The Magazine of the Mountains since 1969
If by chance The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier lands in your bookstore this November and you are bold enough to try to lift it without a small crane, you will be amused to know I first envisioned this production as a pamphlet. Maybe 50 pages max.
Last summer, I was delighted to discover an article in this magazine about how the Caroga Arts Collective is bringing a musical revival to long-shuttered Sherman’s Amusement Park in Caroga Lake.
His artwork was called “rough and rugged as hickory stumps,” like the man himself. Friends described her as “soft, gentle, like the moss in the woods.” It was a match made in heaven, or at least the Adirondacks.
When I go to see Mike Pratt at the Olympic Regional Development Authority’s glossy new state-funded headquarters in Lake Placid, the first thing he does is spread out photographs of Olympic sports venues and stadiums in Beijing, Berlin and Sarajevo that lie abandoned and in ruins. His message is plain: This almost happened here.
A Captain Crum, who navigated the lake in 1819, told a tale of an almost 200-foot-long black monster with three teeth and a star on its forehead. Sandra Mansi, the photographer behind a hotly debated 1977 image of “Champy,” compared the creature to a dinosaur.
The humble, plain-living Quakers who lie buried here rejected displays of vanity and so kept death, as they had life, as simple and unemotional as possible.
Plenty has changed—not just the park’s physical landscape, with its trail system and network of highways that connect even our tiniest communities to the outside world, but also how, in the modern world, people learn about and experience this place.
A few months ago I came across a 1788 handwritten letter by a French nobleman, the Chevalier de La Luzerne, that was being auctioned in a gallery in Boston. I was astounded, to say the least.
Couples swayed to “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” but the young man stood transfixed. He held his hands over his heart as he gazed up at the Scaroon Manor amphitheater. There, a tall singer trilled.
I knew much more about the ecology of Walden Pond than about Thoreau’s connection to abolitionism, but that would soon change. Re-reading Thoreau led me to the story of John Brown, a tragically misunderstood Adirondacker who gave his life to liberate people of color from bondage.
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