New York, relentlessly urban, unforgivingly treeless, is a place where getting away, at least now and again, is essential. It can, however, be remarkably difficult to get away from. Circling it is a wide and repellent moat of horrors designed not so much to prevent entry as to thwart escape, a no-man’s-land of snares and mazes to deter the seeker of bucolic ease.
To the east lies the tract of retail Sahara known as Long Island, where, as if in a nightmare, the strip malls peter out only to be perpetually reborn in the form of more strip malls.
To the south and to the west, you must confront the sulphurous dystopia of industrial New Jersey. The eight-lane highway on which you find yourself, having taken the wrong exit off the last eight-lane highway, leads to nowhere but the next eight-lane highway.
Demoralised by such expeditions, I found it tempting to settle for the quasi-wilderness of Central Park or the uncertain pleasures of the urban beach, at the Rockaways or Coney Island. But I probed a little longer and at last found a chink in the wall. All but the most alert driver will miss it, but if you take the first exit off the George Washington Bridge – just as everyone else barrels on into the Jersey maelstrom – the city falls suddenly away, as if you had slipped out through a secret door. This is the Palisades Parkway, a secluded, tree-lined boulevard that snakes unobtrusively northward alongside the Hudson River before arcing west. After an hour, now in deep country, it joins a conduit with a more prominent place in New York mythology: Route 17, the pathway to the Catskills.
Back in the Catskills’ heyday of the 1950s and 60s, when Dean Martin and Milton Berle were packing them in at the grand Borscht Belt resorts such as Grossingers and the Concord, Route 17 every summer bore thousands of vacationing New Yorkers to the cool, clean air of the interior uplands. And here, 90 miles north-west of Manhattan among the woods, lakes and meadows of Sullivan County, between the Delaware River to the south and the mountains to the north, I decided to turn my occasional outings into a regular fixture. I bought a house.
The purchase had as much to do with economics as with the beauty of the surroundings. A tiny log cabin two hours’ drive away was the closest thing to the city I could afford. My life bifurcated: city slicker from Monday to Friday, rugged man of the woods every weekend.
The contrast is cartoonish but apt, for the gulf between town and country was far deeper than I was used to. Anyone who grew up, as I did, in teeming England will be struck by how sparsely inhabited the US still is. Drive 90 miles from London and you will find yourself either in another big city or passing through a dense clusters of manicured villages full of million-pound thatched cottages with a Mercedes parked in front.
It is quite different outside New York. Here the hamlets are separated by mile after mile of dark, uncharted forest; the houses by-and-large are modern, undistinguished, often scruffy; the few restaurants are closing their kitchens when Manhattanites are stepping out for the first cocktail of the evening.
The sense of remoteness solidified when the arrival of cheap air travel in the 1960s and 70s – and the realisation that Florida was now in effect no further from New York than the Catskills – left the resorts on their knees. Monticello, once the area’s throbbing hub, is now a lifeless husk of a town where on the main street the boarded-up diners and the shuttered cinema have stood untouched for decades.
So this is not the Hamptons. Standard issue for men is the plaid shirt, a pick-up truck and a gun. I may well be the only man who doesn’t hunt. At a nearby lakeside pub, moonshine is dispensed and a goat wanders nonchalantly among the drinkers. The wildlife is satisfyingly wild. Bears emerge from the woods to lope menacingly across the backyard, and at night the howling of the coyotes can spread a tingle over the skin. Even better was the guilty thrill of hearing a local folk musician perform a spectacularly obscene song about Hillary Clinton, our esteemed senator. The regulars at the bar didn’t bat an eyelid. My two city friends joining me for the weekend looked uneasily into their beer.
Yet even here, with a certain inevitability, gentrification, the restless, omnidirectional force, is said to have arrived. Farmers’ markets have appeared. The local store has started selling baguettes and Belgian beers. A performing arts centre has gone up in the field where Woodstock took place, and the New York Philharmonic has been persuaded to play there. New York magazine declared a while ago, to local amusement, that the Catskills were the new Hamptons. Property values are quietly followed on the internet.
There is much talk of whether this will change the character of the Catskills. Not much, I predict. A more pertinent question is what effect the Catskills will have on the character of its weekend interlopers. On this point I have no doubt: I will always feel like Bertrand Russell at a rodeo when I arrive upstate on Friday, but like a horny-handed son of the earth by the time I re-enter the city on Sunday night.
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The air of the Civil War
The most striking features of the Catskills might be at their very edge. The Delaware River, which separates New York from Pennsylvania, serves in effect as the southern and western border of the region.
There is no more beautiful drive than the 50-mile stretch north of Port Jervis, where, on the New York side, Route 97 hugs the water’s edge at the foot of the cliffs.
Along the way, one might even for a while leave the Catskills altogether. If you cross the river at Barryville to the village of Shohola, almost the first thing after the “Welcome to Pennsylvania” sign is the truly venerable Rohman’s Inn. I have never seen a pub where so little attention has been paid to its upkeep.
It is magnificent. Apart from a neon Budweiser sign (mandatory under federal law) and a television, nothing appears to have been added or subtracted since it opened in 1849. The sagging tin roof is coated in nicotine of unspeakable antiquity and the pot-bellied stove has spluttered amiably and ineffectively through winters without number. Some of the air dates back to the Civil War.
When the train from New York extended this far upstate, Rohman’s, despite being in the middle of nowhere, used to attract its fair share of swells, including Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh and the actor Ronald Colman. This can be verified by consulting the signatures in the register, which is kept behind the bar for the curious.
The bar prides itself on its freshly squeezed screwdrivers, which are excellent. But many claim that the chief pleasure of the drinks at Rohman’s lies in their extraordinarily low price. You can stand the world and his wife a round and it never seems to cost more than $11. Now you know you’ve left New York.
Rohman’s Inn, 103 Rohman Road, Shohola, PA, tel: +1 570-559 7479
Ed Holland is an FT correspondent in New York
