Dispatches from Lonely Places

The Catskills grow and shrink in prominence as you cross the Hudson, both more and less impressive the closer you get. They tower unobtrusively, long finger ridges sloping gradually from the river. When you enter them you hardly notice they’ve swallowed you up, and in leaving spit you back out. As if your traversal was nothing at all.
The mountains rise on either side of a wide valley as you pass through Shandaken, whose sign reminds you it is a neighborhood watch community. The Esopus creek evacuates its banks, clumps of tree trunks and concrete drainage pipes still as Sandy left them, and small cemeteries dot the woods. Two men are hanging out with a rifle under the powerlines near Big Indian, pointing it at the road. The stream has overflowed here as well, and huge old oaks sit isolated on their mounds, unnatural islands suddenly formed. A Baptist summer camp can be seen through the trees.
Here various kills feed into the east branch of the Delaware, which flows in turn into the Pepacton Reservoir. During dry times the lake is a deep and opalescent blue, but today the reservoir is a choppy, muddy color, rising far up the banks and swamping boats pulled up to dry. I stop my car and get out and walk to the water. At its edge is a natural deck of cordwood, waterlogged trunks and branches, as well as tires and bits of plastic. The wind cuts over the water but besides it there is a surprising stillness. Even passing cars barely make a dent. On the opposite shore pine trees cut through the leafless mountainside like a storm front.
30 goes into New York 17 and the vistas expand, the road rising beyond small valleys to take in their grand wholes. The East Branch of the Delaware becomes the West Branch at some invisible drainage divide and collapsed houses sit on the banks, trees sprouting through walls and roofs heavy with moss. This image, abandonment, is perhaps the most striking and common in western New York, and it repeats itself over and over, in barns spiraled with vines and factories without glass in their windows. In Deposit (town motto: Reach For Your Star) rises a smoke stack with AGWAY written vertically down the side, alone.
Just before my trip ends I pass a Willow tree in Geneseo. Without foliage it resembles a trunk that has been dug up and reburied upside down, the root system draping like rough and matted hair. In the summer it will be lush and beautiful, so much so no one will remark on it. Only in its curious ugliness does it draw the eye.