Nearly everyone can name a place or two or, if they’re lucky, three, that for them is like no other. Those are the places that generate the emotional resonance and mystery and power of a recurrent dream—the kind of dream that psychiatrists like to analyze, in which every detail down to the smallest reveals the dreamer’s secret inner life.
On a hot, oppressive day in the summer of 1988, an ecologist’s Chesapeake Bay retriever named Muddy made off with my socks and trotted to the end of a log that jutted into Little Howard Pond.
M y friend Adam Welz, a South African naturalist and journalist, identified fish crows flying around an island in mid-lake when he was visiting our cabin on the Saranacs in the summer of 2012.
This time at Cold River—the last time—his touch was light as pollen, no snapped twigs or bootprints on the familiar trail. It was the place Gordon returned to no matter where he was, Blue Mountain Lake or Tahawus, a tiny clearing with a cabin no bigger than a queen-size bed, notched logs standing teepee style, another shed with the necessaries of Noah John’s life.
In 1852, a group of surveyors surprised an old man living in a crude shelter near Herkimer County’s Ice Cave Mountain. He ran off so quickly that they didn’t see much more than a flash of the red patch on the bottom of his drawers. Ever heard of “Old Patch”? No?
In early May of 2001, my wife and I packed up our 10th-floor apartment in Manhattan, loaded the kids in the car with our closest belongings, and headed north for a new life in the Adirondacks. We’d bought the house just two months before, the first one we looked at, in a town we’d never been to, North Creek, New York.
It is, of course, difficult to predict the future. But since I have a half-decent track record, let me offer an Adirondack forecast for the next 50 years, secure in the knowledge I won’t be around to see how I’m wrong.
I drove for nearly an hour on quiet roads through the northernmost part of the Adirondack Park. T-shirt shops and twiggy Great Camps are scarce around here—along with nearly everything but the occasional cluster of tidy raised ranches and mobile homes of every vintage, with miles of sprawling green acres between.
Spotlighting regional characters—a movie star, an angler, a 46er 25 times over—and the Adirondack landscape at the time of America’s birth. Plus stunning photographs, where to find exceptional BBQ, and more.
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