Trippin' on New York's Appalachian Trail

Beyond the Merry Go Round at Bear Mountain

Get off the Merry Go Round at Bear Mountain and hike

I came upon the Appalachian trail by accident, and by "accident" I mean a happy coincidence. My early morning 12 step meeting left me the entire Sunday to just get lost. When lost? I often google words like dogs, and walking, and trails nearby NYC but it's not often that you come upon the freakin Appalachian trail in the Hudson Highlands?!

My trip from the city for a single day reminded me of a single white sheet of paper with black letters titled "Benedicto" - Edward Abbey

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams, waits for you-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls- Edward Abbey

Want a break from NYC? Stuck in a rut? Get off your ass and live. If it's your lucky day? You'll come upon a surmountable obstacle like a downed tree on I-9 to remind you that sometimes it's's the good people who have the machete.

Once you reach your unintended destination? Contemplate 1,403 miles south of walking will wind you up in Georgia and once you're on the trail you might run across some of the "crazies" who began the 2,109 Appalachian Trail in Maine two months prior and have traded their assigned names for trail personas like "Splash" and "Bluefoot" to name a few.

Back when I first received the gift of "Benedicto" I was somewhere in the middle of an 89 day stint in a Sonoma County jail, because I was winning a Federal Case in San Francisco's 9th Circuit, and if I had known back then? Edward Abbey was a twentieth-century polemicist and desert anarchist and depending upon who you ask? It's not like I knew Edward Abbey, and anyway he died in 1989 about six months before my marriage. Don't blame him either. He was like myself; likely to provoke infuriation or inspiration. Maybe county jails in the West should check their Federal "sources" before they go handing out inspirational "poems" by the guy who was proclaiming that the west was in danger of being developed to death and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. The man was an activist, something I strive to be, and having lived through a criminal case on the West and spent five years metaphorically incarcerated on the East. I much concur with the ranting/writing of Edward Abbey. You only need to leave the West and drive East of the Mississippi to see that there's a whole half of our "educated" country that doesn't "get" that all of our citizens aren't allowed free access. The Elitist East are so caught up in their private land "rights" that for this activist? Let me clarify the word activist. You won't find me joining many marches but observing a few, and I don't start movements, but you will find me moving on my beliefs and speaking of my "lived experience" and writing. If writing is an act of anything to me, it's an act of rebellion. I'm that Native San Franciscan, who sometimes wants to pull a Vesuvius beat out of Ginsburg's "Howl" and erupt on the Eastsiders who exhibit a complete denial that their "land" was never theirs?!! A nonstarter if you will. Land in America? If it "belongs" to anyone? It belongs to the first people. You know those darker skinned people who were here first in America long before it was colonized and we call ourselves civilized "American People"? This place we inhabit has long been called Anowara:kowa by the Mohawk people, who are clan members of the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy. Speaking of associations, read John Kennedy O'Toole's Confederacy of Dunces and let him describe New Orleans culture, part of a broader nation that has accepted and even "celebrates" with traditions like Thanksgiving? As if dude. Who worships at the alter of a bunch of American Plymouth "colonists" who betrayed the Wampanoag Indians one Autumn "feast" in 1612? Sorry, but I don't "give thanks" to a bunch of pilgrim sellouts every third Thursday in November and watch a President pardon one Turkey for the 46 million which are slaughtered for our "Holiday". Nope. You won't find me celebrating an atrocity with carcass. Dead Turkey day aside? I'm grateful everyday my ancestry isn't linked to any Americans who gave false treaties and stole land that didn't belong to them in the first place. Thanksgiving? You'll find me pondering May 28, 1830 and the "Indian Removal Act" which led to our American genocide. I will however compliment the West that puts large amounts of acreage West of the Mississippi in the hands of the "public", particularly states like Idaho, Colorado, Alaska, Nevada, and yes my Native state of California. When you say BLM to a Native Californian? I don't think "Black Lives Matter" I think "Bureau of Land Management" which even has a nifty website that "shares" with "the public" all public land. Landmark thinking, huh? The idea that you can freely travel, hike, park your car, and if you prefer? Be a nomad. You try that kind of "alternative" lifestyle in the East, New York, or Massachusetts in particular, with beautiful beaches and miles of wide Atlantic swaths? "Trust me" you're not welcome. You might even be classified a bum, and be treated like a criminal by a local "authority" that smacks you out of a sound sleep and tells you in the middle of the night to "move along"? To where? What's East of Boston Massachusetts? England and the colonies? Nobody I have met born in the East has any real awareness of our "origins" of the struggle beyond a 1970's crying Indian who probably just caught their attention during a commercial in front of their 70's T.V. dinner on a television tray while watching M.A.S.H. Does anyone over the age of sixty even realize the 1971 actor in portrayal of an Indian crying over pollution wasn't even a real Native? He was really an Italian American actor. Try explaining that to someone in Seneca Falls New York (a place where I lived for a time) which is populated by mostly Italian American immigrants, who live technically on the Cayuga "Nation" which is in fact a sovereign nation within the United States? Well perhaps that's why the town placed signs all along the open spaces that said "No Sovereign Land" so ignorant of their own roots, that they forget, and don't even get me going on a rant on the "sovereign land" they claim? Even if the Cayuga people they fear "bought" their own land from the State? It's Federally administered by the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) who've been fucking the Natives since it was established March 11, 1824. That's how long Native lands have been put in government trusts, but that's another rant on the ignorance and lack of awareness one encounters on the East. You say the word AIM in Seneca Falls New York? They might think you're pointing a gun, as they are clueless as to who Russell Means was and what he meant to the Natives before he passed away October 22, 2012. I have yet to encounter a New Yorker familiar enough with A.I.M. to know it is an acronym for American Indian Movement. That fact aside? Just try and park your car on a beach in Massachusetts and you'll know what it "means" to be an American citizen. Why I admire the Edward Abbey's of the world, an eccentric, eloquent, and passionate writer, and an advocate who mocked corporate greed, mindless bureaucrats and was often known to quote Walt Whitman's warrior battle cry "resist much, obey little" and, though I doubt he'd much like that I'd driven my car into a New York wilderness for a hike? I mean the guy didn't think one had hiked until one had bled on the trail? And they call me extreme? But, then Edward Abbey isn't a female activist who uses the act of writing against trusts which take individuals and put claims on children and puts them into trusts for a perpetuity of time that's 20 to 90 years whichever is longer?! Specifically these irrevocable trusts which are disguised land grabs. Just as dangerous and insidious as any bureaucratic system. You don't design irrevocable trusts for any reason but to avoid taxes, and by some curse others call "luck" a last name becomes a birthright? One which forgets that our American birthright? It's not ours. Ask any "Native American" (my second ex was one of "those" people) a half Mexican Pomo who's 100% on the "Native Roll" an indigenous American. And back in California in 2016 my second ex wouldn't say it, but I will. I will repeat what I heard firsthand from an Onandowaga woman cliff jumper I met on a crag in Ithaca New York. "I don't know who we are, but we're all just looting and squatting" and so I find myself in the rather unenviable position of being against the looting squatters who are takers of Falk "inherited wealth" and think a change of last name changes the wrong thing that gives any last name rights to a "thing" in perpetuity? My children of course don't know that their names (along with their social security numbers) have been diabolically abused to put them into such trusts which are irrevocable and only meant to enhance the wealth of their grandparents and in-laws. Don't use my children's name like you're entitled. Family that behaves like the BIA? It's almost like my Falk children could be indigenous? I know my children. They did in fact come through me and I am not a Native American, but I think my non native children would concur with a line from Mr. Harrigan's Phone: a 2022 Netflix "trender" which was based on a 2020 collection of horror stories from If It Bleeds by Stephen King. The fictional character like the real life author began life poor. In the horror tale, the young protagonist runs across a billionaire and bad luck follows him. In the end the character throws the phone into the water and wishes to rid himself of the entitlements of wealth and with line "when I die, I want to die with my pockets empty"? That resonates. I married a guy like Harrigan and my father? Scarier, harrier and a lunatic in need of an Asylum. Any man who will cover up the sexual abuse of his granddaughter in order to keep money in trusts for "perpetuity"? He's worthy of only disdain. Perpetual proof of what the Donald Sutherland Character said on Netflix in 2022 "money can be cruel if used correctly". Seriously? Can I throw Michael Falk, the man I married September 9, 1989 into some sinkhole with my father who looted me from Saint Elizabeth's "infant hospital" on October 19, 1965? Does life allow a do over? No. Life like money can be cruel, but I wouldn't mind leaving behind some of my rebellious writing and propelling some of the grifter criminals with grifter lawyers into some courts for some hearings on the hoardings of Falk dynastic East coast wealth while holding West Coast children like hostages in trusts in Oregon? Nope. I love access to land along the Hudson, and my two Falk children, and the free writing of Edward Abbey. Here's to the next turn in the canyon wall.

One final piece of advice (...) it is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While you're still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out younder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards. - Edward Abbey

Or in the words of another writer named Hemingway? One must first stand up and live before one sits down to write.