Up the Mountain in a Windstorm with John Muir

Interlude of the Cabin Gothic

Thomas Cole, Catskill Mountain House; The Four Elements (1843-44). Oil on canvas.

At dusk this Halloween past, under a waxing gibbous moon, in a gale that bent the trees like rabbis at prayer, the forest is haunted not with spirits but with the mad wind. I head out from the crude shack in the mountains that my mother built five decades ago – my mother who now is so debilitated by arthritis and old age she can barely walk. (Death stalks her, and she evades, oh so slowly.)

The place is cabin gothic. No running water, no electricity, no plumbing, no toilet – one craps in the woods – and only a wood stove for heat. That the shack is still standing after all the years of weathering, dry rot, collapsed trees, bat colonies, carpenter ants—and the many investigations and urinations of coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and skunks—is a testament that even the most foolish structure will persist in the face of nature’s attrition and man’s neglect.

For years I’ve tried to romanticize the place. But the truth is the shack is a horrid little hobbit’s hole made of mildewed batten and blackened floorboards. It’s so tiny and low-ceilinged – 8’ x 15’, an A-frame with a 7’ peak – that I think even Gollum fondling his ring of power would protest. It’s got a mildewed deck with no railing, which is ideal for falling off and cracking your head on God’s stone garden that surrounds it. At present, the shack is blessed with an enormously fecund native population of white-footed mice that defecate and urinate on every surface.

And yet, I love this shack and I refuse to demolish it and start over, despite the advice of contractors. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time killing mice in it when I could have been writing the next great American novel. These mice, I say, are to blame for my lack of success. A quorum of mice observing me (always they have a quorum) would instead say my lack of completion of the great novel is due to the drinking of too much bourbon in candlelight and my conversations with the Milky Way on the mildewed deck.

So we go round and round, the mice and I, until soon we will all be dead, and the Milky Way won’t notice.

Now, however, with the winds bashing against the shack and shaking the world like a lunatic’s tambourine, the rodents seem nowhere to be found. Perhaps terrified by the strange electricity carried in the pulsing air that has engulfed the Catskills.

I can walk a half-mile from my mouse-shit smeared threshold and enter into one of the wilderness areas of the Catskill Park – wilderness protected by law under the New York State Constitution of 1894, with its “forever wild” provision. (The forever wild amendment to the constitution is considered “one of the most successful and far-reaching attempts by a state to preserve and expand its wilderness regions.”) So up the mountain I went, out from my backyard.

This happens to be a splendid expanse. Through the forest for many miles I bushwhacked in the late afternoon as the wind scoured the trees. Branches flew in the air like missiles, and in the distance I heard the tumult and crash of a big tree coming down. I kept climbing, now through older growth that hadn’t been logged in a hundred years or more. It was a mixed deciduous-conifer forest of oaks, beeches, and birch that had lost most of their autumn leaves, alongside wild-gesturing hemlocks and Eastern white pines whose needles caught the breeze and shook.

Soon I came to a towering tiered wall of outcropped ledges, through which already I could see a passage, a climb through one tier after the other, with grips for foot and hand carved just so by wind and water. A view opened from the ledges onto the high peaks of the Catskills, which seemed in the storm taller than usual, more suggestive of mystery and legend. The wind blew harder, night coming on, and the last of the clouds in the dusk-light, under the power of the wind, raced across the firmament like armadas on a swelling sea.

“The mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with love on the forests to develop their strength and beauty,” wrote John Muir in The Mountains of California. The winds, he said, “go to every tree, fingering every leaf and branch and furrowed bole…they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly, bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean.”

The sound of the windstorm in a forest as it rushes down a mountainside can produce terror even in those accustomed to the woods. So it was here, as I hugged the rock ledge, when a seeming jet engine screamed, out of control, sounding out from the top of the mountain I climbed, and raced toward me. My blood froze. I hugged the ledge and waited. The jet engine grew louder and louder and at last the blast was upon me, the gale doubling in speed and force, and the forest exploded with shrapnel of leaves and branches.

Up the ledges onward. I climbed as full dark fell on the land, though the fattening moon lit the way. At the top of the ledges, the land leveled out and at last I stopped, sitting like a lump on an old rotting blowdown from storms past. The storm now was raucous as ever and showed no sign of departure. I figured this sojourn at night with the widowmakers flying was bound to end badly, and the mice back home would have no one to mock. So I turned around.

I got home expecting the shack to be crushed under a maple. But alas it was still there, and so were the mice, who lined up to greet me. Not one big tree had fallen across my property, though the place was a jackstraw timber mess of torn-off branches. A few hours later the storm was over, subsiding by midnight with the moon eyeing the aftermath in the warmth of its glow. I thought of Muir again:

…when the storm is over, and we behold the same forests tranquil again, towering fresh and unscathed in erect majesty, and consider what centuries of storms have fallen upon them since they were first planted – hail, to break the tender seedlings; lightning, to scorch and shatter; snow, winds, and avalanches, to crush and overwhelm – while the manifest result of all this wild storm-culture is the glorious perfection we behold.

Frederic Church, Storm in the Mountains (1847). Oil on canvas.

Longtime enviro journalist Christopher Ketcham writes at his Substack and is the author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. He can be reached at christopher.ketcham99@gmail.com.