Archaeology
Opinion

Archaeology

We didn’t visit the site to uncover concealed treasures.  We were returning to Parksville, in New York State’s former Borscht Belt, yet again, as we’ve done often during the half century or so since my parents sold the Bauman House.

Our memories are deeply ingrained, and we are the last generation of our family members to have such profound and beautiful connections to that town and that special place. The founding generation were Peshka and Pop, my maternal grandparents, immigrants with optimism and vision. They were also gamblers, with no idea as to what was involved in running a Catskills hotel.

When their ultimate success was passed on to the next generation, my Brooklyn-born mother, their daughter, became, legally, the chairman of the board. Next in line was our generation, already fully Americanized, and while having deep love for the Bauman House, exhibiting no patience or yearning to become its management. In old age, my parents sold the place. They were lucky to find a buyer. They could not, however, sell our love for the hotel, which had since become a mere kuch alein, that particularly Jewish mode of vacation living.

My parents then moved to Israel, unburdened by caring for a derelict collection of three deteriorating buildings. They lie at peace now in the Herzliya Cemetery.

My husband and I and my sister are all now old. Our children have visited the Bauman House, but none of them are as deeply tethered to it as we are. They and their children and grandchildren are of those blessed generations that send their young to profoundly influential Jewish camps. And so it should be!

Therefore, it’s realistic to say that the family ties are now severed, and Parksville will be as unknown to our newer generations as any other unfamiliar place in the world. They may read the etchings on the few remaining trees and not recognize the initials in the carefully carved hearts. No matter. Most of those young love stories have long since ended in decline and death. The green-trimmed white buildings are also gone, and the surrounding foliage has thrived to the point that the topography is now unfamiliar, even to us, who knew every giant rock by name.  Those rocks remain, but we cannot see them.

Even our beloved piano rock, with its uncanny resemblance to a grand piano, where we sunbathed through the decades, is somehow misplaced. Of course it is still there, but we no longer know where.

Our Bauman House has become the Parksville branch of the United States Post Office. But this transition was not due to natural growth or evolution. It was due to deconstruction and reconstruction. All that we loved was torn down and carted away, replaced by a building without character and without memories. A tarmac parking lot covers the places where we hung out or hung laundry. Even the cherished lookoutbelow, a makeshift dirt slide down a hilly path, for kids who didn’t mind getting dirty while they exuberantly yelled “look out below,” is gone.

But it was at the site of lookoutbelow that we found a remarkable vestige of our past lives. Perhaps I should be more clear: a remarkable vestige of the past life of one of our dogs.

We shall never know which dog hid that bone, a bone that surfaced after a violent storm, a thunderous event that we always knew hit the mountains regularly and ferociously. In the New Jersey suburbs where we live, a summer thunderstorm is pretty unexciting. In Parksville they are something else entirely. They are violent, noisy events, and whichever dog planted that bone did not do it during a storm. No. She planted it on a peaceful sunny day.  During a storm she would be seeking safety within the house, hiding wherever she could but always in a room occupied by her people who could protect her, while she trembled with terror, often under a bed, until the rainbow appeared.

And so it was when we visited, on a calm day, the day after one of those powerful storms, on a Sunday when there were no distractions at the post office. We walked the disguised, unused paths where our feet had trod throughout our lives, and we arrived at the remnants of lookoutbelow. The ground was as soft as a marshmallow, and I wondered what ancient secrets might be lying below. Perhaps a spoon. Perhaps a clothespin.  Perhaps a hair-roller. Perhaps a puzzle piece.

I hadn’t thought about a dog bone.

But, indeed, that is what had risen to the surface. On reflection, it seems so natural. The family dogs were always burying their bones. Our dogs were brought up without much dog food. An occasional Alpo was always a mere substitute for real food, often attached to real bones, that could last many days, and gave them so much delicious pleasure. My mother would visit the local butcher — in Parksville it was Heshy Kaplan — and claim, for free, liver scraps that she would cook for the dog of the day. Everyone was happy. It cost no money, and the dogs found the meal exquisite.

But on special days, a beefy bone was the best meal of all, and burying the leftovers was instinctive. I always found it remarkable when we would return to Parksville after our hiatus back in New Jersey, and the dog would make haste to her spot, easily remembering where she had hidden the bone, unlike me when I put things in safe places and usually forget where the safe places are, like my computer passwords. So safe but so forgotten!

So there we were, treading the muddy area of approximately where lookoutbelow had ended, that place where so many of our contemporaries had crashed exuberantly and noisily to the end of the free ride, when we saw something white piercing the surface of the ground.

In all our previous jaunts to the Bauman House we had been bereft. We were unnoticed. Our memories were stashed somewhere, but not there. And now, here was a precious memento, a piece of our lives poking up after many years of safe hiding, long outliving the beloved canine who had buried it there for safe keeping, to remind us that we were here, this place was once ours, and our existence was unchallenged.

We pulled the bone out of the soft ground.  We could not tell which of our many dogs had laid it into the good earth. Could it have been Phoebe, our first dog, who had lived in Parksville for 15 summers and had had ample opportunity to conceal the bone? She was a genius, always among the most brilliant of our animals, a contender to Buttons, who came generations later.

Might it have been the short-lived Caesar, with his propensity to bite whomever bothered him, even a little? He was what we called a bad dog! Or was it Major, a major pain who liked nothing better than to run away, and who was caught many times by our inveterate chasers until he finally succeeded in killing himself?  It could have been Toto, never a genius, but a sweet and loving animal who would have mindlessly yielded to her instincts and hidden the bone. Or Laila, a clone of Toto, another slumdog refugee, kind and beloved.

We will never know, so we will attribute it to all of them, they who hid something so well that it stayed hidden for long years, despite the upheaval that had come to their secret places, with bulldozers ripping out the land and dramatically changing the landscape.

We thank our amazing dogs, givers and recipients of much love, who provided credibility to our hunt for connections to that place. They are missed.

And the Bauman House is missed as well.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of seven. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

read more:
comments