We met Rudi a couple of times only, but have always felt an intimate, if somewhat archeological, connection with him. Evidence of his hand is everywhere in the Laraway farmstead, so we are reminded of him almost every day, and, almost as frequently, ask ourselves once again why an Austrian baker’s assistant from the Bronx decided to come to Beaverkill in the first place and then to dedicate years of work and devotion, and to spend what must then have been to him very significant money, to restore and improve a place that, in the early fifties, could hardly have invited access on weekends from the Bronx.

The house had been vacant for about three years when we bought it in 1971, but, although the grounds were overgrown, the place looked as if Rudi had just closed the door. We had bought it – including all contents – from Bob Stein who had bought from Rudi about three years earlier for what I believe was, even at the time, a very low price. (We always understood that Rudi had suffered what seemed to him at the time to have been a heart attack and, concerned about his isolation, had locked the door on the house and on all the years and work and simply walked out.) Bob had thoughts of making it a hunting camp, but did not pursue the thing, and I feel sure that he only visited a few times in the three years. (Bob was a colorful character who lived on a large farm in White Sulphur Springs and qualifies for these chronicles on the basis of that abbreviated valley ownership. He was a teacher and musician who maintained an airstrip, dozens of junked Volvos from which he sold parts, and eventually a Republic Seabee, an iconic post war pusher prop amphibian that he renovated from wreckage – to which it periodically returned as the result of a sobering number of crackups – but was close again to airworthiness at his death in 2005. It may have been the tales of a wheels up landing on the runway or the ditching in the mud flat after running out of gas that discouraged us, but in the event, we never accepted his invitations to fly with him.)

Thus, when he sold to us to get money to buy a predecessor plane the place was almost exactly as Rudi had left it. In the cellar were large barrels and crocks which appeared to have been used for pickles and sauerkraut, dusty old bottles of wine with foxed labels that implied a valuable cellar that tasting did not entirely prove out, a large cabbage slicer, and very large tin can full of honey, which, with some trepidation, we tasted and, with the wine, subsequently consumed over several seasons. The house was still furnished with some sturdy 1950s maple furniture. There were other foodstuffs as well as clothing, letters in German and bric-a-brac. Rudi had a sizeable library of German books, including what turned out to be a moderately rare second edition of Mein Kampf. There were drawers full of books on knitting and crocheting which we presume belonged to Rudi’s sister-in-law who spent time with him in the summers.

The garage, a swayback and settling cinderblock structure that could only have been built by Rudi, contained, with vast quantities of galvanized pipe, a frighteningly large circular saw with a take off for a belt for an army jeep axle. Stein kept the saw and the jeep when he sold to us.

There was a large kitchen stove, all streamlined white enamel and trying as hard as it could not to look like a woodburner – pretty clearly the most modern cookstove available at Sears or Montgomery Ward in the early 50s. As part of his sales pitch Stein proclaimed the glories of turkey roasted in a woodburning stove (along with constant reminders that the suffering garage would last longer than we would). This, as we found out over many trials, is a legend, but I will admit that Rudi’s stove leaked smoke to such a degree that it could well have flavored a bird – it certainly had that effect on us. There was also a large oblong heating stove, a “schoolhouse”, in the living room that could accept very large logs and branches and provide glorious, if brief, heating but which leaked even more than the cookstove.

We believe that Rudi took down the original dutch-cut siding and shingled the house in asbestos tiles, leaving only the wood on the porch – where can still be found the carved initials “J L”, which I attribute to Joe Laraway. His monument, however, was the cellar. What had clearly been a rough stone walled and dirt floored (but gloriously dry) cellar had been redone with very thick concrete, so that it still looks like a bomb shelter which, indeed, may have been its Cold War purpose. It keeps temperatures like a cave in summer, but it may get a little too cold for wine in winter, although we, as Rudi, keep a store that seems to be consumed by all hands without objection. The logistics of the construction effort and the suspicion that he may have mixed the concrete by hand, still impress us.

Rudi also did a lot of work outdoors. He built one of our two ponds in what had apparently been the farmyard and rerouted and repiped the Laraway spring. We found two huge trout in the pond which is filled by the overflow from the spring, and stays clear and cold in the summer, and due to the flow does not freeze in winter. They were quite tame (or decrepit; offering their tummies for tickling without demur), and we believe that Rudi had kept them as pets. It turned out that Bowman Owen, our present local highways supervisor, had put in the pond – I think he told us that it was the first one he ever did. At the same time, Rudi planted all of the conifers, and I believe most of the fruit trees around the place, including celebrated plum trees. His Norway spruces were already large when we came in; one finally so overpowered the house that it had to be cut. The fruits, including plums, pears and cherries were in their prime when we arrived, but have since pretty much died from age and ice storms. He had a vegetable garden marked by the remains of some elaborate barbed wire fencing strung from tall pipe, and, as the real estate brochure from which we bought declared, correctly, “too, there is a fine stand of rhubarb.”

The most intriguing of Rudi’s improvements was the hydro plant. In the wooded gully beside the house there is a small concrete building, now mossy and crumbling, inside of which is an overshot pelton wheel whose bearings were still in perfect condition when last I looked. In the garage there was what appeared to be a generator and quantities of wire, albeit extension cord, as well as pipe. There is no year round stream on the place, and I believe that Rudi must have piped water from the copious spring, which does have a good and constant flow, down to the wheel. I have no idea of whether he managed to generate, or use, a current. There are remnants of a large dry stone structure in the gully that might have been the beginning of a dam, and it is just possible that Rudi had an intent to dam up and utilize the seasonal flow.

It all points to a remarkable commitment to the place, given his time and circumstances. He clearly had an ambitious program of improvement, that, we suspect, reflects an intent to create a permanent and self sufficient homestead, possibly for his retirement. We were pleased that he was able to come up and receive our tribute when we had a ceremony to burn the Stein mortgage five years after we moved in and were even more pleased that he told us, and seemed to give every evidence, that he was happy that the people who had succeeded to the place had the same feelings for it as he had.