Rip Van Winkle wanders into the Catskill Mountains one afternoon and doesn't come home for twenty years, in Washington Irving's classic folk tale.
Rip is the easiest-going man in his little Dutch village on the Hudson, always ready to help a neighbor and never in a hurry to tend his own farm. It drives his sharp-tongued wife to distraction. One day, to get some peace, he takes his dog and his gun and heads up into the hills. There he meets a strange, silent crew of men in old-fashioned dress, rolling thunder out of a game of ninepins in a hollow. Rip helps himself to their keg of liquor, grows drowsy, and stretches out under a tree for what feels like a short nap.
He wakes with a stiff back, a rusty gun, and a beard down to his chest. His dog is gone. His village is still there, but the faces are strange, the inn has a new flag over the door, and the portrait outside no longer shows the king he remembers. While Rip slept, a war was fought and a country was born, and he has to work out, piece by piece, just how much of his life has slipped away without him.
It's a short, strange bit of early American folklore, part ghost story and part gentle comedy about a man out of step with his own time. Listeners who enjoy old tall tales, Hudson Valley legend, and the eerie hush of the Catskills will find a lot to like here.
Andrew Bond reads soft and gentle, so Rip's long, dreamlike sleep becomes an easy invitation into your own.
