I've always liked playing outside, and I've been in love with the Catskills since I first went to camp there at age 6. Photo by Joe Currano.

Tired of the old places 

I didn’t spend too much time alone back then – I didn’t have a choice. I was 16 and working at a summer camp in New York, charged with keeping my 13 kids from being eaten by the black bears that roamed the Catskill Mountains.

My friend Ilze and I had the youngest girls, and I would spend afternoons sitting in the sun-dried grass by the dodgeball field, playing referee and wondering that anyone would pay me to watch children throw a ball against the backdrop of green mountains.

But I'd been learning the paths of that camp since I first went there at age 6, and other rounded mountaintops tempted me from a distance. So Ilze and I borrowed a car on our day off, planning to get breakfast at an amazing waffle house she knew about and then discover the mountains beyond camp.

The waffle place was closed, and it rained. The hills loomed mysterious out of their scarves of cloud-mist, but still, driving got tedious after a while. Ilze didn’t want to go out into the drizzle, so I dropped her back off and told her I’d go climb a mountain. She told me not to fall off, and I promised I’d be back by dark.

The clouds rose and fell down on the mountains again. I stopped my car at a trailhead in a place called Platte Clove. Trees stretched on for miles unbroken, and the trail I took was quiet except for the rain on the leaves and ferns. I could sing as I walked, and no one would care.

But I caught my breath and was quiet when I saw the place where the mountain fell away into mist. The stream ran that way, so I knew there'd be a waterfall. I set off, looking for the place the stream would tumble over into the side of the cloud.

The Catskill Mountains aren't like the Montgomery County suburb in which I grew up, where schools don't have swings because the children might fall off and get hurt. In the Catskills, they make their swings tall, so that when you jump off with a yell, it's like flight. And in the Catskills, when they post a sign telling you to stay on the marked trails, it means they're warning you about something important.

	The waterfall I found: Plattekill Falls in Platte Clove. Photo by Diana Gildersleeve, courtesy of The Mountain Top Historical Society of Greene County, N.Y.

Instead of going down into the valley along the path, I followed a footpath up over the crest of a ridge, ignoring the sign because I wanted to see the waterfall from above. But the ridge was steep, and by the time I realized how precarious my footing was, I had hardly a way to turn around. The moist dirt was just a thin layer over rock, and there was nothing to hold onto but plants with juicy stalks and shallow roots. I saw the way the slope dropped steep toward the edge of a cliff, and when I remembered what Ilze said about not falling off the mountain, I didn't smile at all.

But I didn't fall off. Moving carefully, I crouched down to side-step up the ridge and got onto a marked trail in a hurry. I forgot about seeing the waterfall from the top and trotted down the trails into the valley instead.

They led me right to it. From a ways off, I already felt the mist, which mixed with the drizzle and beaded on my clothes. The stream bounced along the cliff and then fell, splashing, into a pool. A large rock hung out over the edge of the water and I stopped there, kneeling.

The half-circle of mossy cliffs were cupped around me like some great hand, and the thin stream fell from on high, and there was no one there but silly me who makes up bad songs as she walks around, trying not to fall off of mountains.