“My old man was Mr. Mead himself, who had built the place 40 years before. Pointing down to what seemed an earthly paradise, stretched at our feet, I asked, ‘What is the name of that place down there?’ He replied: ‘That is Woodstock Village.’ It looked good to me then; it has not ceased to do so.”
— Bolton Brown finds Woodstock, 1902
It’s difficult to find a path to an optimal creative life, particularly within a single lifetime. But we all try. We try.
Throughout the most recent century, Woodstock has probably had a more varied proportion of seekers, both secular and spiritual, than other Ulster County communities. It looks good to many people who are looking.
Installed on the vernal equinox in September 2008, a ten-foot red cedar peace pole on Woodstock’s village green is laser-etched in stainless steel with the words “May Peace Prevail On Earth” in a hundred languages.
The day before Labor Day, dozens of percussionists surrounded by well over a couple of hundred spectators, many of them weekenders with mouths agape at the sight of a Bronx event so far away from New York City, performed by the weekly Sunday drum circle near the peace pole. What sort of village was this?
A city block away from the village green as the proverbial crow flies is Maple Lane, on one side of which business at the weekend outdoor Mower’s Market seemed more robust than ever.
“It is not so bad waiting around for people to come into your store on a sunny weekend. It is after the weekend that is always the problem,” explained Dharmaware owner Erik Holmlin after loading up his remaining goods from his outdoor space at Mower’s on Sunday evening. “My sales yesterday and today matched what I used to do in the [Woodstock] shop on a Labor Day weekend. And then when the slowdown after Labor Day happens, I am not waiting in the shop for the one remaining tourist to walk in.”
Holmlin says he’s now spending his weekdays teaching with his life partner Catherine Sklarsky at In the North Woods Learning Center, the Woodstock home school cooperative whose director she has been since 1990.
Welcome to the wilderness
In Mink Hollow in Lake Hill, miles away from the commotion, the loudest sound comes from the gurgling Beaverkill running from the hillsides through the dappled afternoon light. Mink Hollow in Ulster County doesn’t have mailboxes indicating house numbers, and further up the road even emergency fire numbers are almost extinct. The Mink Hollow road no longer leads up to Greene County. An unpaved road at the dead end of Mink Hollow clambers uphill toward a larger sky and peters out in another dead end.
“The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness,” John Muir famously said in 1915.
It’s hard to believe that 200 years ago the intersection of Mink Hollow and the Bearsville road (now Route 212) was the population center of Woodstock, as the historians tell us it was. In June 1787, captain Elias Hasbrouck, a former New Paltz resident, was elected the first town supervisor of a geographically much larger Woodstock and held the first meeting of the town board at his home in Lake Hill.
An urban refugee might well confuse the wooded scene of Mink Hollow with the forest primeval of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline. The American wilderness served as a perfect setting for the utopian state of nature portrayed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where man was free and independent without the constraints of society. ,
Bolton Brown cited the “sheer savage impenetrability” of the woods from Greene County to Mink Hollow. Nowadays it’s an easy path for backpackers. Many of today’s wilderness walkers between Tannersville and Mink Hollow were once city people who had found that living in the Catskills had provided them greater control over their own lives.
In the North Woods Learning Center’s “favorite destinations” in Mink Hollow include an apple orchard on New York City watershed-owned land, the trailhead at the end of the Mink Hollow road, and other locations. Kenneth Wilson Park in Wittenberg and Rick Volz Field in Bearsville are on the “favorites” list, as are also Magic Meadow, the Zena cornfield, the Lewis Hollow trailhead, and the Sawkill streamside at the Comeau property. Byrdcliffe was added last autumn. And just this week the learning center was overjoyed with a partnership arrangement for an indoor home at the Matagiri Sri Aurobindo Center (widely known as Aurobindo) on Wittenberg Road toward Mount Tremper.
“Mother nature is our teacher and our guide,” declares the learning center’s website. “Her curriculum is one of cycles, patterns, instincts, transformation, and a profound, luminous wisdom.”
There are both year-round and homeschooling programs. The children range in age from four years old up, and the groups are not segregated by age.
“Children often begin with us as age four and five,” wrote Sklarsky in a recent email communication, “and remain in our circle of community learning until late in their teenage years, often returning as apprentices and teachers. It is an inspiring continuum!”
Approximately 30 families are involved, according to Sklarsky. Parental participation has always been the central tenet of the homeschooling movement. Parents contribute whatever time and money they can. Outside teachers and community resource experts are also deeply involved.
Homeschooling is now mainstream
Homeschool enrollment in the United States increased dramatically during the first year of the pandemic, according to the U.S. Census, jumping from 3.1 percent of the school-age population nationally to 11.3 percent (excluding students engaged in distance learning). The New York State homeschooled population increased from 26,805 early in the first year of the pandemic to 54,414 five months later.
Distance learning proved a flop. Disruptions to learning continued to impact students negatively well past the initial hits following the spring 2020 school closures, according to a Brookings Institution study and other sources,
Students returned to their schools as the risks of Covid lessened. But they and their parents were more willing than they had been to explore educational alternatives both within and outside traditional public schooling.
Though the homeschooling numbers dropped back, they remained well above pre-pandemic levels. Recent data has supported the claim that homeschooling has continued to increase in popularity in 2022 and 2023, leaving its enrollment numbers close to double what they were a decade ago.
This year New York was one of 19 states to expand school-choice options for families.
There’s also evidence that New York State homeschoolers do better on state standardized tests than public schoolers do. However, this difference may be because many homeschoolers come from more privileged segments of the population.
Improved teaching is one key to educational quality at all levels. Just this past week, the state announced a $269,595 grant for Ulster BOCES to support nine teacher resident positions to train new teachers.
A matter of vision
The 1902 founders of the Byrdcliffe art colony had a utopian vision of art and nature combined into a better life. If proximity to nature alone were a sufficient condition to creating art, there’d be a lot more artists in rural areas. Communities require cultural institutions as well. And a creative, responsive educational system is always high on the utopian wish list.
“Though commercialized, nostalgicized, etc., this vision remains our own,” eloquently wrote Will Nixon in Woodstock Times in 2011. “Yet I wonder whom the next Bolton Brown might be. And where he takes us. And whether some of us will have tears on our cheeks as the old order gives way to the new.”
Most Woodstockers of longer than recent standing remember Mark the Buddhist, the scraggly-bearded guy in the center of town who handed out little stones with a Tibetan message written with a Sharpie to anyone who would take them. Mark would engage regular passersby in enigmatic conversation.
In a deeply felt article published in Tricycle Magazine upon Mark the Buddhist’s death in 2011, the local poet Clark Strand wrote: “The whole town received his teaching, for the most part never quite sure what it was. Regardless of all this, it was the town that made that teaching possible. It was the town that made Mark possible. Most anyplace else in America he’d have been a nuisance. But not in Woodstock. We liked supporting someone who improvised Buddhist folk art right on the spot, distributing it for free on the streets of the town. It might not have made sense elsewhere, but it made sense here, to us.”
Strand succinctly encapsulated Mark the Buddhist’s honored place in the local universe. “It was difficult to accept his mental illness, or even to decide what it was,” wrote Strand. “In a town like Woodstock, where the mentally infirm are tolerated, the eccentric awarded a plaque, it’s sometimes difficult to tell the two apart.”
Though no one knows for sure what the new order will bring, it seems Woodstock’s way to fear for the worst. But no tears may be necessary. A Woodstock education begins with an environment of learning, openness, tolerance and acceptance. If those goals can be communicated, old Woodstockers need worry less about the new Woodstockers.
In the North Woods Learning Center’s website is in complete accord: “Our understanding and respect of similarity and diversity is reflected in the attention we pay to each individual’s unique development and the acceptance and nurturing provided for each person’s skills, enthusiasms, frailties and strengths.”
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