David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

The Russians Were Here: A Place Apart

Moments after passing a tiny stone building with a gilt onion dome topped by a double Orthodox cross, I stopped the car at the corner of Tolstoy Lane and Kiev Drive. Less than an hour from home, I’d arrived at the crossroads of a place apart. Remnant Cold War and contemporary election hacking fears aside, clearly the Russians were here.

Instantly, I sensed that I’d arrived at a remarkable place. I determined to return and probe its mysteries. And I longed to see inside the small chapel that seemed so exotic in familiar-looking woods.

Churaevka, or Russian Village as it is known today, was established in the 1920s by those fleeing the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was a summer retreat for artists, and a haven for Russian culture. Count Ilya Tolstoy, a writer like his more famous father, Count Leo Tolstoy, came upon the area while visiting his American translator who lived nearby. The birches, oaks, pines and maples were reminiscent of his homeland. “Am I dreaming a part of Russia,” he reportedly said. Tolstoy bought some acreage to build his dacha, or summer home. Soon after, he was joined by his novelist friend George Grebenstchikoff who bought additional property in this hilly area between what is now I-84 and the Pomperaug River near its confluence with the Housatonic. Roughly 100 acres was subdivided into building lots, with some land reserved as open space. The name Churaveka has been variously described as derived from a mythical place in a Grebenstchikoff novel, his home community in Siberia, or a family name.

Royalston Falls (New England Trail Haibun)

 Well into April under a brilliant sun, the mercury climbing into the 60s, Mary and I cross Falls Brook under the cool twilight of hemlocks.  On ground half covered by inches of crunchy snow, cold air rises underfoot.  The water is smooth, clear and tea-colored where we cross, fattened by winter’s melt and recent rain.

Following the flow downstream is slow going.  The rocky, root-tangled trail winds among ledges and around boulders on hummocky ground patched with snow and upholstered with iridescent moss.  Despite the difficulty, young families, couples, clusters of friends and a hiking group are slowly making their way.  The Falls are a magnet.

Soon the water erupts in a series of accelerating cascades and steep drops, sliding over rock shelves and crashing onto jumbled stones, eddying briefly in a dark, waxy pool before exploding and tumbling over itself again in acrobatic spray.  White foam grins, the rushing flood fills the air like an unending wind.

At the gorge, we stand on a high ledge watching the brook sluice through a rough rock cleft, its roar vibrating my chest.  Sheets and tusks of opaque ice cling to the dark chasm walls.  Water is whipped to such froth it seems lighter than air.  Watching the brook like a caged zoo animal performing tricks, a dozen people stand locked by hypnotic sound and flow.

we go with the flow
restless like legs on the trail
water never tires

 

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/

Say it with Pencils: Happy Birthday Henry David Thoreau

These eager pencils
come to a stop
... only ... when the stars high over
come to a stop.
    Carl Sandburg, Pencils
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
Happy birthday Henry David Thoreau!  As the author of two books featuring the Concord naturalist born on July 12, 1817, I intend to celebrate.  But I won’t be baking a cake or lighting candles, gestures unlikely to be appreciated by the sometimes prickly Thoreau.  Instead, I intend to go out and buy a pack of my favorite pencils, sharpen them, and write a couple poems.  A good pencil was something the birthday boy would no doubt rejoice in and relish.

Famous as a writer, social critic, apostle of wildness, and for the hut he built and lived in on Walden Pond, few know Thoreau as a pencil maker.  Yet to one degree or another he was involved in his father’s small pencil factory behind the family’s Concord home for most of his adult life.  As a result of Thoreau’s efforts, by the 1840s the company’s pencils were the best America had to offer and rivaled those from Germany and elsewhere.