Adirondack Summers

Recently, my son took our family on a hike. He uses AllTrails to find interesting excursions from his university in Seattle, and he’d found one near Granite Falls, Washington, that looked good for the four of us: 5.5 miles, 1,200’ elevation, rated moderate.

We set off from Seattle after big breakfasts, stopped to pick up sandwiches and chips, and hit the trail in the late morning. We had a 7:30 dinner reservation back in Seattle that night, and I remember thinking that I was so full from our delicious breakfast (Saint Bread, by the way; highly recommend), I might not want my whole sandwich. (Reader, I wanted the whole sandwich, plus a bag of chips, a tub of nuts, and an enormous dinner later.)

There’s no big drama about the day; it was a good, tough hike in a light rain, over rocks and roots, up seasonal waterfalls and across streams, the kind of hike where you need to assess every step before you set down your foot, and I was definitely wondering how we would get out of there if my husband Tony or I twisted an ankle (I didn’t worry for a moment about our nimble-footed children). About a third of the way up the trail, I picked up a stick for balance, and then I found a second; I used them to step my way along a log laid high across a stream and the warm glow I felt when my eldest said, “Nice job, Mama,” has not entirely faded.

the pay-off for our tricky hike: beautiful Heather Lake, still snowy in late May

Every time I hike in the rain, I think about a hike with my Dad, uncle, older brother, and two of my cousins when I was about 9. We had been camping and climbing in the Adirondacks, as we did every summer for a while, using my uncle and aunt’s cabin on Paradox Lake as our home base. My grandparents had learned about the area in the 30s and for years it was their family’s annual summer destination; when my aunt and uncle, Dad’s younger brother, bought their cabin, it became one of our family’s summer destinations, too. We would hike and swim and go fishing in one of the boats Uncle Michael had built; on rainy days we would play cards on the screened balcony or paint rocks (apparently I am prehistoric). My oldest cousin used a fine-tip brush to paint delicate scenes of mountains and wildflowers, using the natural contours of the rocks to give her painted features depth and shadow; once she collected a series of rocks in graduated sizes—the smallest a pointy triangle and the biggest a flat oval—and painted them all bright green to make a snake, wowing me with her creativity.

Paradox figures also in my first political memory, the night we piled into the station wagon after a post-dinner swim, all of us wrapped in towels and dripping, to listen to Nixon’s resignation speech in the car (although the cabin had electricity and running water, it didn’t have a TV or radio.) Dad, always the most interested in politics, made the drive out to the general store the next morning to buy the paper and when I looked at those side-by-side pictures of Nixon and Ford, I realized for the first time that politicians are people, not just figureheads; they both looked so unhappy, I felt kind of sorry for them.

After my oldest two siblings started working summer jobs, Dad and Uncle Michael would organize the four youngest of us kids for long weekend camping trips from Paradox. Mom and my aunt stayed home, happily washing their hands of all the planning. Dad and Uncle Michael would debate the relative merits of lightweight backpacking food versus bear-proof canned foods; we generally didn’t have enough of any of it. We’d park at a trailhead and hike a number of miles to one of the lean-to’s marked on the softly-creased map, hoping that if it wasn’t empty, the occupants would shove over and make room for the six of us, because although we had sleeping bags, we didn’t carry tents (as the youngest, I got away with a pretty light pack: my sleeping bag, my Snoopy, and a paperback.)

lean-to life: that’s me in the background next to my uncle, who’s having a smoke

My cousins had proper hiking boots, canteens, Swiss Army knives and the like, but I managed in my gym shorts and Tretorns; Dad hiked barefoot in moccasins. Among others, we climbed the tallest peak in New York State, Mount Marcy, which I remember because of the number of false summits, and the third highest, Haystack, memorable for the aid cables set into the granite. The mere sight of them scared me, but Uncle Michael took the lead to show me it really wasn’t so frighteningly steep, and Dad nudged me along from behind, and until I delivered children, summitting that mountain was the physical accomplishment I was proudest of.

the strap for my canteen looks sturdier than those cables

One year, we woke the last morning to a steady rain. We couldn’t get a fire started, and only had instant soup left, anyway, so we mixed it up with water from the stream and hiked a long, wet 9 miles to the trailhead. Before long, I stopped trying to avoid the puddles of water on the trail or pick my way carefully across the streams; I just stomped along in my sneakers, soaked through and hungry, but Uncle Michael cracked jokes and his light-heartedness inspired Dad to sing songs and together, they managed to make the experience less miserable.

At the trailhead, we piled into the cars with our wet backpacks, and drove to the local market where the dads bought lunch fixings. Back at the cabin, we made sandwiches and took turns in the shower—not taking too long, lest the hot water run out. For the first time in my life, I ate two sandwiches; on the drive home, we stopped at Dairy Queen and I ate a burger and fries. Stuffed, I exclaimed, “I’ll never eat again!” a pledge that became a lie the next day and a story that even my children know.

Busy with college and graduate school, I didn’t get to Paradox much in my 20s, but Tony and I brought the kids a couple of times for family reunions. We swam in the lake and my cousin’s oldest son took them out for a ride in one of Uncle Michael’s boats. We did not hike, and the weather was too nice to sit on the screened balcony and introduce the kids to the old-timey pleasure of painting rocks, but I’m glad we got to be in the place, for them to hear Uncle Michael’s laugh and for Eli to eat a fish he’d pulled from the lake that morning. They sold the place and moved to assisted living some years ago; my aunt died last year, and Uncle Michael just last month, inspiring me to look up some of those hikes we used to do on the AllTrails app. Strenuous, I read: the hardest rating; it really never felt like that.