Jims Journal

I can’t remember when I discovered John Burroughs, but I think I was a member of the John Burroughs Society while still in my 30s.  Burroughs died in 1921.  I can remember going to one annual meeting.  I was living in Miami, so the date must have coincided with a trip north, probably to see my folks.  The meeting was held at Burroughs’s cabin, Slabsides, in West Park, N.Y., a short drive from my parent’s home in  Leonia, N.J., up Rte 9-W.  There was a small, elderly group attending.  That’s about all I remember.

Few today realize how well known John Burroughs was during his lifetime.  He was considered America’s first essayist on nature at a time, after the civil war, when people had enough leisure to take up bird-watching and other similar outdoor pursuits.  Burroughs kept company with Walt Whitman, Thomas Edison, John Muir, Jay Gould and Henry Ford.  Ford visited him many times and even gave him a car.  One of his biographers, Edward Renehan, had this to say; “The nature essays of John Burroughs had for more than 20 years been packaged by his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, into special editions as children’s reading primers.  By 1912, these were used in almost every school district in the country – and were just one of the reasons why Burroughs was a very famous man.”  A large framed photograph of John Burroughs and John Muir taken on the E. H. Harriman Expedition to Alaska in 1899 hung on my wall for years.

Since I was headed for Vermont from my nephew’s home in Stroudsburg, PA, it was an easy thing for me to include the Catskills.  Burroughs had made Slide Mountain, highest of the Catskill peaks at 4120 feet, well known through his camping and tramping there; I wanted to climb it, too.  And I wanted to visit country I had hiked in with Bill Kemsley many years ago while he was editor of Backpacker magazine.  We had a good climb looking for the source of the Rondout, a stream Burroughs had written about.  Kemsley was also a Burroughs fan.

I turned off Hwy 28 through the heart of the Southern Catskills on to County Road 47.  At first the twisting road was lined with small frame houses that harkened to a time gone by, perhaps my parent’s generation; vacation houses for folks from “the city.”  Several looked permanently vacant.  Then I passed gravel roads with names like Lost Cove Road, Hatchery Hollow and Little Peck Hollow.  Then came some very on-going retreats: Cold Spring Lodge, Full Moon, Slide Mountain Forest House and Forthaus Restaurant.  Not much farther on a roadside plaque read, “John Burroughs author, naturalist, hiked extensively in Slide, Wittenberg, Cornell and Panther Mountains.”  I had heard there was another plaque on the top of Slide and I wanted to see it.

At the trailhead for Slide Mountain, I learned that the trip was 5.4 miles round-trip.  It was all uphill going, all downhill returning.  Fall was in the air; a few maples had turned red; many yellow birch leaves littered the path.  But the woods were bereft of birds until I finally saw some juncos and a hairy woodpecker.  And then a decent prize: a ruffed grouse exploded near me and whistled away in a whir of wings.

There was a grassy clearing at the top and a rock with a vertical face below me but no plaque.  I figured it must be on that face, so I scampered down and found it:

In Memorium:

John Burroughs, who in his early writings introduced Slide Mountain to the World, made many visits to this place and slept several nights beneath this rock.  This region is the scene of many of his essays.  “Here the works of man dwindle.”  In the heart of the Southern Catskills.  Erected by Winnisook Club 1923

Burroughs put me in a philosophical mood and I made some notes on my tape recorder.  I’ll share them at a late date.

Next: Vermont and the colors get good.  So do the apples, blueberries and figs.