A sense of this place
This "about" page begins with a grounding in the physical landscape. The water and countryside here are the ancestral land and waters of numerous Native tribes, including the Lenape, Susquehannock, and Mohican [link], or Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee-Ga : or the territories of the People of the Long House [link] According to oral history, five nations banded together over 1,000 years ago to form a union. The five nations were the Mohawk, Cayuga, Seneca, Oneida and Onondaga. (In 1722, the Tuscarora joined the union making the confederacy Six Nations.)
The Iroquois, also known as the Five Nations or the Six Nations and by the endonym Haudenosaunee; meaning "people who are building the longhouse"), are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of First Nations peoples now called northeast North America and Upstate New York. They were known during the colonial years to the French as the "Iroquois League", and later as the "Iroquois Confederacy". The English called them the "Five Nations", including (east to west) the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. After 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora from the southeast were accepted into the confederacy, which became known as the Six Nations. The Confederacy likely came about between the years 1450 CE and 1660 CE as a result of the Great Law of Peace. [link] [link] [link]
The present-day community of Narrowsburg (pop. 373) sits in the Town of Tusten and County of Sullivan, both of which are named for European military colonizers. The town's name is derived from Benjamin Tusten, a physician and a militia lieutenant colonel during the American Revolutionary War who was killed at the Battle of Minisink. The township of Tusten is in the southwestern part of Sullivan County (which is named for another revolutionary militia officer). The town was previously part of the townships of Mamakating and Lumberland. Benjamin Homan was the first European settler, setting himself up by Narrowsburg in the early 1770s, overlooking the narrowest and deepest spot on the river which the Lenni Lenape, the original stewards of the valley, for countless generations called Lenapewihittuck. Homan renamed the spot "Homan's Eddy" in honor of himself, but that name didn't last.
From the East traveling West
My own European ancestors were natives of Ireland [link], Britain[link], France [link], Russia [link], and Poland [link]. The first to emigrate this continent arrived in the early 1600s, settling on Staten Island and traveling thence up the Shatemuc ("the river that flows both ways") to Esopus in Ulster County; and to the lower river valley area now known as Bucks County, Pennsylvania; westward across the continent to Kentucky, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, and then back to New Jersey. Direct ancestors fought the British in the American revolution. None are known to have been loyalists to the Crown. Subsequent ancestors both fought to preserve American union and abolish slavery, while census records show that others of my ancestors enslaved people on their farms. This history can't be ignored.
My maternal ancestors were Irish Catholics and Russian Jews who fled their native countries to escape religious restrictions and persecution. Likewise, my paternal ancestors were Huguenots who left France in the 1600s ultimately to settle in Esopus, Ulster Count, New York.
Nineteenth century immigrants settled in the lower river valley (Lenapewihittuk, river of the Lenape) valley at Lambertville [link] [link] and northward in Somerville [link]. On a Monday late in October while Dwight Eisenhower was President, I arrived in Plainfield, New Jersey.
I grew up in New Jersey and in Milanville, Pennsylvania (pop. 134 in 2020) at a place called Innisfree that was a second home to my family from 1970 until 1996 when it was sold. I lived as a caretaker of sorts on the property for a few years after completing graduate school until I moved to Monticello in 1988. I attended 6th grade there in Damascus. In between, my family spent as many summers, weekends, and vacations at Innisfree as we could.
After exploring the world, starting college in Utah and Israel, Egypt, and elsewhere; serving a two-year ministry in Colorado; later enlisting in the USAF and serving Laughlin AFB in Del Rio, Texas; and eventually completing college and graduate degrees in psychology and counseling at the Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey) and Rider College (now Rider University), I took a job at the Wayne County Group Home in Beach Lake as a houseparent working from 3 pm on Fridays until 10 pm Sunday nights. This weekend shift left me the full week to work as a writer, ad salesperson, business manager, and contributing editor for The River Reporter from 1985 until 2000 [archive] when I began working at the NYS Office of Alcoholism & Substance Abuse Services (OASAS) in Middletown and no longer had time for news reporting. From then until 2013, I worked at various local human service agencies, including the Wayne County Children & Youth Services, Sullivan County Probation Department, Berkshire Farm Center & Services for Youth, and Sullivan County Department of Community Services. That's a mouthful of workplaces in a run-on sentence!
Since retiring from State service in 2010, I have remained self-employed as the sole clinician at Choices Mental Health Counseling PLLC. Despite "retiring" from public employment, I still work full-time in private practice. I have loved independent practice more than any employer. Clients of all ages with whom I have met and worked over the last three decades have gotten my full attention regardless of who wrote my check. I am grateful for them all.
I was sucked into the rabbit-hole of Monticello politics on August 2, 1993, when I was arrested with four others at a village board meeting for holding a small oaktag sign in the back of the room that said, "We love democracy," followed by a protracted Federal civil trial in White Plains. Two months later, on October 24, 1993. My father died suddenly during a walk-a-thon which he had organized with other members the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Innisfree was sold in 1996. All these events drew my attention away from the river valley that I loved, but I have always considered it home. In late 2021, like Thomas the Rhymer, after three decades in the Village of Monticello I emerged in a comfortable apartment above the Forestburgh General Store with a kind landlord and a friendly chihuahua named Rigney. I'll say no more about that rabbit-hole at this time other than that I met many good people there and made lasting friendships during my 33 years in Monticello. My residency in the village ended on September 15, 2021, when I moved to Forestburgh, but some friends in Monticello remain.
For part of those 33 years, it was my pleasure to serve the as the municipal historian for the Village of Monticello, from 2008 to 2021. Since my resignation (upon moving to Forestburgh), to the best of my knowledge the Village has not appointed a replacement. Al Dumas has since been named Historian for the Town of Thompson, in which the Village of Monticello resides. Any inquiries regarding the Village might be well directed to Mr. Dumas or to the Village Clerk.
Following the reopening of society after the covid-19 pandemic, I spent two and a half years alone and working full-time at my office in Monticello (or working remotely from home). It was then that I reconnected with an old friend and former coworker from long ago at The River Reporter. Jill Behling at that time was the newspaper's graphic artist during much of the period I wrote regularly for the paper in the 1980s. She was always someone that I liked and respected and is now someone that I love. On March 18, 2023 at Repair Cafe Tusten we somehow came back into each other's lives at a time that was right for both of us. We had never dated or socialized in the past, other than working together at the newspaper and on community projects, but in later years found that we still share core values about our connections to community and to the earth and many other things. I knew then I was in love. I am very lucky.
By August 2023, Jill, Rigney, and I were living together full-time in Narrowsburg with long-term hopes of someday getting old and of doing so together. At the same time that I moved my residence, I relocated my office to the Narrowsburg Union a nearby office environment for my present professional needs, which has changed significantly since the covid19 pandemic (my group therapy sessions have been virtual since March 13, 2020, while my in-person counseling sessions are about 50% in-person and 50% virtual). I've heard a slogan in town lately urging readers, "Love where you live." I do.
A lifelong journey
Over the years, I have walked many lengthy roads and trails, taking photographs, writing, talking with people, speaking in public when called upon or on issues that I considered important, and supporting the good work of others when I could. My personal ministries and studies, secular or sacred, have almost always been in communities where I have lived.
I have served over the years on organizational nonprofit boards of directors and worked directly with people toward progress and healthy positive changes. In 2022 (until moving outside the library service area), I was elected a Trustee and later Fiscal Officer of the Ethelbert B. Crawford Public Library; and a member of the Executive Committee and chair of the Health Committee; and a member of the Civic Engagement Committee of the Sullivan County NAACP. I left the voluntary library position to which I had been elected a year before in order to move Narrowsburg.
I won't go into details here on this page about youthful experiences in and exiting from high-demand religion, (click here if you're interested), except to note that the impact of leaving a highly structured lifestyle and belief system can include a crisis of faith that often will (as it did for me) lead to discovery of other more meaningful paths through the universe. Support for others who may now be similarly engaged in deconstructing patriarchy in a search of more authentic spirituality and religious experience than can occur in the Patriarchal Order is plentiful on Instagram or Reddit for example, and elsewhere, with hashtags like #exmormon.
In 1986, I drafted what I called my own thirteen Affirmations of Faith, and one year later helped found the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, of which I served as the congregation's first President after the group's formal affiliation with the Unitarian Universalist Association, and previously as the fellowship's Secretary. During late 2023, after moving to Narrowsburg, I returned to activity in the UDUUF see it moving forward for the good it does for the community and its members. Since January 2024, I have been the Vice-President and chair the Service Planning Committee. The Rev. Laurie Stuart, owner and publisher of The River Reporter, has been the President. Since the 1980s, I have identified spiritually as pagan. Unitarian Universalism, which has no doctrines or dogma and welcomes and respects people of all ethical belief systems and backgrounds, for which I am grateful.
During the late 1980s I worked with the Upper Delaware River Association, busying myself (along with Barbar Yeaman, Ed Wesely, others in Damascus Township at that time) with such tasks as collecting signatures to hold a ballot referendum on Damascus' participation in the Conference of Upper Delaware Townships and offering public comments of our own during the planning process. I was trained and served a domestic violence volunteer for the Women's Resource Center in Honesdale; and as President of the board of directors of the Delaware Community Center in Callicoon [link]. After moving to Monticello in 1988, I served on the board of directors of the Community Action Commission to Help the Economy in Liberty; drafted and filed the certificate of incorporation for Habitat for Humanity of Sullivan County and served as its Secretary in the mid to late 1990s (this affiliate chapter is understood to currently be inactive); and as Master of Monticello Lodge #532, Free & Accepted Masons during the years 2000-2002 and as Lodge and District Historian, among other community activities.
This disjointed assortment of facts may give some sense of values and interests and provides links to organizations that I value and endorse. These are the varied personal ministries to which I've been called throughout my life, secular and spiritual.
Websites
To the extent that my middle-class income allowed, I was an early adopter of Internet media when it came to Sullivan County in the mid 1990s. My first website was hosted on zelacom.com, from 1997 to 2005. Alex Schiffer, owner of that first local provider of Internet service in Sullivan County, advised me to view page source on pages whose design I wanted to emulate. I taught myself HTML tagging by hand in text files. After manually tagging an article of text interspersed with photos and other images, changing the file extension to .htm or .html and uploading it to the server magically made them viewable to the world.
Moving from MS Edit to an early version of Dreamweaver, I created the inaugural websites for organizations and people that were important to me. Included among early websites that I registered with ICANN and built were the The River Reporter, the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, my sister's church in Califon, New Jersey, the New Jersey Forestry Association, and a bunch of local politicians who never paid me a dime. I developed and maintained a website for the Village of Monticello for a few years during Gary Sommers' first term as mayor for which I was paid a small amount. When voters gave him the boot, I took the site content with me and restored the municipal page to the condition. Incoming politicians slammed me for killing the website. I replied that I had not deleted anything. The creative content was mine ("©TSR Graphics") and has largely remained accessible on this website.
In 2007, I installed FreeBSD on a computer I had rebuilt in my basement, and for several years hosted my personal and several other websites on that server. That lasted until a winter storm one year caused a power surge that fried the system. I was able to retrieve nearly all of the data files from the hard drive, but the MySql database was "hosed" (the term used by a Drupal professional who examined it for me) and has not been recovered. Rather than building a new operating system and starting over with the server, I rented disc space on a commercial host and reinstalled Drupal. I now rely on a more secure computer infrastructure maintained by Bluehost. For this latest install of Drupal 10 will serve as a blog and record of my activities and thoughts.
So, here we are with an old website and a spanking fresh Drupal install. Rebuilding is always a process.
March 23, 2024
Narrowsburg, New York
