A Sentence Unspoken is an Expectation Maintained

We were staying at Fairview Lake and the cabin was on a hill that ran green without brush or bramble straight down to the water. We could see the other houses across the lake over the slanted lawn and would walk down to the water at some time nearly every day and stand at the long dock which included itself in the lake’s image. The dock was built by her great-grandfather before anyone else had come to this lake, she would tell me later.  In the evenings and the mornings when there was an action in bugs, lake fish would come close to it and we would see them jumping high to overtake the gnats and watch the swelling bulge of water.

One morning I went out onto the oval lake and from its center observed long stretches of turf surrounding the blue and pleasant water, each with their own cabin perched high on an overlooking hill with only a thin tree line designating one glistening lawn from another. This was not wilderness to me and it was hardly isolated. Being raised on Eastern Long Island among wide farms and infinite sand, I looked down on this “cookie-cutter” partitioning of lake-view. 

Before coming to Hamilton I had no understanding of the Adirondack Park apart from what it looked like on Google Maps, which is green. At one point or another in my use of the free service I had mistaken “green” for “park” for “no people.” In this way I did not see the lies a map might tell, as warned by The Adirondack Atlas, and assumed that my only company would be the stray wanderer. Spurred on by an immature and underdeveloped longing for purity or exclusivity or maybe just privacy, I drove on a hazy Sunday into that great green unknown.

Fishing pole in hand, what I found was not at all unlike what I experienced on Fairview Lake in New Jersey as summer homes stifled each lake within my reach. It was the natural extension of the resort and recreation systems, the genesis of which is summarized by Phillip G. Terrie as “the nature to which middle and upper-class gentlemen from outside the region repaired to recapture the vigor of body and soul.” Yet I was much more comfortable with a place like Fairview Lake being used to its utmost capacity. In my mind, it was New Jersey and of course a lake there would be overused and spoilt. It bothered me on another level that The Adirondacks could be no different. I still don’t know much about the Adirondacks but I do know that this Seasonal-Sprawl is not the whole story (and have since found much better places for fishing) -I need only to go to more places I wouldn't want to be to find what I want.

Jenkins, Jerry 2004. The Adirondack Atlas: A Geographic Portrait of the Adirondack Park. Syracuse University Press / Adirondack Museum.

Terrie, Philip G. 2008. Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks. Second Editon. The Adirondack Museum/Syracuse Univ. Press.