point, Poughkeepsie, Kingston and Albany. His job entailed working at the Port of New York. My grandmother refused to live in or near New York City (starting a family tradition that has led to myself and all my siblings settling down in smaller cities and towns, avoiding the big cities). She and my grandfather settled in Cresskill, New Jersey. My grandfather was able to get home only late at night by crossing to the west side of the Hudson River by ferry and then by train upriver to Cresskill. When the First World War got under way, increased traffic at the Port of New York caused him to work late often and he was no longer able to get home each night. This put a strain on their already fragile marriage. They eventually separated and never really reconciled. He died relatively young in 1945, having been born in 1892. Belle Dickerson Lockwood survived her husband by thirty-four years, dying at the age of eighty-nine on New Year's day 1980.
My father was the eldest of three children. He had two sisters, Dorothy and Margaret. Aunt Marge was a pretty blonde and the favorite of my grandmother. After her birth, my father was pretty much ignored by his mother until he was about eighteen. At that period, my grandmother would take my father to county fairs and organize boxing matches for him. They would set up a ring and my grandmother would find likely opponents in the crowd for her son to fight for small prize money. My father was strong and athletic and as a left hander, had considerable advantage over the local farm boys. He won all the fights.
Throughout his boyhood, Dad was shunted from relative to relative and was closer to his uncle, Edward Lockwood and Edwards' goodwife Eunice, than anyone else. The family property on which my father was raised was in Newburgh, New York and consisted of two houses called "the big house" and, logically enough, "the little house" . My father spent each summer in the little house which was a rural homestead on property bordering a small lake into which his grandfather threw him one day with the admonishment to "sink or swim" . My father sank. His grandfather had to jump in after him fully clothed to effect rescue. Dad evened the score by putting my great-grandfathers' ladder under the wheels of his truck. When the old man backed the truck out of the barn he broke several rungs. Dad also spiked his grandfathers' tubs of elderberry wine with dirt. Years later, in the 1930's, my then eighty year old greatgrandfather took a swim in this same lake fully unclothed and was hauled out by a pair of state troopers. He was lectured and released, but the incident was recorded on the police blotter on a slow news day. As a result, a siily-season story on the incident, giving all particulars, appeared in the New York Daily News under the headline "Can't A Boy Have Any Fun?" . My father fished on this lake from a rowboat built by his Uncle Ed, who was a master carpenter. The boat was so well constructed that it was still in use during my fathers' last visit to Newburgh long after he himself had become a grandfather.
Dad was not a great fisherman nor hunter, but he liked hiking in the woods and camping when he could. From time to time he would take my older brother and me off for a camping trip in the Catskills Mountains to a campground near Phoenicia, New York. We would camp and fish, often accompanied by some uncles or a friend or two of my father's. These were always strictly men's affairs and I felt privileged to be included.
It was years before I realized that females were even allowed to go camping. During winter when fishing and camping seemed inappropriate, my father would sometimes take us kids for a drive to some wooded area upcounty and we would build a small fire and cook hot-dogs or just stand around in the snow for awhile. Today, this would be called spending "quality time" with your kids and quality time it indeed was. It had an effect on my overall outlook on life.
I have never got used to cities despite living most of my life in them. I grew up in the old Dutch town of Yonkers, NY (original name de Jongheers Landt) literally within sight of New York City skyscrapers which I could sometimes see shining distantly in the night from my bedroom window in winter when the leaves were off the trees. I nevertheless felt much more at home in upstate New York with its lakes full of bass and pickerel and its mountain streams full of trout. My home lay at the edge of forests that stretched northwestward into lands named after mountains: Catskills, Adirondacks, Berkshires, Alleghenies. In these lands were towns, lakes, counties and rivers with k's in their names, given them by the Dutch or the Indians: Battenkill, Neversink, Kinderhook, Shandaken, Kaaterskill and Ashokan. From the porch of my home or from the window in the cloakroom at PS 16 in Yonkers, I could see the Hudson River flowing quietly past the Palisades - that dun gray march of cliffs on top of which New Jersey was built. I could not look at the Hudson without thinking of the upstate counties through which it flowed, the small Adirondack towns near Lake George that built gazebo-and-bandstand parks on its banks, and the countless trout streams that tumbled down the wooded mountainsides to feed it on its way to my house and school. To me, the great river was my link to Lake Tear, the tiny remote pond on the flank of Mount Marcy -- tallest peak of the Adirondacks -- from which the Hudson sprang, more than it bound me to the great city just to the south, past which it flowed to scour out an undersea canyon stretching for hundreds of miles into the Atlantic.
In the early 1950s', when I was a small boy, my family often summered at a YMCA summer camp on a small lake in Patterson, NY not terribly far from the old family compound in Newburgh. The camp was in the process of being closed and as my father had been very active in the YMCA, we periodically had the use of the camp. I thought at the time that this boys' camp was out in the wilderness, but it actually was near the eastern Connecticut border only some 75 miles north of New York City. This was a rural area in those days to be sure, but it was hardly the remote virgin forest land I believed it to be.
The camp had a main house.
that contained a dining hall and large commercial style kitchen with a walk-in refrigerator. The area in front of the main house was cleared into a sort of parade ground which seems, in my child's memory, to be about the size of a football field in length and width, but may have been smaller than that. Beyond and around the parade ground were cabins nestled in the woods. They possessed a certain fascination for me. I liked to imagine which cabin I would bunk in when I was eligible to stay at the camp in some future summer. The fact that the camp was for sale and would have no future summers had not really come clear to me. The cabins were identified with letters and there were probably about a dozen or so of them. They were rough and unheated and propped on stilts. Most lay along woodland pathways that were often steep and crooked and mined with unexpected ankle-twisting depressions and toe-stubbing, tripping roots. Legendary among the cabins was Cabin "H" , its location known only to my older brother who confidently predicted that I would never so much as lay eyes on it. Cabin "H" was the most remote of the cabins. Only the most experienced and privileged of the boys were bunked there while the YMCA camp was in operation. My brother could not completely conceal the reverence he felt for Cabin "H" and for the swaggering lads who had dwelt there. The camp had closed before he attained the status needed to be inducted into their fraternity. I could imagine then and can imagine still now the sense of superiority that being a Cabin "H" boy must have engendered in the fortunate few selected to stay there during those long ago summers, and the envy and admiration it instilled in the unlucky many assigned to lesser accommodations.
The camp had outdoor plumbing, yes, outdoor. Water pipes lay on the ground about the camp running off toward the gang showers (the cabins were unplumbed). The pipes had never been properly buried and they lay concealed in the grass and underbrush, their presence given away by their metallic thrumming as the water pressure rose and fell. We were accompanied with several of my parents' acquaintances: Lynn Lyford and his family. Mr. Lyford was employed by the New York City Transit Authority. He drove subways for a living. I could not imagine a more awful job. I had been on subways, they were noisy and smelly (still are). Mr. Lyford had two daughters, one was about four years older than me which made her my older brothers' age. She was very pretty - a future cheerleader. The other daughter was about four years younger than me and was much given to earwax-shattering squeals and headache-inducing shouts - a future cheerleader. There was another couple of whom I can recall little. They had a son - a spoiled creature named Russell whom I have not seen and have not missed in many decades. Finally there was Jack O'Connor - a decent bachelor friend of my fathers' who played the piano and created fishing reel backlashes so complex as to baffle Dr Rubik.
Mr. O'Connor could not get the hang of casting fishing line. When cast, the line peels off the reel setting the spool spinning forward. When the line hits the water, it stops suddenly and one must thumb the spool to halt its forward momentum. Timing is important in this. If the spool is thumbed too early, the bait is jerked to a stop and slapps itself down noisily on the water, frightening off any fish in the vicinity. Thumbing the line too late spins slack line off the reel. The latter miscue results in a jumbled corsage of black nylon string, knotted into Gordian intricacies and convoluted sinuosities known collectively as the 'backlash'. I can still see Jack O'Connor sitting glumly on the dock, fishing rod in hand, resignedly tugging and pulling at twisted fishing line. Backlash happened to us all. I remember one time when my thumb caught in my sleeve at a critical moment of a particularly good cast. I watched wide-eyed and helpless as the line screamed off the reel and busheled into a horrific ball of impenetrable mystery. Such things happened to Jack O'Connor all the time. But he was an interesting man. He had made his living as a piano-player for a while and had once been offered employment by the movie star Tallulah Bankhead who had been dining in the dinner club in which he was performing. He was to be her personal piano player, I suppose (Ms. Bankhead was a dyke). He had laughed heartily at her proposal thinking she was joking. As the star was leaving, her chauffeur approached Mr. O'Connor and said "You should have taken her up on it, Bud, she's a very wealthy woman" .
Several years after Patterson while on Cape Cod, my parents were shocked, as was I, when my mother discovered Jack O'Connors' obituary printed in a New York City out-of-town edition newspaper. He had died suddenly of heart failure while still a relatively young man.
My memory is not complete enough to describe the main house at Patterson very accurately. I remember the dining hall and ping-pong tables and the basketball net behind the house. I slept upstairs in the main house in a rustic dormitory. There was a stuffed moose head hung on the wall. I cannot recall if the moose head was upstairs in the dormitory or downstairs in the rec room but I recall that moose plain as day. I was amazed at the size of the moose head. A moose is a big animal. I did not know it at the time, but there had been no moose in these parts in some 100 years or more, the head on the wall must have been imported from Canada or Maine. It was hard to get to sleep knowing that the moose was staring blankly into the dark all night. I had to fight off, with what logic I had, the eerie notion that it came alive when the lights were extinguished. Often, at night, my sleep was disturbed by strange hooting sounds - owls surely - but I could not control the natural tendency of my boys' brain to invent all manner of terrors, ready to commit unspeakable evil and bring my short life to an unimaginably horrible end. Other nights, when the wind was blowing, scraping and rustling noises could be heard - branches against the eaves, perhaps - but I knew it better. One awful night a general commotion occurred outside the main house. It was the sound of hoofbeats on the hard dirt road which led into the camp. Hoofbeats! This was sufficient to wake my parents who strained their eyes to see into the evil dark without. They did not see anything but wondered aloud if someone's horse had got out and was lost, the hoofbeats sounding of a larger animal than a deer. I feared the moose was prowling about, bent especially on killing me as revenge against humankind for having chopped its head off. The moose never got me. Indeed, the fine old moose never blinked. At last came morning with its light and smell of Canadian bacon cooking in the kitchen. My nocturnal terrors dissolved and I dressed and bound down the stairs for breakfast followed by fishing, swimming and hiking.
The lake at Patterson was weedy with beds of lily pads hemming its shoreline. There was a wooden pier which ran out into the lake encompassing a square swimming area which had a wood floor - a sort of swimming pool. This area was completely enclosed and was shallow enough to allow wading. The floor was brown and slippery and I didn't like the feel of it on my feet. I was a poor swimmer at the time and therefor was restricted by my parents to this protected section as were my older sister and younger brother who was then a toddler. Usually, we floated slowly along the surface clinging to large black inner tubes. One time, my father tied a rope around my sisters' waist and she was allowed to swim in the deeper water off the front of the dock with my father holding on to the rope in case she got into trouble. My sister wasn't very athletic and she dog-paddled splashily about for a few minutes before my father fished her out. My older brother was allowed to swim off the dock in the lake proper with the adults. He had actually stayed at Patterson when the camp was still operating as a YMCA summer camp for boys and had therefor what seemed to me arcane knowledge of the lake and the surrounding woods. He did not much enjoy his stay at the camp, however. He complained that every time he and the other boys started to enjoy themselves at some activity, bugles would sound and camp leaders would call them to some other activity. In those days shortly after the Second World War, the adult world was dominated by men who had fought in the great war and thereby the YMCA, the Boy Scouts and other such institutions came to suffer from the military's known weakness for over-organization. " Attention Troop! You will proceed on my order to the shore. You will carry one standard issue bait casting fishing rod in your right hand! You will carry one bait can containing one dozen units of nightcrawler type bait in your left hand! When you arrive at the shore do not fish! Anyone found fishing prior to my command will be dealt with severely, gentlemen!"
There were rowboats and a canoe tied to the dock for our use. I was never allowed in the canoe, it was deemed too unstable a craft to carry small non-swimming passengers. The rowboats were of wood painted a military green and had names neatly stenciled in white on their bows. I remember best " The Colonel" . For some reason I believed " The Colonel" to be the most prestigious of rowboats. It cut the surface of the waters with a martial arrogance fitting its manly name, there was a cockiness in its smooth, sure maneuvers through the spatterdocks, the most and largest fish invariably fell victim to its occupants, and, laden with its scaly cargo, " The Colonel" returned triumphantly to the dock - the best rowboat in the world. I only rarely got to ride in it, and when I was so privileged its mystic fish-fetching powers seemed temporarily dulled. For if " The Colonel" was the best rowboat in the world, I was the worst fisherman in the world - but not for lack of persistence.
I must have cast a jitterbug ten thousand times in the hope of snaring a largemouth bass (or " a bigmouth" , my term for them in those days which I used with an air of familiarity despite never having caught one and only twice having seen one). I cast red-and-white Eppinger Daredevle spoons till muscle fatigue forced me to abandon, temporarily at least, my quest for the needle-toothed pickerel. I never had any luck at all. Partly this was due to the relatively primitive fishing equipment available to me. These were the bait-casting days, before spinning equipment hit the sports market big time. Traditionalist bait-casting men (of which number, at age eight, I counted myself) might refer to spinning rods as " minnow guns" , but the future lay with spinning. There were good reasons for this. Spinning was much easier to master, it made use of elegant lures, much smaller and lighter than the anvil-weight monsters required to pull line off bait-casting reels; and spinning used wispy, near-invisible monofilament line which created no Jack O'Connor-defying backlashes when cast. But that was the future. Now, I had to cope with the miserable reality of bait-casting. I could not cast with the short, stubby rods and heavy black braided line more that 20 feet or so with a good tail wind. The ponderous plugs and leaden spoons I was compelled to cast dove into the lake with dramatic effect, creating a spectacular, drenching splash which rained down heavily over a radius of perhaps twelve feet. As our boat worked along the lily pads, the lake was churned up with these geysers as if we were bang in the middle of a naval gunnery range. Dazed and frightened fish, stunned by the concussion, floated belly-up to the surface in the vicinity of the detonations, as though they had been depth-charged. Upon coming to, they would sullenly slink to the deepest part of the lake and stay off their feed for a week. I never caught a bass nor pickerel at Patterson.
My older brother did. Al was the fisherman of the family. Indeed, he was the fisherman of the entire Patterson group. While the rest of us busied ourselves with a variety of concerns, Al devoted his time to fishing as though it were a vocation. Some are called to the Cloth, some to the Creel. His labors paid off in an occasional reward. I recall the pickerel he caught casting off the dock. He had invested perhaps 2,000 boy-hours in that fish. Another time, he caught a large yellow perch on an odd-looking lure that he had been casting in the hope of snaring a bass or some other sport fish. Yellow perch were usually caught by worm-dunking. I didn't think it was legal for a lousy perch to take an artificial lure and I daresay neither did Al. The catching of this perch on a plug stuck in my mind. Thereafter, whenever I was casting away for bigmouths the possibility of bagging an ambitious perch encouraged me to believe that I was perhaps not entirely wasting my time.
I had more luck panfishing with worms. I could focus unblinking on a bobber for hours, all the time tensed, froglike, to detect the slightest motion. The bobber (Mr. Lyford always called it a " dobber" which drove me crazy) was a hard plastic sphere white on top, red on the bottom. 
It lay listless on its side until the impaled worm dangling in the water below was disturbed by a yellow perch or blue-gill sunfish. The bobber then stood upright with a start. It would be tugged suddenly downward and momentarily dunked, popping back to the surface looking surprised. This was followed by several more tentative jigs and finally by a strong dive signaling that the fish had hooked itself. The powerful bait-casting gear made any struggle an unequal one and the fish was soon landed: usually a round-bodied sunfish with a dark blue spot on the gill plate and bright yellow under the chin, or a perch, with yellow body striped with broad dark vertical bars fading to a white belly, or more rarely and then to everyone's' horror a muddy brown bullhead armed with finger-piercing barbs.
When not fishing or swimming I took delight in solitary explorations of the camp. One beautiful day I hiked along a pathway which ascended steeply up the hill and into the dense woods above the lake. I had hiked here before. It was a long, tiring climb that brought me past several cabins lettered " E" , " F" and " G" on alternate sides of the path. I had always stopped hiking just past cabin " G" as the woods thickened and the path took a steeper grade there, but this time I decided to continue. A few feet further up the path I sat on a rock and looked back over the roof of cabin " G" . Through the trees, I could make out the lake glinting with sunlight far below. The forest here was standard Eastern Woodlands: a dark, moist earthen floor supporting a mixture of evergreen and hardwoods among which buzzing insects and twittering birds went about their business in the broken light. Squirrels, excited by my arrival, scrambled and leapt and chattered among the branches like northern hemisphere monkeys. Looking up the path, just visible through the vegetation I could see another cabin. I did not dare think that this could be cabin " H" , but I had to find out. The path steepened even more and I was soon reduced to crawling the better to keep my balance as I pressed on. At last I arrived at the cabin. It looked ordinary enough, but next to the door, prominently displayed on a wooden plate was the letter " H" .
It was indeed cabin " H" . I felt like Champollion at Karnak, but it looked like all the other cabins - a square wooden shelter with pitched roof and two small glass windows on either side of a door to which three wood steps led. But the place! Cabin " H" stood on the highest point in the camp, but invisible to it, at the end of the steepest and longest pathway in the compound. It stood alone dappled with light filtering through the forest canopy. It glowed with the remembered warmth of camaraderie, fellowship and fun it had only recently encompassed. Now for company it had but one small boy -- red hair crewcut, freckle-faced and checker-shirted in Howdy Doody style -- peering in the windows from outside, never to enter. In the empty interior I made out ghosts of sleeping bags and comic books, fishing poles and sneakers, dirty socks and clean unworn underwear, the life and youth of the proud boys who had dwelt in Cabin " H" in summers then recent, now remote. Those good recent summers already belonged as much to the past as Babe Ruth home runs and Orphan Annie Radio Club decoder rings. For the Patterson YMCA camp was already closed, the land to be sold to developers a short time later. The momentum of time would soon backlash the moose head, the Main House, " The Colonel" , Cabin " H" and my childhood into a tangle of fuzzy memories, alive only faintly in the contents of an old tackle box on the floor of my storage closet.
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2 June 1995