UNSPOILED=WELCOME

    Cole's River in the Catskills is considered the first "major" painting to include a steam locomotive within the "natural" composition. The addition of this fly in the ointment of the pastoral landscape was seen by many (until recently) as Cole's acceptance of the unavoidable industrial future cutting across his idyllic horizon.  Only in more contemporary scholarship have art historians questioned this premise and put forth the proposition that Cole was actually an "antipastoralist," hoping his tiny brush stokes that conjured the diminutive Canajoharie-Catskill rail line would be a passing fancy and his beloved views of the Catskills would return to their unspoiled splendor....in time. The line did fail, but the railroad was just the beginning of the spoilage. I can relate.
     My earliest memories of the Catskills are of my grandfather and I standing on a rocking, half submerged dock at Wolf Lake, as hurricane winds pushed the white caps over our feet, playing tag with the waves. The pines on Blackbird Island danced and bent to kiss the blueberry bushes as we giggled in the face of approaching storm. The old feeder pond for the D&H Canal was then littered with driftwood, swampy islands, frogs, snakes and sharp toothed pickerel as big as your arm.  Lakes like Wannasink, Yankee, Lake Louise Marie, Masten and Wolf were all manmade basins, dammed up and designed to control the flow of the Delaware Hudson Canal that cut through the Bashakill Valley, just down the mountain. It was a massive project that became obsolete before an aqueduct system could be implemented. The railroad saw to that.
    When the canal reverted to swamp, these feeder lakes of the eastern Catskills also returned to a more natural state. It wouldn't be until a few savvy Orange County businessmen/developers, among them Hank Bull, Judge Wilmont Decker and my grandfather Wray Osterhout, spied the property before WWII, that Wolf Lake would be yanked into the Twentieth Century.
   Sixty years after I popped and jiggled in the face of that hurricane, Wolf Lake is no longer a wild place. Upscale year round homes ring the placid waters. Blackbird Island is gone; as are the snakes, frogs, tangle of driftwood and chaos of nature. It's still beautiful....but tamed forever. Thomas Cole was an early environmentalist, warning through his brush strokes, poetry and commentary of what was to come. The grove of trees around the old Van Vetchen stone house, those shading the ancient Indian burial ground, once axed for the railroad line were lost for all time.
    I moved back to Sullivan County in 1995. In the twenty five years since, I've witnessed a similar degradation of my view and cherished surroundings, as the pastoral moves in, trims and encloses. Large property owners, hobby farmers, orchardists and weekend dilettantes are moving into paradise at an ever increasing rate. There's no stemming the flow. So how can we preserve what we have and at the same time welcome these strangers? This is what I want to discuss.