A Delightful Tarry at the Mohonk Mountain House

Autumn Among the Mohonkies

My grandfather was a truck driver for a local quarry. My father was in construction, and my mother began as a hairdresser, then managed food service, and became a librarian assistant at a high school. I am announcing my blue collar credentials, because this post is about as bougie as it gets.

A few weeks ago, I spent a few days at a mountain resort near the Catskills that I’ve wanted to visit for many years. So many in fact, that I can’t remember where I first heard about the place. One of my high school friends takes his family there every year, and shared photos on Instagram, which is what reminded me that it exists. The Mohonk Mountain house was established in 1869 by two Quakers, the Smiley brothers, and has hosted guests ranging from John D. Rockefeller to Dee Snider, the lead singer of Twisted Sister.

And now, the Plucker has joined their ranks:

If you’ve read The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle, about the “sanatorium” resort built by enema-obsessed wacko Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, this is where they filmed the movie adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins, Bridget Fonda, and Matthew Broderick. Kellogg and his ilk are the reason that Americans eat wood mulch like Raisin Bran, Grape Nuts, and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes for breakfast, to flush our our colons of toxicities. I enjoyed both the book and the movie—which also includes Bridget Fonda discovering the ecstasies of “womb manipulation,” and captures the huckster zeitgeist of the turn of the 19th century so delightfully well—and I can’t recommend them more highly.

I mean, the views alone:

The Delights of Mohonk Preserve

The rooms ain’t too shabby. Nice and solid, with a good view and a fireplace. But the hearth was too close to the bed for me to imagine lighting a fire. The bed was decent, but I had better rest at an Element by Westin. So, you’re paying a lot for the stately edifice, its history, and the lovely grounds. All meals are included (criminally, drinks are not) but there’s a breakfast and a lunch buffet where you can gorge yourself on locally farmed produce like a Roman patrician fond of the vomitorium.

The Mohonk Mountain House also has a luxurious spa, where you can have your face scrubbed with dirt, have your feet rubbed with oils, or begin the morning with a bracing leap into their ice-cold lake, followed by a comforting cup of ginger tea and a soak in the hot tub. (Sadly, the lake leap ended the week before our arrival; probably for the best, as the stocked trout looked enormous, and might have snapped at our cold-shocked genitals.)

No enemas, as far as I know. I did make a few silly videos, of course. These really ought to be premium content. But I like you people.

The closest I came was a deep tissue massage by a strapping young Syrian-American massage therapist with forearms the size of bison thews, when he told me my problem was tight hamstrings and glutes. I have written before about the blue collar scorn for self-care. That scorn is mostly because we can’t friggin’ afford it. If anyone needs a spa, it's people who work with their hands or on their feet all day. I had to massage my mother’s shoulder blades after she was tired from carrying serving trays shoulder-height for rich fucks at the country club who demanded French Service. And my father’s, when his were sore from carrying bags of concrete up ladders. Heck, my friend Johnny still asks me for The Knuckle of Death when his shoulder’s sore from a workout. And Sarah gets a delicate rub.¹

This kind of thing should be physical therapy and covered by insurance, but it’s a luxury in the United States, much like Sick Days are for Rail Workers. I hope by the time you read this, they’ve held a wildcat strike and brought the economy to standstill. This article explains how equity robber barons forced Precision Rail Scheduling onto the rail companies, and with a 30% cut in headcount, they can’t give the workers sick days. It’s a capitalism-generated crisis, much like “just in time shipping” caused all those pesky supply chain issues, because why warehouse parts when you can order them from overseas in a few days?

I think I saw two of these magnates soaking in the hot tub while making deals on their phones that put families out of work. Next to a smug sugar daddy with his spray-tanned, Instagram arm candy hottie taking selfies. That was the downside of visiting a fancy resort. You might meet Dee Snider, or some nice bird-watchers from Princeton, and get to chat up the axe-throwing instructor and the nature hike leader about how much they’ve loved working there for decades—it’s apparently a nice place to work—but you also have to rub elbows with the upper crust. And by crust, I mean the crust in capitalism’s underwear.

We didn’t run into much entitlement, thankfully, outside of the Wall Street Journal Hot Tub people. There was a night-time lecture on the neolithic sites of the area, with artifacts and history of the Native American tribes who lived there first, and still do. The teacher was an old white guy archaeologist, but he focused on how advanced the technology was for the time. He showed us spears and arrows that worked like darts: the point stayed in the prey, and the shaft and fletching fell out so if you lost your deer, you didn’t have to make a whole new weapon. I’d never seen those before.

I climbed to Sky Top one day, and out to Eagle Cliff another; the views were amazing. I get why the leaf-peepers come here every season. On a morning bird watch, I didn’t see any birds we don’t get in my backyard, but I did spot a sleepy porcupine.

I also saw my first ravens in the wild. Here’s a pair flying around each other. It really made me verklempt, so I put it to the end theme from The Secret of NIMH, which has a similar scene of two crows together:

On the day that I was in New York to see the Edward Hopper exhibit, I had a late Laotian lunch with Lawrence Block. (And if you read his latest, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, I like to think that our last pre-pandemic meal together at the same restaurant inspired the restaurant Two Guys From Luang Prabang.) I mentioned my sojourn at Mohonk, and he mentioned that in the ‘80s, Donald E. Westlake—the legend responsible for the Dortmunder and Parker novels—with his wife Abby, used to hold murder mystery weekends at the Mohonk Mountain House where up to 300 guests would try to solve a murder roleplayed at the resort. At least two of these puzzles were written into books, some apparently with instruction on how to host your own murder mystery party, and are known as the Mohonk Mysteries. The books are out of print, but that seems like much more fun than the board meetings and whatnot that were being held in their conference rooms while we were there.

If you haven’t had Lao food, get yourself some. I had a banh mi sandwich made with fried oyster mushrooms, of which John Harvey Kellogg might approve, but it was delicious. And if you need one more reason to visit the Mohonk Mountain House, if only virtually by watching The Road to Wellville, I leave you with this trailer:

1. To get technical, all four of them have tight infraspinatus muscles; when I can’t get to a fancy spa, I rub my infraspinatus against a door jamb like the big hairy bear that I am. There’s also a device called an Alpha Ball and a knobbed foam roller that I call The Donkey Dick, which are cheaper than massage therapists.