A Personal Journey:
View from Wilderstein
As a child I knew little of my father except that he gave me the name Stoutenburg.
When this name was announced at roll call on the first day of school, the other children would look around to see who would answer, and I always claimed it proudly with a wave–”Here!”
I felt it was the best thing I owned.
After my children were born I became melancholy, mourning the grandfather who had passed on. He would never bounce them on his knee or sing them an old cowboy song. I could remember him lifting three of us children onto the back of the old sorrel horse Pal, and then leading us through the golden wheat of upstate Washington. Stuck in the middle, my bare feet tickled by the kerneled heads, I’d lift my face to the hot sun and squeeze my eyes shut, never wanting it to end. Daddy wasn’t home much. Missing him terribly, I realized how little I knew about him. Like many World War II veterans, he never entirely returned home.
Then, suddenly, the question sprang: Where were his family?
Believe it or not, I picked up the kitchen telephone and dialed 4-1-1. At the operator’s query I answered “Give me the Stoutenburgs, please.” To my amazement she did. That day I learned of two uncles living, and with some trepidation my shaking finger dialed the number in California.
The voice that answered “Hello?” caused me to drop the telephone, for it seemed my father, nearly eight years gone, surely was on the other end of this line.
Trembling, I recovered the receiver. “Daddy?” my strangled voice asked.
“Who is this?” a beloved voice spoke again, this time with a slightly different timbre.
Hesitantly, I began to explain to the suspicious man that I was looking for my father’s family. I was interrupted by a hearty, booming exclamation: “The lost kids!” I had found my father’s biggest fan, his youngest brother. An excited commotion in the background celebrated our reunion.
This was the beginning of the path that led me to Hyde Park, New York where our Family Association has its roots.
Between the West Coast and the East Coast lies more than distance–it is a vastly different culture.
California is edgy, on the brink of it all, still very much a frontier-prodding, risk-taking adventurer, probably stamped upon us by the vision of “Gold!” in our history. We are still new and eager, as though to say “By God, we’ll make it so!” and “Don’t tell me I can’t!”
In 2007, I had my first visual feast upon the Hudson Valley during our Wilderstein visit. My eyes roved over the rolling green miles toward Hyde Park and I felt what rich is. Rich is the land with the pride of centuries. Rich is the preservation of what has come before with its sense of establishment. It is the determination to hold on, as we realize we are connected to our past and our future, and our children’s future. Rich is the bond with community, with its desire for peace and prosperity. Rich is the active pursuit of happiness in activity by taking hold of it with the work of our hands.
Rich were my eyes that glorious October day overlooking the Hudson River from Wilderstein.
There is a world wide with history between northern California’s rugged mountains–wearing grand forests cut by plunging torrents ridden by kayaking mountain men (yes, they really exist)–and upstate New York’s lush fields contentedly grazed by flocks of sheep, its street markets ripe with harvests, brought to bear by gentile folk and farmers living in pre-Revolutionary mansions.
As I traveled Route 9 last October 2008 in a procession toward our family meeting with my distant cousins, I had a sense of my family line, and it brought home the passage of progress since 1609 as though superimposed in time over these past four hundred years.
Really, Henry Hudson had found the right place to grow a nation.
IMS Malloy
Family Historian
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