Feature > Bushwacking Buttermilk Falls
by Christopher Ketcham
Illustration by Elwood Smith



The Catskills can still be seen in their primitive monster state,
the way the first frightened white men saw them 250 years ago.
I took a walk up Peekamoose Mountain recently, on a warm July day, hiked through the fields of ancient fern that smell like peaches, up to Recoinnoiter Rock, where there’s no view—the elms and mountain maples obscure all. My friend Petra and I continued two miles to the height of Peekamoose, and then to Table Mountain, a jaunt if you’re healthy and young. On our way down, we forsook the well-wandered trail and bushwhacked into the col that Buttermilk Falls Brook, fed from the springs off Peekamoose, had been cutting for tens of thousands of years.

This was regrettable, a dismal mistake, and we loved it: just 500 feet off the trail, the gradient keeling over into the col, as our quick slipping feet in the denim grass grabbed and caught and lost traction, we slipped but did not fall, clung on thin birch and thin maples bending, clung and swung in switchback arcs. Buttermilk Brook babbled distantly, seeming to recede as we grew closer, and the country grew obtusely wild. Huge nettles rose up, obscene and whorish and lascivious in their largeness, shaking like dancers, five and six-feet tall, the nettles stung our arms and our faces; and then the blowdowns arose, a no man’s land of big dead, the sky opening where the fallen had stood, the giant spruce and oaks and elms forming brackish walls of foliage, crushed brute buttress trunks cross-thatching and bridging over the nettles. We tight-roped the trunks till they tapered thin. The ground was fourteen feet below. We tottered, jumped, fell on our hands, and were hurt. We stopped and leaned against the medusan upturned roots of a felled oak; Petra tried to pull a rock from the wet roots of the tree but it held fast, and we marveled at the intricacy of the roots, their intestinal, gastric-like whorls. The nettles had bitten us bad: my hands seemed to swell, my arms pounded with itch. We had gone too far into the col to stop, so we armed ourselves with sticks—I with an inch-wide dead cedar branch, tough as rock, that I broke down, with a sting across my knee, to about three feet, she with a thinner longer branch that had a hilt and resembled a long-sword. I swung at the nettles: they fell. It was a delicious act. And next to me, Petra swung her sword, and together, we sweated and growled, angry at the forest, threshing the nettles before us, such slow-going that it was a half-hour before we spanned the 300 feet to Buttermilk Brook.
And what a disappointment was this “brook”. I expected easy-going along the rocks, a dexterous sprightly dance through Japanese gardens, and perhaps our feet would get damp, trippingly. It was a piddling little stream, a piss-water, erupting with ogling loam-stinking nettles, like a swamp meander, and was criss-crossed, as if some shattering god-head had thrown all his fury against it, with dozens of blowdowns like thick folded forearms of wrestlers, the trees making more walls, of branches, of leaves, of skeletal deadwood that clipped us along our cheeks and our eyes, raking red streaks in the cheeks, forcing us down into the water. The bugs were lavish, and they took to Petra first, they liked her sweat, and then they surrounded me, for the lush land, the wet rootless blowdown land and the mewling stream had made it savory and sweet for their breeding. They ate big. They clanged and bazoomed in our ears, they bit along our necks, they swarmed our arms; they bit along my right eye and I felt the pores react, the eye blurred. Petra looked at me and said, “The bugs. My God, the bugs around your head.”

I was happy. Sweat began to pour, and I thought of the first poor bastards who came through this land and did not stay, fled to the soft valleys. Here along Buttermilk Brook—which would lead us to Buttermilk Falls, that 30-foot drop of sweetwater and rock—we were deep in it, drowning in it, the mean mother mountain force swinging her hardened breasts at our heads. The Romantic ideal is wrong: Nature is indifferent. When she cares to look at you, she is a bitch: under blue skies she drops a tree on your first-born.

We passed down the brook like old women, slogging in the stream until our shoes soaked 47 times over, and the wet crawled up our pants by some creeping capillary action, and the cold stream burbled in our toes and chilled us, and under the giant blowdowns, these massive corpse trees that seemed prehistoric, we crawled, and sometimes over them, along venous webs of crackling branches that broke when we placed all our weight on them, and breaking they dropped us like turds into the bowls of the stream, the little cascades over slippery mossy rock. Our feet did not grip, our eyes grew dim and gated with the bugs and the sweat, our arms grew tired with swinging our sticks, and we could hear our breath. And there was silence, and many cemeteries of brutish dead trees, and there was no wind. This was the Catskills: Ha! Good to know. I hacked hatefully at the weeds and the nettles and the branches of the blowdown. Petra said, “Save your energy for what may come.” (I loved her for saying that, I wanted marriage and children with such a woman.) She took the lead. We clambered high, some 10 feet above the stream, onto a rickety trellis of blowdown flesh.

“The storm that must have been through here,” I said. “The storm to fell these trees. What winds.”

We ground our teeth. My eye burned and swelled, and the bugs were eating at the wings of my nose and one had got into my pants and at my balls and sweat seeped into my ears, and this foul brook was endless, the blowdown was endless, the insects ran sorties, bleeding us. We’d get 30 feet of wet shoes and nettles and then another shaggy steaming barricade of root and trunk and rotting wood-flesh. I sat down on a trunk for a moment, trying to rest, and it dissolved under my ass like a moldered book. I dropped, dead basketball, and laughed.

Petra said, “We’ve not gone far. Do you think we’ll make it before dark?”
It dawned on me that we had set out late on the trail to Peekamoose, dark was not far off, nor was the thunder. For now it began to thud, as I imagine distant artillery thuds, and perhaps it had been sounding for some time and neither of us had noticed. Everything was gray and green and misty gloom. “We’ll make it before dark,” I said.

She slashed and I slashed, and then she stopped and grabbed her eye. A midge or a gnat or a small fly had lodged itself in the mucus and died, and I tried to dislodge it gently with the long nail on my pinky; I hurt her, and she pushed me away, and finally she rubbed mercilessly, like she was scratching dirty pubis, and the bug came out.

The thunder ooommed.

We passed under a lead-colored trunk, four feet wide and rotting, and my face smooched a glopping spider-web, lard-heavy, skeined under the tree, and I saw a black spider the size of an infant’s fist scuttle away along a trunk perpendicular to this one (the network of trunks now seeming like the thoroughfares of collapsed cities). I heard heavy shuffling in the nettles up the hill, steep aside the stream, and I wondered if perhaps it was a bear, smarter than us, regaining the high ground, knowing what was coming.

Thunder and rain to come, that I knew, and if the rain did come, in the torrent, it would send a flash-flood down Buttermilk Brook.

It was indeed a bear, a yearling perhaps, his buttocks disappeared up the hill, into the green-walled air, and it was no surprise, for we had seen, all along the banks, wide chocolaty piles of steaming scat—the excretions of a bear that had a lot to give, a big bear. So that wasn’t him, or her. We sang loud idiot songs, but I didn’t tell Petra I had seen the furry-assed boy-bear so near us, whose mother would no doubt also be close by and covetous.

“You think we’ll make it before dark?” Petra said, but her voice wasn’t worried. She was affirming that we would.

In five minutes, she would find the path. The steepness of the walls of the col softened, there began to appear wings of flat leaf-covered earth along the sides of the stream; the nettles dwindled, a shore was developing; along it there was the faintest trail, scattered with pellet scat, and Petra nosed it out. “Come on,” she said, walking faster, and the path rose slightly above the stream, along a rocky mound, dipped back along the water’s shanks, but it was really a path now, we both could see it. It was a deer path. We moved fast, no rocks or water or the chaining trees or the constant watching of the ground for footing, we almost ran; the path led up and away from the stream, and we could hear where the stream descended into a series of quick white cascades, the Buttermilk name understood now; and now we stood on a cliff height above the Buttermilk Falls. We saw a path down, and we scrambled, around the cliff, and at the bottom of the descent, Petra ran up the rocks to the edge of the falls. She shed her clothes, and I shed mine, and we held hands under the waterfall, making sounds that monkeys make at feeding time in zoos.

The rain fell in horses ten minutes later, after we had pulled on our wet pants and wet shirts. We still had a mile to walk up the road to the car at the trailhead of Peekamoose Mountain, and as we tramped, the sky unloaded its bowels fully, blowing against the mountain. There would be new blowdowns along Buttermilk Brook tonight.