CHAPTER V: THE HOUSE AND ALL THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED HERE

THE HOUSE AND ALL THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED HERE

 WELCOME TO MY HOUSE

Name's Bo and I live here.  I do all the work around here.  I paint the walls, inside and out, sweep and vacuum the floors on all the floors, especially the mud room right behind this door.  Not having it swept makes it look like someone is not paying attention..  Women in West Africa sweep their courtyards three times a day.  I learned from them.  It looks friendlier.

I fix everything that goes wrong here.  And something goes bad or breaks almost every day.  So there is only me to fix it because I prefer not to have other people here to do that for me.  Just the other day, my big lawn mower tractor's blades came loose.   I needed to upright it to get to the blades.  It is a big machine and when I put all my strength into lifting the tractor, I realized I had not done any stretching to loosen my leg and especially my calf muscles.  So  the  calf spasmed big time and threw me into the lawn where I lay cursing for a while until the cramps went away.....

When    you    move    into    a    house    where    other    people    lived   before   you    did...............

Anna M. Cowhey, the owner of  Camp Rip van Winkle for Catholic Boys is sitting in front of her house......

When    you    move    into    a    house    where    other    people    lived   before   you    did...............

I don't really believe in ghosts or spirits.  But even now that I have lived in my house for decades, I will still at times hear noises coming from somewhere in the house that I cannot track or identify.  I easily dismiss them as the unending settling of the old structure or making minor adjustments to its position on the rocks and in the soil.

I never believed in spooks but most of my friends do.  In the early years when I'd have up to a dozen friends up each weekend, there was little else they talked about and by the time cocktails and desserts had rolled around my friends would speculate where the next chain dragging or shrieks would come from and, even more important,  at what time they would start.

My friends became quite expert about it.  My good friend Vicente from Barcelona with the most inspired imagination brought a Ouija board.  It's a  wooden board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9, the words 'yes' 'no' 'hello' and 'goodbye'.   The fingers of the séance participants move around the board on the planchette, stopping at letters that spell an answer to a question asked.   Whoever controls the planchette of course, if there is such a person or power, dictates the answer. 

This particular evening, we had called up Agnes, one of the camp nurses who told us about her affair with the handsome young camp chaplain who had made her pregnant and with the camp doctor who had arranged for an abortion she did not survive.   When Vicente asked Agnes where she was now, our fingers went first to the letter 'h', and then to 'e'.  By now it was 4 am.

The third letter could be an 'a'; or it could be an 'l'.  When Vicente realized it could be an 'r', spelling 'here' he took the board and threw it in the air, breaking the spell......

Even these days I hear noises in the house, at all hours, I cannot explain.    

When I lie awake in bed before getting up in the morning, I may hear a sound I have never heard before. 

And, me, I know exactly what the door to the washroom or any other place in the house, sounds like......

I realize I am lucky enough to know the immediately previous owners;  the people who lived here before I did, the people who sold the house to me. 

Three straight couples from New York City who used the house as a weekend place.   Lawyers, publishers and writers, a bright intelligent crowd who had decided to give their children an alternative to urban life to grow up in. 

They truly loved it here, they told me many times.  As did their kids, all grown up now, who showed me all the secret places in the house and the garden........ or rather the yard, because there really wasn't a garden to speak of.

Structurally the house was sound, a good buy.  Aesthetically a little disaster.   Multiple owners shrug off maintenance responsibilities and it showed but because of that I fell for the place big time because I could kneed the place to my vision.....

And the owners before them?   When Camp Rip van Winkle went bankrupt in 1968, the house was rented by ten or so young people then called 'hippies' who spent the days weaving, recording music, cooking, hanging out in Woodstock and entertaining friends form the City.  They amused themselves with the favors of the day.  Many of them still live in the area and have become responsible and still fun-loving friends.

Old houses like this one are likely to have long-term residents and have long histories.  From 1919 until 1968,  the house was called the Administration Building and housed the owner and the staff of the Boys' Camp. 

In 1919 Mr. Cowhey, from New York's Upper West Side, bought 2,000 acres of land and gave them to his daughters, Josephine, Anna and Marguerite.

Marguerite was given Camp Adrian, a City sponsored camp.   Josephine, the eldest, was in charge of Camp Ontiora for Girls and Anna, of Camp Rip van Winkle for Boys. 

The Camp was an expensive one.  The 1937  Camp Catalogue quotes a fee of $750 for July through August.  That is $12,000  in 2012 Dollars,  assuming  an annual inflation over this period of 3.79%.

The Camp had the reputation as a rich kids ' camp.    T.C . Murray in his Memoir 'Just  A Kid  From Hell's Kitchen' relates of his stay at Camp Adrian   

"A highlight of the season was the annual Camp Adrian-Camp Rip Van Winkle baseball game. This occurred during the last two weeks of Camp Adrian’s season when we had the oldest group, usually ranging in ages from 12 to 14. The game itself was held at the Rip field, which was professional by all standards. It even had slate under the sod so that the field would dry quickly after a rainfall.   Not making excuses, the boys from Rip were playing as a team all summer long while our boys were playing as a team less than two weeks.  It showed, as we usually lost.  However, good sportsmanship prevailed at all times.  It’s a matter of fact, the rich boys treated the poor boys to a soda after the game. How nice of them."

Above,  images from the 1937 Camp Brochure.   Very organized and disciplined as behooves a place of good standing.

Below some of the many camp group photos I found in the attic.  The earliest from 1923.  The colored photo from when I turned 50.  I couldn't think of a better place to hang it.

The old frames now occupy an honored place in the house.  I am surrounded by mementos from the days before.        While me, I am here only for a short time.

And that is the underlying reason for this book.   To create a record of the time I was here.

 and the trail starts to get murky after a while…

This is the Big Room of the Old Camp Rip van Winkle for Catholic Boys. 


I took out part of the floor at the far end because I did not need that much space.  Besides, it makes a nice  double height terrace room below.  

The small picture on the left shows the exact same room from the same angle as it appeared in the 1937 Camp Catalog. 

The lighting of the small picture is not as slick as in the main image, but often when I spend time in the Big Room, when I squint, I can see the 110 boys lined up waiting to sit down  for lunch or dinner after the food has been  brought up by the massive staff downstairs in the two dumbwaiters. One lift is still functional, the other used to be in the far right corner and the rails are still there.

This is the room where the main kitchen used to be.  The first decades, it was the stepchild of the house because there was no logical function for it.  Then, I started to use it for summer afternoon naps  [a luxury I had to teach myself] after rough arduous labor in the garden.   On hot summer afternoons the room is cooled  by a  40-foot long stone wall built into the slope the house is built on.  A natural air cooler.

Behind the mahogany bookcase, part of the Lamu Industries collection, is a door that opens to the dumbwaiter that carried the boys' food into the dining room upstairs.  Between the divan and the bookcase, a nude painting of me made by my good friend Kees Knopper.   In front of the window and door, two King's chairs from Lamu, Kenya used for ceremonial purposes.  The groom would sit in it while his friends would perform 'stick dances' and after every one was done and tired, he'd be invited to deliver the final stick blows.    Behind the wood stove, four door panels of armoires I never sold and the head and foot ends of an Indian bed. 

In front, two lonely non functional  legs of my first  Lamu Industries' consoles.  And a Moroccan chess set that also folds out into a bridge table and a  backgammon game.

 

 The fireplace in the Big Room actually heats the space in the spring and autumn evenings.  It's not for show.  But in mid winter,  the outdoor temperature  drops too low for any  fire  to warm the room up comfortably....  During the days of the Boys' Camp,  the space was never used outside of the summer months......

The old terrace room, in the small picture on the left here, was not much to look at.  It served as an auxiliary space to the kitchen.  In the  far corner you can see the dumbwaiter being dismantled.  I took out the ceiling, then removed the  far wall and replaced it with french windows, welcoming everyone onto the terrace I had planned.  The stones on the floor come from a quarry close by.    


The room is not insulated and unheatable because of its size.   I don't descend from the heated part of the house until mid April or so and try to stretch it till mid to late October.  Differs every year.   


Behind the red couch is a collection of  airplane  blankets to keep everyone  who is sitting still evenings, comfortably  warm....

What is now the Master Bedroom, were three narrow rooms where I imagine lots of kids were put away to sleep.  I took down all the multi-colored walls, painted the room white and realized my Upstate bedroom was as big as my City Apartment.  

 

To the left, from my pillow I see the sun rise over the Garden.  The whole garden...   To the right, when I open the windows, the roar of the Kaaterskill Creek lulls me to sleep every night........

From the pillows in this Mahogany Lamu Industries bed, you look straight at the Fountain in Alpha.  Hence it is called the Fountain Room.  There used to be two seperate rooms here each filled with whatever bed was in it.  Little room to move. 

 

This is the Lily Pons Room.  The famous French Opera Singer was best friends with Anna Cowhey and stayed in this room whenever she stayed at the Camp in the  30's .  When I made it my bedroom in the early 80's  the ceiling, as in all the rooms in the house, was wallpapered in silver flower paper.  The  room's walls were  covered in swirls of pastel flowers. 

I quickly discovered the best way to get rid of all the paper was to boil pots of water in the room  and let the steam do the works.  Coming back after 2 hours all the magnificent paper would be curled up on the floor, leaving a flawless french           to be  treated or painted as iI wished. 

My friend Paul Byron Downs built the headboard from old planks he found in the shed, for that rugged, elegant masculine look.