Voyager: Travel Writings (14 page)

That’s not a coincidence, I suppose, but it’s not intentional, either.

Since I was eighteen years old, as if caught by an ocean current, I’ve been drifting south in the direction of Miami, pulled toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean by a New England Protestant white boy’s eroticized fantasy of semitropical history and geography and climate and culture and race. How and why I lately ended up wintering over more or less permanently in South Florida is a long, circuitous story of stops and starts, like an imagined current pushing stubbornly south against the northbound Gulf Stream. It’s a coherent story, though, one that I pretty much understand now—a classic, or at least an old-fashioned, American male quest story. I started fictionalizing its early chapters back in the early 1960s, and one day I’ll get around to telling it for its own sake. Perhaps that’s one of the things I’ve been doing here.

Meanwhile, for the last twenty-eight years I’ve lived season
ally and sometimes year-round in a tiny, remote village in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains of New York. When asked,
How did you happen to pull up and drop anchor there?
I don’t have a reliable ready answer or a long or short story to explain it. Not the way I do for Miami. When I arrived in the Adirondacks in the late 1980s, I was following no romanticized vision of the place, no mythologized, projected version of its history, the way I was when I first drifted south to Miami; I wasn’t on a quest and in fact had little knowledge of where exactly the Adirondacks were located and what kind of people lived there. No prior fantasy or projection drew me there from wherever I was before—which happened to be New York City, where I was living with my wife Becky, and Princeton, New Jersey, where I was employed as a professor. I came to the Adirondacks purely by accident. Serendipity. On a rainy night in June 1987.

I should say that I was following a woman. It would be the basic truth. As I confessed earlier, I’d done it before, back in the early 1960s, when, crazed with love, I followed the young woman named Christine south from where I was working as a restaurant dishwasher in Massachusetts to her family home in Richmond, Virginia. Eventually, as young lovers do, we quarreled, then betrayed each other, and I moved on to Boston, the Florida Keys, San Diego, ending in New Hampshire, where this time Christine followed me, and we forgave each other our trespasses and for fourteen turbulent years lived as husband and wife and raised our three children together.

Now, twenty-five years later, I was crazed with love for the woman named Chase—she whose given name is Penelope—who was in thrall to her Connecticut family’s multigenerational, transcendental, forest-and-mountain Adirondack fantasy. Her male ancestors were mostly clerics and academics, and for generations the family spent long summers and fall and spring breaks and winter holidays in the Adirondacks. It was the place where she had enjoyed something like a happy childhood, a respite from the rest
of her childhood. It was the only place on earth where, as an adult, she felt at peace with the world. Her reasons for settling there make a different story from mine, which I leave for her to tell someday.

I followed Chase to the Adirondacks, then, she who had a good, perfectly understandable, familial reason for living there. Start with that. And for nearly three decades I have lived with her in a house perched on the shoulder of a mountain, a house that she bought at the age of thirty-seven as a summer retreat for herself alone, when she was a professor in Tuscaloosa, less than a year before I arrived on the scene. I might have just hung around as a summer vacationer, a middle-aged, love-besotted houseguest, and departed sadly in the fall to teach my classes at Princeton, and she might well have followed me, instead of me following her—as indeed she did many years later, when I wanted to continue my lifelong drift south and end it in Miami, for which I bless her. But I instead stayed on with Chase in Keene. And in addition to living with her down in Miami now, I live up there with her, too.

And where is “up there”? It’s a six-million-acre sprawl of mountain and muskeg, marsh, river, and pond, a land of cool, abbreviated Mongolian summers and long Siberian winters, bordered on the east by the Champlain Valley, on the north by the Saint Lawrence watershed, on the south by the valley of the Hudson, and on the west by the gently rolling hills and valleys of New York State. It’s a “howling wilderness,” as the first white settlers called it, and from the beginning has been viewed as a kind of Ultima Thule.

It’s a true borderland, a place between places, which in a sense is what has preserved it more or less intact into the early twenty-first century. Which may account for its continuing attraction for so many writers and artists and philosophers and clerics and professors, people whose lives depend for their meaning on standing slightly outside the world. People without year-round jobs. People, I suppose, like me.

From the wood engravings that portray Samuel de Champlain’s tentative first encounter with the North American wilder
ness to the svelte, four-color, fantasy-ad inserts of Ralph Lauren; from the writings of James Fenimore Cooper to E. L. Doctorow’s
Loon Lake;
from the transcendentalists’ Philosophers’ Camp to the U.S. Army’s northern outpost at Fort Drum: the word
Adirondack
has over the centuries evoked a variety of conflicted images and meanings. Translated into eighteenth-century English, the word means “bark eater” and refers not so much to the natives’ diet of choice as to one of the more unpleasant consequences of being condemned by hostile and more socially organized neighbors in more favored regions beyond to reside in a land that everyone, Algonquin, Iroquois, European, Quebecois, and Yankee, regarded as uninhabitable. That is, you will grow so hungry there that, like the starving deer in winter, you’ll eat the bark off the trees.

Following the Revolutionary War, the financially strapped American Congress surveyed the land, financed a narrow corduroy road through the forests, and offered wide swaths of the Adirondacks to New England and New York soldiers as a veteran’s benefit. Despite the undeniable natural beauty of the place—haunting mountain passes and waterfalls, splendid primeval forests, glittering chains of lakes, and north-flowing rivers and streams—there were very few takers. Too cold, too dark, too much snow and ice for too much of the year, too many black flies and mosquitoes in spring and summer, too little arable soil and too short a growing season to farm it.

Landless veterans preferred to pay a pretty price for softer Vermont acreage or simply trekked west and south to homestead in Pennsylvania and Ohio and beyond. The Adirondacks they left to hunters, fur trappers, hermits, and, in time, to bluff and hearty millionaires on seasonal safari helped by local servants and guides, roughing it in Victorian comfort and splendor in their huge, elaborately furnished and decorated great camps. Behind them came those artists and philosophers and writers I mentioned, along with clerics and academics like Chase’s ancestors, looking for a scenic hideaway located in the mostly unsettled far corner of the soul-
stealing, newly industrialized, fallen world of urban New England and New York.

I’m not sure if this is background to my story or foreground. But it’s my nature to see myself and everyone else as contextualized by the warp and woof of history and place, by geology and climate and economics, by culture and class and race, before I see myself or others as individual human beings. It’s a way, I suppose, to delay facing what baffles and distresses me.

But I knew nothing of this and held no beliefs or opinions regarding the place when, late that night in June 1987, having left one good woman for another, my third wife for the woman who would become my fourth and final wife, I drove my ten-year-old diesel Mercedes sedan north for six hours and arrived sometime after midnight in the village of Keene, nestled in the valley of the Ausable River at the center of the forested wilderness known as the Adirondack Park. It was blackout dark, and a heavy late-spring rain pounded the car roof and hood. I knew nothing of the history or ecological fragility of where I had arrived; it could have been anyplace at the dead end of an unpaved lane a six-hour drive from the Manhattan apartment I had abandoned that night; it could have been someplace in West Virginia, Maine, or Pennsylvania. As has happened so often in my life, I didn’t know where I had gone. Only that I had gone
away,
that I had left someone, someplace, something behind.

It was long after midnight, and the house in Keene was dark when I arrived. The diesel engine clattered to a stop. The rain pounded down on the car. I asked myself, What have I done to myself? What have I done to the good, loving woman I have lived with for nearly five years and now have left behind, and to the equally good, loving woman I have followed into this unknown wilderness? For the last six months the woman I left behind had ridden the F train every day to her Manhattan office, returning to our apartment alone every night, while I casually, more or less innocently, befriended Chase in faraway Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while I
was the visiting writer-in-residence at the university and Chase was a professor in the English department. Not until nearly the end of my one-term residency did we realize that, despite all our best and honorable intentions, we had fallen in love—suddenly, unexpectedly, as if one night in May on a dance floor at a literary party in Chattanooga we had simultaneously, spontaneously gone insane.

This was not, of course, the first time I had gone crazy with love for a woman. It happened with the teenaged girl I married when I was nineteen in St. Petersburg, Florida, and again, a few years later, in Richmond, Virginia, with the woman who became my second wife, and yet again in New York City with the woman who became my third wife. And it was not the first time for Chase, either. When it happens to you, when you go crazy with love, there is no advance warning, no point ahead of time when you can merely move to higher ground and evade what’s coming. Suddenly you are obsessed, totally fixated on another human being, and it’s as if you’ve been hit by a tsunami, and you find yourself flailing wildly, upside down and tumbling heels over head, carried off by an overwhelming wave whose irresistible force has been generated at the bottom of the sea hundreds of leagues away and thousands of feet below by vast, unpredicted tectonic shifts.

The living room light came on, and then the glow of a porch light cut a pale wedge through the rain and the darkness, and she walked onto the porch wearing a tattered pink cotton bathrobe and stood in the light and waited for me there. Her left index finger was wrapped in a thick bloody bandage, which she held in the air like a beacon.

The house, now that I could see its outline, was not a farmhouse or a summer cottage and certainly was not a great camp. It was a long, low structure that seemed to have been built in stages over generations for a large, steadily growing family, as if every few years a new wing and roofline had been added onto it. It seemed much too large for one person or even two or three. A towering pair of pine trees stood like sentries near the porch stairs. I got out of my
car and beneath the pouring rain jogged across the dirt driveway and climbed the half-dozen steps to the porch, and we embraced. She kept her bandaged finger in the air above our heads. Probably she quietly said, Welcome, for that is what she almost always says when someone arrives at our house for the first time.
Welcome
.

Welcome to the Adirondacks. Earlier that evening she had sliced so deeply into her finger that she’d rushed it for stitches to the emergency room of the hospital in Elizabethtown fifteen miles away. She’d cut into it while standing on a wobbly stepladder in the kitchen stripping the wire of a broken overhead light fixture with a pair of fingernail scissors.

This all happened nearly thirty years ago. It was the summer before our courtship tour of the Caribbean. She still wears a thin white scar like a piece of string across her left index finger between the second and third knuckles. Whenever it catches my eye, everything about that night returns to me—the wild, uncontrolled plunge into betrayal and abandonment and the emergence of a new connubial adhesion and the total reconfiguration of my life; and the rain, the porch light, the pink bathrobe, the bandaged finger in the air; and the all-too-familiar burden of shame. And sprawled out there, invisible in darkness, as if it were an ocean and there were no end to it, the wilderness.

As must be apparent by now, Chase is a gambler. She was definitely gambling on me, a thrice-married man with four daughters, scratching out a living as a novelist and part-time teacher, and who, having just left his third wife, was essentially homeless. But she was also a card player whose reputation had preceded her when she first arrived at graduate school in Iowa and later when she went to Alabama and held weekly card games at her house with only the most dedicated players among the faculty sitting in. I had never known a woman who was a serious, deliberate gambler, and it attracted me. She owned a beautiful set of poker chips. She also
owned a set of drums and had played in a rock band in her twenties and still worked out on her drum set alone in the garage. That attracted me, too.

Thus, all along, on Sint Maarten and Antigua and now on Aruba, wherever we found them, Chase and I had been hitting the casinos, seated shoulder to shoulder with the package tourists at the blackjack, craps, and roulette tables, and in spite of the glitzy bustle and smoke, the cynical exploitation of greed, fantasy, and addiction that casinos foster in an island culture, we enjoyed it. It helped that we were both winning at the blackjack tables. Back then Caribbean casinos were nothing like those in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. They were generally small, a little tatty, and on the amateurish side, like the depressing Oneonta and Mohawk Indian reservation casinos in upstate New York. Some of them were more like church bingo parlors than the Sands or the Mandalay Bay, and rather pleasant for that. Especially on Aruba, at the Alhambra Casino on Eagle Beach north of Oranjestad, the capital, where Chase tried the roulette table for the first time and cleaned up and I continued to do just fine, thank you, at blackjack. We dressed fancy and cashed a bunch of traveler’s checks and let ourselves be good-time Charlies, and we stayed lucky for several nights running.