Full Circle
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Adirondack Park is perhaps the world’s greatest experiment in ecological recovery, a place hard used a century ago and now slowly proving that where humanity backs off,nature rebounds.
Photos © Mark Godfrey
Since this story was written, the Conservancy has helped the Adirondack Land Trust purchase an additional 4.5 miles of undeveloped shoreline on Lows Lake. Round Lake has been added to the Adirondack Forest Preserve and is open for paddling. Bog Lake, Clear Pond and their adjoining lands remain closed to the public, pending their purchase by the state of New York.
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Anywhere else in the eastern United States, 26,500 acres would be a huge land purchase. In the Adirondacks, the deal will add less than 1 percent to the total protected land in Adirondack Park. Which raises the question: Is it as urgent to buy land here as in other places? There’s no perfect answer to that query, but here’s why I think so: There’s almost no other place in the country, and certainly nowhere else in the East, where the chance exists to complete, not begin, the cycle of protection. Elsewhere it’s crucial scraps and remnants and odd corners that get bought in a mad scramble to save them ahead of the developers. But here, because of the century-old state commitment to wilderness, those scraps and corners are rounding out a whole, allowing us to imagine what a truly conserved landscape looks like. In many places we have no choice but to save fragments of the old tunes, allowing us to imagine what once they sounded like and what they might sound like again some day in the distant future. In the Adiron-dacks, as in Alaska, you can hear the symphony as it was meant to be played.
Philosophical reflection ceased at 8:30 the next morning, which was the hour we finished our paddle across Lake Lila and plunged into the woods. This was the carry we’d been talking about since we began—relatively short, but absolutely trackless, save for a few pieces of flagging along a route that Jim had explored a few weeks before.
It was here that my canoe really came into its sweet own. Built by Adirondack craftsman Pete Hornbeck, it’s a high-tech knockoff of a cedar-strip design built in the 19th century for an early Adirondack explorer. It paddles beautifully on open lake, and even better in narrow channels, but you really bless its builder when you come to a carry like this one. That’s because it weighs about 14 pounds. You can put on your pack and sling the boat over your shoulder like a giant handbag, then negotiate fallen trees, moss-slicked rocks, crowding alders, scraping spruces. It took us 20 minutes, and suddenly we popped out into the sunshine at Harrington Pond, another long, flowing, marshy land, this one rich in purple pickerel weed.
We hauled the canoes out of the water once more half an hour later, this time on a railroad track, the one that was used for generations by freight and passenger trains running north from Utica into the heart of the mountains. Jim and Bill were soon telling stories. “I can remember watching the train stop at Dr. Webb’s private depot,” says Bill. “We’d scratch the frost off the windows and watch the people getting down, the staff with lanterns there to greet them. It was real pretty.” Their grandfather had been an engineer on the railroad. In fact, in 1908, when a great fire ignited by sparks hitting logging slash had swept through the area, he’d backed the train down these tracks into the tiny town of Sabattis to rescue the encircled inhabitants. Now, shielded from the hot sun by the boats on our heads, we just trudged slowly along.
After crossing diminutive Clear Pond, we spent the night in a grove of hemlocks on a little peninsula jutting into Bog Lake. I swam for a while, and then wandered off along the old logging roads on the only kind of biological survey for which I am well-qualified: I found not only blueberries, not only lush and heavy raspberries, but even a few bushes of early, perfectly ripe blackberries.
At sunrise the next morning, we set off on our final day’s paddle, out the marshy outlet of Bog Lake and on to Lows Lake, another long, narrow, well-loved sheet of Adirondack water. It had been the center of Augustus Low’s 19th-century empire. At one time, insisted Bill, the maple trees in this vast sugarbush had produced more syrup than the entire state of Vermont. “And it would win all the medals at their state fair, too, till they made a rule that the entries had to come from Vermont.”
The longer we paddled, the longer I listened to the stories of the Frenettes, and the more I saw the old rail tracks and the scars of the logging fires and the remnants of the 19th-century baronial camps, the more I understood why these purchases seem so vital to me. The Adirondacks are perhaps the world’s greatest experiment in ecological recovery, a place hard used a century ago and now slowly reverting, slowly proving that where humanity backs off, nature rebounds. And these parcels are paradigmatic: Few places in the Adiron-dacks have been worked as many ways, have had as much timber and game and beauty wrung out of them. And now all of that hard use is slowly ceasing.
I tried my theory out on Jim. “Yeah, I guess,” he says. “It’s like an old man that works hard all his life, and then when he’s done he gets to sit still and relax.” And then he winked and tossed his canoe up on his shoulders and trotted off across the next carry.
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Bill McKibben’s most recent book is Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape, Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.
Mark Godfrey’s photographs have appeared in Life, Time and U.S. News & World Report.
