Catskill Calendar:
A Natural History of
'My Side of the Mountain'
LITERARY LANDSCAPES VOL.2

Novel and illustrations by
Jean Craighead George

I first read My Side of the Mountain in the third grade. I was 9 years old and the year was 1980. It was by all accounts, my first “chapter book.” At that age, I cannot say for certain if the book’s themes already spoke to my nascent proclivities and curiosities as a naturalist, or indeed, if the book itself planted them there. Either way, Jean Craighead George’s story of the purposeful and resourceful runaway, Sam Gribley, filled me with the desire to develop and test my own abilities to live and thrive in nature. Survival skills based upon one’s own whits and raw know-how. A set of skills which today we might call woodcraft, Scoutcraft, or bushcraft. By this measure, I am little different a person today, than I was when I first imagined Sam’s tree house, falconry skills, and eye for edible plants. READ MORE

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“ I had been working since May, learning how to make a fire with flint and steel, finding what plants I could eat, how to trap animals and catch fish – all this so that when the curtain of blizzard struck the Catskills, I could crawl inside my tree and be comfortabley warm and have plenty to eat.”

“ I must say this now about that first fire. It was magic. Out of dead tinder and grass and sticks came a live warm light. It cracked and snapped and smoked and filled the woods with brightness. It lighted the trees and made them warm and friendly. It stood tall and bright and held back the night . . . and never have I felt so independent again.”

“ Wild boy!” he shouted.
“What a sanguine smell. What a purposeful fire. Breakfast in a tree. Son, I toil from sunup to to sundown, and never have I lived so well!”

Carey Russell and father, Randall Russell, 1979

“ And so with the disappearance of the deer, the hoot of the owl, the cold land began to create new life. Spring is terribly exciting when you are living right in it.”

“ Frightful would set on the foot post of the bed and preen and wipe her beak and shake. Just the fact that she was alive was a warming thing to know. I would look at her and wonder what makes a bird a bird and a boy a boy. The forest would become silent . . . The fire would burn itself out and I would be asleep. Those were nights of the very best sort.”

Continued from above
In 1980, my only other affiliation with the city of New York was a faint recognition that it was also where one might find Sesame Street. While the Catskills were a name pulled from out of time and space – so far away and unknown to me that it might as well have been a place carved from fantasy. After many turns and home places in my adult life, I now find that I have in many regards become Sam Gribley. I live in New York City and not only fantasize about escaping to the Catskills, but do so on a regular basis as a licensed guide and master naturalist – and now as a photographer.

If you too were inspired by My Side of the Mountain in your youth or still daydream about “getting away from it all,” I hope you will find a piece of yourself within these photographs as well. For me, they function as a way of understanding myself and my adopted landscape with greater awareness, and as something of a scavenger hunt as I trace what might have been Sam’s trail through the city, wilderness trails, and communities of the Catskills.