RIP VAN WINKLE and THE HALVE MAEN

FYI–I wrote this story purely for my own exertainment. My spin on an old Washington Irving classic.   Text; Mea culpa     Images; Mine + AI

 

I love these mountains. And their majestic sister, the Hudson River, forever pushing her dark way southward against the changing tides. The Hudson Valley and the Catskill Range. Home.

The mountains will soon explode into a million vivid colors. Rutting season is coming. The deer will be active, as will other critters of a furry persuasion. Water birds–mergansers, gannets, wood ducks, mallards, geese and other marine avians will be migrating through. Female bears will be surveying the area in search of safe shelter in which to birth and nurse their cubs. This is a place where nature thrives and feels at home.

 

It’s also a place of mystery and myth. Where dwell gods and goddesses’, elves, ogres, dwarfs, the Fae people. People and things that might or might not happen. Or didn’t happen. Strange things. Spooky things. Woodsy things. Other things.

And it’s a place of legend, rumor, nuance, the foggy remnants of things undone, unsaid.

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It’s in this strange place that the legend of Rip Van Winkle resides.

Rip, we’re told, lived with his wife and children in a small village on the lower slopes of the Catskill Mountains. He was, by all accounts, an amiable man, but also known to avoid work of any kind. Children loved him and he loved them. This merely worsened the situation and Dame Van Winkle chided him repeatedly for spending more time playing with children than tending to his responsibilities.

 

So one fateful day, to escape Dame Van Winkle’s “constant harping”, Rip took a walk in the forest. As he approached the uphill slope of the mountain, he encountered a strange silent man carrying a very large keg. Curiosity having overcome his aversion to work, Rip offered to help carry the keg. Not saying a word, the man politely refused the offer and pointed uphill, indicating that Rip should follow him.

After a strenuous four-hour climb, the two men reached a hazy clearing in the woods. There in the haze he saw a group of men dressed in colonial sailing garb playing ninepins. He couldn’t help noticing that every time a man rolled a strike, a bolt of lightning shot out of the ball, followed by a loud clap of thunder that rattled through the mountains and into the valleys below.

His silent escort called his attention to a very large nearby tree. There hung the name board of “THE HALVE MAEN” (HALF MOON). The very ship in which Henry Hudson had explored the river, later given his name, and his crew. This crew. The ghosts of “THE HALVE MAEN”. Years after Hudson explored his river, the HALF MOON was sunk by the British in a battle near Jakarta. This, its ghostly crew and its nameboard, were all that was left of THE HALVE MAEN.

The crew briefly interrupted their game and tapped the keg, Each one then quietly filled a large mug from the keg. The men then turned in unison to face the nameboard, raised their mugs in song and drank a toast, the old Dutch sea chanty Het Zeemansilied, to THE HALVE MAEN. (The instrumental version of which accompanies this story.)

The crew then returned to their game and Rip, feeling unusually dizzy, lay down to take a nap.

Leaves, snow, rain and hot sunshine fell upon him for twenty years. Spiders spun a blanket of webs across his body and nested in his hair. Mice chewed his clothing to rags and his beard to shreds.

When Rip finally awoke, the name board was gone. As were his silent escort and the mute crew of THE HALVE MAEN. He cleared his eyes, nose  and ears, as well as he could, of bugs, worms and woods dirt. He then rose very slowly and painfully to his feet and took the first few halting steps since he had lain down twenty years ago.

The sun was beginning to rise. So Rip decided to descend the mountain and return to his old village. Though on a descending slope, the ten hour trek down the mountain seemed much longer to Rip, given his decrepit condition.

His heavy leather purse had fortunately preserved a few damp pound notes. However, when he arrived at the bottom of the mountain and tried to purchase a room for the night, the innkeeper called for the constable and had him thrown out on the basis of his appearance, alone. “Not to mention a certain ambiance”, his wife added “which might disturb the guests”.

The constable had no choice but to place Rip in a cell for the night. The next morning, after the constable had opened his cell, Rip went the local tavern to purchase some breakfast. Following breakfast, Rip found that there had been a revolution during his slumber. He was now in a new country and his pound notes were useless. The tavern owner called for the constable and had him thrown into jail where he spent the next two days for petty larceny.

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Rip was returned to the streets slightly better fed but no better looking. Passersby stared with disapproval at his dirty, shoddy appearance. When he gently put his hand on a frightened young boy’s shoulder to assure him that he meant no harm, the child screamed, lurched away and fell to the ground in hysterical tears.

Several nearby adults witnessed this and immediately sought out the constable. This time, Rip was jailed for a week on charges of what we would today call suspected pedophilia. There being no such sophisticated medical term in Rip’s Day, the constable booked him as an aged deviant and let it stand.

 

When Rip was released, records show that he was taken in by the local church as a service to the community. He was commandeered by the parish’s two nuns who trimmed his hair, beard and scrubbed him head to toe with lie soap and very hot water.

He was given a set of clean clothes. His old clothes went into the trash. He was then shown to a small cabin behind the church. It had recently been occupied by his predecessor, a young man who had harkened to Horace Greeley’s words and “gone west to seek his fortune.”

The cabin contained a cot, table and a large bowl for washing. A hand pump was the church’s only water source. He shared an outdoor facility with the priest. The nuns had their own. He received meals, prepared by a parishioner, from the church kitchen. For all of this, he was expected to dust the sanctuary and alter areas, keep the holy water fonts full, spittoons emptied, the outdoor facilities clean and neat and do odd jobs.

Other than that, he had the run of the place. Which proved his eventual undoing. Or his emancipation, as Rip might have put it. Having access to the entire property, he eventually located the cabinet where wine was stored for celebration of the Holy Eucharist. And he drank half of that reserved for the next day’s service.

The kindly old priest forgave him but required that he attend the next day’s confessional.

However, the next morning before daylight, the nuns found Rip gone, his new clothes in a pile on his cot, his old clothes gone from the trash. Apparently, he had found that the constraints of the church and society were too much for him to bear. Some thought that perhaps he had moved on to another town or moved into the woods and become a hermit– or just died. A dirty pesky old man, well out of the way. At any rate he was gone, and soon faded from local memory.

Still, there were rumors of people having seen a ragged old man, visible only in a flash of lightning, struggling uphill in the forest. “A dead tree snag or someone’s imagination.” the villagers said. Thunder boomed and rumbled across the sky. Some people said that it was the sound of giants bowling ninepins. “It’s the weather. A childhood superstition”, they said. Some swore that they had heard the faint strains of male voices singing Het Zeemansilied. “The wind”, they said. “A wolf howling at the moon.”

 

As years, decades and centuries have passed by, “facts”, as they’re called, have become the only reality in the sadly constrained minds of mankind.

And things not based on fact, like ogres, elves, the Fae people and the story of Rip Van Winkle have become purely fictitious “bedtime stories”, chaff for the idle minded or are dismissed as being merely laughable.

But those of us who know and love these enchanted mountains–know their spell–know that they’re all wrong. All of them.

Don’t we.