Women

Back To The Forest?

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Back To The Forest?

I bet the inmate in upstate New York had no idea what was outside his prison walls when he decided to escape into the Adirondack wilderness last summer.  He probably thought the Adirondacks was like a really big Central Park.  He probably thought it was the perfect break.  Fleeing into the Adirondack Mountain wilderness near the Canadian border had to mean certain success and freedom.

I was in the Adirondacks on the day the inmate broke out of the Ray Brook Correctional Facility in Ray Brook, New York.  My car was stopped three times at one of the many roadblocks. My trunk was checked, and I was questioned.  The locals at the grocery store laughed about the break because when prisoners escape up there, they usually turn themselves in after a couple of nights in the woods.  It was no different with this guy. After only one day of being out, he was found walking down the street in Saranac Lake. The Adirondack woods was no place for him.

Other inmates have run away in the past and have turned themselves in after being lost, wet, hungry, and eaten alive by bugs. They said they had no idea it was so much better in prison than “out there.”  Instead of a tame Central Park type woods, they found a dense, sometimes impenetrable place filled with bears, bogs, and millions of mosquitoes, gnats and black flies — the wilderness.

In primeval times when we were hunters and gatherers, the concept of  “wilderness” didn’t exist. Nature was nothing to be afraid of ; it was where we lived.  It was home.  We were wholly connected to the natural world. That’s all there was and for us it was a “Garden of Eden.”  As agriculture evolved and we became homesteaders and farmers instead of hunters and gatherers, we thought of ourselves as separate from the natural world and the concept of wilderness was born.

Wilderness became the other, a place to be feared and conquered. Wilderness means in Old English, a place of wild deer.  Satan inhabited the forest. Druids practiced their “pagan” rites and witches lived there. By the Middle Ages wilderness meant a place where hermits, insane people, and savages lived.  It was a place uncivilized, and therefore to be avoided and feared.

Wilderness became something we needed to control and dominate, and we did this through cultivation, which we esteemed more highly than our old way of living.  Land became something to be owned by a group or an individual.   Cutting down forests, plowing, planting and taming the land became our vocation.

Dominating the natural world instead of being a part of it was promoted and valued as our human right by both politicians and priests. Priests quoted from the bible the passage stating that man shall have dominion over the entire world. God created the natural world for man’s use and pleasure.   Politicians supported that idea, seeing how it could work to their political advantage. Europeans believed it was Christianity’s duty to convert the “pagans” to Christ and thus we rationalized stealing the Native Americans’ land in North America, colonizing Africa, South America, and the Middle and Far East. We wanted to rule over men as well as nature.

This monumental change in our perception of our relationship with nature put us out of our “Garden of Eden” and into a power struggle for dominance over nature.  Ever since, we have struggled with the dichotomy of our need to be reconnected with nature and our need to dominate it.  Yet, we still yearn for nature and consequently protect and preserve it. And this is why we write about and concern ourselves with conservation, ecology, and pollution.  We have a strong desire to save wild places and preserve virgin forests, because we need to know there exists the real possibility of reconnection with nature. Wild places are an extension of ourselves.  We’ve not traveled as far as we think from our primeval days when we lived in nature and not merely beside it.

In the nineteenth century many people wanted to “get back to nature”.  They wanted to reconnect with wild places, calling them “sublime.”  The Romantic poets wrote about nature’s wonder, beauty, and ability to take one’s mind into the spiritual realm. Wordsworth wrote To a Butterfly, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, The Sparrows Nest, and To the Cuckoo — all poems about the love and the beauty inherent in nature– nature created by God and therefore inherently good. Nature became idealized as something transformative – being in nature became a new type of spiritual experience. Where previously man’s spiritual experiences had been limited to church and prayer, now they were outdoors in nature, God’s world.   The idea of living and sleeping close to nature never minding the bugs, dirt, and the inconveniences became a fad, particularly of the comfortable classes. Getting away from the modern, fast paced Victorian life style and its conveniences such as indoor plumbing, comfortable furniture, and insulated, warm houses became a way of seeing life and the world differently. Paulina Brandreth, a nineteenth and twentieth century writer and hunter writes, “One of the chief beauties about hunting or fishing rests in the fact that both create within the individual an enthusiasm that is tonic to mind and body alike.”

People who lived outdoors in shacks and makeshift tents because they had no other choice were called poor. But people who chose (the operative word) to spend their summers living in tents and lean-tos were called campers. Mildred P. Stokes Hooker (1881-1970) and her family were among those first campers.  Hooker’s book, Camp Chronicles about spending seventy summers at her family’s camp on the Upper St. Regis Lake, New York, gives an intimate look at what camping was like at the turn of the last century.

During the first several years her family, including infants and toddlers, lived in tents.  Balsam branches covered in quilts were their beds and the lake was their bathtub.   They had to take along all their food supplies for the summer or buy them from local farmers.  Hooker’s upper class mother took forty chickens to kill for their meals and Hooker’s father rented cows for milk from a farmer. Her father kept the cows on a nearby island so they couldn’t escape.

They were not the only ones camping 120 years ago.  Other families, primarily from New York and wealthy, spent their summers in similar accommodations until their Great Camps were built.   It was common for the men in these camping families to hire guides who would take them out hunting and fishing for game they would use to feed themselves and their families. Sometimes groups of men with guides would spend a week or two off in the woods and mountains killing as many deer, bear, and other game they could. Days were spent feasting on roasted venison haunches and scores of grilled and baked trout, partridge, pheasant and sadly the now extinct American Passenger Pigeon. Game and fish were so abundant that they were considered in unlimited supply and a guide’s reputation grew from the number of game he killed. According to Paul Schneider in his book The Adirondacks, one of the Adirondack’s greatest guides, Alvah Dunning, killed eight moose in five days and during one winter he and three others killed 100 moose. It was not uncommon to catch fifty to sixty trout on fly rods in a couple of hours. Another guide, named Elijah Simonds, was believed to have killed more than 2,000 deer, 3,000 foxes, 150 bears, 12 wolves and 7 panthers during his guiding career.

Slowly these nineteenth century campers built simple or elaborate cabins and icehouses. Some camps had servant’s quarters and stables. Some civilized their wilderness environment a lot and some not too much.  Either way the whole idea was to experience the “freedom” of living out of doors in the great north woods –to experience a different culture than the staid upper class Victorian culture they normally lived.

The idea of combining and relating culture with nature was not a new one.  Muir, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne wrote about it.  Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Church painted it — man’s effect upon wilderness, man’s perception of nature. Whenever a human being goes into nature, he brings culture along.   Even a stroll through the woods changes those woods, leaving footprints and human scent where before there were neither.  Thoreau believed that nature and humans had a sympathetic relationship–one where nature responds to us as we respond to nature.  He writes, “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?  Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”   Or Emerson who wrote, “ Nature is so pervaded with human life that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular.”

That is what those early campers were after, a sympathetic relationship with nature.  While they wanted some creature comforts, i.e. ice and wooden dwellings instead of canvas ones, they didn’t want to destroy the very essence they were after in living in the wilderness for the summer.   They wanted to experience and understand nature and their undeniable connection to it.  They believed as Paul Gruchow, author of The Necessity of Empty Places, believes, “We will not come to any deep understanding of our place in nature except as we delve into its basic documents, and these documents are our wild places.”

We need to keep in touch with the wildness within us, the animal side of our nature.  That is one reason why we have preserved wild places all over the world.  Places where we know wildness exists, places we have not tamed and developed into skyscrapers, roadways, and farm fields.  Knowing wild places exist buoys us when we are in places uncomfortably manmade, like shopping malls and parking lots.  This need for connection and communion with the natural world fuels a camping, fishing, hunting, and boating industry worldwide. In the United States alone, millions of us spend millions of dollars a year on tents, boats, fishing equipment and guns. We have an innate need and desire to be in nature whether it is an ocean, lake, desert, wood or mountain.  The visit makes whatever is lacking or ailing in us whole and well.  We are restored, freed.

For those wealthy Victorian campers connecting with nature meant freedom from some of the social strictures of upper class society.  Hooker’s mother wrote in her diary,  “I do like the freedom of this place in the way of dress.  Even calls are made in flannel suits and gentlemen wear knickerbockers and coarse stockings.”   Dressing for dinner was banned at some camps while at others women “bedecked in diamonds and men in ‘boiled’shirts paddled their canoes to the Vanderbilt’s for dinner.”  For some, too much social freedom while in the wilderness was too much wildness.

For Martha Reben, wildness and wilderness were her salvation.  Reben was a tuberculosis patient at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Her father had sent her there from their home in New York City when she was diagnosed at age sixteen.  Her mother had died of the disease ten years earlier.  Reben had endured three dangerous and painful operations over her three-year stay and still was no better.  She was dying.  One day as she was reading the local newspaper, she chanced upon an ad looking for a TB sufferer who would like to try an experimental “treatment” in the Adirondack woods.  This “treatment” was to spend a summer in the woods camping beside a pond and being taken care of by an Adirondack guide named Fred Rice.  She answered the ad and after some convincing of Mr. Rice and her father, she was accepted as Rice’s first experimental patient for the summer of 1931.  It worked.  By the end of that summer Reben was remarkably better.

For the next ten years, Reben spent spring, summer, and fall camping along the banks of Weller Pond.   Although she eventually was cured of TB, she never completely recovered her strength because of the lung damage she had incurred from the disease and the operations.  Still in her book, The Healing Woods, she writes that she wouldn’t have lived another year without her summers spent camping on Weller Pond.   There she learned how to live out of doors, to use a compass, to fish and to write on an old typewriter.  She wrote about what she saw at Weller Pond much as Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond.   She made pets of raccoons and birds.  She slept at the edge of the pond with the water literally lapping at the legs of her bed.  She learned the constellations and how to read the wind and sky for weather clues. When she had to leave in November before the pond froze, she cried.  While many people would find the realities of life beside a wilderness pond more reality than they would like to experience, Reben found there the reality of a new life.

Some of us try to get into a wilderness forest and some of us try to get out. It all depends on our perspective. As for me, the next time I hike along Heart Lake with the chipmunks scolding my passing and me preoccupied with my thoughts and suddenly an osprey swoops down six feet away to retrieve her prey, I’ll be as startled as the escaped Adirondack inmate, but I’ll also be amazed. And if a Great Blue Heron and I surprise each other along the banks of the Rocky Falls Brook, he’ll squawk and I’ll scream and after the shock wears off, we’ll both thrill at the meeting.

adirondack mountains adirondacks adventure Animals Appalachian Mountains backpacking Commentary death Environment Family forest hiking Home Humor hunting Inspiration Kids Life Lifestyle Literature Love mothering mountains Musings nature Opinion outdoors Personal Philosophy Places Random Thoughts Reflections Relationships Romance rural Spiritual Spirituality Teaching writing Thoughts Travel Women women and nature woods Writers Writing

Sledding

Uncategorized, , Leave a comment

Drafted winter, 2002. Completed 2021.

“ Stop! Stop! Stop!”, I yelled and then screamed as I watched my two children careen away down the ice covered snow. If they heard me they couldn’t stop. I knew their sleds would roar against the ice as they flew away. Their sleds were those molded plastic flat-bottomed sort you get at the True Value hardware store for $10 a piece. These were turquoise with yellow pull ropes at the front end.

Ten minutes earlier, we’d walked to the top of McCleary Road and had looked out over the hundred acre hill covered with 2 and a half feet of snow and 2 inches of ice on top of that.   In the summer, the hillside is planted in corn and sometimes beans. It is steep about 45° to 55° and goes down about a quarter of a mile to a stream bordered by thick woods full of sticker bushes and brambles. It is a long hill, a good hill for walking or sledding or skiing on most days but not today.

On this late afternoon with the last bit of sun shimmering off the ice, we’d come to sled in the setting sun. But now I could see this was a bad idea. The top two inches of ice had melted and with every other step into the field, we’d plunged down to our thighs or worse. I looked at  my twin eleven year old daughters, “ I think we should come back tomorrow.”

“No. No. We want to go,” they both protested.

Finally I said, “All right, but only sled over here where it isn’t so steep. Then you’ll be able to stop by jamming your heels through the ice into the snow.”

They said okay. Then they looked at each other in silent communion, turned and threw down their sleds, flopped their rear ends down on them, and with a push of their hands jettisoned down the entire quarter mile hill. I was furious. Then I was frightened.

I continued to yell for a few more seconds, amazed with disbelief at their joint defiance. They became smaller and smaller; the red and blue and pink and white patterned ski jackets became a blur. My heart pounded. How will they ever get back up the hill? You could take one or two steps on top of the crust then ‘boom’ you broke through up to your hip.  I knew from backpacking in the snow that this was quickly exhausting especially uphill.

Campbell was bigger and fitter and an athlete who loved to play outside. Anna Lou, however, was small for her age and not an outdoor girl. I realized I couldn’t go after them  crashing through the crust every other step; I needed snowshoes and polls.

We’d walked two blocks from our home, so I turned and walked down the snow packed road as quickly as I could trying to calm myself. I found my snowshoes and polls in the mud room, threw them in the back of our black Explorer and drove around the corner to the field. I could see them trudging and then falling up the hill pulling their sleds sometimes behind them and sometimes pushing them ahead and flopping down on their stomachs to rest a bit.

Ann Lou was 50 yards from the top; Campbell was about 25 yards ahead of her pulling her legs free every other step, but looking strong as she moved steadily closer to me. Anna Lou looked exhausted. She was crawling on all fours her long blonde hair streaming out from her fleece hat covering most of her face. She had the rope of the sled in one hand and this was getting tangled up in her legs as she crawled. As she got a bit closer I could hear her crying and then yelling with frustration. She alternated her crying and yelling with some whines and whimpers.

My anger was beginning to melt as I moved across the snow in my snowshoes and polls sinking in a few inches but able to move fairly quickly. I reached Campbell first. She said she was okay. I went on  to Anna Lou who upon seeing me put her head down on the snow and began crying long hard sobs. I told her to get up on the sled which she lay on gratefully, and I picked up the yellow rope and began pulling.

Campbell and Anna Lou said very little as we put their sleds in the back of the truck, and they climbed in tired, wet and cold. We drove home in silence. When we walked into the mud room a few minutes later they each said, “I’m sorry, Mom.” I said I hoped they’d  learned something about snow and ice and hills and listening to mothers. They nodded solemnly.

We went back to that hill a few days later when the temperature was 10° and the ice crust was so hard we could walk on top and never crashed through.  We rode our sleds down the entire length a few times until finally settling on an icy stretch two thirds of the way down that was the fastest. This meant more rides and less trudging. We laughed and sleighed until it was almost dark.

Later after hot showers, we sipped hot chocolate with mini marshmallows at the dining room table recounting our wild rides in the cold. We’d made what had been a hair-raising experience a few days earlier into a joyful family adventure.

Years later, we’ve told his family story many times. A story of children being children, a story of calamity and adventure. A part of our family history that makes each of us feel together even when we’re apart.

Finding My Place

Uncategorized, , , , , , , Leave a comment

Written shortly after moving up north to the Adirondacks during Covid, 2020

Finding my place. That’s what I’ve been dong these past 4 months. Since moving to our home in the Adirondack Mountains because of Covid, I’ve been pinching myself most mornings when I look out our bedroom window at the 100 plus year old white pine. I like to think the farmers who built our small white clapboard house over 100 years ago planted it as a symbol of their good fortune. The Champlain Valley was prime farm and iron ore mining country at the turn of the last century.

Now it’s home to vacationers, second homeowners, and year round residents. Some of the year round residents have been here for generations or like us, they discovered this amazing landscape over the past 30 years, fell in love and stayed.

We’ve owned our little home since 2007 and have longed to move up here full-time. This year of the Covid has made that possible. This terrible pandemic forced most of us, who could, to work remotely. As college professors we were teaching online last spring and figured we’d be teaching remotely through the fall and possibly winter. We thought, why not move to our Adirondack home for the duration. We made arrangements for our months away, packed up a lot of stuff and were off. It was intense.

Now that the dust has settled, I’m figuring out how I want to live up here in the north woods. We’re far away from interstate commutes, crowded streets and cities. I haven’t worn ‘work’ clothes except for my zoom teaching stints. And then, it’s jeans below and silk blouse/jacket above. 

I walk in the woods most days and gaze at the high peaks from a hill behind our house.  Chickadees come up close – one almost hit me in the head the other day as I was walking on the trail behind our house. Then it perched within an arm’s length, unafraid and chirping. Amazing.

Now, we get our ‘groceries’ at our new CSA, Essex Farm. Each Saturday, I take my bags and put on my mask to ‘shop’ at the farm. We have separate time slots because of the Covid which means I don’t have to rush or worry about distancing. There is a large pavilion with tables full of produce and staples like pastry flour, bread flour, corn meal, rolled oats plus two refrigerator trucks/containers of more produce, eggs, chicken, milk, yogurt, cream. It’s a full diet CSA.

I’m picking up and then googling strange veggies like Kohlrabi, celeriac, Daikon radishes, Delicata and Kabocha squash. I’ve taken something called Schmaltz (chicken fat) from the freezer. Who would think six months ago, I’d be simmering lamb bones for hours to make a delicious stock for lamb stew and later chicken stew. Now I have time to cook! And I love it!

Cooking was not my favorite activity for the many years I worked fulltime and raised my twin daughters. It was a job, not a pleasure.  Now when I wake up at my 4:00 AM worry time, I think about what I’ll cook. Hmm. How about a pork shoulder roast with farm sauerkraut, apples and mashed tiny white and red potatoes. How about a combination of chopped leeks, red onion, garlic, shallots, and broccoli in white wine over pasta? How about mashed Delicata squash or roasted and halved squash filled with ground lamb and spices Indian style. The roasted chickens are to die for and with buttered and parsley new potatoes, steamed kale or carrots or brussel sprouts or cauliflower, ahhh. You get the idea. The possibilities are endless.

Because I have all this food in our frig and freezer, I don’t have to run to the store for missing ingredients. I use what I have and make actual grocery store runs to TJ’s in Vermont every two months. When I’m stuck, I use Google, and I use my imagination. It’s so much fun. I look forward to 4:00 or 4:30 each afternoon when I put on my butterfly apron and begin to chop and cook. For now my place is in the kitchen, practicing my culinary skills and listening to our white pine rustle in the evening wind.

Packing Up

Aging Parents, Childhood Home, Chronic illness, Families, Family and Chronic Illness, Home, Moving, Old Age, Uncategorized, , , , , Leave a comment

img_0545

Paul Avenue

Everything was old and tired and worn. The chintz on the wingback armchairs was split and the green background in places had faded to near white. The small Art Deco vase that had sat forever on the Queen Ann table was chipped. The off white silky drapes hung limp; gray dust shadowed their folds. The house smelled old and empty and untended.

I sighed and thought how everything in my childhood home looked exactly as it had 35 years ago, only totally spent. It was surreal. It was strange. And, it was weird. It looked as if my parents had up and left one day leaving everything in its place, as if they would return in a short time. They didn’t.

My mom had died two years earlier. My dad was in their Florida condo and was too ill to help me. He said even if he was well, he just couldn’t bear to do it.

I was there to pack up.  I felt the hook in my chest, the tension headache coming on, so I breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly, just like I do when I’m practicing yoga. Packing up. Packing up, I kept thinking. How can I do this? It’s too much: too much to deal with emotionally and physically.

A 3,000 square foot house lived in for 60 years and packed, and I mean packed. Packed to the gills. Every drawer, closet, and room contained stuff. Every empty nook was filled. The basement rafters and crawl spaces were jammed full of old bent curtain rods, dirt covered Lionel Train boxes, paint cans, plastic covered fabric from the sofa slipcover back in 1963. You get the picture.

And then there was the emotional part. My mother had loved this house on Paul Avenue, poured herself into its appearance and decoration. This was her home. This was the last physical expression of whom she was that I would experience. And I was in charge of taking it apart.

img_0499

Our Living Room — Unchanged for 35 Years

Every object, painting, chest, table, piece of crystal or china had been chosen and placed by my mother’s eye and hand. She’d created the still lives on the tabletops, the bookshelves, and the mantel. As I walked from room to room, I remembered when we’d driven to Lahaska, Pa to look at the 19th century chest in the dining room. I remembered learning to dance the jitterbug with my dad in front of the 1950’s oil painting of the bridge covered woodland stream. Now two years after her death, the dried pomegranates she’d arranged in the silver bowl five years ago sat dust covered in the center of the dining room table. The dozens of family photos sat crowded together on the piano as usual. Memories leapt out of everything. Pictures, movies unreeled in my brain. I grew up here, was happy and sad here, argued and laughed here.

Fortunately for me, I wouldn’t have to pack up all alone. My two childhood friends, Cheryl and Fran, helped me a lot. We spent whole weekends together. My partner, Kevin, came several times helping me to make decisions about what to keep and what to toss. My twin 24-year-old daughters helped too. And through the relator, I had the help of the dismantling-sixty-years-of-stuff expert, Nancy. Taking apart my mother’s home took 10 weekends of cleaning out and packing up.

img_0610

Rosemont Mini-Skirt Mob

It was hard, really hard especially that first weekend. By the end, I’d hardened. I’d become an expert at throwing away without remorse. I threw away the three dozen framed photos on the piano. We all had these pictures in our own homes. I even threw away the hundreds of photos of long dead ancestors. No one had any idea who they were. Chipped crystal and china that my mother had loved so much she’d kept the damaged ones, I tossed without a pang. Dirty, faded crewel pillows I’d embroidered for my mom 40 years ago, into the Hefty bags they went.

We recycled what we could. Old towels and sheets went to the animal shelter. Dr. Clutter, a recycling company, picked up three truckloads of stuff.  Weekend by weekend, Paul Avenue changed from being somehow my mother and my mother’s home to a house. A pretty 1920’s painted brick house with a slate roof and the original cooper gutters. A very desirable house to old house lovers according to the dismantler, Nancy and the realtor, Barb. As my friends, daughters, and I cleaned out and packed up together, we reminisced. Rooms and objects brought up old stories, some we’d forgotten until then. Yes, the house was packed with a mountain of stuff, but it was packed even more with our memories.

On those packing-up weekends, I was a teenager once again, laughing with Cheryl and Fran about sleepovers, remembering the dinner parties my mother made for our group of six girlfriends. My twin daughters, Anna Lou and Campbell, and I talked about the weekends spent with my mom and dad at the pool or the golf course. We laughed about how Anna Lou had peeled the wallpaper off of the bedroom wall during her nap. (I’d thought my mom would be really upset; she wasn’t.) As we packed up the kitchen, Campbell reminded us of my mother baking blueberry pies and never being too busy or too tired to make French toast or sit at the kitchen counter and play a hand of gin.

I realized dismantling my mom’s house wasn’t getting rid of my mom or my dad or my life. I realized we were dismantling a place that was once beautiful and interesting and meaningful – and now it wasn’t. Just because it was gone didn’t mean it was gone in my imagination. I could be right back in our living room or kitchen or my childhood bedroom, anytime I chose.

img_0500

My Parent’s Den and Their Two Chairs

I realized too, that family traditions and rituals go on. We still have my mom’s blueberry pie and special muffins every time Campbell bakes them for us in my mom’s muffin and pie tins. I use my mom’s sterling forks, knives, and spoons in our home now. She’s with me at every meal. Anna Lou wears my mom’s gold scallop shell locket and remembers long heart-felt talks with her Nana about what’s important in life and how to see the world as a place of love and beauty and possibility.

Paul Avenue sold on the first day it was on the market – we had five contracts, most over the asking price. A young woman bought it. She fell in love when she walked into the dining room and looked out its many windows to the sweet brick patio and original fishpond surrounded with hostas, rhododendrons, and hemlocks. The same view my mom had fallen in love with sixty years earlier. A circle.

img_0542

My Mother’s Favorite View

Now, many months later, I consider my stuff and begin clearing out. I’m reading Paris In Love, a memoir by romance novelist and English Lit professor, Eloisa James. She packed up and cleared out most of her stuff after she recovered from breast cancer. I’m also reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.   I totally get why clearing out makes you feel lighter and freer. I totally get why some stuff is a burden and some stuff isn’t. It seems to me that stuff has a shelf life. When it’s expired, pack it up.

img_0568

The Fish Pond and Patio

Snippets — Renewing in the ADK

adventure, backpacking, Families, freedom, hiking, motherhood, sense of place, Uncategorized, wild places, women and nature, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Gallery Leave a comment

Two Hornbeck's on the shore of Lake Champlain

Two Hornbeck’s on the shore of Lake Champlain

I usually write essays, drafted and tinkered with over many weeks — sentences and words agonized over and then agonized over once again.

Now after 5 weeks in the ADK, I want to write only snippets. Too much has happened in these past weeks.  I could write a bulleted report of my doings but that would not only be boring but would only scratch the surface of my experience, would leave out the most important part — how I came to be more of who I am, not restored after the terror of the past three plus years, but  renewed.

Over these weeks, I have discovered through moving my body and mind and soul through experiences as diverse as restorative yoga, paddling rivers, hiking mountains, grading students’ essays, chatting with friends, attending concerts and theater, shopping, eating, and visiting with family and friends that I am different from when I left Stewartstown, PA.  I am my old self and my new self.  The anxiety, pain, and fear that was my daily and hourly experience has vanished, and I am in a foreign land, one in which I want to stay, permanently. If I had to sum up my new place, it would be with one word — perspective.  My perspective has shifted, shifted to a place that I plan on staying for quite awhile. It feels so  good to be here, seeing and feeling from this place that current or future conditions can’t shake so ferociously.

 

Black Spots

adventure, backpacking, freedom, hiking, sense of place, Uncategorized, wild places, women and nature, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

THAYER LAKE, THE BRANDRETH PROPERTY

THAYER LAKE, THE BRANDRETH PROPERTY

PREFACE — My essay, Black Spots, tells the story of my adventure at a 15,000 acre camp in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.  My partner, Kevin and I, camped, paddled, and fished in the middle of the wilderness for a couple of days with permission of the Nature Conservancy who had just purchased a portion of this family’s original tract.

                                                           BLACK  SPOTS

KATIE IN FRONT OF OUR QUONSET HUT

KATIE IN FRONT OF OUR QUONSET HUT

Late last August I went to the Brandreth family tract in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.  The same Brandreth as Paullina Brandreth, an early twentieth century hunting and fishing writer who wrote under the pseudonym of Paul Brandreth.  I had read her book, Trails of Enchantment, and couldn’t believe my luck when Kevin, a friend and landscape painter, invited me to spend a week there in a Quonset hut type cabin  on Thayer Lake, one of several ponds on the property.  The Nature Conservancy had recently purchased the 15,000 acre  property and they were eager to show it off.  I was to write about and Kevin was to paint the reclaimed property that had been in the same family for over one hundred years.

As we drove on the twisting private dirt road fifteen miles into the cabin, we surprised two bears who were feeding on the blackberries that were growing on the verge between the road and the woods.  When they heard our truck, they ran as fast as they could down the road, leaped into the heavy brush, and disappeared.  All we saw were two large round bear bottoms dashing away ahead of us.  People hunt bear here. The woods, thick with alders, are perfect bear habitat and difficult to see or walk through. In fact, you can’t see more than a few feet into the woods on either side of the road.

We stopped at a couple of ponds along the way, one whose water was so clear it was hard to believe that it was dead, a victim of acid rain.  Acid rain works like bleach does on fabric.  It irradiates everything: all color, design, and life. But just as the fabric looks spotless, so does the water.  Spotless and lifeless.

We passed Shingle Shanty Pond where Paullina Brandreth had had a lean-to they used for

SHINGLE SHANTY POND

SHINGLE SHANTY POND

hunting expeditions.  When you own, hunt, and fish on over 24,000 acres its nice to have shelter here and there.  I planned on kayaking its 100 acres, searching around the perimeter in hopes of finding the remnants of her camp.  Two hours after we had begun bumping and winding  up and down over the hilly woods, we arrived at Thayer Lake and our Quonset cabin.  We had expected a dilapidated, primitive structure filled with mice and spiders.  To our delight we would be living, sleeping, and cooking in a steel twenty by fifteen foot building with a pine table and matching chairs, aluminum cots with thin mattresses, two folding deck chairs, and a deck overlooking the one mile long lake.  We also had a clean, new privy 25 yards away and a barbecue pit style fireplace just off the deck, feet from the water. We had arrived in paradise.

As if it had been choreographed by a Wild Kingdom producer, two loons, a male and female, swan up to within 30 yards of our place.  As they swam they called their tremolo, “hahahahahaha” back and forth to one another and to us, we hoped.  The pair stayed for fifteen minutes yodeling and diving, dipping their heads and watching — watching us. After unpacking the truck and making our beds, we carried the red camp canoe into the water and paddled out onto the lake.  We paddled to the middle, stopped, and just sat.  Silence.  We were in it, deep in the north woods, surrounded by 100,000 acres of wilderness.  The dirt track on which we had arrived was our only way out unless we wanted to hack our way through thousands of acres of dense brushy woods so thick with dead fall, alders, black flies and mosquitoes that we would need a machete and  several bottles of bug dope.

After paddling the shore line, we decided upon a likely location for catching some small mouth bass.  We were told the lake was full of them, and so we had visions of a dinner of  crisply grilled bass, baked potatoes, and  steamed string beans accompanied by a couple of glasses of shiraz.  Since we only had one fly rod,  I had planned on doing the paddling while Kevin, an expert fisherman, did the fishing and catching.  But after a couple of casts, Kevin insisted I try, saying it was easy and small mouth bass are  fun to catch.

I am a worm fisherwoman and proud of it.  Back home on the Gunpowder River in Maryland, I catch lots of rainbow trout and brown trout on my spinning reel baited with worms dug up on the river bank. A fly rod is baited with a fly and has a much longer line than a spinning reel and rod.  One must cast back and forth and then out, making the fly appear to the fish as if it is a real insect just waiting to be caught and eaten.  I tried it  after much cajoling, and incredibly, a bass attacked my bait.

My line went out, and my rod bent over U shaped towards the water’s surface.  I had a bass.  I actually had a bass! But as I reeled it in, Kevin announced that he’d forgotten the net so I’d “just have to tire it out” before bringing it along side the canoe.  I followed his patient directions as I broke my tension with loud high pitched “oooh’s”, imploring every other second, “What should I do now”?  Miraculously, the bass stayed on and tired.  Carefully, I hauled him up and over the gunwale and into the bottom of our canoe.

I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe I’d done it and without a net.  I wanted to try  again.   I cast sloppily, but the bass didn’t mind; they jumped onto my bait at almost every cast.  Getting them tired and into the boat was harder.  As soon as they got close to the boat, they swam away from it as fast as they could.  I had to be ready to give them line, but not too much, or they would be able to jump up out of the water and get off of the hook.  Every one of them jumped, at least once.  And every time, I squealed like a child at an amusement park.  After I had caught six and kept four, we called it quits.  We couldn’t eat more than two a piece.

As we paddled to shore, the loons called from the other end of the lake.  This time their calls sounded primordial like a bevy of ghosts wailing loudly, plaintively.  Their “hoooo-lii” echoed ten times over the water, woods, and hills, sending shivers up our  backs and raising the hair on our arms.  .

COMMON LOON WITH BABY

COMMON LOON WITH BABY

Common Loons are large birds, 32 inches long with a wing span of 46 inches.  They are described by the Audubon Society as “black-headed, with a heavy, dagger like black bill,  a white and black striped necklace, prominent white checkers on their back, and white underpants.” Their eyes are red.  They eat mostly fish, sometimes diving 240 feet  for them  and staying submerged for fifteen minutes.  Because they can stay submerged for so long, Eskimos and Native Americans thought them capable of magic.

Back at the shore in front of our cabin, we pulled the canoe out of the water and changed into fleeces and long pants.  It was chilly, about 55 degrees. I opened the shiraz as Kevin sharpened his knife.  We chatted back and forth about our day, how lucky we were to be here, such a nice cabin and no sign of mice.  We’d had bright sunshine and seventy degrees with only a slight breeze.  The water in Thayer Lake was still warm.  We could swim in it tomorrow.  The loons came floating back, looking us over quietly this time.  Kevin spread a wooden board on a flat rock and began to filet the bass.

As he cut, he explained that bass smell bad when you gut them, so he was just going to avoid that and simply filet their sides for the only meat we would eat anyway.  Why make a mess when you didn’t have to.  After cutting the filets from the first fish he stopped and looked at them closely.  “Katie, look at this.  The fish has parasites.”

I looked and sure enough hundreds of little black spots as small as the head of a straight pin dotted the meat.  “Why don’t you clean another one and see if it has any?”

Kevin did and the second one had them and so did the third and the fourth.  “I guess the whole lake is infested with them.”

I didn’t want to give up my image of wilderness camping, the image of fishing and eating our catch. “Maybe they’ll be alright if we cook them.  The parasites will die won’t they?”

“Katie we’re not eating these fish.” And we didn’t.  It’s funny how black spots in fish can change everything.

We thought we were in a pristine environment, fishing in immaculate water. Water we could

BLACK SPOT PARASITES ON FISH PERFECTLY NATURAL

BLACK SPOT PARASITES ON FISH PERFECTLY NATURAL

drink, water cleaner than we’d ever seen.  But now that notion was dashed.  Our small mouth bass had little black spots all through them.  We imagined the worst and blamed man, acid rain, and pollution. We made grilled chicken instead and sipped our wine wondering how this lake in the middle of no where could have  become contaminated with parasites.

Ironically, we were all wrong.  Humans didn’t cause the parasites. After our trip, we found out from a local Adirondack fisherman and the Michigan Department of Natural Resource’s web site that Black Spot is not man made.  Black spot is a  naturally occurring parasite that is commonly found in earthen bottomed lakes and ponds.  It has nothing to do with pollution. The parasites only infest fish with certain diets, not humans swimming in their waters. Even when a fish is heavily infested, he is no danger of dying or becoming sick.  These parasites are not harmful to humans and die when the fish is cooked.  So we could have eaten the fish, even though they looked pretty unappetizing with all those hundreds of tiny black parasites imbedded in their flesh.

Has our postmodern culture  conditioned us to believe that we are the cause of everything that seems harmful because we see the havoc we have caused in more populated places?  Well, we’re not always the cause of harm, and parasites are a natural  part of the natural world.

BRANDRETH PROPERTY

BRANDRETH PROPERTY

If being in the wilderness for a few days taught us anything about our place in the natural world, it taught us that we are a part of the whole.  We’re not the center or the biggest part or the most important part.  We’re just a part.  We don’t affect everything.  In the wilderness, we affect very little unless we bring along dynamite and heavy equipment.  Without any props, we fit right in — we aren’t too loud or too rough.  We eat and sleep and make love like everything else in the woods.  And that is what we’d come for after all– to fit in and to be a part of the wild with or without parasites.

Into the Wilderness

adventure, backpacking, freedom, hiking, motherhood, sense of place, wild places, women and nature, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

ADIRONDACK MOUNTAIN STREAM

ADIRONDACK MOUNTAIN STREAM

Amelia M. Murray, the maid of honor to Queen Victoria, camped in the Adirondack Mountains in 1855 with the Governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, his niece, and three guides.  While on

Adirondack Autumn Landscape Where Amelia Murray Hiked

Adirondack Autumn Landscape Where Amelia Murray Hiked

her five-day trip, she learned how to sleep on a hemlock bed, to bathe in Saranac Lake, and to hike sixteen miles in one day through a dense forest filled with “gigantic timber felled by storms…deep bogs and slippery rocks.”  She did all this while wearing a corset, which greatly restricted her breathing capacity, and very unsensible shoes.

Although she was a refined English lady, she carried her fair share — “a basket and a bundle.”  Throughout her diary account of the trip, she makes light of the dirt, rain, thunder, damp bedding and clothes.  She brags about her “London portable soup” which she had brought from England a year earlier and claimed was still in “good preservation” although one should “add lemons and a good store of sugar, brown and white” before eating it.  Amazing.  Her account is enthusiastic, joyous, and chatty.

She was a woman of privilege, an English lady.  Yet she was able to escape “polite society” long enough to have an adventure out of doors in the company of the genteel (the Governor) and not so genteel (the guides).  Although she writes after the trip that it took her “three days at Utica …to recruit and repose” herself, she had had a fine time and welcomed the chance to do it all again.

What is this need, this trenchant desire we have to be in the “wilderness”, to connect with the natural world?  Why would an elegant and refined lady of the 1800s who had probably never ventured much further than a stroll down an English country lane seek the untamed woods of New York State?  She sought adventure, yes, but more than that, I think.  She sought to discover a part of her that had not been tested, had lain dormant.  She wanted to test her fearlessness, her courage, her adaptability.  Normally, tests of fearlessness and courage are associated with men as men’s goals.  Men are supposed to like adventuring; they want to be tested in nature.  Isn’t that what the armed forces ads used to say, “Come see the world. Come adventuring with us.”?  But women need to be tested too. Even girls of thirteen seek adventure.

Last Sunday, my daughter Campbell announced she wanted to go fishing with me down by Cross Mill in Cross Mill stream about one and half miles away.  I thought she was kidding.  Even

Campbell, age 12, my outdoor girl.

Campbell, age 12, my outdoor girl.

though it was sunny and warm for February, 55 degrees, there were still patches of snow about, and I knew the water would be icy cold.  She persisted.   After packing an old red school backpack with a water bottle, water shoes, a towel, and a fishing rod, she pronounced herself ready to ride her bike down to the stream.  I couldn’t convince her to walk, arguing unsuccessfully that the roads are narrow and winding and in some places cars fly by at forty miles an hour. Ultimately, I agreed to her riding the bike as long as she stayed with me.  I wanted to walk.  We spent three hours walking and riding to and from the stream and playing in the water.  We waded in the frigid creek, our feet aching and numb.  We skipped rocks, looked for crayfish.  I snoozed in the sun on the brown picnic tabletop in between commenting to Campbell about her solo rock skipping contest.  On the way home, we spotted a male pheasant a few feet away, scurrying through the bushes by the side of the road.

Why had Campbell wanted to go? Did my daughter latch onto the idea of riding off with fishing rod, towel and water bottle because she needed to get away, needed to be out of doors?  Or did she want to go adventuring in order to test her mettle by  riding her bike to a place she hadn’t fished before and wading in frigid February water?  I doubt she could answer these questions or would even want to.  She’s thirteen.  She just wanted to go.

She just wanted to go like Opal Whiteley, a writer who grew up in Oregon in the early 1900’s.

Opel Whiteley, Nature Writer

Opel Whiteley, Nature Writer

Whiteley wrote in her diary at about age seven, “I like to go in among the rushes where the blackbird s with red upon their wings do go.  I like to touch fingertips with the rushes.  I like to listen to the voices that whisper in the swamp.  I do so like to feel the mud ooze up between my toes.”  Campbell could identify with that.  This desire to connect with nature and to seek sensory experiences in it is common to most of us.   My daughter and Opal Whiteley aren’t the only young girls who’ve found adventure and joy in nature.

Hannah Hinchman, a contemporary writer and visual artist, created an enchanted world in the woods near her home when she was a teen.  She spent whole days attired in a wood nymph dress dancing among tall oaks and pines, performing rituals she had “learned “ from the woodland fairies.  She “wanted these adventures to form an unassailable world, composed only

Hannah Hinchman, out door writer and artist.

Hannah Hinchman, out door writer and artist.

of pure things.”  As she grew older she abandoned her woodland fairies and her fantastical view of nature, yet nature continues to be her solace.  “If I were about to pull the trigger and happened to hear a red-winged blackbird, I doubt that I could complete the act.”

Sometimes this desire to connect to nature becomes a pathological need, a self-medication for mental or physical illness or ordinary loneliness.  When I was enduring and battling a brutal divorce, I used to run long and often on the Panther Branch trail in Maryland.  The two mile trail curves through the woods around house-sized boulders, decaying deadfall, and foot high maiden hair ferns edging the stream and winding up to the top of a hill.  I used my runs there as therapy, going over and over all the terrible lies and injustices.  I recounted the same sad incidents and betrayals in my head; the dialogue never changed.  “He said this; can you believe it? And then he did that on top of everything else.  Doesn’t he even care about his children?”

As I ran, I ran, literally and figuratively, through this dialogue every time.  I spoke sentences, paragraphs in my mind as if I were speaking to a therapist or friend.  As I hit the chest high boulder with the red columbine I would begin my diatribe.  I couldn’t stop it; it rolled on and on of its own free will.  After the divorce was final, I still began this ugly conversation whenever I got to the red columbine boulder.  I did it unintentionally, unconsciously, until I consciously put an end to it.

Sadly, after I’d resolved my divorce and the ugly voices, I no longer wanted to go to the place.  The Panther Branch trail, which had been my solace, my comfort, my dumping ground became my nemesis, a reminder of bitterness, hurt and anger.  I felt as if I’d deposited every vengeful thought and desire in its rocks and branches and they were all there waiting for me.  I didn’t go back for years and then only occasionally.

For me, the Panther Branch became a place that was lovely on the surface but underneath was seething with unpleasantness.

Why do we attach meaning to place?  Does it make it more real, make it more our own?  I heard a psychologist say that artists are often depressed because they try to find meaning in every single thing, and when they can’t find it, they become despondent.  Most of us don’t go that far, yet most of us do attribute some meaning to place.

Places are the tangible stage sets for our happiest and saddest moments, celebrations, rituals and events. Hospital bedsides, altars, and babies’ rooms are the backdrops for life’s most poignant moments. Some cultures construct places to house these significant events – churches, burial mounds and grounds, concert halls, and court rooms. Others, like Native Americans, believe some natural outside places hold deep significance; these places contain spirits or powers that other places do not.  They are hallowed or evil, full of the universe’s energy or places of death.

Place enriches or diminishes what happens within it.  Sipping tea in front of a roaring fire is not the same as drinking tea at the local Seven Eleven store.  Place can change our mood, alter our interactions with one another in positive or negative ways.   Having a conversation in a basketball court or in a room full of whining children is not the same as having a conversation beside a woodland stream or in a quiet, candle lit room.  “Place subtends and enfolds us, lying perpetually under and around us.  Place…is the bedrock of our being-in-the-world,” writes Edward S. Casey, author of  Getting Back Into Place.

I just came back from spending two days in New York City.  I love New York.  I love its

Manhattan Street Scene

Manhattan Street Scene

overabundance.  It’s so full of everything human, overflowing with everything people make. Art, buildings, fashion, food, noise, dirt.  People are everywhere.  On foot, in cars, on bicycles — talking, driving, and honking.  Walking around the city is like walking a human obstacle course; you are blasted with people, color, and noise — snippets of intimate conversations, a man on a space age motorized walker rolling along the sidewalk, pigeons under foot, shop window after shop window stuffed with every conceivable and inconceivable object.  Food markets, their cases over laden with hundreds of cheeses, ten types of proscuitto, twenty pates, truffles, black or white, sauced or canned, marinated or plain. The stimulation becomes overwhelming; the noise eventually becomes too noisy and then it’s time to go home.

After 48 hours of being high on the over-stimulation, I crashed and felt like Amelia M. Murray.  I needed three days at home in the woods in rural Pennsylvania “to recruit” myself.  Just like Murray, I wanted an adventure, a taste of the unfamiliar.  And when it was over, I wanted to repose — in my own place.