Enlargement

Shortly after we met in New York City and were married, Ross and I started looking for weekend places to get out of Manhattan and rekindle our growing-up experiences from the mountains of North Carolina. She and I had both attended summer camps in the western Carolina mountains and enjoyed the camping and outdoor experiences from those years. Getting out maps, we saw that two likely destinations were practical – the Poconos and the Catskills. I remembered my father had answered an ad he had seen in an outdoor magazine placed by someone in the Catskills who offered to make a fringed, deerskin jacket using a customer’s throw-away shirt as a pattern. (I eventually inherited that jacket and wore it until it virtually fell off.) Also, we heard that a famous trout river, the Beaverkill, was in the heart of the Catskills, though we had not yet taken up fishing. That combination was persuasive, so one weekend we rented a car, loaded up an old pack I had kept from camping days, and a laundry bag for stuff that wouldn’t fit in the pack, and headed for the Catskills.

Using a topographical map, we found a small triangle of state-owned land just below Balsam Lake at the head of the Beaverkill and spent our first campout there. On another outing, we camped at Long Pond, a feeder lake on the upper Willowemoc Creek, sister stream of the Beaverkill.

Eventually, Ross’s uncle, an avid fly-fisher from her hometown, Winston-Salem, said we could enhance our camping trips many-fold if we learned how to fish for trout with a fly. He invited us to his fishing club on the flanks of Mount Mitchell, and loaned us the rods and other gear, except for a pair of hip waders Ross bought in New York at Abercrombie & Fitch – our first fishing acquisition. There, in the same mountains we had grown up in, we caught our first trout (not too many and not very big, but it was enough). My uncle, also a fly-fisher, gave us a “50-dollar prescription,” a sort of starter kit that included fiberglass rod, reel, fly line, and a dozen basic flies. This was 1967 and in Herter’s catalog we found everything we needed to outfit ourselves as novice anglers.

Soon afterwards, I was reminded by a college mate that John Adams, whom I had met playing touch football in Central Park several years earlier, had grown up in Roscoe, right on the Beaverkill River, and who might help us locate a place we could rent as a base for more frequent visits to what was now becoming a treasured camping and fishing destination. And so he did: a small house on Berry Brook road, just a few miles from the Beaverkill covered bridge. Three seasons there, and the landlady (“Widow Wildblood” we nicknamed her) wanted to sell but we didn’t want to buy, so we moved on to a rustic cabin near Junction Pool, in Roscoe, that we found through Elsie and Harry Darbee, fishing and fly-tying friends whom we had met locally. The cabin, though close to town, was isolated on the side of a hill right above the river. It had no water, no electricity, a two-holer outhouse, and we loved it. With two wood stoves – one for heating and one for cooking – kerosene lamps, blocks of ice for an old icebox, and a six-gallon water carrier, we were all set.

After three more seasons in our little cabin, we nevertheless wanted something permanent and one day John Adams came racing over in his old powder-blue pickup and told us “Jessie Foote wants to sell some land.” We had decided against buying an existing house, so we quickly got in touch with Mrs. Foote and eventually, nine years after camping and renting and knowing that this had become “our valley,” we bought land, retained Dave Hamerstrom, a local architect, and started building a small house on the hillside opposite the home of John and his wife Patricia. We rented a room in the valley from Stuart Root so we could be close at hand to oversee construction.

At first, we wanted a home entirely of logs, but found that we had two choices: buy a “kit” from one of the log-home builders (a sort of “Lincoln Log” solution) or cut our own trees and hire experienced log builders to create a custom house. The first was totally unappealing and the second unaffordable, so we included as many rustic touches as we could in a standard woodframe house. We were shooting for something one friend described as looking like “it just growed there.” Wavy-edged hemlock siding, split cedar shakes for the roof, stripped hemlock porch railings, fieldstone foundation, red pine logs for front porch supports, stone chimney, and we were as close to our ideal as we could get. Still, the desire for logs hadn’t gone away, so five years after moving into the house, I began cutting spruce trees, with the help of local logger Roger Lynker, and started building a one-room log cabin just across a small ravine and within sight of our house. To span the ravine, I built a log bridge of the same stripped hemlock as our porch railings. Full of pride, I wanted to name the bridge, so I approached Mrs. Foote, asking her whether she thought it should be the ”Jessie T. Footbridge” or the “Jessie T. Foote Bridge.” She laughed and we decided the first choice had the casual feeling appropriate for so rustic a structure. Now, in her memory and for short, I think of it as the “Jessie T.”

What started in the North Carolina mountains has evolved in the Beaverkill valley as a perfect solution for two lovers of the outdoors, sustaining a great rhythm between the city and the mountains. We never dreamed we would be so lucky.