Soulscape

 

My father’s dream was to buy some land in upstate New York, a couple hours ride from the city. He and my mother dragged my sisters and I all over the Catskills region one summer in the mid-sixties in our Ford Impala station wagon in search of the perfect parcel of land.  After weeks of exploring, he found a five acre wooded plot with a small stream running through it in a miniscule town called Cahoonzie just north of Port Jervis.  

 As a young boy, I was thrilled. Having grown up as a city kid in Queens, this was such an alien landscape. I couldn’t wait to explore it. Once we purchased the place and settled in a bit, my parents were comfortable with me going off into the woods for hours on end. Eventually I could disappear for days without them thinking twice about it. It was as if they had a different set of rules for me in that environment.  

 My father taught me how to use an axe, a bow, his BB gun, a sledge hammer, saws, and crow bars. The rules on how to safely build fires were clearly laid out. The area at that time was very sparsely populated and I could walk for miles in any direction and never see a soul.  I would spend endless hours in the woods by myself, hiking, camping, trapping, and climbing. I would find all kinds of wild pets like Red Efts (eastern newt), turtles, frogs and snakes and bring them home. 

The camping alone was full of sensory input and so fascinating to me. There was one night when I had pitched a lean-to with a plastic tarp under some trees along a stream. As the darkness took over, I noticed what sounded like rain drops hitting the tent but it wasn’t raining. The sound got louder and louder. Eventually I realized that I had camped in a section of the woods where the gypsy moths had decided to defoliate the area. The “raindrops” were moth poop raining down on me!!!

It was not unusual for a raccoon to walk over your sleeping bags while you were sleeping.  I eventually learned how to survive in harsher conditions like snow and deep cold. 

 There was always an adventure to be had. Once during a hike, I spotted a porcupine and followed him along his journey for hours. This freedom to be myself and explore was addicting. I never wanted to leave it and when I was away from it, I would be thinking of what adventures would be next.

 The camping forced me to learn how to cook for myself at a very young age.  At first it was heating up cans of soup, but little by little I became more adventurous cooking the fish I caught, foraging mushrooms and ramps. These culinary treks might have been seeds of my spending the most of my life as a chef. 

 When I first started camping on my own, the deep silence of the woods touched me deeply at night. I would ask myself, “Why are the nights so different here?” Besides there being no pollution to obscure my view of the Milky Way, there was something else. When I returned to Queens, I realized instantly. My whole life in the city had a background soundtrack. We lived two blocks from the Long Island Expressway and there was the 24-hour soft constant buzz of that highway that was always there. 

 During my travels through the woods, there was a particular campsite that drew me towards it like a magnet.  It had this deep calming effect on me and I loved spending as much time as I could there.  There were many old pines there and their needles made a nice mattress under my sleeping bag. Eventually as I got older, I would bring friends there to camp with me. We eventually built a more permanent fireplace there and would spend entire nights telling stories.  I remember my best friend one night insisting on recanting to me every single scene of a movie he had just seen called “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!”. 

Thirty years later, as a Buddhist monk, I was asked to be part of a construction crew for a new temple being built upstate.  When we drove up the first day, my jaw dropped. To my astonishment, the temple project was being built on my favorite childhood campsite!!

 

So, when wondering whether I ever had the experience during my travels of encountering a landscape that spoke so directly to your soul that you forgot (at least for a while!) everything else and just wished to remain there, this experiences are what came up for me.

 

Robert

Apr 2023