The Catskills: The Man with a Hole In His Head
By Jeane Bice

Orson Barnes is standing in front of me in the supermarket line. I am glad he doesn't see me yet because I can't help looking at the hole in the side of his head where his ear used to be. Legend has it that he lost his ear in the First World War, though it was just as likely a more recent melanoma. Nearing ninety years of age, Orson still goes shopping—and quite ably, I might add.

Orson comes from an old family up here in what is no longer remembered as the Northern Appalachians. “Old families” where I came from in Connecticut usually meant the families of stuffy judges and landowners with family lines running back to the Mayflower. Like himself, the Barnes family is old without distinction.

The real estate people don't even know about the Lenape Indians who used to live where Orson does, surviving on the generous wildlife and the teeming river. Nobody knows anything around here the way Orson and a few others do. Years ago, Orson gained local renown for building a massive eel weir on the river below his house each year. You had to build a new one annually, since the floods would take it out before winter, and certainly by spring.

A weir is a large wooden frame shaped into a trap to catch eels should they swim downriver. Their movement is coerced by two walls of submarine stones piled in the configuration of a huge “V”, leading into a long wooden trap. Hardly anyone knows how to build one anymore, and Orson is now too old to try. Delaware River eel once sold for top dollar in New York City, even Paris and London.

The ancestors of old-timers like Orson called themselves farmers. What they had to farm was largely the rocky detritus of the glacier that stopped here twenty thousand years ago. It stopped and melted here and left megatons of unplowable granite, which they made hastily into stone walls. Unlike the tidy, patrician walls of Connecticut, these are tumbledown piles that stretch away into often impenetrable forest. Not far from my house stands a strange configuration of walls, one of which must have been a pigsty or some other animal pen. I still wonder at the strength of body and will that preceded my quiet life here.

Self-sufficiency remains the invisible trait of these proud and private few. One hundred and fifty years ago, a “farmer” was a person who could do anything: like treat sores on livestock with homemade remedies, cultivate corn, shoot and cure venison and other meat, or make one's own shoes if necessary. In these parts, a farmer was just as likely to harvest eels from the Delaware River and smoke them for dinner, just as Orson did for decades.

These days nobody realizes, either, that we are one range west of the Shawangung Mountains. We are in the vacation backwoods of the Poconos on the Pennsylvania side of the river, the Catskills on the New York side. We are, nonetheless, still in the ancient hollows of the original Appalachian backwoods, where isolated families fought through the seasons for sustenance. And some remain in these hollows. South of here in, say, Virginia, the glacial ravines and gorges that converge on the river and its bottomland are called “drafts” and given names like Chilly Draft or Hulitz Draft.

Orson lives in a hollow, now named Minisink Ford, after some shallows where the river was easier to ford. That was before John Roebling built his famous wire-suspension bridge in 1848, a prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge he erected later. Locally, this place is just as famous for the Tory turncoat Indian who, during the Revolutionary War, anglicized his name to Joseph Brant.

Here Joseph Brant lead sixty of his Mohawks and twenty-seven Tories in an attack on the Minisink settlement in July of 1779. Six houses, eight barns, a church, and three mills were burned. A day later militiamen from as far as fifty miles away were mustered to this part of the river valley. Led by Colonel Tusten, forty-seven militiamen men were dead by the time the battle was over. Many were scalped when they attempted to hide in a cave from the Indians who outnumbered them. My house stands on the boundary line of the Town of Tusten, named for the frontiersman-soldier who fought for these mountains.

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