The Little Kebin in the Voods

For a few years, now that we were mobile, having bought a car, a big Dodge,  my parents decided we could take vacations and be Americans, that is, have adventures.  We would go into the wild country, outside The City and even beyond Vastchasster, up into the mountinks, out there in the world of Nature where hopefully the signs “Restricted” would not appear on restaurants or hotels.  So where did we go? We went to the Eddirondicks, and particularly to some of the little lakes around a village still there called Old Forge.  This is the story of how we got there, where we stayed and what we did.  Plus maybe a few other things as I think of them.  It also about the vilda cheya, the wild animals we encountered, although my sister and I were often also called vilda cheya because of our entiks.

            Entiks are in no way shape or form related to antiques, or anti-kues, which are simply old things you shouldn’t throw away and maybe other people would buy for more than something new, who knows why?  They are tricks, noise and aggravation created by children in order to ensure their parents inherit a form of madness from them.  At home and in the city, you have to try to be self-controlled and respectful of grown-up-niks. But out in the rural lands beyond the boundaries of the city, nu, so there you could be a little free.  You could be like Gene Jock Roysoo or the American big shot writer who lived next to a pond called Waldo in New England and meditated long and hard about Nature. 

Mountinks also maybe I have to explain.  You have to think about hills that are tall and rugged and covered with rocks and trees, and so many of them that when you get inside you can’t see out, only up there in the sky where the clouds and the birds fly.  And especially the Edderondicks, named after some wild Indians who once lived there, you can find ponds and lakes, as well as streams and rivers, and also a few kebins to rent for a holiday with the mishpucha. 

And what is a kebin? you ask.  It is a little house with just a few rooms, and it sits on a piece of dirt, with rocks and trees and maybe a stream close by.  You can live in it a week or two before it drives you crazy with all the shmutz and hindsects that fly about.  For the kinderle it is a good place.  They run around.  They scream a lot.  For the mother, so she doesn’t have to clean up so often, can cook a little less than usual, because boys and girls like peanut and jelly sandwiches on white bread you buy from a little shop down the road in a general store.  Eventually, she goes crazy anyway, because, after all, who can she talk to?  The father, you know, stays home in the city to work, and he comes up only on the weekend, Friday afternoon, before Shabbos starts at sundown, when you can count three stars in the sky.  When he comes, he is pooped, too tired to talk, only wants to sit on the porch and shnooz.  This is called a holiday.

Look how fast we cleared up a lot of potential misunderstandings.  You now know everything you need to know about the stories I am going to tell you about the times we spent up in the mountinks having fun with entiks in the Edderondaks.  Just one more thing.  Unlike all the narratives already spun out to you for the last few years, which were about me and my memories, and in which sometimes I was not always telling you the full truth but slip in a little fib here and there, this time, the whole mishigas is about somebody else.  To make it easier for myself and maybe for you, though the stories are mostly make believe and about other people than myself, I will still speak about me and I and we.  Also, let me assure you, nobody in my family ever spoke with a crazy Yiddish accent, it still appears here, a kind of mask to avoid any reader thinking he or she is dealing with a fency shmency professional writer.

Be that as it may, in the mountinks there are also little lakes and ponds, and near them, on the shore—what do you expect, in the middle of the water?—there are little kebins, as I said.  So we stayed.  So when we stayed in the summer you could stand on a wooden dock made from planks with a stick and some string and a hook upon which you put a worm and in this way you fished for sun fish (already I made a story from this, with even a picture).  If you wanted to take a boat, if an older child or a grown-up were willing, you could fish from the middle of a lake and then maybe catch a trout or a bass what you could then have your mother clean, cook and eat.  Sunfish, of course, not.  You would need maybe six billion of them to fill one frying pan, that’s how little they were.  In truth though, they had too many bones and you could never find a little flesh to chew.  The other kind fish a different story, you could make a whole meal for two or three people, depending on your appetite and how big the creature was.  OK, enough about fishing.

Now about hunting.  In the wnter it could be that some men would come by themselves or take along a few children old enough to hunt for deer, bears, rabbits or whatever else happened to be roaming through the snow and in between the trees.  This, by the way, was never from my family.  Did you ever hear of a Jewish hunter?  What could you find that was kosher?  No, by us, the hunting was in the summer and the prey was not mammals.  Instead, it was salamanders.  In the beginning, when I was very young and my sister much younger, since I was seven years older, which would make her still just a baby when I went hunting for salamanders, it seemed there were all kinds, some pink, some green, some with blue spots, some without, and others too perhaps.  Later, by the time I was already eleven and a smarty-pants, I knew they were all the same; they just changed their colors and spots depending on how or if the sun was shining.  This was called camel-fatch.  I would go out in the early morning after breakfast to search for salamanders no matter what shape or color they might be.  The best places were in the little streams that ran down from the top of the mountink where we had our kebin and all you had to do was pick up some stones and there was always or two that would scurry along.  Usually they scurried too fast for me.  Sometimes a little creature could be found in the middle of the morning when the sun was breaking its light out through the trees and warming up stones on top of which these little salamanders liked to take a nap.  It was not necessary to be very fast then; however, it was better to be slow so you didn’t wake them up with a startle.  Then I could put it into a tin can, cover with a piece of waxed paper in which I punched tiny holes with a fork or a stick, and take back to the porch of the kebin where I tucked it in safely in the sunlight.  By the evening, when I went to have a look, if I remembered from all this, the salamander was not there.  Could it be the wind had blown off the waxed paper or the animal by itself found the strength to push away the cover or somebody you couldn’t guess set it free?  It didn’t much matter because the fun was in the hunting not in the keeping.

Which brings me, you should excuse this slide from one part of the story to the next, to what my sister did.  Already she was growing up, as fast as I was, naturally, but more dramatically because she went from being a baby to a little girl and it only took a season or two of holidays.  She had her own games.  I had no interest because she was a girl and I lived completely in my own dreams.  One day, it must have been a weekend because my father was there and he had the car, so we drove into the little village of Old Forge to go shopping in a grocery store, the whole caboodle of us together.  For a few hours we went to the shop, then we walked around, then my mother bought ice cream cones, either chocolate or vanilla or a mixture, you could get two scoops, then we sat on the steps of the shop, and then we walked around here and there, with little stores that sold finishing tackle, others that had picture post cards and baby toys, and soon the afternoon was over and my father announced we were going back to the kebin by the lake.

Before we got back in the car, my mother took out her big handkerchief, made some spit to clean us off, because she said all over your hands and face there is shmootz from the ice cream drips and leaks and you can’t go into the car like savages or vilda chaya.  Me it was easy to wash down with a few wipes of spit on her handkerchief.  My sister, oy, there was a tumult, a lot of noise, screaming, capturing and complaints.  For why?  She didn’t want to open her hand.  My mother could clean the other hand, spit and wipe, wash her face, spit and wipe, but not the other hand.  That she clenched shut with all her strength and will.  A struggle like no one had seen in her since she was born.  Finally my father came over too, and together the tatter-momma wrestled her into submission, somehow and with a lot of tears and cries.  When my sister was thus forced to unclench her fist, so look, what was there was at first a mushy-squooshy mess, not anything, but gradually, with words and looks and a little more strength of will and force from one side against the other, the stains on her hand were identified as a salamander.

She had hunted it herself, she said, and held it in her hand all day, including when eating an ice cream cone.  This was her biggest defeat in her life so far, yet it was only after this that my own salamanders, carefully put it into tin cans, covered with wax paper, perforated by a fork or a stick, positioned on the porch for enough sunlight to keep them warm and happy through the day began to disappear before we even got past lunchtime.  Their loss soon became discouraging.  What’s the use of hunting in the morning if you have no prey to watch over later?  So ended my hunting adventures.

In these mountinks called the Edderondacks were also real hunters, but not the kind of gentlemen who drive up for a weekend or a whole seven days maybe in the winter to play a game of being backwoodsman hunters, with expensive guns and bright colored jackets you shouldn’t shoot them by mistake.  But trackers, trappers and old-fashioned kind, proper Indians that once owned all those lands and lived off the land like you read about in books by James Feigenmore Kuyper that are stories of the last of the Monhiggans or the  Irikeys and similar tribes.  There was a family living near to Old Forge, a little further north and higher, in a kebin by a lake so big it had little dams made by bivvers.

In the winter when I was already approaching twelve years old and big enough to go with my father and his friends through the snow up to a different place, a lodge, not a place for girls or women, a real man’s weekend.  These men from Brooklyn what my father knew also were not hunters but fishermen who liked to cut a hole in the ice in the middle of a lake, stick in a string with a hook, and wait for a nobble by some trout or bass swimming around under the frozen water and waiting for a wiggly worm to eat. 

The trees had lost their leaves, the rocks were covered with snow, and the sky up above was a dark grey, with maybe sometimes a cloud or a bird to fly around in.  It was also very cold, so it was fun at night to sit around a brick fireplace, with big logs burning, and everyone sipping hot chocolate and singing funny old songs and telling stories.  These were not like the stories or songs you heard at Boy Scout meetings or in the YMHA summer camps I was going to already.  These were grown-up men’s adventures about their work and about the wars they had been in.  They were very interesting, let me tell you, only I couldn’t understand them and usually fell asleep, the nice hot waves of flame from the fire helping me doze and from a doze into a sleep.

One night, though, everyone decided to go visit a kebin even further into the woods, and why? Because an Indian named Arthur invited them all over for a special dinner, made from bear meat, which he had trapped  and now had sufficient food to share, there being no other Indians nearby any more, and to thank these men for the support somehow they gave him and his wife when his son, a young man, had passed away a few years before.  These friends of my fathers were, you should know, doctors and lawyers and dentists, and that’s how they helped out the Indian and his wife when their son was sick and died.  The son had come to the city to study in the university to be a doctor and that’s how they knew each other. 

Well, needless to say, when they went over for this invitation of a dinner, they asked me if I wanted to go, and , of course, I said yes.  Who would not want to meet a real Indian, go to his kebin and eat a piece roast bear?  It didn’t even matter the meat wasn’t kosher.  I expected to see Toronto from the Lone Ranger or Runnink Bear like in the song or Nutty Bumpnik or some other tall, strong brave out of a book, he should have a feather hat, a jacket with fringes, and other things that make a person an Indian, like maybe a hatchet or a medicine sack or a wampum belt.  What I did see was a normal person and his normal wife.  They lived in a log kebin, as I said, with rugs and furniture and lamps and all kinds regular things you find in houses.

In such a small place somehow was close to a dozen people, my father, myself, the Brooklyn people, the real-live Indians, and plenty of room to sit on benches around a table, and a table groaning with food.  Big bowls of rice, little bowls of chunks of meat and others with vegetables, and also brown loaves of bread bakes in an oven from a little hut next door.  Then fruits and cakes and bottles of beer, wine and juices.  A magnificent feast.  People, let me tell you, were very impressed and happy from all this. 

Then there were spiches, some formal from a welcome, a thanks, another invocation from spirits and ancestors what lived in trees, in streams, in mountinks, and sometimes inside the smoke that was hovering above us in the kebin. The thing that seemed most strange to me, however, was that when the special speeches were over, there began a series of other talks, less formal, from different people, including the Indian man, he was called Mr Arthur Forest Coldwater, about how it used to be around these places when he was a mere lad growing up, with his whole family and other tribal relatives, and their memories of the long ago before the white men came.  As usual it was not something I could understand very well, although because I was growing up and found all this better than the books I loved to read, and this Mr Coldwater reminded me of real Indians you see in pictures—except, let me emphasize, he didn’t have bright eagle or turkey feathers in his hat or carry a bow and arrows, and this was a kebin and not a tipi  or a Hogan—because his face was a kind of bronze brown with lots of wrinkles in it and his little black eyes really did seem to sparkle and dart about from one person to another as he spoke—and the sound of his voice was, as the books said, sonorous and wise—I really tried my honest best to understand and to remember so that later when I was more grown up I might understand more and better.  

Meanwhile, sitting next to Mr Coldwater, when she wasn’t quietly slipping away and returning laden with more food and drinks, his wife, or better I should say his squaw, Mrs. Coldwater, or as she once quietly whispered in my ear a special message, because I was the only child there, “Call me Mary or Mom if you want,” and before we left she said her real name was Bluebird-that-sits-on-the Mountain.  Also once in a while during the spiches and the long personal talks that went on all evening for hours and hours after the main part of the eating, she would also whisper in my ear to try to explain a little of what grown-ups were saying in a way that a boy of twelve could make sense of. 

This was pretty special.  I wish I could remember what she said, but the significant thing is that if not exactly at this moment when everything was going on way back then so many decades ago, right now as a grown-up old man myself I feel deep inside me what she meant and somehow or other I have a feeling that it was her explanations and the softness of her voice and the warmth of her body in the smoky heat of the kebin that has helped me know everything else I ever experiences or read about in books.  It was, you might even say, if you are so inclined, a total experience, a work of organic art.  To be sure, this is not something I have ever told to anybody else, and I am now speaking I strictest confidence to you, just because there comes a time, who knows why, as you get older and older, and you realize that the whole world you once knew and thought you could understand, has changed, and maybe, honestly, into something not so nice, certainly not one in which you feel comfortable or want to have anything to do with any more.

            But one final matter.  I have remarked before that all my funny accents when writing are just a mask to protect me from embarrassment and having to confront too closely the rift that has opened up between what I once was and knew, between the people that exist now only as wispy, dreamy memories and the crowds that swish by in the present, none of whom can ever be as close or warm as the ghosts back then, or even that one little night in the kebin in the voods, when I felt so close to the Indian and his wife, their warmth and age-old wisdom, all of together like vilda cheya and hardly like the mensch you were supposed to become and make a living by in the city, that is, to be a professional with degrees and certificates.  It was maybe only adventures or entics up there in the Edderondaks most of the time.  Pure kid’s stuff, someone said whom I once almost opened up to before I met you.  

Probably this is the way it sounds and the way it looks.  No reason to argue with appearances or common sense.  Still, just as salamanders can come in all colors and have dots that are there in one glance and gone in the next, maybe too all of life is like that.  Or better, if you to draw analogies, extrapolate lessons, and make a whole big to-do out of something so simple it could live in a cloud or a wisp of smoke, you can’t keep the salamander alive either in a tin can because someone or something will let it out before you come back to examine it closely, or you certainly can’t hold it rightly in your grasp the whole day long and expect it to be other than a mushy stain by the late afternoon.  Nor, because the words keep pouring out like the icy cold water in a stream that flows down from the very top of the mountinks to the little lakes and ponds below, can you think you can make a meal and keep alive from catching as many sunfish as there are, so abundant they seem to jump up out of the water for you to catch, without really needing to tie a string to a stick or put a hook with a wriggly worm on it.  So enough of my own ridiculous spiches.  Time to say goodnight.