The Adirondack Park in mid October is like anyplace in the mid ‘60s. The summer trippers have left the park after Labor Day, and a few more – those with aesthetic bents – after peak foliage. None of the non residents will return until skiing season begins in late December. Other than the few modern grills on occasional oncoming cars along Route 28, nothing looks different than any town did in 1966. Adirondackers don’t change.
Saturday started with a pre-arranged breakfast with a local novelist at the Silver Star Diner in Chestertown. I had by chance pulled one of his books from a Chestertown library shelf, and fallen out of my chair when, after finishing the book, I read on the back flyleaf that the author is a neighbor. That in itself wouldn’t have been so miraculous: the interesting part was the main character’s individuation by way of the Jungian model. I had never in my life run into another person with an interest in the subject, and wondered if I ever would.
Neither one of us ventured what we looked like when we agreed to meet over the phone. We knew it would not be necessary. Everybody else would don suspenders, long beards, plaid flannel shirts and muddy boots. But as soon as I pulled open the door, a waitress beckoned, “Sir, he’s over here!” David and I repaired to a side room with tables, and the waitress followed us in.
“It’s cold,” she said.
I said I thought it was always the patrons who were cold, since the waiters had to run around.
The girl pulled up her already short uniform front to address my consideration. “I have bare legs.”
“And pretty legs, I would add,” David ventured.
It was then that the realization hit me that all is not lost. I have bemoaned often, including on this Forum, that the world has gone to frivolous and rapacious hell. It still exists untouched in the Park. I am going to consider it to be a State from now on; a state the size of Connecticut or Vermont, or a separate country, even; but with only 130 thousand people in it, when the recreationers are not here, such as right now.
I remember girls’ legs in the ‘60s, the ones that lived in the country. There was nothing more inviting. There was a certain terroir associated with them that simply didn’t exist with girls’ legs in the burbs and cities.
Later, my wife Lynn and I drove west on Route 28 to Inlet, where in 1906 Chester Gillett tried to forget the fact that he had just drowned his girlfriend in Big Moose Lake because she was pregnant. We have like Diogenes been searching for the exact right lamp that can be hung in a certain corner of our camp for the right ambience at night. Every other wall and corner is perfect, including the opposite one where a real fish hangs so that an internal lamp can be seen glowing through his skin.
But I did find my other object of search: a shelf that would fit perfectly under a painting of a wine store in Bordeaux. I want to place my five empty First Growth bottles from 1997 on the shelf so that they join the painted bottles on display in the painting. A bit ‘60s, but what the hell, I don’t have a lava lamp and that’s what camps are for.
On the way back to camp, I veered off the main road into the hamlet of Raquette Lake. There’s a general store, a church, which could date to the 1700s, and a hotel tavern; and on a dirt road stretching from the gravel road of what could have been Main Street, if there had been a couple more stores, a red caboose, still on a fragment of track, converted into a gift shop, jutted its rear quarter in our direction. We open the rear door and entered. Another beautiful country girl with dark eyes peered from behind the counter.
“Everything is on sale,” she said. It was like a dream, because I can’t see how anybody other than us could have found the store in the last hundred years. We looked for our lantern, but all I could see of interest was an Adirondack style Kleenex holder. I tried to get Lynn to buy it, but she said tissue paper should be clean, and a box like that would get dingy over time. The girl said she would get some lanterns in by spring, and I said we would stop back.
That night, watching the sun set over the still colorful leaves on the hill across the lake, I opened a 1999 Talbot. I’m not sure if it was wishful thinking, or synesthesia, but I could detect a hint of the old Cordier aroma.