My father knew the mountain very well. Of course, he knew it in his youth too, but, that time he had to sell the cows and he was recuperating, that recuperation gave him all the time in the world. He spent a good deal of that forced downtime on the mountain, on the trails, or bushwacking. When he was well enough to walk a good distance and climb embankments, he replaced part of the lost income from the auctioning of the cows by seeking out mountain laurel, cutting it, and selling it to local florist shops. It was at least something, and it gave him the excuse of being out of the house, on the mountain, and, to him, that activity fit the doctor’s admonition to “taking it easy.” To him, after adhering to the normal workload of a dairy farmer for all those years, hiking across a mountaintop with a burlap bag over your shoulder and sharp pair of shears in your back pocket couldn’t be considered exertive work, it couldn’t’ve been thought of as work at all.  He knew the mountain from Wurtsboro to Mohonk but was particularly fond of the terrain along Clove Road. 

 

Clove Road was dark, covered tent-like with leaf cover and in some places with old growth hemlock and white pine. The narrow road parallelled the ridge lines and ran between the ridges of the mountain and ran alongside a stone-bottomed brook that ran cold as a Coke machine and clear as Corning gorilla glass. Harvesting mountain laurel was a Fall activity and a couple times, my father, dressed in a red and black checkered wool jacket, took along his 30-30 Winchester, thinking he might bring home a cut of venison. As good of a shot as my father was, he was never a big hunter, at least not as long as I knew him, and I am perfectly well aware that a man has another life entirely before his children are born, but that said, he did not enjoy killing anything, not even a chicken for dinner. I think, in part, this aversion was due to the fact that, as the eldest son on a farm during the Great Depression, it was his job to behead the chicken for the dinner pot and pluck the feathers after dipping the now headless bird in boiling water. I can almost hear his mother, Grandma Eleanor, saying, “Sam, get that old pink hen, she’s not laying anymore, and get her ready for dinner tonight.” The guillotine funnel for the beheading of all things fowl, was still attached to the siding of the red barn when I was a kid, outside the sliding wooden door to the barnyard, the east side, and he did show my brother and me how to do it, once, and that was enough, and we plucked the bird like it was still alive and the task fell to our mother, with her capable Methodist hands, strong as barbed wire, to finish the job and put the now unrecognizable feast on the table, the table with the red and white tablecloth like a big handkerchief. 

 

He never once brought home a deer, nor a pheasant, nor a squirrel for that matter, and he would say, announcing to our mother in the kitchen, with something akin, I felt, to spiritual relief, “There’s no deer on that mountain. Why would they be up there when all the clover is down here?” And the fact is, it was his father’s generation that wiped out wildlife up and down the valley during the Depression and earlier, that World War One crowd, all trained in guns, that stripped the known world of deer, bear, geese, quail, ducks, with maybe a Canvasback left on a corner of the Wallkill. Crows, eagles, hawks, woodchucks, muskrats, anything that moved, nothing was sacred, and it was in reaction to this sentiment that my father rebelled, and the older he became, as reverent as he otherwise was of his father and his uncles, and as well as he could shoot skeet right along with them, with their Parker 12 gauges with the fresh bluing, he rebelled in this singular way. 

 

The older he became, the more of a conservationist he became, to the point that, when I was a teenager, he was taking injured birds of prey to school classrooms, showing what could happen to lively creatures when a careless, or cruel, hunter took his twisted joy out on the targets of the living. 

 

But that was Fall and this is summer and it was in summer when he took us up there and our mother filled the big thermos with lemonade and brought her wicker picnic basket in from the back porch, and we made for Clove Road on the hot days, the week’s hay bailed and the morning milking done.