Are you familiar with the writing of Woodstock poet Will Nixon? If not, you should be because of his funny, wistful, poignant poems. His latest effort, however, is an intriguing book, co-authored by poet, novelist and critic Michael Perkins, entitled Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Hear of America’s Most Famous Small Town. The book’s cover is attractively illustrated by Carol Zaloom who has also peppered the text tantalizing thumbnail drawings within. Nixon uses his poetic sensibility as a lens through which to observe nature while walking through the “wild heart” of his own hometown. He sees walking as the last radical act left to Petroleum Man, a statement that would have endeared him to that earlier bard of the Catskills, John Burroughs.

“Free man” extraordinaire Michael Perkin’s ability to capture history in a phrase made me want to know more about Catskills’ history than I already know. Perkins confesses to a “certain obsessiveness” about local history and doesn’t disappoint, sprinkling his essays with tasty historic tidbits that beg for future research. For instance, who were the Mink Hollow witches and what was their fate or what is the Cooper Lake whale and is he related to Nessie?

These two literary partners make a great pair. Michael Perkins’ reclaims indigenous names for the area such as Waghkonck, the Native name for the oldest part of Woodstock, now called Zena. Once a common cornfield, Zena is yet haunted by the spirits of Indians, Dutch, English and American farmers that only saunterer-seers like Perkins may conjure. Will Nixon’s frequent poetic turns-of-phrase when describing the noises to be heard while walking the road’s edge as “pastoral muzak” when compared to the deeper, richer sounds of the arboreal forest or likening a catbird’s grating music to “a robin’s song put through a grinder” or “avant-garde music”.

Will Nixon’s descriptions of those first flowers of spring, Fiddlehead fern and Dutchman’s breeches, sent me on an extended on-line search for information about these two mountain blooms, one so common to me that I have almost ceased to see it outside my splintered farmhouse door; the other a blossom I have yet to discover. Under the simple search words “Fiddlehead fern” I learned that these ferns refer to the unfurled fronds of a tender, young fern that are harvested and cooked as a leaf vegetable. These unfurled ferns look like bright green miniature rams-horns or intricate little nautiluses. Others have likened them to the scrolls or curled ornamentation on the end of a stringed instrument (hence the name fiddle) or crosiers, after the curved shepherd’s staff. Native Americans have been harvesting fiddlehead ferns for centuries. Beware; however, as some ferns contain carcinogens and the bracken fern has been linked to stomach cancer.

Dutchman’s breeches are a flowering plant that grows mainly in the East. This perennial plant derives its name from the flowers that resemble white breeches and appear on the plant each spring. I like Will Nixon’s description of them as “as endearing little plant with flowers like billowy white pants hung on a laundry line.”

This book about Woodstock is full of worldly surprises: Imagine finding the Ganges Delta—or the equivalent of it—in the Catskill Mountains! During their walk through Sloan Gorge, this is exactly what Will Nixon and Michael Perkins did. They got it straight from the mouth of Dr. Bob Titus, the Catskills’ favorite geologist, who explained that some three-hundred and seventy-five million years ago these “mountains” were formed from the outwash of far higher and truer mountains; the Catskills are merely ancient bluestone riverbeds scoured by a major flood.

Perkins and Nixon not only talk the talk in their great new book, which—we hear—was the Number One seller at the Golden Notebook this past holiday season—but they walk the walk.

Why?

“We’re born pedestrians but are everywhere trapped in cars,” Michael Perkins explains.
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I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me how the Catskills got its name. I used to tell them that the Catskills was a marriage of two words, Cat for the wild cats that roamed the hills, and kill, the Dutch word for stream. Roughly translated, Catskills meant the stream where the wild cats roamed. It sounded plausible and left most inquiring minds satisfied, except, that is, my own. I promised myself that I’d keep searching for the real reason the Catskills got its name but, until then, I’d use my old chestnut until a newer, better one came along. With the publication of Shirley Dunn’s The River Indians: Mohicans Making History by Purple Mountain Press, that time has finally come.

Dunn, who is a scholar of the Mohicans and the Dutch, begins her new book with an explanation of the phrase Cats kil, which she says first appeared on an 17th century Dutch map, and combines two sources: Dutch and Mohican. Cat derives from the Mohican and translates as leader or chief sachem of the Mohicans. His village was on a creek, which the Dutch called kil. So, Cats kil or Catskill was the village where the Mohican’s chief sachem lived. Thus did the Mohicans leave their indelible mark on the mountains that now bear their name.

Dunn’s book is filled with scholarly facts, some of them myth-busters. She debunks the theory that the “Mountain Top” of Greene County was used by the Mohawks as hunting grounds and credits their ownership to the Esopus Indians of Ulster County instead. More on this book in my next column.