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There aren’t supposed to be mountain lions around these parts. Sure, for decades, there have been sporadic sightings. Sometimes they turn out to be bobcats or fishers, other times, hoaxes. Most reports simply go unsubstantiated. After all, the cats are long gone. Extirpated. Wiped out. This spring, after decades in limbo, the eastern cougar was finally declared extinct.
Months later, a wild mountain lion that had roamed halfway across the country was killed by a car on the Merritt Parkway. Was he an anomaly? Or are there others out there?
Authorities insist that if more mountain lions were here, we’d know. “Even small populations of cougars leave physical evidence behind,” said Megan Racey, spokesman for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “Scat, tracks, hair, genetic samples. They get hit by cars, shot by hunters, caught by traps.”
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry Hajna doesn’t know whether mountain lions still have protected status in the state, now that they’e been declared locally extinct. “Would you protect a rhinocerous?” he asked rhetorically.
But if they’re not here, then what are these giant, muscular tan cats with long tails that people keep seeing?
1500s: Mountain lions, also called cougars, are the most widely distributed mammal in the western hemisphere. Perceiving cougars as a danger to livestock, settlers set bounties, hunt and trap cougars.
1800s: Trapper Thomas Meacham kills 77 cougars in the Adirondack Mountains.
1929: “In the eastern States, [the puma] is virtually extinct. If there is a pair of cougars in the Green Mountains of Vermont, now, it is the highest possible number. If there are six pairs in the mountains between the Catskills and Georgia, I should be agreeably surprised.” – wildlife writer Ernest Thompson Seton
1973: The eastern cougar is declared endangered. But with no evidence of its existence at all, its status is fast on the way to extinct.
May 2006: A FedEx driver reports to the Vernon Township police in New Jersey that he found a mountain lion in his truck after making a delivery.
June 2006: Christine and Sean Fitzgerald hear “ungodlyscreaming” outside their house in Glenwood, New Jersey. Christine goes outside and sees a mountain lion with a cub. She calls to Sean, a Vernon Township policeman. Sean recalls the incident:
“My wife yelled, ‘Mountain lion.’ I grabbed my gun. We shined a flashlight at it. I got in the car and drove off the driveway and onto the grass by the woodline [about 20 yards from the animal] and shone my headlights on it. It didn’t do anything. I went back in the house. I told my wife, ‘I’m not going to shoot it. What are we going to do?’ I was new, I’m like, god if I call the guys on the midnight shift I’m never going to hear the end of it. I didn’t want to be known as the crazy guy that saw the mountain lion.”
State authorities tell the Fitzgeralds that they likely saw a rangy coyote or a golden retriever. “I’ve dealt with struck coyotes,” said Sean. “This was a big cat. It had that cat face, and it was huge. It was definitely a mountain lion.”
The next morning, the Fitzgeralds find dead bodies of a stray cat and three kittens – the source of the screaming – covered in pine needles and brush.
March 2011: After a five-year study, US Fish & Wildlife determines there is no reproducing population of mountain lions in these parts. The eastern cougar – on the endangered species list since the seventies – is declared extinct. Other than a patch in Florida’s Everglades, the mountain lion has been exterminated east of the Mississippi.
June 2011: A cougar is killed by a car on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. At first, authorities presume it is an escaped exotic pet. But an autopsy shows he was a wild young male that traveled halfway across the country from South Dakota, the first confirmed wild mountain lion in Connecticut in over a century. He is not an eastern cougar, but a western itinerant that roamed exponentially farther than mountain lions have ever been known to travel. His existence begs the question: what else don’t we know about the shyest creature in North America?
October 2011: Security guard Chris Homan sees a huge tan cat in Pawling, NY stalk across a narrow back road while patrolling in a Jeep shortly after midnight. At first he takes it to be a bobcat. “It took me by surprise how big it was. With the tail, it was probably like the length of the front of a car – the front bumper.”
“It happened real quick, it took me off guard. It crept down low, like a cat, and crept away. It was the tail that was very distinct, very long.”
Homan does some research and discovers the bobcat has a short tail. He concludes the animal he saw must have been a mountain lion. He also learns that mountain lions attack from above. “So I’ll look over my shoulder when I’m outside, but I’m not paranoid about it.”
November 2011: Weeks after Homan’s sighting, his co-worker, security guard Don Malone sees a mountain lion in the same area, on a tar and pebble road in Pawling, NY.
“I don’t think I’ve seen one, I’m sure I saw one,” says Malone, insulted by the phrasing of Dirt’s question. “Everyone else in the world thinks I didn’t see one.”
“It was a flash. I was driving on one of the roads at work. We have a speed limit of 10 miles an hour there. I turned one corner, and sure enough this thing in full extension jumped from a high bank on my right side and landed in the middle of the road. I can’t even say landed because he wasn’t down that long. He hit the middle of the road and jumped off to the left in one motion. He made 25 feet in one jump. As he jumped and landed you could see every muscle moving.”
The cat – lighter tan than a deer, with a body about four feet long and a tail about two and a half feet long – didn’t seem at all scared, says Malone, but rather annoyed by Malone’s presence. “He looked like I interrupted something. Like just my existence bothered him. This thing didn’t even look at me, no cock of the head, nothing. He was doing what he was doing. He saw me coming down the road and said I’m out of here. I was a cop for 20 years, so I know that look.”
Malone, on the other hand, was very scared. “The window was open. One of the first things I thought was, this thing is gonna kill me. This all happened in maybe a second a half. And I still am, at my place of employment, very wary of this now.”
Malone scoffs at the nonbelievers who sent him photos of bobcats, which he sees regularly. “Everybody’s trying to tell me it was [a bobcat] except for the fact it didn’t have spots and it had a long tail. It was very muscular. Not muscular like Schwarzenegger, more muscular like a marathon runner… A bobcat looks like a cat that got caught in your garbage can and got its tail cut off. The two aren’t even comparable. This thing is like the royalty of the cat family. The bobcat is like the garbage rat.”
“It’s okay everybody else thinks I’m crazy. I know what I saw. In fact I go out at night looking for this guy. I’m going to put a leash on him and drag him out to the people who laughed at me. On my regular patrols now, instead of looking in front of me, I look up.”
November 2011: Cyclist Wayne Gottlieb crests a hill and sees a large wild cat with a foot-long tail standing on Clinton Road in West Milford, between Wawayanda State Park and the Newark watershed. The cat bolts into the underbrush.
“Coyotes look like mangy dogs. This was a cat. It was at least as big as a big dog: 80 or 85 pounds. The tail was a cat-like tail. Not a coiled tail, a long tail that looked like it had some wave to it. It was multi-toned, mostly kind of golden brown with charcoal accents toward the back.
I’ve seen wild turkeys, foxes, coyotes, porcupines, bears. This doesn’t correspond to anything I’ve seen on the road.
I think it caught sight of me and the car that was coming the other way. I was pleased to see it was a little bit scared. I know my 85-pound black lab in her prime could take me off my feet.”
It’s winter. The days are short, which of course means it’s time to enter a state of semi-hibernation. Now’s the time to give the ol’ body a rest, gain 15 pounds so you can lose it again in the spring. Excellent excuses. But if you’re done making excuses, read on. We scoured the area and discovered grown-ups acting like kids at summer camp and masters teaching physical disciplines we had no idea existed. The hardest part is getting motivated to go check out that first class, so we pulled on boxing gloves, a bathing cap, bike shorts, even a coin belt, and did that part for you. We’ve got your next thing.
Body art
Body Art Studio, Chester NY
This is rebel yoga. Owner Michelle Dawson opened the studio last fall after being kicked out of the Coast Guard for reasons she can’t divulge, working as the drench wench at the Scarborough Fair, shaving her head, traveling from festival to festival doing henna, having a lovechild, and getting booted as an instructor from various yoga and dance studios.
Something new is happening here: “body art” is a strain of yoga inspired by the pre-watered-down sixties, intertwined with with henna. Michelle’s toe-ringed foot is painted an elaborate flower paisley pattern. There’s a cushioned alcove by the window where painting sessions happen.
There is no hiding in the back corner. My downward dog never seems to be satistactorily sharp, and yogis are always pulling my hips and tucking my shoulder blades to make my body into a more pronounced V. So I expect some intervention — but Michelle doesn’t fiddle around. She gets leverage by straddling my legs, wrapping my hips in a bear hug and pulling my pelvis up. Best downward dog I’ve ever done.
Tip: Don’t use the wall as a security blanket for upside-down poses. Not in this class.
INTENSITY RATING: 6
Synchro
Ramapo Aquamasters, Suffern NY
These women love to swim enough to do it at 6 in the morning and 10 at night. I don’t know the first thing about synchronized swimming. The job of teaching me falls to Kris-Ann Gutenmakher of Oradell, NJ. We swim three laps to warm up and stretch against the pool wall. Then Kris-Ann teaches me the oyster. Floating on your back, spread your legs wide and bring all four limbs together while sinking down, like an oyster closing up its shell. When she’s smoothed out the kinks, we add two more pieces: turn upside down and do a split, close your legs and propel yourself downwards. This is called the shrimp. Don’t ask me why.
I join the group in practicing a stroke sequence — breastroke, freestyle, sidestroke, backstroke. Someone keeps time by hitting a metal rod on the side of the pool, which you can hear underwater. I even get to join a formation. That’s me in the purple.
Tip: You don’t need to be graceful or flexible. You find the style that suits your body.
INTENSITY RATING: 5
Belly dancing
Belly Dancing with Sarah, Hudson Valley
“We’re going to flirt with the audience,” Sarah instructs. “Look over you left shoulder, then over the other.” Her arms float out and and up, her head moves side to side like a cobra’s.
This is one of the last rehearsals before a show (not a class for a newcomers) so I watch as six women tighten up their choreography at a dance studio in Newburgh. They are a variety of sizes, and some isolate their hips more successfully than others, but all of them look alluring in their coin belts, particularly when the colorful veils and finger cymbals come out. Sarah (whose real name is Vicki Bell) calls out the moves: Latin push, John Travolta, high five, rabbit hand, four chachas forward and back to get the tambourine. Putting down and picking up the tambourine is quite the choreographing challenge. One dancer, aiming for the wall, slides her tambourine into Sarah’s feet. And there’s barely enough time to retrieve the tambourines, let alone in a sexy fashion. “Don’t run for it!” Sarah scolds.
After class, Sarah finds a coin belt for me. I face the mirror and try the hop drop, chest shimmy, hip circle, hip shimmy (like dribbling a basketball with your butt cheek), and the hip bump. I feel surprisingly unabashed.
Tip: Don’t belly dance naked. It’s not pretty. Everything jiggles.
INTENSITY RATING: 4
CrossFit
CrossFit Warwick, Warwick NY
Why are cars speeding into a nondescript parking lot between an office building and a hardware store? The answer is written on the white board inside what looks like a garage in the corner: If you’re late, run 200 meters, says the note. Behind the garage doors is a Spartan gym, with kettle balls, a rope hanging from the ceiling, a pull-up bar and serious weights. The highest tech piece of equipment is a rowing machine. Since CrossFit’s birth in the nineties, thousands of these gyms have popped up nationwide. Crossfitters have their own philosophy and a lexicon to go with. “WOD” is workout of the day. “Metcon” is metabolic conditioning. I’m about to learn what they mean.
Tonight’s WOD starts with three sets of ten of “your weakness.” I’ve got options. 1. Handstand push-ups. I kick my legs onto the wall and struggle through one. On the second, the ground threatens to collide with my face. I kick my legs down. 2. Double unders. Ryan Hansen, CrossFit owner and former marine, tweaks my jumproping form, and a couple times I do get the jumprope under me twice in one jump. Mostly I snag my legs. 3. Pull-ups.
Next we do a timed circuit that consists of three snatches, then sprinting down the block and back. Repeat for 10 minutes. It’s a full moon out, and everyone has words of encouragement when paths cross on the run. But the best encouragement is, of course, getting passed. I feel ready to puke in the best possible way.
Tip: CrossFit never gets easier; you get better.
INTENSITY RATING:10
Biking
Orange County Bike Club
My bike is a little rusty, but this 36-mile ride is listed as “friendly B pace. ” Sounds like no problem. We roll out of the Salisbury Mills restaurant at a good clip. There’s something primal about moving fast in a pack. It’s not until the first uphill that I start to worry. If I fall behind, I realize, I could ruin nine people’s Sunday ride.
They’re casually chatting, and I’m standing in my saddle pumping. And falling behind. I stop to check my tire, which must have gone flat, since it feels like I’m towing a baby elephant. Nope. Now I’m farther behind. Trip leader Rob Daly is incredibly nice about it. “We’re touring!” he keeps saying. It’s turning into a gorgeous, sunny late fall day, and there’s lots to see: a foundry with massive sculptures outside, Mohonk Mountain in the distance, dams and rushing rivers and farms. But now my bike is squeaking. I am nicknamed “Squeaky.” Lube is suggested. There’s no point apologizing. I just keep squeaking along on my jello legs, falling farther behind.
Tip: If you’re not sure what level you’re at, start with the easier one. Turns out there are two levels below “friendly B.” Good to know.
INTENSITY RATING: 10* (* Note: it was probably a 7 for everyone else.)
Boot camp
Hudson Valley Boot Camp, Goshen NY
I expect an ex-marine and a lot of yelling. Donna Houlihan is closer to Jane Fonda, and doesn’t seem at all frightening until about the third round with the kettleball, at which point I do begin to detest this smiling pink tank-topped mother of four. In a mirrorless room, Donna pep talks six women through a grueling routine, which tonight involves lifting a kettle ball every which way, jumping jacks, jumping rope, running in place with chest-high knees, then doing it over again.
By the time class ends with sets of push-ups, punctuated by lifting and lowering yourself from straight arms to elbows in plank position, my hands are slipping in a pond of my sweat.
Most of the women here want to lose weight. Eileen McCullough of Chester, who started with Curves, then tried zumba, and graduated to boot camp, has dropped 16 pounds in two months. Jess Bridge of Greenwood Lake, who had trouble with a lap around the track when she started, just ran a 5k.
Tip: If you feel nauseous, you’re doing it right.
INTENSITY RATING: 9
Self defense
Thaishodo Martial Arts Academy,
Fair Oaks NY
Defense seems like a misnomer. Grabbing your attacker by the neck and smashing his nose into your knee repeatedly? Well, offense is the best defense. Taught by Gino Terranova, a giant former Mixed Martial Arts fighter, this is really an MMA class dialed down. Gino gives out fighter nicknames like “Tapout.”
Class starts with an aerobic warm-up, and then stations: punching bag, pummeling a dummy, agility ladder with a resistance belt, jumping over and crawling under a rope, sit-ups throwing a medicine against a wall. Then boxing gloves go on for the real stress release: kicking, kneeing and punching sequences on Gino, who’s holding and wearing pads. Apparently you’re supposed to call Gino “sir” — then roll your eyes.
Tip: Lean back when kicking so you don’t get punched in the face.
INTENSITY RATING:9
MMA
It’s going to be rough and tumble, Gino warns. And all guys. While I don’t covet a squashed nose or cauliflower ears, I still have to try Mixed Martial Arts.
Tonight we’re learning takedowns. Gino breaks the move into components. Drop into a crouch, drop onto your front knee and slide forward, scoop your hands under your opponent’s knees so they buckle, and lunge upward, lifting and slamming your opponent down. Time to practice.
I brace myself to be thrown to the ground, and am pleased to discover that the mats feel like a mattress. And the takedown works on unsuspecting friends, too. It annoys them though.
Tip: Exhale when punching to tighten core muscles and generate power.
INTENSITY RATING:10
Beyond barre
Pilates in Motion, Warwick NY
I was going to be a ballerina when I was five. Then I got off track. Now was my chance to pick up where I left off.
But not quite yet — the ballet is a reward that must be worked up to. First, we tone more different muscle groups than I knew existed in my arms with two-pound hand weights. Then I am introduced to the slide board.These thingamajigs are the length of a yoga mat, slick and have foam-padded wooden blocks at each end. Sliding across them in your socks like a speed skater is what you’d most want to do, and that is in fact what you’re supposed to do. Faster, faster, faster, until I trip over my feet.
Finally, it’s time to approach the barre. We stand in second position facing the mirror, holding ourselves like we think ballerinas should, that is, like marionettes with strings coming out of our heads. We do some simple leg lifts, behind us and out to the side, and some work on tippy toes. We plie and jump with pointed toes. I don’t quite look graceful, but I feel like one day I might.
Tip: Tuck your abs and point your toes.
INTENSITY RATING:6
Why are people driving hours for their fix?
Glass mason jars clank as Mary Juliano heaves one cooler after another into her minivan. She picks up two envelopes labeled “eggs” and “milk,” peeks at the checks inside – $60 for 15 dozen eggs and $92.25 for 41 jars of milk – and backs out of the driveway.
For 10 Warwick families, Mary is the milkman this week. They can’t buy their milk at the grocery store, because the milk Mary is picking up is unpasteurized, and according to the FDA, dangerous.
Each state regulates raw milk as it sees fit, from banning it altogether in New Jersey to selling it retail in Pennsylvania. The most common arrangement is the one in New York, where you can only buy raw milk on the farm it came from.
Mary, mother of five, belongs to a CSA year-round and recently installed solar hot water panels. She likes raw milk because it’s “closest to the earth. I’m glad to be able to drink that and not feel like it’s been altered.” She has it with cereal, makes it into yogurt and butter, and blends it with fruit and agave syrup to make smoothies for her kids.
Her destination, 40 minutes northwest, is Freedom Hill Farm in Otisville, with a stop at Kirby Farm in Middletown for free-range eggs. Freedom Hill Farm doesn’t advertise, but since it started selling raw milk in 2007, word has spread like wildfire: “There’s this woman with this farm. You can eat off the floor. It’s raw milk. So-and-so says it’s the best milk you can drink.” Freedom Hill’s base of regular customers has grown to 700. Some make pilgrimages from as far as Manhattan.
Mary parks and shouts a greeting to farmer Julie Vreeland, who’s forking hay from the back of a golf cart into a calf’s pen. The small parking lot has two other cars in it, and more pull in as Mary unpacks 41 empties and loads full bottles into the coolers. Julie and Rick Vreeland had no intention of becoming the hub of a movement. Timing is everything.
♦
When Rick Vreeland says “the milk you buy at Shoprite is just white water,” well, for 26 years that was his milk. Half a life ago, Rick started one of the state’s biggest dairies, a 2,000 cow factory farm in Slate Hill.
The milk was homogenized to break up fat globules, pasteurized, and sold at grocery stores at the price the government set. The grain-eating cows and the humans were pushed to their production limit. Not your government man, Rick took a job with the county to make ends meet. After two and a half decades, this situation “got a little stressful.” The Vreelands sold out to Rick’s partner and bought the old farm from Rick’s dad.
This time around, the Vreelands settled on practices somewhere between today’s and those Rick’s great-grandfather (who died “right there,” said Rick, pointing to the barn floor) might have used. The Vreelands have 54 Jersey cows, grazed in the pasture, and milk 30 of them. The John Deere tractor out front was Rick’s grandmother’s. “I use it every day. I just love to hear it run.” Visitors can see the milk travel from vacuum cups attached to the cows’ teats through the circa-1960s milking system, headed for a tank in a sanitized room, to be hand-bottled.
Their vision was to start a visiting and teaching farm, while creating a business to be handed down to the next generation. They went with raw milk simply because it didn’t seem worth sending 186 gallons of milk a day to a processor.
While the cows are being milked, Rick, Julie, and three teenage girls who want to be vets brush the cows, moisturize a dry udder, salve a bruise. When a cow lies down on the barn’s memory-foam floor (perhaps the most modern of the farm’s equipment), the girls pile on top of the cow, which seems not to mind in the slightest. Time your visit right, and you might walk out with milk that was in the cow when you arrived.
“This is the way farming should still be,” said Rick. “Small, you can raise a family, get intimate with the animals.” Selling raw milk at $4.50 a gallon straight to the customer – plus, recently, pasteurized kefir and yogurt – the Vreelands now have a viable business. “I have better cash flow here than I did with 2,000 cows,” Rick said. “With the respect that when I get bills, I can pay ‘em.”
Raw milk drinkers say it eases maladies from asthma to eczema to cancer. At five percent fat, it’s creamier than whole milk but doesn’t make you fat. One of the Vreelands’ customers is on a raw milk diet, consuming nothing else for three months. That it can be drunk by the glassful by people who are normally lactose intolerant, this writer can attest. But of all its benefits, not the least is its potential, in an age of behemoth farms, to resuscitate the family dairy.
♦
James Kleister, 25, jogs outside in his socks when I arrive, thinking I’ve come to buy milk. A few years ago he caught wind of what was happening 25 miles to his west at Freedom Hill Farm. “When I saw the farm in Otisville, I saw yeah, it can be done.” He followed suit.
The fate of the 200-year-old family dairy in Washingtonville, or the 50 acres left of it, lies entirely on his shoulders. Until recently, things didn’t look good. “It costs $1.50 to produce a gallon and you’re getting $1 per gallon,” he said. “It doesn’t cut it.”
Aimee Polman, 23, lives a mile down the road from Kleister’s farm. She learned about raw milk when she researched it for a communications class at Orange County Community College. But Freedom Hill, then the closest source, was too far. Raw milk remained a hypothetical until she saw Kleister’s sign.
Now she buys a $5 gallon a week for herself and her mom (that’s $4 more than Kleister was getting per gallon three years ago). Four aunts, and a couple family friends have started getting it, too. Polman likes the milk’s fresher taste. She’s into the idea that it hasn’t been processed. Best of all, she hasn’t gotten a cold, sore throat, or sinus infection since she started drinking the stuff.
Kleister’s Udderly Fresh Farms has 100 customers like Polman, but persuading the mainstream is not proving easy. With the privilege to sell unpasteurized milk straight to the public come regulations exponentially more strict than those at a conventional dairy. Still, “a lot of people stop by, they want to buy milk. They hear it’s not pasteurized and they won’t try it, won’t even look at it.”
Not until he builds his base to 300 customers will Kleister feel confident that his dairy and its herd of 35 cows will continue into a fifth generation.
♦
Before she started milking them, Lisa Ross kept goats as pets. She’d dress them up in pink sweaters and university hoodies. She raised one that had been abandoned by its mother in her house, until it started humping everything and eating pictures off the wall. “I don’t have kids,” she said, “so I think I have a lot of animals to substitute.”
When she and her husband John, who run a dog boarding business from their Goshen property, needed an agricultural exemption to lower their taxes, they tried boarding horses. That didn’t work out. Lisa started breeding and milking her goats. Unsure whether she had enough milk to go into the bulk tank for pasteurization, she got her raw milk certification and started selling her milk for $25 a gallon.
And the people started coming. Like the Saudi royal staying at the Ritz-Carlton in New York last winter whose six henchmen would pull up to Ross Farms weekly in a black S.U.V., paying in hundreds.
The Ross goats moonlight as b-list celebs. Ginger was on the Letterman Show, dressed up like a peacock spoofing the bird’s escape from the Bronx Zoo. The rats backstage at Letterman’s studio are so big you could milk ‘em, laughed Lisa. A $750 check from the Dr. Oz show is displayed in on the milk room fridge, along with a permit to bring the goats to the city.
Ross Farms is experiencing more demand than its herd of 50 – 15 of them milking – can supply. “I tell everybody to call. Please, please call,” said Lisa, as she cleans Moomoo’s teat with iodine, preparing to milk her. “They don’t like that, when they show up and there’s no milk. I usually don’t have enough milk for everyone who wants it. I have to save it for people who really need it, people who are sick or have babies.”
She stopped selling to the public this year from August to January, but she makes exceptions. Frank Golio, 33, of Monroe, gets this VIP treatment. A year and a half ago, he and his partner didn’t know what to do about their three-month-old son, who had developed colic on formula. A gay couple, they didn’t have access to breast milk. They went to their holistic pediatrician. The closest thing to breast milk? Raw goats’ milk.
Raised on the Ross goats’ milk, the 19-month old twins now have “insanely aggressive” immune systems. Golio has been using it sparingly in anticipation of the winter shortage that happened last year, even buying extra and freezing it.
But if he should run out while Lisa is resting her goats, the babies won’t have to be weaned cold turkey. “She may milk here and there,” said Golio. “Lisa’s really good to me.”
The pasteurization debate
The milk you buy at the grocery store has been heated to 161 degrees for 15 seconds; if it’s been ultra-pasteurized to extend shelf life then it’s been heated to 280 degrees. We’ve been pasteurizing milk since the Industrial Revolution to kill disease-causing bacteria like salmonella and e-coli.
FDA: Raw milk is dangerous. It can harbor dangerous microorganisms that cause diseases like listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and brucellosis. Don’t drink it, period. Pasteurization does not affect milk’s nutritional value or cause lactose intolerance.
Raw milk proponents: The high heat used in pasteurization is an equal opportunity killer that cooks out vitamins, fatty acids, antibodies and enzymes, including the lactaid that helps digest milk. The milk produced by healthy, pasture-grazed animals in a clean environment by conscientious farmers doesn’t harbor dangerous bacteria and doesn’t need to be pasteurized.
By Becca Tucker
It’s a disheartening stat: 40 percent of the food produced in this country never gets eaten. But look closely and you’ll see there’s more to the story. This extravagance in our dumpsters has given rise to new industries devoted to intercepting garbage before it gets to the landfill.
Here are two.
It’s composted
1.
A yellow truck backs up the long driveway and parks at the unloading dock. The driver gets out and unhinges the truck’s rear. Jill Fischer, who has just started giving me a tour of Ag Choice, a five-acre composting facility in Andover, nudges me backwards.
I immediately see why. The truck vomits a red liquid stream into the pit below, where it splashes. Then comes the overwhelming smell. I expect putrid stink, not… strawberry shortcake.
This puree seems to be what’s left from the process of making either a flavoring or a fragrance (Jill can’t divulge clients’ proprietary information). Before Jill’s husband Jay Fischer came up with the idea of converting his sawmill into the only composting facility of its kind in New Jersey, this leftover puree was garbage. Since 2006, Ag Choice has diverted three million pounds of food waste from local landfills. Now, strawberry puree is one of many ingredients in a recipe that will produce high quality topsoil and garden compost.
2.
Within 24 hours, a backhoe shovels the puree into a pile seven feet high and 12 feet wide, where it will mix with some sampling of South American gourds, horse manure, milkshakes, moldy corn silage, paper filters, peppers, pineapples and leaves, plus a little clay to build humus. There it will be left to rot under a green row cover.
A straddle turner, which Jay went to Denmark to buy, will turn the row to exchange carbon dioxide with oxygen, necessary for aerobic decomposition. In two weeks, nothing in the rows will be recognizable. In eight, the soil will be ready to dry, screen and bag.
3. 
The Fischers sell the resulting compost and topsoil to garden supply stores and landscapers. It’s highly fertile stuff , if the South American gourds growing rampant all over the composting facility are any indication.
It Feeds the Hungry
1. 
This can of beets comes from a Price Chopper. It might have fallen off the shelf or had a rough journey to the store. It was dented, but not terribly. A clerk pulls the can and reverse scans it. Years ago, it might have gone to the dump. This one’s bound for Latham, north of Albany.
2.
Welcome to the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York. Forklifts buzz around the 64,000 square foot warehouse. About 27 million pounds of food will pass through this building this year, up from 11 million in 1990. Shelf stable food like our can is stored on a loft – the volunteers below literally laboring under tons of work – until a forklift brings the pallet down to the sorting room fl oor.
Here, old or punctured food goes onto a conveyor belt that leads outside into a dumpster. Good but sticky food goes on another belt leading to a sink. The rest, volunteers sort into categories and enter into a computer. Our can goes into a banana box with other canned fruits and vegetables. When the box is full, it’s forklifted to its assigned unit of the warehouse, where it waits to be ordered by one of a thousand pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters.
3.
Every Wednesday night, Our Father’s Kitchen in the basement of the Sacred Heart Chapel in Monroe cooks and serves a hot dinner to about 100 people, who are bused in from Central Valley, Harriman, and Woodbury. Volunteers make 50 more to-go meals for people who can’t leave home. About half the food served here probably would have ended up in the garbage three years ago, before the soup kitchen started.
The menu the night I stop by is hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, salad with carrots and tomatoes, and a plethora of bread, buns and bagels. The bakery stuff was donated by Stop & Shop, Shop Rite and Stewart’s because it was at or near expiration. No beets, though. Our can hasn’t showed up here yet, but it might.
Our Father’s Kitchen buys about one sixth of its food from the food bank for 16 cents per pound. On any given Wednesday, our beets might end their journey in a few of the 100 hungry mouths just now filing in for dinner.
E.J. Fox was vomiting every morning. It was midterm week of his freshman year at Pine Bush High School. He’d been shuttling between public and private schools. It was becoming obvious to his parents that traditional school just wasn’t a good fit. He stopped going.
His school friends were highly supportive: “You can get out of here? Cool!”
Well-meaning relatives wanted to know what the plan was. The plan? He guessed he was going to continue following the school curriculum from home. It was an answer, at least. But given E.J.’s lack of interest in “the school game,” it wasn’t a plan he was likely to follow. Not for long.
That September, E.J. went to a weeklong gathering of about 100 teenagers in Oregon called Not Back to School Camp. Its leader, educator Grace Llewellyn, wrote The Teenage Liberation Handbook: how to quit school and get a real life and education. He came back home to Circleville persuaded that he wasn’t being a slacker; school really just wasn’t for him. School, as he puts it, should not be a factory churning out kids. “It’s strange and really 1930s industrial-style to do it like that. That’s not the future.”
Kate Fox had her reservations. E.J.’s mom would have liked to see him doing some math, history, social studies. But Fox, who runs a nature summer camp in Westtown and has a masters in environmental education, saw that her son was using his free time productively. He was reading voraciously, teaching himself design on the computer, making music, and collaborating with people he met online.
Kate took the gamble that E.J. would be a good self-directed learner, that his interests would lead him to find places to plug in and get information, that he wouldn’t sit around and watch TV all day. As required by New York law, she filed quarterly reports with the Pine Bush school district laying out what E.J. planned to study (which, of course, required a degree of imagination). In New Jersey, there’s no required paperwork.
So began three years of unschooling. Kate and her husband, a teacher, worked out a schedule where he’d be home in the mornings and she’d take the afternoons. Kate took course books out of the library. But it wasn’t long until E.J. had fallen off the parental radar. He was sleeping during the day and up at night. All Kate saw of him was a breathing body. “Help!” she thought. “We made the wrong choice!” This “decompression period,” Kate now knows, is the hardest part of unschooling. Re-learning how to learn looks a lot like nothing.
Fourteen-year-old E.J. was exasperating. “I said question authority,” Kate remembers telling him, “But I didn’t mean me.”
Three years later, Kate still has moments of doubt. But she’s also got a happier kid, with a college acceptance and a job offer. In September, E.J. heads to in San Francisco, where he’ll be working at a start-up that does internet graphics for the likes of Cisco, CNN, HuffPost and Bacardi. He got into SUNY Purchase and deferred.
So how did E.J. spend the last three years? “I wouldn’t know,” said Kate. “It all went down in the deep dark basement when I wasn’t there.”
E.J. squints into the sun, remembering. From his basement bedroom, the internet was his portal to the world. He surfed time zones. He hung out in a chat room while waves of nationalities came and went: Americans at 9pm, Amsterdam kids at midnight; English, Norwegian and Swedish kids at 3am. He met 12-year-olds in third world countries striving to teach themselves computer skills, because like E.J., they figured that was how they’d make their place in the world. He read science fiction.
He made $10 per piece writing software reviews for Macintosh’s youth online magazine, which he only did because he got to keep the software. That gig scored him a press pass to the MacWorld convention, for which he spent a weekend in Boston with his grandfather, who’s in the computer industry.
When E.J. got particularly difficult, his parents packed him off to visit family friends in Phoenix. He spent two months biking around with headphones in his ears, applying for jobs at Subway, Chinese food places, Chipotle. He ended up busing tables and babysitting, and learning to make a mean baguette and hummus. He came back with a healthy dose of humility.
That, too, is unschooling.
Abe Karl-Gruswitz, of Andover, introduces himself as an “unschool dad.” He stays home with his three kids, Winter, 2, Beatrice, 6, and Noah, 9. They bake, hike, bike, visit museums, take nature walks, and go to horseback riding and aikido lessons. They don’t have TV, and spend very little time sitting down with pen and paper. His wife, Mary Karl-Gruswitz, works as an accountant and part-time doula.
The Karl-Gruswitzes are trying to start northern New Jersey’s first free school on a farm property in Andover. A free school is essentially a cooperative of unschooled kids. There are free schools in New Paltz, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Monmouth County, NJ.
Tuition at the Emerson Lily Free School will be $5,000 a year, with scholarships available. The mixed-age students will help run the school. The major obstacles are securing the property and funds. Once that’s done, Karl-Gruswitz guesses that about 12 students will enroll. Emerson Lily Free School might be up and running by the time you read this, or it might take longer. Patient by nature, Karl-Gruswitz isn’t prone to stress these things.
Mary and Abe both grew up in Sussex County. Abe is a product of Green Township public schools, Mary, of Catholic school. “Abe and I were just bored in school,” said Mary. Mathematically inclined, Mary recalls how, as a middle school student, she worked her way through the math curriculum and then, when the school ran out of math for her to do, had free periods. “We want them to know that learning is limitless.”
“As a young kid, you have natural curiosity,” said Abe. “Schools can crush that.”
On a hot summer weekday afternoon, the whole Karl-Gruswitz family was at K&E Stables in West Milford, watching Noah’s horseback riding lesson, and heckling a little when Cinnamon, the horse, stops and refuses to go over jump. Noah and Cinnamon are a good match, said Mary. They’re both stubborn.
If Noah were at a traditional school, he’d probably have a label and a prescription. Before he was home schooled, Mary got a call from Noah’s charter school. Noah was standing up at lunch. She asked whether he was bothering anyone. He wasn’t. Mary didn’t see a problem, at least not with her son.
“Then they get diagnosed with ADHD and behavioral problems when they’re just trying to play. That’s how they process,” said Mary. “The intent behind standardized education is teaching kids compliance, how to listen to directives, not critical thinking. The theory is that kids are empty vessels to be filled up. But they’re individuals.”
Horseback riding lessons aren’t cheap, and the Karl-Gruswitzes live on a single income. This activity has been carefully chosen. Noah, an animal lover, feeds his pet guinea pig from greens he forages. He wants to be an animal scientist, so Abe talked to him about different things he could do with animals. When Abe mentioned horseback riding, Noah lit up.
The lesson doesn’t end when they leave the corral. This is also an introduction to horse care. Noah got to sit in a recent vet visit, and what Noah learns, Beatrice learns by default. Beatrice and Noah walk Cinnamon up to the barn, take off his saddle, and clip his bridle to straps that will hold him while Noah hoses him down. Winter feeds him a carrot.
Then Noah requests to be locked in a horse stall so he can pretend he’s in jail. Just for a minute.
Dave Sherfey of Warwick brews 130 gallons a year, and rarely makes the same batch twice.
Home brewers take beer to the limit – and beyond
“Hot! Hot! Let’s cool her down.” Charlie Holmgren bounds away from a billowing vat, grabs the garden hose that recently filled his son’s kiddy pool, and aims it into a plastic bucket. He runs the full bucket over to the vat so fast you’d think his house was on fire. He dumps the cold water in, and checks a thermometer: 157. Still three degrees too hot. He blows on the concoction, trying to cool it off without further watering down its oatmealy consistency.
These five gallons of grain mash will ferment into an imperial stout like no other. Frankenstein, Holmgren’s calling it. Grain Debacle Ale was also in the running. That’s because this morning, as the water was heating up on a burner in his Warwick back yard, a hung over Holmgren discovered his 50-pound bag of premium malted barley was emptier than he’d thought. He had to improvise by mixing ten different grains.
He remains scientific in the face of chaos. He weighs and jots down each ingredient to two decimal points, so if Frankenstein turns out to be the best beer ever, he can replicate it. He tests the pH of the mash on litmus paper and makes a little pH adjustment by adding salt. Holmgren seems to enjoy the fact that a carpenter bee made its home in his keg spout, “so there’ll be little fragments of bee in this beer as well. Frankenstein!”
“We’re close,” says Holmgren, looking at the thermometer. He blows on the mash through puffed cheeks. Then he inhales deeply, taking in the chocolaty aroma of the darkest of roasted malts. “This s***’s gonna be pitch black.”
Dr. Frankenstein, aka Charlie Holmgren of Warwick, in the act of creation.
There are a few things home brewers can’t do, like distill hard liquor, sell home brew without a license, or brew more than 200 gallons of beer per household per year. Other than that, these brew-it-yourselfers freely go where breweries would fear to tread.
Take Dave Sherfey. He and 10 of his brew buddies get together every year to order a couple pallets of malt from a company in way-upstate NY that supplies breweries. He brews about 130 gallons a year and rarely makes the same batch twice.
The Thomas Edison of fermentation does things like let his hops get so stale they take on a cheesy consistency and a grapefruity smell. For most brewers, a pellicle — a slimy bubble thing that grows in the fermenter — is a sign of infection that requires cleaning or replacing one’s brewing equipment. For Sherfey, it’s “a wonderful thing.”
That’s because Sherfey has gone sour. Once upon a time, in a land before stainless steel, sour beer was the norm. But it’s a huge headache: slow-aging, it requires time and floor space. Unpredictable, it requires a willingness to pour a lot of beer down the drain. In America, ballsy microbreweries have re-embraced lambics and Flanders ales in the last decade, but the art of sour beer really belongs to the Belgians – and Sherfey’s getting pretty good at it, too.
Wild yeast and bacteria strains colonize Mason jars in Sherfey’s basement. He calls them his “bug farm.” Some are “organisms no megabrewery would ever want near their product” because they could infect the entire operation. As with his grains, Sherfey buys a year’s worth of weirdo microorganisms at a time. Then he selects certain bugs to make things like malt vinegar beer. Yes, vinegar beer. It’s for mixing with other beers, to make them… vinegary. Seem like a lot of trouble to elicit a pucker? Revolutionizing your conception of beer is Sherfey’s idea of a good time.
Sherfey’s Belgian immersion is not limited to sour beers. In fact, his gold standard is saison, a low-alcohol ale that farmhands drank in the fields centuries ago. He used to daydream about bottling it and selling it to restaurants. That was back when he could imagine throwing kegs around all day. “I’m 63 years old. Something like that would kill this body in short order. I’ll enjoy somebody else’s.”
Every home brewer harbors a dream of going pro. Holmgren’s already picked a name: Warwick Valley Brewing Company. “I’m sure there’s other people in this area thinking the same thing. How could they not? I’d say Warwick is seriously in need” of a brewery, he said. “We’ve got all these wineries.”
In his basement, between the washer-dryer and the CD rack, Sherfey’s inventions bubble and burp with microbial activity. Unless you show up at his back door (his basement, by the way, is fully equipped for beer tastings), the only time you’ll find Sherfey’s beers on tap is at Warwick’s Tavern Night in February. Don’t be afraid to try them.
Seriously, stop thinking about pellicles! Relax. Sherfey won a bunch of national awards in the nineties, before he got bored of brewing within the parameters of a given style. He still judges competitions regularly. Besides: “If it’s in beer,” Sherfey reassured, “it can’t kill you.”
Chuck Lutz of Walden checks the gravity of a batch of Kolsch-style brew
I think the FBI stopped by once,” said Chuck Lutz, a home brewer in Walden known for his annual hop harvest party. “A couple agents came by under the pretence of wanting to check out my [brewing] club. I think they were making sure I wasn’t brewing nerve gas in the basement.”
“They didn’t know what I was doing and they were afraid to ask,” said Sherfey, of his neighbors’ initial reaction to his lawn laboratory. A brewer’s set-up consists of a variety of vats, kegs and carboys, a wort chiller, a mash paddle, burners, and hoses.
“There are some beautiful new systems you can spend thousands on,” said Sherfey. “That’s for the Wall Street hobbyist who needs to fill his basement and impress his friends.”
Home brewers tend to be fix-it guys. Sherfey, now a health coach (alcohol in moderation is good for your heart, he says) used to be an industrial engineer. Lutz is the night supervisor at the hydraulic shop at Stewart International Airport. Holmgren, a gym teacher and guitarist, improvised a fly sparge – a sprinkler that rinses the grains – in the basement in 10 minutes. What can’t be begged as a birthday gift, a brewer can probably figure out how to make.
Sherfey estimates the hobby, including propane and electricity for his freezer, costs him about $500 a year, plus up to $300 on a year he builds or buys a new piece of equipment. Lutz, who brews beer for his and his friends’ parties, guesses that the hops, yeast and grains alone cost him $1,000 a year.
Once you’ve got the equipment, the raw ingredients work out to about 21 cents a beer. When they’re done, many home brewers re-use the spent grains. Lutz makes dog biscuits, pizza dough or bread out of them, or gives them to a local horse farmer to use as feed, or to another brewer who uses the “second run” to make his own beer. (It’s like using a teabag twice – less potent the second time, but free and less work, too.)
Lutz started brewing in the early eighties, when beer selection consisted of Bud, Miller, or Pabst. He went overseas with the Marines, and in Japan, discovered Orion, a rice lager. Then in Prague, he found Pilsner Urquell, the mother of golden beers. A Czech bar would open up in the morning for him after he worked the night shift at the field hospital, so he could have beer with his eggs. “That’s when I just got the bug.”
Now that Pilsner Urquell is readily available in all fifty states, Lutz sometimes wonders why he’s still brewing. Well, it’s cheaper than buying good beer. Home brew makes good Christmas presents for the guys at the shop. His Rex Ryan Pale Ale makes his house the best place to watch football games. And when all’s said and done, buying a microbrew just isn’t the same. “I like the satisfaction of making a good beer.”
So what’s his favorite? Pilsner? Orion? The Kolsch-style beer he got up at 4am to brew? The wheat bear, Belgian IPA, cider or wine in the fermenting room in his basement? Rex Ryan? Last year’s maple imperial porter?
“I’m a bourbon guy,” Lutz shrugged.
More photos here.
From crawling crops to shamanic mushrooms, this is one mind-expanding harvest.
Orchid Therapy
Did you know there are 25,000 species of orchids and 100,000 hybrids? A year ago, Margaret Bridge didn’t either. She was a big-time hospital fundraiser spearheading projects like a $30 million emergency room capital campaign, until an online search for a few new house plants brought up an item about an orchid business for sale in Chester. She was considering retirement.
Bridge decided Google had given her a sign.
She recruited daughter Micki as greenhouse manager, and so was born Black Meadow Flora, orchid wholesalers. The little company is filling some big orders. For New York Botanical Garden’s spring orchid show, they delivered 3,500 orchids over eight weeks.
Two sessions of recent Orchid 101 classes, held at the greenhouses, were standing room only. Attendees learned that orchid roots need air more than water, overwatering is the most common mistake, and bright sunlight’s a no-no.
If Bridge did her job, her students left not only with an orchid, but with a feeling of calm. “I just want people to learn about orchids and appreciate them,” she said. “When I was working and the pressure was high, my little greenhouse at home with my orchids was my therapy.”
– Barbara Gref
Fluff farmer
Hum. Orgle. Click. That’s alpaca talk, and after nine years tending her herd, Marsha Oliver understands every sound – and excretion. “She wasn’t aiming at you,” Oliver reassures when a wet wad lands between my eyes, spat by a female six feet away. Impressive velocity, if not aim.
Oliver was running a Sugar Loaf health food store when she started contemplating a semi-retirement living off her rocky, hilly 18 acres in Chester. It was perfect terrain for alpaca, a South American ruminant raised for its hair, which feels like a cumulus cloud. Oliver saw big eyes and cuddly animals. Her husband, Wayne, saw clearing land and putting up pens. The division of labor was going to be clear at Rock Ridge Alpaca.
They began with four bred females from a farm upstate. Early on, Oliver would run home from the store at lunch to check under the females’ tails for signs of labor. Now Oliver, 60, cares full time for her herd of 27, observing fascinating things. Alpaca, for instance, have an 11.5-month gestation period, but when they’re due in the spring they give birth a little late, waiting for good greens for their babies to graze; fall babies come early.
– Becca Tucker
Fella’s fella
Six years ago, Newton gardener Geoff Crann placed a mail order for 20,000 worms whose services he wanted to engage as compost-producers for his plants and fruit trees. A worm will eat just about any organic matter, process it and excrete black gold fertilizer — and still find time to have 96 babies in six months.
Now that the retired car carrier driver’s bins are bursting with about 100,000 “fellas,” as he calls his red worms and European nightwalkers, he gives the compost away to farmers and friends and brews it up in liquid form, too. In two round plastic brewers he mixes castings with water and molasses for a potent worm tea for watering nutrient hungry plants. Schools and the local garden club have invited him to give wiggler talks.
Crann has earned himself a nickname at the local grocery where he picks up food for his worms in the form of fruits and veggies that are going to be tossed. “They don’t know my name,” he said, “they only know me as the worm guy.”
If you’re thinking you’d like to start worm composting, keep looking. Crann’s not selling his fellas, despite inquiries. “I say, ‘No you can’t have them. They’re mine.” – Barbara Gref
Sensei of Shiitake
Fourth generation Goshen farmer Daniel Madura, 60, doesn’t drink coffee or take Advil for a headache. He hydrates, meditates, and drinks tea made from the Reishi, a mushroom that looks like tropical coral and is so powerful that the Japanese believe that simply gazing upon it brings good luck.
Madura’s re-education began in 1977, when a surplus of cheap vegetables from California forced him to specialize or see his 100-acre farm go belly up. What, he asked himself, was no one else growing?
Karma introduced him to a guy delivering mushroom spores to a farm in Coxsackie, who would become his mentor. Armed with a biology degree and a stack of books from the Goshen and Middletown libraries, Madura steeped himself in all things fungal, including Eastern medicine.
In a mix of spent grain, wheat straw, and sawdust , Madura grows cancer-fighting Reishi, Enokitake, Lion’s Mane, Shiitake, King Oyster, and Pioppini. He’s working on becoming the first American to cultivate the Bluefoot mushroom, which grows wild in California and is cultivated in France. Inside a greenhouse, I point out a slug. “Everyone’s gotta eat, Becca,” Madura says kindly. “We don’t kill anything. That’s the Buddhist in us.”
– Becca Tucker
Farming by the Book
Norman Schlaff, 83, is an electrical engineer three days a week. The other four, he’s the world’s only kosher fallow deer farmer.
He was running a dairy until 1988, but unreliable milkers kept up and leaving at inopportune moments. So he traded his cows for 25 fallow deer, fenced his 100 acres, and pretty much let the herd do its thing. Today 175 of these petite Eurasian natives frolic at Musicon farm in Goshen, carrying oversized antlers and serious pedigree.
Fallow deer have been around for at least 10,000 years. You can read all about them in the bible. They’re among a handful of wild game that’s considered kosher if healthy and killed properly. A rabbi has to kill them instantly, with a knife that has no nicks. The shochet who does the ritual slaughtering on-site at Musicon had to teach himself the ancient practice – it’s not part of standard rabbinical curriculum these days. The slaughter is still the hardest part for Schlaff.
Venison, partly thanks to Disney, remains “a macho type of food,” says Schlaff, but it’s catching on at upscale kosher restaurants like Herzog Wine Cellars in California and Le Marais in New York.
– Becca Tucker
Photo by Michael Bloom
“He learned incessantly from the river. Above all, it taught him how to listen, to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.”
– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
There is supposed to be a daisy chain of campsites along the Hudson River that reaches from the Adirondacks to Manhattan. It is the kayaker’s equivalent of the Appalachian Trail, or so I’d heard. But of the many sights I’ve seen on local waters – including a juvenile whale in the Gowanus Canal – I had yet to see a legal campsite or any sort of trail marker. Was the Hudson River Greenway a good idea that ran out of money, or was it out there somewhere, invisible to the uninitiated? It was time to find out.
I tracked down the most recent guide book. “The Hudson River Water Trail Guide,” last updated in 2003, would be my bible for the next four days. I filled a few gallon jugs with water and into three dry bags packed food, camping gear, a copy of Siddhartha, a hand-crank radio, cell phone and camera. My kayak strapped onto the roof of the car, I got a ride to a waterfront park in Kingston and pulled on my dry suit.
So began my 50-mile solo trek downstream. – Becca Tucker
Click for a larger view.
Day one: Kingston to Esopus (10.8 miles)
Up here, the river is timeless. The tide of waterfront condos hasn’t made it this far north yet. If it weren’t for the tugboat pushing a supertanker, I could almost imagine myself an Indian squaw.
A hyperactive Indian squaw. I can’t stop snapping pictures. Yellow tulips, picnic benches, a red brick beach. Even oil tanks and abandoned cement factories cast romantic shadows in the early evening sun. Every other minute, I quit paddling, un-Velcro my gloves, unroll my dry bag and pull out my camera, getting turned sideways by the current in the process. Just as I get into range of Rondout Lighthouse, the first scenic highlight that you, reader, might legitimately care to see, my camera battery dies. I back paddle and swivel in my seat in a frantic attempt to squeeze out one more picture before the current sweeps me past. Nope. This de-evolution will not be photographed.
At least now I can sit back and – oh, right, figure out where I’m going to sleep. Scenic Hudson’s 96-acre Esopus Meadows Preserve has a reassuring road post sign indicating mileage to waterfront cities like Troy and Newburgh. It’s reassuring because it implies that if you were to consider paddling 80 miles to Manhattan, that wouldn’t make you insane. But it might make you criminal: even here, camping is not allowed.
I camp anyway. I forego a fire, eat cold leftovers, and pretend I don’t feel just a little lonely. I don’t have to pretend for long. One by one, voices pipe up. The freight train’s triple-toned wail, a motorboat’s thrum, a man’s voice across the river, crickets chirping Morse code, a helicopter, a siren.
Day two: Esopus to Wappinger Creek (19.8 miles)
I spent 29 years being ‘not a morning person.’ I’m now a convert.
4:45am: The water is glass. A goose honks. A lunar hangnail fades into a yellow sky. A striper jumps. 7am: Trembling ribbons of light undulate on the bank, leaping downriver like a school of bait fish. Two bald eagles fly from a low cliff, squawking at me. (Okay, I’m no bird expert, but I looked them up in my guide book and I’m 95 percent sure they were bald eagles.) 8am: An aircraft’s contrail hovers low in the sky, a rainbow inside it. 11am: I pull onto a tiny beach just south of the Mid-Hudson Bridge to pass the time while the river inhales.
If you ever can’t shake the feeling that life is flying you by, kayak 20 miles in a day. By dusk, my eyeballs feel desiccated behind my sunglasses. I engage the abs and hustle across the shipping channel to the eastern shore, where my guide book tells me of a provisional campsite up Wappinger Creek. After a Metro North train clatters by, I ask a fisherman whether there’s any such thing. “Nada,” he says.
He’s right. There is no camping allowed here anymore. But where the creek ends there is a hiking trail, the Wappinger Greenway, blazed with markers. It will do. “Nada” is better than civilization, in my opinion. The woods offer firewood and a peaceful place to sleep.
At 2am, I’m not so sure how much I like nada anymore. A dog-like prowler – Coyote? Wolf? Monte Python-esque rabbit? – is out and about, doubtless on the hunt for flesh.
I crank my hand-crank radio, hoping the noise will scare him off. I scroll through static until I get a clear voice. “In the city that never sleeps, they’re getting even less sleep than usual,” it says. “Osama Bin Laden is dead.”
Huh. Those revelers are only 60 miles away. They seem much farther.
Day three: Wappinger Creek to Beacon (7.7 miles)
I oversleep. Here it is, practically daylight, and here I am, camped illegally. Hustling to break camp, I stuff a fiber bar in my mouth and glance up. The world has been colored in with a pink highlighter: a hot magenta sunrise in the sky and a hot magenta sunrise in the creek. Thirty seconds later, it’s over. The sky is pale blue. For all I know, this happens here every morning, and every other morning of my life I missed it.
I have big plans on this short day to cross the river to explore Moodna Creek, then re-cross to my intended campsite, Denning Point, a peninsula that overlooks the iconic Bannerman Castle. But it’s raining, the river’s bucking, and my arms are trembling with fatigue. Fatigue. I haven’t factored that in, but the river is expressing itself via a strong northerly wind, and I have no choice but to listen. I’ve learned by now that like Walmart customers, the river is always right.
I slash my itinerary and spend an indulgent morning at an overgrown brickyard just north of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, to the chagrin of the resident heron. I wonder whether the Metro North passengers can see me snoozing by the fire as they whiz past, and if they can, whether they’d like to trade places. I wouldn’t.
Day four: Beacon to Bear Mt. Bridge (13.1 miles)
I slumber nine hours, the untroubled sleep of the (possibly) non-criminal. (When my guide book was published in 2003, at least, Denning Point was a designated Greenway campsite.) I feel reinvigorated, which is fortunate, because now I have only 45 minutes to cross the river and make progress on my 13 mile day before the tide turns. West of Bannerman Island, the river develops an attitude, kicking up nasty one-two waves; the first sends my bow into the middle of the second. It’s so rough that seagulls attempting to fish keep getting their wings drenched.
It’s time to kick it into monster gear. I lean forward and feel new muscles engage under my armpits, where pectoral fins would be on a fish. I feel like I could go forever.
Hell, why not? The tide has turned, but I keep paddling in search of the perfect resting spot. I peek under a railroad bridge, expecting to see an outflow where dirty water enters the river after it rains. Au contraire. It’s like the closet into Narnia.
This is Storm King Cove. Sheltered to the north by a massive cliff face, accessible only by kayak or canoe, it may be the river’s best kept secret. I haven’t had a beer in four days and I don’t particularly want one. I just want to live right here, on a shelf halfway up the cliff, where hawks take off without flapping a wing, watching a tugboat tug by.
But I have promises to keep; specifically, a photographer to meet at 5pm. Blissed out after six hours in Shangri-la, I book it past West Point, getting a wave from a well built cadet in a blue polo shirt. Bear Mountain Bridge appears before I expect it.
I pull off at a beach and finish my book. I talk to fishermen. I’m dawdling. I don’t want the trip to end – ever. The wind and tide have carried off my ego. I have never felt so peaceful.
dirt
Healthy living from the ground up July-August 2011
In this issue
- photosynthesis … Hay is for horses and for municipal garages, too
- poetry … Weeds are wise. Even the dandelion is an oracle.
- friends … Bags under your eyes? blame the deerstuds
- studs … Our world-class disc golf course has a pro to match
- dig it … Practice zucchini birth control, and stop making fun!
- debatable … Let’s get technical: the electric-hybrid faceoff
- yonder … Dying not to be embalmed? You’re not alone
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get out … Local farmers + top chefs / This 5-course meal is not to be missed
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griterati … What industrial revolution? Farmers love their beasts of burden
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born again … Stable ground for migrant kids: From Mexico to House on the Hill
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homemade … The BLT has met its match. Bacon’s out; the tomato can stay
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news&views … Tying the knot in hemp: Notes from a green wedding
About Dirt …
Corporate
BETTY ALLEN, director of sales & marketing
BECCA TUCKER, editor
BARBARA GREF, contributing editor
HEATHER MORMILE, editorial design manager
FRANKENY DESIGN, creative design consultants
TIA BERTOLOTTI, production & finance
Art and production
BETH MORIARTY, graphic design manager
SHARON GANNON, pre-press coordinator
NANCY KRIZ, production coordinator
Advertising sales (845.469.9000)
BETTY ALLEN, director of sales & marketing
LORI MARRIE, sales executive
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Meet the local sun pioneers
It started with Andy Mulvihill. Dirt heard he was planning to start a 100-acre solar farm, so we called him. He confirmed. By the way, he said, Heaven Hill Farm is doing a field, and the PAL did one. Heaven Hill’s Martin Theobald said yes, he’s about to go before the town land use board for permission to install a ground mount, and by the way, there’s solar on the roof of the flower shop next to Highland Bank. And just like that, they started coming out of the woodwork. Dirt invited ten people to our “who’s who in local solar” photo shoot. Fifteen showed up, and at the shoot we learned of a handful more who should have been there. It looks like solar has arrived.
Why are we going solar?
- I know it’s the right thing from an environmental standpoint, but I don’t know from a financial standpoint. The verdict is not in yet… Sometimes I just do things out of impulsiveness. – Steve Pennings, Pennings Farm, Warwick
Steve Pennings at his Warwick farm
- Because it’s the green thing. I wanted to do it just to save energy. It could be profitable and it might not be profitable. – Martin Theobald, Heaven Hill Farm, Vernon
- The environment was our primary incentive. It’s an average 12-year payback, we’re not going to make a killing here. Plus, it’s very timely now with all this nonsense going on the Middle East. Here we are being held financially hostage because we can’t get off of oil. – Glenn Maerz, homeowner, Goshen
- I’m worried about the planet, about our grandchildren. I’ve been worried since the 1970s. – Bill Makofske, homeowner, Warwick
- We recognize what makes this area so spectacular. It doesn’t start with the amenities we’ve built. It starts with how beautiful it is. That’s why people come up here. It would be our goal to go completely solar, be completely green – we haven’t quite figured that out. Since we’ve acquired Mountain Creek, we want to be good stewards of the environment. – Andy Mulvihill, Crystal Springs Resort, Vernon
- Most of my customers are average people who are tired of being so vulnerable to their utility company. – Buddy Damiani, Damiani & Sun, Monroe
- Warwick is a little bit more of a hot spot in the county now. Anywhere that’s kind of rural is a good spot, because when the roofs don’t work we can do ground mounts. There’s a lot of farmland. – Chris Bernardino, 2K Solar, Middletown
- You’re creating energy independence, every time you make a house more efficient. We’re importing fuel from countries that are using the money to fight us. – Patrick Gallagher, Gallagher Solar Thermal, Warwick
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