After months in lockdown, adventure is where you find it
I do a weekly podcast called “What Am I Doing Here?” It’s a tremendous amount of work and pays zilch, just like writing this article. The show should be called “Why Am I Doing This?” It’s just crazy, funny, true stories about my visits to weird and dangerous places: Iran, Easter Island, North Korea, the North Pole. My wife has dragged me like a piece of battered luggage to more than 130 countries, most recently the
-stans: Paki-, Kazakh- and Uzbeki-. She was planning a trip to Afghani-, for reasons I don’t quite under-, when the pandemic hit. Suddenly we were stranded, unable to leave the tiny island home we call Manhattan. Since we had no car and were leery of using public transit, we were limited by how far we could walk in a day. Like medieval villagers, we never went more than five miles from home.
For me, it was a dream version of New York: no crowds, no noise, no Broadway musicals. After four months of this, my wife wanted OUT, but no one would take us: Americans were considered too disease-ridden to be allowed into any country. I wasn’t afraid of Afghanistan — they were afraid of me. To call us lepers is an insult to leprosy — it’s nowhere near as contagious as COVID-19.
In desperation, my wife and I did what New Yorkers have done for centuries — we went to the Catskills. I’d only been there once, half a century ago, to visit the Catskill Game Farm.
If you were a kid growing up in Connecticut in the 1960s, you saw
commercials for the Catskill Game Farm every three or four minutes. The ads featured Roland Lindemann, owner of America’s only private zoo, who talked like one of the cuter Nazis on “Hogan’s Heroes.” I nagged my father to take me there. It was a hundred miles from our home, but Dad acted like I’d asked him to pull me by rickshaw to the moon. It was worth all the begging. The Catskill Game Farm was a magical place, even better than the commercials. And a llama spit at my father.
Fifty years went by. I got married, had a career, moved to New York. The chubby little boy had become a chubby little man. If I wanted to visit the Catskills Game Farm, I didn’t have to whine till my dad drove me there. Now I could whine until my wife took me.
We arrived at the zoo to find it had been closed since 2006. There was a creepy rumor that all the animals had been sold to exotic meat butchers. But I had hope. The buildings and enclosures were still around, slowly crumbling away. Nostalgia freaks, aging boomers and fans of decay were allowed to tour the facilities two days a month ... but we’d come too late.
“Maybe we can sneak in,” said my wife, standing right next to a sign reading “YOU CANNOT SNEAK IN.” That’s not a joke — it was the most explicit sign I’d ever read: “THESE PREMISES ARE MONITORED BY SECURITY CAMERAS 24 HOURS A DAY. IF YOU SNEAK IN, POLICE WILL CATCH YOU AND PUT YOU IN JAIL.”
My wife seemed to see some wiggle room in these words. As a gardener left the grounds, the electric gate remained open just long enough for my wife to squeeze our rented Jeep through. She was like Clark Griswold, the lead character in Chevy Chase’s only good film “National Lampoon’s Vacation” — she’d brought us to the Catskills for an adventure and, dammit, we were going to have one. She’d found a little slice of Afghanistan in upstate New York. We roared past signs reading “NO VEHICLES EVER” and “YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW,” our Jeep bouncing over dirt roads and gravel paths too rugged for the movie “Sorcerer.” And you know, I loved it. The fences had fallen, the cages were overgrown with weeds, the roofs of enclosures had caved in; but I could still see the Catskill Game Farm of my youth. It hadn’t aged gracefully, but then, neither had I.
If you ever visit the Catskills, check out the Old Game Farm. Try to do it legally.