Tag Archives: Catskills

New York Novels, Region by Region — Part Three!

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For the past two weeks in this space, we’ve been looking at novels that represent various regions of our Empire State. And for the ADIRONDACKS, my thoughts turn to A Northern Light (2003), by Jennifer Donnelly. It’s based on, or at any rate inspired by, a 1906 murder in an Adirondack resort… and yes, I know that Theodore Dreiser already plowed the same ground, back in 1925.

The protagonist, Mattie Gorkey, is only on the fringes of the murder; she happens to work at the resort where the victim stays, has a few conversations with her, and comes into possession of her letters. Mattie’s main conflict revolves around her place in her family, and in society. She has a chance to go to Barnard College, but her widowed father insists that she stay home and help operate the farm. Is she, like murdered Grace Brown, destined only to be acted upon, and never herself to take action? The same questions revolve around her African American classmate, and the young friend whom she helps through the agonizing birth of twins.

And for a change of pace, we might also mention Laura Ingalls Wilder’s slice-of-life Farmer Boy (1933), the story of her husband Almanzo’s childhood in Malone. It… is… slow… but it’s also long! If that doesn’t sound promising, just take it as it is, the story of a nine-year old’s life on the farm – hard-working, with its frustrations, but in a good family and a good life.

Down in the CATSKILLS AND HUDSON VALLEY I’m cheating a little, with two short stories by Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Irving was consciously helping build an American literature in and for the new republic, but always with an eye to Europe where the money and prestige were. He drew from history and folklore, but created NEW legends for the new country.

Most of us know the stories. Lazy Rip Van Winkle manages to sleep for 20 years, awaking to find his world utterly changed – who, for instance, is this George Washington that everyone talks about? Instead of making himself useful, he ditched his hunting trip to play at ninepins with Henry Hudson’s supernatural crew, drinking their magical brew and paying the consequences.

Ichabod Crane, the unpopular schoolmaster of Sleepy Hollow (near Tarrytown), fancies himself the ideal mate for wealthy 18 year-old Katrina Van Tassel, but has a rival in Brom Van Brunt, a classic conflict of Brunt’s brawn and Crane’s hypothetical brains. Brom regales a harvest party with a ghost story, and as Ichabod Crane nervously wends his way home by night through tree-shrouded Sleepy Hollow he finds himself pursued by a headless ghost on horseback – pursued out of sight, our of the story, out of Katrina’s life, and apparently out of human ken.

In a much more modern mode, when we think of LONG ISLAND of course F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) springs to mind. There’s a whale of a lot more to Long Island than we find in Gatsby’s pathetic circle, and yet it captures a certain level of Long Island life.

MANY people describe reading Gatsby as a lifechanging experience. I don’t see it, myself, but I guess I was brought up in a different mindset. I DO see it as a very good novel, even if I can drum up only limited sympathy for the characters. These are the people of whom Fitzgerald would later write, after Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, “For a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams.” But in the end, he observed, “we would all have one more.”

Next week – New York, New York! It’s a hell of a literary town!

Fifty Milk Cans: The Story of Richard Storm

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Once upon a time, one of the most famous writers in America was Walter D. Edmonds. He was an Upstater, and his novels brought Upstate to a fascinated readership coast to coast. He’s mostly remembered for two books now: Drums along the Mohawk (which became a hit movie starring Henry Fonda) and The Matchlock Gun (which won the Newbery Medal for the year’s most distinguished contribution to children’s literature). He also won the National Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
The Matchlock Gun takes place at Guilderland in Albany County – suburban now, but very much frontier back in 1756, during the French and Indian War.
Edmonds tells a story that he says has been handed through two centuries by the family of ten year-old Edward van Alstyne and his mother Gertrude. With militia (including the boy’s father) in the field hunting a raiding party, Gertrude loads an obsolete Spanish matchlock gun brought over three generations earlier from the Netherlands, sets it up (the thing’s huge), and coaches Edward in how to use it.
That night she’s attacked, barely making it to the house with a crippling wound. As five attackers charge Edward lets loose with the matchlock gun, whose great shotgun-like blast kills three of the five attackers and wounds a fourth, driving the survivors off. The mother survived, but lost the use of one arm.
Coming out in 1941, just as we were sucked into the Second World War, Edward’s and Gertrude’s story probably struck a chord with frightened Americans who felt themselves under siege. But in 1974 Walter Edmonds published an altogether different children’s book. While The Matchlock Gun is set in a small tense compass, The Story of Richard Storm makes a rollicking romp through Upstate. William Sauts Bock illustrated the picture book.
Richard is one of the many children of old Mother Catskill, who sends her little thunderstorms out to play, racing around the mountains and the Hudson River Valley. Richard, on the other hand, won’t budge. He only sits at home, laying his plans while getting bigger and bigger.
And bigger. At last he sets off without a word to Mother, but heading WEST, rather than east. He pushes through Diamond Notch between West Kill and Hunter Mountains (in Greene County) and rampages into central New York.
From there it’s a short hop to Gilboa in Scoharie Countty, where Richard blasts lightning down the whole length of the reservoir, worrying the residents with this early start to the season. Next stop Otsego County, where Richard strips the trees along Charlotte Creek, blasts a poultry barn to flinders, tears down trees in Oneonta and even blows up a freight car.
He quickly tears across Unadilla Valley and the Butternut Creek before turning north across Oneida lake; by now he’s big enough to cover half a county. Exalted with himself, Richard kills a whole dairy herd and terrorizes picnickers before jumping Tug Hill into Black River Valley, on the edge of the Adirondacks.
But by now Richard Storm is even out of his own control – he’s become a tornado, capriciously wrecking houses and churches and yanking the cables from Snow Ridge ski slopes near Turin. In Port Leyden he turns a house around. Hawkinsville loses a pile of firewood, and Forestport Flats the good part of a pine plantation. He bowls fifty milk cans down the street in Remsen “in a clatter that has not yet been forgotten.” Richard rips the roof from a home in Olden Barneveld, then spins on up Deerfield Hill, from which he spies the target-rich environment of the Mohawk Valley… the river, the railroad, the Thruway, the Barge Canal, and even the City of Utica. But the twisting cloud continues to rise from the top of the hill, finally ending the career of a frustrated Richard Storm.
Walter Edmonds wrote some tremendous stuff, and this is definitely a minor work. But he clearly had fun with it and so, we imagine, did his grandchildren. Read it to young kids, especially if they know any of the territory. Get out a map, and follow Richard’s route. They’ll love seeing places that they know in the pages of a book. And what kid wouldn’t love to roll fifty milk cans down a village street?