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.
In compensation, however, something else is slowly happening: the woods are growing in to a kind of deep and anonymous majesty. The nonhuman thrives. Here in the Hoffman Notch, logging once ruled. And when it did, other things suffered. The beaver had been extirpated from the Adirondack park by the beginning of the twentieth century, when state wildlife officials reintroduced a few pairs they’d trapped in Canada. Here, as in every other little watershed in the park, the beavers have by now completely reclaimed their territory—there’s not a stream I know of that could support a lodge that doesn’t have one. Behind their dams, new wetlands back up every year, their muck the single richest biome around. They buzz with dragonflies; frogs turn them earsplitting in the spring. And it’s not just small animals: even the big ones, most of them, have returned. The moose have slowly wandered back in during the last fifteen or twenty years, and as we made our moist way through Hoffman Notch, we kept an eye peeled. It was a moosy spot, and if we didn’t see one this day, we could have. Which in a tangible way makes this place richer, too.
For me, the ecological story of the Adirondacks is more interesting precisely because it’s not virgin wilderness. At one point or another, most of it has been cut over, sometimes pretty heavily. And yet, on purpose and by accident, this is one area where people have taken a step back. And nature has responded to that gesture. This is second-chance wilderness—not Eden, but something better. It’s the Alaska, the Ngorongoro crater, the Galápagos not of creation but of redemption. No place on the planet has restored itself so thoroughly in the last century; while much of the rest of the Earth was turning from green to brown, it was going the other way. And so it produces an emotion at least as important as the sweet nostalgia that comes with remnant virgin wilderness. It signals to the rest of a deeply scarred world that, where we can figure out ways to back off a little, nature still retains some power of renewal. As we wandered farther south along the trail, the trees kept getting bigger, the understory more open, the beech trees more bear-clawed. Barbara McMartin, the obsessive chronicler of all things Adirondack, says in one of her guidebooks that this is among “the most stately mixed forests in the Adirondacks, making you wonder if it has ever been logged.” A century hence, if we are lucky, people won’t even wonder anymore. They’ll just
assume it’s always been that way. They’ll be wrong, of course, and in their error they’ll miss much of the human history that Shaw remembers. But as errors go, it will be a sweet one nonetheless.
TO GET AN IDEA of what a century can do to a tree, all you need is to walk to the trail’s southern end, in what was once the small settlement of Loch Muller. A truly giant white pine shades the turnaround, and from it hangs this hand-lettered sign:
On this site in year 1845 this pine tree, a sapling of twelve years, was transplanted by me, at the age of twelve years. Seventy-five years I have watched and protected it. In my advancing years it has given me rest and comfort. Woodman spare that tree, touch not a single bough. In youth it sheltered me, and I’ll protect it now.
PASCAL P. WARREN, JUNE 14, 1920
NOT ALL THAT much has changed around Loch Muller since Mr. Warren left his plea. A massive new vacation home hangs over the small lake, but the rest of the road is pretty much as it’s been for a long time: poor, a few trailers, scattered hunting camps. We’re beginning to come into my country, down out of the High Peaks and into the central Adirondacks.
Unlike most North American mountain ranges, where settlement is heaviest south of the big peaks, the central Adirondacks are big and lonely, sparsely settled on the fringes, largely given over to big, unbroken blocks of state land and timber company property. Loch Muller shades into Irishtown and Pottersville and Olmstedville, and a little to the west into Newcomb and Minerva—none of them particularly prosperous or well-known, all of them worried about how much longer they’ll be able to hold on to their schools, their stores. The glamorous mountains and lakes are a world away: Saranac Lake or Lake Placid with their CEOs arriving by private jet for a few weeks at “camp” in the summer. My mother’s family grew up in West Virginia, and to me this landscape has always seemed closer to Appalachia than to New England. Closer geographically, with its many ridges and hollows; closer culturally, with an ingrained underclass of poverty; closer politically, with none of the strong tradition of town meeting, of civic involvement.
And yet, if there is a more beautiful land, I don’t know it. Once I was writing the text for a book of aerial photographs, and the photographer, Alex MacLean, took me up in his tiny plane for a look at my own backyard. What struck me (apart from the terror of riding in a plane with a pilot who spent the whole time leaning all the way out his window with a camera) was the sheer unbroken scale of the forest. The little town roads wound along the edges, but mostly it was unrelieved green.
Too, despite its small population, it contains some of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met. The people of this territory are backward—which is to say they’re only a generation or two removed from knowing how to take care of themselves. Self-sufficiency remains a living memory, although, as Shaw suggests, that memory dims. Still, since almost no one can make a living doing just one thing, the average Adirondacker has many more talents than the average American. Today, for instance, Nick Avignon joined me for a walk through the woods to a place called (I warned you) Stony Pond. Nick, in my experience, can make absolutely anything. When one of his clients wants a stone wall for her summer home, he builds it, by hand and as beautifully as you could ever want. His shop at home is full of tables and desks he’s finished—mortise-and-tenon joints, no nails in sight. For a while he worked with Pete Hornbeck, the great canoe-builder of this region, who has taught himself to make Kevlar knockoffs of nineteenth-century Adirondack canoe designs. (My solo boat weighs about fifteen pounds, and it attaches with a couple of wingnuts to my backpack frame, and it’s my pride and joy.) In the winter Nick teaches cross-country skiing at one of the local resorts (he used to be a national-caliber downhill racer), and in the spring he plants a massive garden for another affluent family so it will be in full abundance when they arrive for the summer. He does it all quietly and easily and gracefully.
We walk quietly today, talking about family (his wife, Jackie, was our Lamaze teacher) and about old hikes we’ve taken in the past and grand hikes we’re planning for the future. It’s a quiet day, nothing spectacular except the mushrooms sprouting obscenely in this wet summer, but quietly grand, just like this country. This would be a good place for an interlude of real nature writing, but I am, as you have doubtless already gathered, an incompetent naturalist. beyond the obvious—trillium, loon, monarch—names tend to slip from my memory. I love walking with good naturalists in the woods, eagerly taking in their descriptions. But each such outing is as exciting as the one before, because I’ve managed to forget most of what I learned. I’m sure I’ve been introduced to the yellow-throated whatever on a dozen occasions, but each time it’s as if we’d never met. It’s impressions that linger with me, the sense of the woods as a whole—the relief, the density, the changing feel underfoot and over head. If you dropped me from a helicopter here and asked me the date, I could give you a pretty good guess—not from the wildflowers out on the forest floor, but from the color of the leaves. The vibrating, nearly neon green of spring has dropped away; we’re now approaching the leathery deep green of high summer, which will steadily deepen further until—three weeks or so from now—the first maples along the swampy edges will, overnight, start to show a band of red along the leaf edge. It’s the general, the trend, the feeling that somehow sticks with me.
THE WALKING’S GETTING easier day by day. Partly that’s because I’m through with the big mountains and the high passes. The trails now mostly follow creeks and streams. And partly it’s because every hour brings me more into my home country. There’s always a certain stress that goes with the adventure of backpacking in less familiar terrain: how far to the campsite? Where’s the water? On home ground, though, you not only know the trails; each of them is filled with stories to keep you company.
Nick and I end our day’s wander, for instance, at Route 9N, the road that connects the metropolis of North Creek with the bustling communities of Minerva and Newcomb. In point of fact, a dog could nap quite nicely on this road. But if that dog had been napping there one night in 1901, he would have had a tale to tell. Theodore Roosevelt was vacationing in the Adirondacks that summer. These mountains were old stomping grounds of his (his first publication was a bird list of the Adirondacks), and as governor he’d done much to protect them. Now he was vice president, and climbing Mount Marcy on his holiday, when word came that President McKinley, shot by an anarchist earlier in the summer at the Buffalo World’s Fair, had taken a sharp turn for the worse. A guide charged up the mountain to tell TR, who hurried back down to find a stagecoach waiting at the trailhead. A mad night drive down this road brought him to the train station at North Creek4—and there he learned that McKinley had died and he was in charge, the mud of the High Peaks still on his boots. And thus began the greatest environmental presidency of our history, the one that saw the protection of more wild places than any since.
Most of the stories passing through my head were more personal, though. The next day, for instance, after a spell of dirt-road walking, I was alone on the trail into a place called Blue Ledges. But not really alone. I could remember carrying my godson Micah on my shoulders through here years ago, and remember how proud I was of my Sophie, only a couple of years older, when she made the same hike uncomplaining. Halfway down the trail I started to hear a dull roar off to my right, and I knew just what it was: the Hudson falling over the rapids at Blue Ledges. And I knew that when I got there it would be—always is—drop-dead gorgeous.
Most people recognize the Hudson from its wide industrial terminus in Manhattan, or perhaps as a broad foreground for the slope-shouldered Catskills of the Lower Hudson Valley (that’s where the Hudson River School met). But here you could throw a rock across the river with ease—it’s only twenty or so miles from its birthplace, a fresh and lively cataract. At Blue Ledges the river takes a sharp turn—there are rapids on either side, but right here just some quiet pools, with fish rising. Froth from the upstream rapids turns in slow, lazy circles, and high above them on the
cliff walls that give the place its name, ravens turn in slow, lazy circles of their own, against a translucent half moon in the bright blue midmorning sky. Lazy seems to be the leitmotif, so I lie down on a broad shelf of rock next to the water and take a nap.
Half an hour later, when I wake, my feet are wet. Which can only mean one thing: the bubble! In the early spring, melting snow pushes more than enough water through the gorge of the Hudson—the rapids fill with enormous standing waves, huge sucking hydraulics and holes. But the rest of the year, the rafting industry requires a bit of a boost. Three mornings a week, around 10:00 a.m., upstream in the town of Indian Lake, a town employee opens the gate of the dam on Lake Abenaki and lets a surge of water out. As that bubble pushes through, the water rises all through the gorge and then, after an hour or two, subsides again. For those couple of hours the river is big again, big enough to be an exciting raft trip for the paying customers whose whoops and hollers even now I can hear in the distance. This gorge is some of the best white water in the East, and almost certainly the most remote—I’ve just come in on the one trail, and it stretched a few miles to a dirt road that sees almost no traffic. Cell phones and radios don’t work down here in the bottom of the canyon; if you get in trouble, you stay in trouble for quite a while. Every couple of years someone dies, which only adds to the allure.
Still, you could say it’s not precisely exactly one hundred percent wild. At least not for the hour that the bubble is coming through. And indeed in the last year or two a few fishermen have begun to complain, loudly, that the daily releases of water are killing life in the stream—that the daily raising and lowering of the stream level, the rapid fluctuations in temperature, kill off invertebrates and hence the trout that rely on them. They’ve forced the state to convene a series of meetings, which in turn are attended by platoons of raft guides, raft bus drivers, bartenders who pour drinks for raft customers. And environmentalists, hopelessly confused by the whole thing. Are we for the most natural Hudson imaginable? Or are we for the least intrusive tourism imaginable—one that transforms any section of the gorge for just an hour a day, leaves no discernible trace, and provides pretty good jobs for all sorts of people, not to mention converting tens of thousands of people annually into friends of the river? It was only three or four decades ago that people fought an epic battle to keep this same gorge from being dammed for hydropower—shouldn’t we be keeping our eye on the real threats?
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