The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (25 page)

Of course, Murray was right, and the outrage over that first summer did not dent the growing popularity of the Adirondacks. When the season of 1870 arrived balmy and clear, the region surged ahead as the country's democratic playground, with Murray as its chief promoter. Now a wealthy celebrity author, he mixed his religious duties with lecture tours around the Northeast, making more than 500 appearances to an estimated half a million Americans in the next three years. His soaring oratory, rugged good looks, and powerful physique made him a huge success, as did his rags-to-riches life story. Raised as a poor farm boy in Guilford, Connecticut, he had started at Yale College wearing handmade clothes and with $4.68 in his pocket. He spent his first summers in the Adirondacks at the suggestion of a friend, and began writing stories about it for a local newspaper. His passion for the outdoors often raised eyebrows among New England congregations: on one occasion, he arrived to give a sermon while still wearing his shooting jacket and hunting breeches, and leaned his rifle against the pulpit.

“Murray was the right person, in the right place, with the right words, at the right time,” says Steven Engelhart, executive director of Adirondack Architectural Heritage in Keeseville, New York. Although enlightened American writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson had argued for the spiritual value of nature as far back as the 1840s and '50s—Emerson even slept out with erudite friends in the Adirondacks, in the so-called Philosophers' Camp on Follensby Pond—their work reached only a relatively small, elite group of readers. But Murray's book, with its direct, straightforward “how-to” tips, mixed with a series of humorous short stories about wilderness camping, truly seized the public's imagination.

The Adirondacks were soon booming. By 1875, some 200 hotels and camps were operating in the mountains, with new stagecoach services rattling from the train stations and steamboats plying the lakes. By 1900, the Adirondacks' summer population had risen to around 25,000 from 3,000 in 1869. Attracted by the fishing and hunting but appalled by the crowds, the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Huntingtons, and other fabulously wealthy industrialists built their own spectacular “great camps,” where they could disport with their families in private luxury. The American vacation was born—quite literally. The scions of New York City took to declaring that they would “vacate” their city homes for their lakeside summer retreats, and the term
vacation
replaced the British
holiday
in common parlance. As fellow Bostonian Wendell Phillips put it, Murray's book had “kindled a thousand campfires and taught a thousand pens how to write of nature.”

 

Today, New Yorkers have no doubt about the pleasures of escaping the city in summer. Last season, as the canyons of Manhattan began to radiate heat like a pizza oven, I found an original 1869 edition of Murray's guidebook in the archives of the New York Public Library. Its brown leather binding was beaten and cracked, as if it had itself been on a few canoe trips around the St. Regis lakes, but the pages were still intact, and were illustrated with engravings of outdoor life. The abundance of practical advice (“The Wilderness: Why I Go There,—How I Get There,—What I Do There,—and What It Costs”) offered a wealth of detail on Gilded Age travel. Murray advised his readers how much to pay a guide ($2.50 a day), how to budget for food ($2 a week), and what to pack (“one pair pliable buckskin gloves, with chamois-skin gauntlets tied or buttoned at the elbow,” and, as an insect repellent, “a bottle of sweet oil and a vial of tar”).

Sadly, his favorite guesthouses have vanished, including Mother Johnson's inn, where “you find such pancakes as are rarely met with.” But the general message of the guidebook could not be more valid today. Within a day's drive for 60 million people lie vast swaths of wilderness, including some 3,000 lakes, that are now protected as part of the Adirondack Park—a sprawling 6.1 million acre reserve that is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier National Parks combined. The park was created in 1892, as conservationists became concerned at the effects of logging and other industry in the area. The state legislature set aside an initial 680,000 acres to be “forever kept wild” and began purchasing private land as it became available. Today, the Adirondack Park contains a complex mixture of state and private property, with nine different categories of protection. But despite its scale, the park has lost its iconic status. When it comes to wilderness, most of us think first of the western parks.

With a photocopy of Murray's book in my pack, I decided to leave the big city and see how much of the Victorian solitude could be found via Highway 81. Even in 1869, Murray recommended that travelers venture into the genuinely pristine corners—a principle that is rarely observed today. Of the over 7 million visitors who enter the park every year, only a small fraction stray from their cars. “This area is still pretty rugged compared to the rest of the Northeast,” says Hallie Bond, former curator at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake. “Instead of agricultural farmland, you're suddenly in dark and forbidding woods, which can be quite daunting. We get some people who arrive in Lake Placid or Lake George”—two crowded tourist centers, their streets lined with clothing chains and fast-food stores—“and think they've seen the Adirondacks.”

So I quickly turned off the main roads into Murray's favorite part of the region, which boasted scenery, he wrote, “to rival Switzerland.”

 

As dawn broke the next morning, I was in a kayak on the mirror-still waters of Sagamore Lake and already spotting loons. The sudden emptiness was startling: not a single structure could be seen in the forest, except for the distant form of Great Camp Sagamore, whose wooden façade blended soothingly into the surrounding trees. Dipping my paddle through the rising condensation felt like rowing through the clouds.

For travelers today, the most direct link to the genteel past is by staying in one of the surviving “great camps.” These vernacular follies began to sprout across the remotest lakefronts in the 1880s, designed along a uniquely American style pioneered by William West Durant, whose intention it was to literally bring the outdoors inside. They were built from tree trunks with the bark left intact, and their interiors were decorated with local stones, furniture crafted from branches, animal skins, and hunting trophies. After the Great Depression, many of the camps fell into disrepair when their owners' fortunes dwindled. Some burned; others were leveled or imploded with neglect. Today, only about 35 survive, and most are in private hands. But in a democratic process that Murray would have applauded, several of the finest have become available to the public.

Built in 1897, Sagamore was originally one of the many Vanderbilt family estates. Guests arrived by horse-drawn carriage and were welcomed by bonfires and fireworks before adjourning to the rustic chic of their cabins. Descendant Alfred Vanderbilt III fondly likened Sagamore to the fantasy village Brigadoon that magically appeared from the mists. (“As the horses came to rest, the weary travelers knew they had reached heaven.”) The decades of social merriment lured guests from Hollywood, including Gary Cooper, Howard Hughes, and Gene Tierney, often to enjoy the luxurious gambling room. The Vanderbilts left in 1954, and the camp was in danger of collapse when it was taken over in 1983 by the not-for-profit Sagamore Institute. Today, its 27 surviving structures have been stabilized and guests can still enjoy the porch of the Wigwam building, for example, with its railing of bark-covered logs, or the open-air bowling alley made entirely from polished timber.

Farther north, by Osgood Pond, White Pine Camp was rescued in the 1990s by a group of history-loving investors. Built in 1907 for the New York banker Archibald S. White, it became “the summer White House” when President Calvin Coolidge moved in for three months in 1926, spending most of his days fishing, often in the company of Herbert Hoover. Today, the olive-green cabins have been refitted with period furnishings, and a slender 300-foot wooden promenade still stretches across the pond to an islet crowned by a Japanese teahouse, an iconic image of the Adirondacks today.

But perhaps the most symbolic restoration story is Great Camp Santanoni, built in 1892 for a prominent Albany banker, Robert Pruyn, and his wife, Anna, whose devotion to nature verged on the mystical. It's the only camp free and open to the public year-round—that is, if you can get there. Cars are forbidden on the grounds, so after I parked at the imposing riverside gatehouse in the town of Newcomb, I set off on a mountain bike along five miles of rough dirt road, passing the remains of the Pruyns' private farm. At last, an enormous log structure loomed from the pine forest, in the final stages of renovation. A lone volunteer caretaker took me through vast empty chambers constructed from enormous logs, as Newcomb Lake shimmered below in the afternoon sun.

When Great Camp Santanoni became part of the state park in 1973, historic structures were simply allowed to decay, or were even deliberately destroyed, to keep the land “forever wild.” “They were seen as interfering with the purity of the wilderness,” Engelhart explains. In 1979, Great Camp Nehasane, a magnificent edifice by Lake Lila, was obtained by the state and burned by park rangers, at the request of the owners. The loss of such a nostalgic treasure helped galvanize preservationists, and Adirondack Architectural Heritage was formed in 1990 in part to save Santanoni. Visitors began to trickle to the site after it was acquired by the state. “People had no idea,” Engelhart recalls. “They would say, ‘Oh my God, look what's here!'” In 1983, a new state law was created to help preserve historic sites and granted permission for building repairs. “It was real pitiful at first,” recalls local craftsman Michael Frenette, who has worked on Santanoni every summer since 1997. “There was nothing but porcupine scat and rotten lumber.” The boathouse had collapsed and was restored from about 30 percent of the surviving structure. Today, visitors can camp, hike, and take free rowboats and canoes out onto the lake.

As I explored, I met another staff member, grad student Nina Caruso. “Robert Pruyn once wrote that ‘there is independence, delight, and peace in the isolation,'” she said. “Santanoni still has that. You get a bit of your soul back when you come up here.”

It was hard to imagine that anyone had ever thought of letting the elegant edifice vanish. “It's easy to judge, but the nineteen sixties and seventies were the low point of public awareness of the great camps,” says Engelhart. “They really saw them as white elephants. But the public's attitude has evolved over time. Today, we see the camps as valuable, because they reflect a design ethic we have come to embrace.”

 

In Murray's day, the remotest corners of the Adirondacks could be reached only by canoe, often along hauntingly beautiful streams and rivulets. It's still the same today. About 1 million acres, a sixth of the park's area, is designated wilderness, its highest level of protection, ensuring that no motorized boats or wheeled vehicles are permitted, not even bikes. The High Peaks region around Mount Marcy offers the most dramatic topography, and I hiked in to overnight at Johns Brook Lodge, a base for long-distance treks that has been operated by the Adirondack Mountain Club since the 1920s.

But Murray was not a fan of foot travel. With few trails in the 1800s, progress over fallen trees was painfully slow. “Key to Murray's Adirondacks was the idea of hiring a guide and traveling by river,” says Bond. Murray waxes lyrical about guides with nicknames like “Snake-Eye” and “Old Mountain,” who were raised in tune with nature. His ideal was one John Plumbley, “the prince of guides”—“a man who knows the wilderness as a farmer knows his fields, whose instinct is never at fault, whose temper is never ruffled, whose paddle is silent as falling snow.” The Gilded Age guides even designed their own type of canoe, the Adirondack guideboat, with a shallow draft suited to navigate the smallest creeks, and lightweight enough to be carried across land.

For a trip that Murray would have approved of, I headed to the remotest stretch of the park, along the Oswegatchie River near the Canadian border. There, I signed up with Rick Kovacs, the last guide based in the town of Wanakena. “A century ago, there were fifteen guides working this river, each one with his own fishing camp,” Kovacs told me as we paddled along the ever-narrowing Oswegatchie, whose waters were a rich brown from the tannin of decaying leaves and branches. “Now we're barely holding on.” Like many of the 137,000 year-round residents in the Adirondack Park, he and his family company, Packbasket Adventures Lodge and Guide Service, struggle to make ends meet when the summer season ends.

The river snaked back and forth upon itself in tighter coils, as we paddled beneath enormous half-fallen trees from recent storms. “Easy bends, slow bends, sharp bends, rapid bends, and just bends everywhere,” wrote a traveler of his 1907 trip here. Robins swung low overhead, and raccoon tracks could be seen on the banks. At one point, we pulled the canoe over a beaver dam. By late afternoon, we set up camp at the Spring Hole Lean-to. When I dove into the river to cool off, it was like swimming in iced tea.

Not a soul passed us by, and it was easy to assume that little had changed since the 19th century. But nothing in the Adirondacks quite meets the eye.

“It looks like pure wilderness,” said Kovacs. “But even back in Murray's day, a lot of the forest was being logged, clear-cut, and burned. In the early nineteen hundreds, a logging railroad even went right by this river. The biggest trees would have been three hundred to four hundred years old, and grown as high as one hundred fifty feet. Even though the logging stopped a century ago, it will take a couple of hundred years more to get back to its original state”—assuming that recent weather extremes, which are affecting the forest, do not take their toll, he adds.