Wandering Home (11 page)

At least Marcy was a
name
, though—for the most part, this is anonymous land, much of it named as if it had been inventoried by a warehouse clerk. There’s First Lake, Second Lake, on up at least through Fourteenth Lake. There are so many Blue Mountains and Clear Ponds that the map index reads like a Beijing phone directory. As a result, I take it upon myself to occasionally rechristen particular spots with names I can remember. Tonight, tuneless hymns were drifting across from the campers on the far shore of Round Pond, an off-key bleating shamed by the pure clear laughter of the loons. “Shall We Gather at the River” is one of my favorites, but not in a Gregorian chant. From now on, I’ll call it Bird-Beats-Baptist Pond.

T
HE NEXT DAY’S
destination was Elk Lake, and I’d been looking forward to the hike. But that’s because I’d misread the map. From the top of Giant, I could see straight through Hunter’s Pass, which crossed the height of land on this day’s journey. It was a low pass—3,200 feet on the map, which meant that my high point for the day would be almost 2,000 feet lower than the summit of Giant. And I knew much of the trail—I’d gone winter camping along the Boquet one Christmas week.

A longer look at the map, however, would have reminded me that the trail didn’t actually go through Hunter’s Pass. Because of an intervening piece of private property, hikers are forced to climb almost to the summit of Dix Mountain, fifteen hundred feet above the pass. And what a climb—this little-used trail was essentially hand over hand, a shinny up roots and cracks. Kind of fun, I’m sure, on a cool fall day with your lunch in your pocket, but kind of not fun on a hot and humid morning with too much crammed in a backpack. I went through most of my water on the ascent; then the climb down was very nearly as tough, especially since I was still gingerly from yesterday’s fall. And then the long walk out. I should have stopped at one of the creeks and pumped myself some more water with the filter I’d carefully carried all this way, but I’d dropped into a kind of walking stupor. I’ll just keep going till Elk Lake, I’d tell myself—there’s
water there. Hell, there’s a big lodge there. They probably have
ice
water. Maybe ice
cream.

And indeed by two-thirty in the afternoon the trail spit me out onto the access road to the Elk Lake Lodge, one of the Adirondacks’ finest hostelries. What I’d forgotten, however, was just how fine. There were signs
everywhere
reminding hikers that they should stick to the trails, that the lodge was For Guests Only, that they shouldn’t pass this point without permission, on and on and on. I have no doubt—well, not too much doubt—that they would have received me civilly if I had walked the half-mile to their porch. But I was suddenly conscious of just how smelly, muddy, blood-flecked, and dusty I actually was. So I headed the other way, walking the four-mile road out to the Blue Ridge Highway. That dirt road, essentially the driveway to the Elk Lake Lodge, passes a couple of lakes, but these too are plastered with No Trespassing signs. In fact, in under two miles I counted 155 posted signs along the road—Guests Only, No Stopping. There was not a spot along the road out of sight of such a sign, and it worked—I just kept trudging, parched and a little sullen, thinking the kinds of thoughts that English peasants must have thought when nobles fenced off all the good hunting grounds.

On the other hand, it reminded me to be truly thankful for the 3 million acres of public land in the park, a landmass half the size of Vermont open to absolutely everyone, no questions asked. By tonight I’d be back on
that land, and I could stay on it pretty much all the way home.

Anyway, my weariness set me up for one of those moments that you wouldn’t fully appreciate under any other circumstance. Reaching the highway (if that’s what you want to call the Blue Ridge Road—it is two lanes, but it’s about as busy as the post office on Sunday), I turned left because in the distance I could see a low building with a sign out front. Real estate? Chain-saw-carved bears? Or, just maybe, food and drink? It took me twenty minutes to get there, but when I did—well, it was like some kind of desert mirage that turns out to be real. Odd but real. The establishment was called the Adirondack Bison Company, and indeed there was a herd of bison out back, in a small meadow carved out of the woods that stretched for miles in every direction. That was queer enough, but there was also a deck overlooking the bison pasture, and on it was one of those telescopes like you’d see at Niagara Falls, where if you put in a quarter you could watch the bison standing in the dust very close up. You could make out every bison hair! But I didn’t do any bison-gazing for about half an hour. Instead, I went into the tiny store, which featured four things: vast quantities of bison jerky, a cooler full of Snapple, some garden produce, and a table piled with homemade desserts on Styrofoam plates wrapped in Saran Wrap. Without saying a word I drained three lemonades and ate two slabs of chocolate cake and a piece of blueberry
pie (fifty cents apiece)—it was as if every food dream of the last few days had somehow managed to assemble itself here on this lonely road, with a herd of bison thrown in for good measure.

My belly comfortably distended, I sat on the porch and chatted with the proprietors, who manifestly had not been born in California. They were not New Age bison-herders. They were people who had lived here all their lives and thought there might be some money in bison. Or maybe they just liked bison—abstract questions didn’t get very far. So we chatted about the news of the central Adirondacks (“A bear climbed a power pole over to Long Lake last night. Electrocuted himself. Knocked out power to the entire town.”) and discussed the peculiar buying habits of tourists (“city folks like big kernels on their corn”).

So, I said, is there a restaurant around here somewhere where I can get a bison steak?

The rancher looked at me a little funny, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. And then he said, “Well, they have it over to Vermont.” Which struck me as the punch line for a long, complicated joke I’d been telling for the last ten days.

I
CAMPED THAT NIGHT
on the northern edge of the Hoffman Notch Wilderness, along a stream known locally as “the Branch.” It began to rain around midnight,
and it was still coming down with some vigor the next morning, when Chris Shaw joined me for the day’s trek.

The Hoffman Notch wilderness is quintessential Adirondacks, much more typical than the High Peaks country I’d been traveling the last few days. It’s pretty big—36,000 acres—and it’s very lonely. Because the peaks stay under 4,000 feet, the trail register shows just fifty or sixty people a summer hiking the one trail that bisects the area. Except during hunting season, I imagine that the number who wander very far off that single trail might be counted in the single digits. It’s empty, trackless country, unless you count the tracks of other creatures. Predictably, the main point of interest along the one trail carries the compelling name of Big Marsh; the biggest lake in the wilderness is known as Big Pond.

And Chris Shaw was the perfect person to hike it with, for there’s probably no one who’s traveled more widely and lived more deeply in these mountains. He came to the Adirondacks as a young man, and over the next decades worked as a camp caretaker, raft guide, ski-lift operator—always in a different town, a different corner.
³
All the time he was writing stories and novels and articles, and eventually he ended up as editor of
Adirondack Life
, turning what had been a low-wattage tourist rag into an award-winning regional magazine. One of the ways he did that was to
encourage actual reporting, which of course got him fired eventually, when he offended one (subsequently indicted) local power broker—but no matter, since he’s gone on to write fine books since, and explore ever more deeply into these mountains.

So we walked up the Hoffman Notch Brook, admiring many small cataracts and moss-slicked boulders. When the trail leveled out at Big Marsh, the overgrowth was so thick across the trail that we might as well have been bushwhacking. The rain had ceased, but we hardly noticed, for every step brushed us against boughs freighted with water. Our rain pants and Gore-Tex jackets were soon soaked through—their main effect was merely to trap our sweat on this humid afternoon. I’ve been wetter in my life, but I’ve never been damper.

Never mind, though, because Chris talked as we walked. He’s lived, as I said, across the park, from Stony Creek in the southeast to Rainbow Lake in the north, which are somewhat farther apart than Boston and Hartford. But, he insisted, there was something consistently Adirondack about them all. “The quality of the light is essentially the same. And the general feeling of place. It’s continuous throughout the Blue Line—it’s amazing how continuous it is. When you start to get up on the massif, the air changes and the light changes. Sometimes I wonder where it comes from—the rock, maybe, or the combination of the rock and the altitude and the vegetation. There’s a very special time in the late summer, late
August say, toward dusk. You’re along shore on a lake or river, along that distinctive shoreline of mixed heath and rock. And all of the features click, fall in place for me. When that happens all at once it’s like seeing your own name by accident in print, or catching sight of your hand writing on a piece of paper where you didn’t expect to see it. There’s a very powerful feeling of identity.”

But something else unified Shaw’s sense of the Adirondacks, especially when he first arrived around 1970: “The memories of the old timers, those who were still around. The people who had really lived the industrial life of the Adirondacks, who had made livings off the resources of this place, back when you could still do that. The people who had worked in the woods or in the garnet mines or the tanneries. Who had farmed and failed, or farmed and moved on to other things. I think there must have been about fifteen of us who arrived more or less simultaneously from the outside in Stony Creek in the 1970s. As often happened in those back-to-the-land days, there was a standoff for a while with the locals that pretty quickly changed to accommodation and then to affection. It was as if a lot of those men and women had almost been waiting their whole lives for the audience we represented. We sat spellbound for four or five years, and we heard about the old days. Learned the logging songs not from some folk CD, but from people who’d sung them in the logging camps. It meant a whole lot to us, coming from the suburbs. All my life I wondered
where real life was, and so to be welcomed into their cir cle was a great honor. There was a kind of authenticity in the life they led. Less in our life, but it grew to have some.”

Five or six years after the newcomers arrived, those old-timers started to die. “It came as a great shock to me,” Shaw says. “I remember one guy, George Ardnt. He’d been in both world wars—in World War I he was in the cavalry, down on the Mexican border, chasing Pancho Villa with General Pershing. In World War II he’d been an Army cook in Europe. Mostly he was a horsetrader, a guide, a caretaker, a trapper, a hunter. One day in 1976, I remember driving home from a canoe trip. I came past the town beach in Long Lake and saw his truck there. I knew what he and his friend Mo West were doing—it was a hot day, they were asleep in their undershirts, there was a bottle of whiskey no doubt. And I knew what they were going to do when it cooled off a little—they liked to go bullheading out there in the lake, some little bay they liked. I mean, I knew the pattern of their lives pretty well. And then I found out the next day that he’d died out there in the boat. After that it was like a domino effect—after that it was Mo West, Grant Richards, Jackie Perkins. Some real beauties, people I miss. It wasn’t so much just themselves, but there was a quality of memory that I believe informed the place. It was tangible. It was in the air, it made the place what it was for me. When those memories were extinguished—well, I remember the guys, but I don’t remember what
they remember. Their children have sort of become part of the general American television culture. They’re not as place-defined as the old timers. The loss of them and their memories has changed the place. It’s as if someone came and knocked down a thousand-acre stand of mature timber, as far as I’m concerned. It reminds me of this great story by Borges, who writes about the last real Saxon in England dying in a stable in England, the last guy who remembers the rites of Wodin in the Christian era. With the death of that last pagan Saxon, a whole world of memory is lost. That’s what I felt like when some of those old men and women started to drop off.”

By now we’d gotten past Big Marsh, and the trail had opened up some—it was an old logging road by the looks of it, from the time fifty or a hundred years before when the big hemlocks and pines had first been cut. People still work at some of the old occupations—cutting trees on the half of the park still in private hands is probably the most common job—and they’ve pioneered a few new occupations. (Shaw himself helped pioneer the park’s white-water rafting industry.) But in general I think he’s right. The days of the battle to carve a living from these woods are in some ways past. People here often live on money from away, either in the form of government payments or on their own money accumulated before they got here, or on the money that tourists and second-home buyers bring with them. Making a living off the land is no longer the common
denominator of Adirondack life, and one result is that much of the land, or at least those parts of it below 4,000 feet, get less use with each passing year. The number of hunters drops annually, since many boys would rather do their shooting in computer games. And all of that is a sadness, precisely because, as Shaw says, there was an authenticity to those human lives that no longer can be matched.