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Inhabiting History
BY Jim Andrews photos by Roy Gumpel

The naturalist John Burroughs once wrote, "Nature comes home to one most when he is at home."Bob Steuding has taken those words to heart. A writer, educator and historian, and Ulster County’s poet laureate, Steuding has spent his career celebrating the area and its natural and social history.
Didn’t know we had a poet laureate? Join the crowd. It’s no wonder, given that the appointment was made more than 20 years ago. In the 1970s, the Ulster County Council for the Arts was formed to funnel state funding to local artists. Among its many ideas was the appointment of a county poet laureate, and on May 5, 1981, the UCCA named Steuding, a SUNY–Ulster English professor. When the Council disbanded in the early ’80s, Steuding was left in office, in effect, for perpetuity.

Other local counties have poet laureates. Rosemarie Werkman is Orange County’s laureate. A septuagenarian poet and the author of a memoir, Love, War and Remembrance (Trillium Press, 1992), Werkman says her mission is to "encourage young people to find joy in the written word" and she spends most of her time working with students in the schools. Last year Tompkins County named Katharyn Howd Machan its first laureate. A poet and assistant professor in the writing program at Ithaca College, Machan gives a series of monthly workshops and organizes poetry readings around the county. Dutchess County, a likely place for a laureate, has never had one. Robert Kelly, a renowned poet with more than 50 books to his credit who teaches at Bard College, claims he’s never heard of a county laureate, but asked, tongue-in-cheek, to be told if anything turns up: "New York has many counties. Some may need Absentee Laureates."

But with the slumping economy and calls for cuts to arts funding—Governor Pataki proposed cutting the budget for the state’s arts council by 15 percent this year, and a few states have called for cutting arts spending entirely—it’s unlikely we’ll see any new laureate positions created anytime soon.

That doesn’t phase Steuding. His efforts to record and celebrate the history of the county have gone unabated for 30 years—honorific or not.

Born in Kingston and raised in Hurley, Steuding was an academic standout who won a full scholarship to study history at Sienna College. Later, wanting to get away from the demands and expectations of his large family, he left for California. He enrolled at USC, studied literature, and earned a master’s in the early ’60s. Disaffected by the Vietnam War, Steuding and his wife, Martha, "decided to try some other countries." He got a job teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where, he says, "We came to really love and respect Chinese culture. I suppose it was in Hong Kong that I began to get a sense of how to live in the world in a different way."

A few years later illness brought Steuding back to the States. He landed at Michigan State University as a professor in the new field of American Studies, and here his twin interests in literature and history dovetailed. He began writing a book on the work of poet Gary Snyder, whom he’d begun reading in Hong Kong, and began studying with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Russell Nye, a pioneer in the field of social history and popular culture. "Studying with Nye and reading Snyder came together to clarify in my mind that if I was ever going to write anything authentic—that would be my own—I had to go back to where I was born."

So in 1969 Steuding returned to the Hudson Valley. He took a position as professor of English at SUNY–Ulster, bought an old stone house in Olivebridge near the Ashokan Reservoir, and then systematically immersed himself in the region. "The first thing I did when we came back in the summer of 1969 was go to O’Reilly’s stationary store in Kingston—it’s now long gone—and buy all the quadrangles for the county and the mountains. I would read them in the morning, like a newspaper, and learn all the names of all the little cloves, and then I would get into that quadrangle for a couple of days or a week. I’d climb up all the mountains, walk up all the streams, and look at all the little towns. I did that for most of the towns of Ulster County, particularly the towns west of Route 209, the wilder ones, the ones less developed. Gradually I started to write history in the early ’70s, and I was writing poems at the same time."

By the time of his appointment as poet laureate 12 years later, Steuding was a published writer with two chapbooks of poetry, Ashokan and Winter Sun, and a critical biography of Snyder. He was busy giving readings, lecturing on his historical research into the Ashokan Reservoir, and teaching courses on the literature of the Hudson Valley as well as a course called Hiking the Catskills, which involved taking students on hikes and lecturing on history. "I’ve never done just one thing," he says. "But they all interpenetrate."

Steuding’s published work also includes two books of local history, Rondout: A Hudson River Port (1995) and The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir (1989), both from Purple House Press. The latter describes how the reservoir, built in the 1910s to provide fresh water for New York City, dislocated over 2,000 people and involved razing 11 villages and hamlets in the upper Esopus Valley. "There’s something about that story that moves people deeply," Steuding says. "It’s about place, but it’s about losing your place. It’s about an entity outside the community [the City of New York] deciding that they want what you have, and having the political and economic clout to get it. And putting an end to your way of life and to a place where maybe four of five generations had lived."

Steuding's attraction to the Reservoir began when he was a boy, and he continues to write about it, in poems and sketches. "The reservoir is an incredibly beautiful place," he says, "probably a geomancer’s delight—these wonderful mountains that come right down to the base of the reservoir—and all this interesting weather that occurs up there." When he was writing the last chapter of the book, he felt conflicted: Was the reservoir a good thing or wasn’t it? "I came up with the notion that overall it’s good we have it because it’s generated incredible beauty and a place of solitude for people, but also because it’s preserved open space. You know what Route 28 is beginning to look like from Kingston out, and that would have continued probably all the way to Binghamton. The reservoir is a glorious preserve. I still like to walk along the shore and listen to the place and hear it and feel it and smell it. It’s our Walden Pond."

Steuding articulates his views on writing history, which he calls "an act of participation," in the essay "Inhabiting History," which appears in A Catskill Mountain Journal, a 1990 collection of his poetry and prose. Steuding writes, "The study of local history is not...the collecting of bits of historical trivia, or the uncovering of provincial genealogies.... It is the imaginative revisioning of human existence in a particular place. Thus, what is important is not simply the ‘lore,’ as local historical fact is often called, but the reliving in one’s mind of that lore, the dreaming of that dream of place, a special kind of dreaming." Steuding says that at the time he wrote the essay, he was reading about the bushmen of the Kalihari Desert and their idea of existence being something you dream. "I’ve studied Zen for some time," he says. "And meditation, hiking, spending long periods of time alone in the mountains, listening to the wind, hearing and seeing things, dreaming—all of these are ways of experiencing or celebrating being."

Asked to reflect on his career, Steuding says, "We live in an area where history is a living thing. I’ve been honored and gratified [by this office], and I’ve been available to do what I can do to celebrate this place and commemorate its history. Whatever happens in the future, I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity to come back and find a place and have some real work to do in this life."