Back from the Mountains

David Schatsky | September 03, 2007, 12:10 PM

Every year we go to the beach, and every year it becomes more obvious that beach vacations are a metaphor for the human predicament. For while in his soul the contemporary man seeks to realize the loftiness of his essential nature, in actual life he finds himself whacking a ball against the windmill arm in an eternal game of mini-golf.

Middle-aged man seeks the spiritual grandeur of a mountain vacation, but is trapped in the saltwater taffy of a beach vacation. He seeks to ride a dude ranch horse among whispering pines and timberline silences, but society is structured such that he finds himself in a piercingly loud ski-ball arcade surrounded by “Party Like a Rock Star” T-shirts and eating a funnel cake.

(from the NYT.)

I'm back after a wonderful break with my family in the Adirondacks.

We hiked about 60 miles of trails, and enjoyed wild forests, mountain peaks, streams, lakes, waterfalls and peace.

On some of the trails we did not encounter a soul; on others, we sometimes crossed paths with other hikers, often exchanging a brief greeting that seemed to say, "I don't know you, but we share a secret."

We didn't see much wildlife--local experts say the park system is so large that the bobcats, martins, and other mid-sized mammals have no motive for straying closed to humans. Black bears are not hard to encounter there, but it's better not to and we didn't either. We did see a salamander--my favorite amphibian--frogs, wild turkeys and deer.

To navigate the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks we used trail maps and guide books published by the Adirondack Mountain club. We also camped for a few nights at an ADK-managed campsite at Heart Lake. Adirondack Mountain Club is a great organization, with the pragmatic mission. It is "dedicated to the protection and responsible recreational use of the New York State Forest Preserve, and other parks, wild lands, and waters vital to our members and chapters." A founding principle was to make this wilderness accessible to greater numbers of people, for to know this area is to care for it and to have a stake in its preservation. If you've been there, you know what I mean.

You can appreciate the beauty of a forest in its sights, its sounds and its smells. And you can be dazzled, too, by the complexity of a forest. To gain a deeper appreciation of how forests work, I read a wonderful book, Reading the Forested Landscape, by Tom Wessels. The book is a natural history of forests--focused on central New England but applicable more broadly in the East--that uses examples from real and idealized forests to illustrate how you can look for key indictators in a forest, such as the stone walls common in New England (which invariably were not used as property markers but as fences to keep in livestock), or mounds, stumps, snags, and charactertistic compositions of plan species to deduce the historical narrative that unfolded on that patch of soil. He takes us through the evidence he finds in an oak forest in Vermont to implicate the great hurricane of 1938 as the cause of its current appearance. And we are amazed so much can be read from the forest around us.

Is this really the way we want to spend the summers of our lives? Am I going to spend every August of my declining years sitting on broiling sands feeling inferior to the lifeguards? In fact, probably.

It’s the human predicament.

I hope you had an inspiring summer.