Some Observations from the Hill
By HH (Hub) Brown of Owego

There was a time when I was still in school and brother Bob worked in the shoe factory, when lots of weekends found us camping somewhere in the Catskills. Bob had a motorcycle and sidecar and he would ask me and one of the two kids that I ran around with to accompany him on these trips. He would ask one of my pals one week and the other the next time.

We had a tent that would sleep three and a gas stove and lantern and some pots and pans. He would stop at a store and get some bacon, pork and beans, canned milk, bread, and potatoes. We planned to eat fish in the summer and rabbits in the fall as the good part of our diet.

We agreed that Basket Brook was our favorite locality. It was a pretty little trout stream not large enough to be favored by dry fly fishermen so we seldom had any company. One time Bob spied a plank bridge across the stream and picked out a nice place to camp on the other side. All the land along this part of the stream was abandoned farms so we never saw anyone to get permission to camp there.

The next spring when we planned to go back to the same place, we found that someone had needed the planks and all that was left were the two trunks of trees that had been the stringers. One was a good sized tree that had been hewn flat on the upper side. The other was a much smaller tree. Bob drove the motorcycle down and in line with the larger stringer and said, "You know the three of us could move that lighter pole to fit the sidecar and I could drive across to our old spot."

So, by moving a few stones and scrabbling around at the edge of the brook, the three of us moved an end at a time and put the stringer where Bob wanted it. Then he got on the Harley and started very slowly and very carefully across. But when he got right in the middle of the crossing, the log started to move up and down in cadence with the engine.

The log got to moving so much that Bob knew something had to give so he shut off the motor. Here he was, perched on two poles right over the center of a deep pool with a big round rock right under him. He said, "You fellows push me on across to other side then I can start her up and drive up the bank."

We pushed him across till the front wheel was at the end of the stringer and then he started the engine. That side of the brook was shaded by old hemlock trees and the end of the log and the rocks that supported it had become covered with a thin layer of moss. When Bob let the clutch in and started to move, the wheel spun on that moss and slipped off the log. The hind tire landed right on the edge of the rock, spun there a second, and then took hold. After he was on good going, he drove on up the stream through old abandoned fields till he came to a place shallow enough to drive across and then work his way to a place where he could get back on the road.

Going back down the road toward the river when we passed the place where the bridge had been, Bob said, "I don't think we will camp there any more."