Getting back to the mountains

Forty years ago I graduated from Hunter-Tannersville Central (HTC) School, a small public school in the Catskill Mountains in New York. One of the 50 graduates that year, our class represented one of the biggest classes ever at the school. Not many people choose to live in the area and the low number of children in the school system is the result.

When I think back to those times I remember specifically the little cliques that developed, based mostly on the area in which you lived. For instance, there was the Haines Falls crew at the very top of Route 23A where it climbs up out of the Hudson Valley and forms one entry into the area most people there call the Mountain Top. Haines Falls is about three miles from HTC. The area where I lived, Platte Clove, was closer to five miles away in a completely different direction and at the top of the Back Mountain road, which led up 1,500 feet from Woodstock, NY. Most of the children there formed their own clique. West Kill was another area at another access point, but it was much farther away—several of the students probably could have retired from the school system based solely on the amount of time they spent being ferried back and forth between the schools and their homes on a school bus. There were many other areas as well.

Our school alumni association sponsors a dinner every year. Everyone is invited, but a special effort is made for what they call the “celebrating classes” who fall on five or ten year anniversaries. Having graduated in 1973, this year marked my class’ 40^th anniversary. We were able to get 14 members to attend the dinner, and we had one dinner crasher who rounded out our group at 15 classmates.

One friend in particular, Fran Warm, whose parents owned the local restaurant in the “old”-haha- days, rented a condo for the weekend and held open house on Friday and Saturday for everyone to get together in a social environment. The condo was full, but we would have liked to have had even more of our classmates there.

It’s funny how things change over the years. The cliques, I suppose nowadays they would be called gangs, sort of disappeared as our collective vision of the world expanded. With our advanced years, we could now look back on the stories from our high school days and get a good laugh. Some stories came out that I didn’t remember, and of course there were those that I remembered but no one else did. I am still wondering if those things I recalled really happened—probably not, since I seem to make things up as I go along.

But the rest of the time was full of fun and merriment, as we tripped through our time at HTC. In such a small school, everybody was pretty much involved in everything. It was not unusual to be an athlete, a prize student, and the head of whatever local social club was going on. Everyone seemed to be active in different aspects of life.

Looking back at some of my friends from those days and strangely enough how things turned out sort of make sense. There are now two factions of our graduates. There is the group that stayed on the Mountain Top and managed to eke out a living. The area is depressed with a lack of what I would call good paying jobs, and in reality those that are good paying are limited in number.

The best jobs seem to be working for the State or County. Solid jobs with decent pay that allow you to do a bit more than subsist in the community when the weather starts acting up, like in August. For those who don’t happen to fall into a government job, employment is a little bleaker. It’s possible to find a niche in which you can develop your own business, and make a pretty good living. But for many, it’s working numerous part time gigs and trying to cobble together enough money to pay rent and cover other necessary living expenses.

My brother actually showed me the way out of the mountains by leaving home when he was 18 and heading to Florida. I followed two years later, and now most of my family has migrated away from NY. I guess I wasn’t only one who shuddered at the minus 32 degree temperatures and month-long cold snaps where the thermometer never got above zero.

Returning to the Mountain Top is always a great time for me. As we cruise up the slope on 23a that leads to Haines Falls, we pass rock outcrops and areas where we used to go swimming, and slide past Bastion Falls at the bottom of Kaaterskill Falls, one of the tallest in the state. A distance from there and we reach Haines Falls.

At times, I would like to spend a little more time on the Mountain Top than three days. It would be fun to visit the high school and see what’s changed. But in the end, I know the temperature will drop by September, snow will appear in October or November and stay until April or May. I think for now, I would prefer to stay in Virginia, where the temperatures don’t get too much below freezing and rarely if ever reach sub-zero.